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Money and Markets: Investing Insights

My analytical “Ace in the Hole”

Mike Larson | Wednesday, May 8, 2013 at 4:00 pm

Mike Larson

No soldier goes into battle without the best intelligence and gear possible.

No sailor heads out of port without researching the tides, the winds, and the waves.

And no INVESTOR should put his hard-earned dollars at risk without the best possible research and expertise on his side.

That’s why I feel so privileged to have an analytical “Ace in the Hole” when I’m researching and recommending investments. That ace? The stock selection system originally designed by Weiss Ratings!

xxxxx
Having the Weiss Ratings stock selection system on your side is like having an “Ace in the Hole.”

If you’re not familiar with the ratings system, or Weiss Ratings overall, trust me when I tell you that you should familiarize yourself with them ASAP. After all …

  • Our Weiss bank ratings have warned of nearly every major and minor bank failure in ADVANCE for the past three decades …
  • The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that our Weiss insurance company ratings beat our #1 competitor’s by a factor of THREE to ONE. And …
  • The Wall Street Journal reported that the Weiss stock ratings we published beat EVERY other provider they covered by a wide margin.

How the ratings work — and how you

can put them to work for you!

Why else do I feel you should have faith in the ratings system?

Well, because unlike most Wall Street ratings, our ratings are never swayed by conflicts of interest — be they from the stock brokerage business (to generate more commissions), the investment banking business (to build huge underwriting fees), or from the companies themselves (to create more liquidity for their shares).

Unlike other ratings — which focus almost entirely on profit performance — ours have neither a bullish nor bearish bias. Moreover, they look equally at both profits and balance sheets.

That’s critical because without a strong balance sheet — plenty of capital and moderate debt loads — we believe a company’s performance is not likely to be sustainable in the long term.

And unlike other ratings, we built these ratings with safety foremost in mind. Result: Only stocks with the best potential to outperform with reduced risk merit our top grades.

Our ratings scale is simple …

It includes grades A, B, C and D — like typical school grades. Plus, we added the grade “E” for stocks that we consider to be the most likely to truly bomb.

Want to translate these into traditional, buy-sell-hold parlance? No problem! You can consider:

  • Our grades “A” (excellent) or “B” (good) as the equivalent of “buy.”
  • Our grades “D” (weak) or “E” (very weak) as the equivalent of “sell.”
  • Our C grades (fair) the equivalent of “hold.”

So how have those ratings performed over time? We just completed a study on the power of the stock ratings we created and that we still distribute along with Jim Cramer’s company, TheStreet.com. And the fact is, these ratings could have made you a LOT of money, with many of the gains substantial:

  • Church & Dwight Co rose 183.1 percent, beating the total return on the S&P 500 by 35 full percentage points.
  • ITC Holdings rose 195.5 percent — nearly a triple — beating the S&P by 48 percentage points.
  • Edwards Lifesciences rose 205.67 percent — more than a triple — beating the S&P by 58 percentage points.
  • O’Reilly Automotive jumped 207 percent, beating the S&P by 60 percentage points.
  • Novo Nordisk rose 313.1 percent. That’s more than FOUR times your money invested, and that outperformed the S&P by a whopping 165 percentage points.
  • Amazon surged 333.5 percent, also more than a quadruple, and 185 percentage points better than the S&P.
  • Netflix did even better, up 343.6 percent, or 196 percentage points better than the averages.
  • And Ross Stores was up 347 percent. That’s nearly 200 percentage points better than the S&P.

Bottom line: If you haven’t already done as I have, and put the system originally developed by Weiss Ratings to work for you, don’t delay! I believe it will help make you a better investor, bar none!

Until next time,

Mike

Mike Larson

Mike Larson graduated from Boston University with a B.S. degree in Journalism and a B.A. degree in English in 1998, and went to work for Bankrate.com. There, he learned the mortgage and interest rates markets inside and out. Mike then joined Weiss Research in 2001. He is the editor of Safe Money Report. He is often quoted by the Washington Post, Reuters, Dow Jones Newswires, Orlando Sentinel, Palm Beach Post and Sun-Sentinel, and he has appeared on CNN, Bloomberg Television and CNBC.

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