Conference nyoss1::market_investing

    I am usually quite skeptical of this kind of marketing of newsletters.
    If they don't send me a sample newsletter so I get an idea of what
    it is I'm buying, in the trash it goes.

    
    In principle, if you could select positive-alpha stocks with low beta,
    you could make consistent nominal profits.  There's just two problems:
    
    	1)  Alphas are small and generally not statistically significant.
    
        2)  Alphas change over time
    
    Every money manager is ultimately judged on their ability to find
    positive alpha holdings with minimum risk/return...  the trick is how 
    to forecast this.  
    
    Find out how he does his forecasting, then let us know.
    

FWIW....

Gillett's 5th Law of Investing:  Anybody who says they have
                                 a proven system doesn't.

./chris

    Lee Euler is a huckst\s\k\c\u\h marketer/promoter.  He'll sell you
    anything you're interested in.  If you are bullishly inclined toward
    the future prospects of pantyhose in Pamplona, Lee will have at least
    two newsletters that he's affiliated with that will help you net in a
    pile of profits.
    
    There's nothing fraudulent here.  The guy is a salesman, not an investor.
    (I'm looking at an ad from him that pitches a computerized AI OEX option 
    predictor for $595.  Backtests beautifully, makes a million over a few
    years.  But he's apparently more interested in selling it than trading it.
    
    Draw your own conclusions.
    
      John

While I agree with those who are skeptical about this type of advertising
and I would almost never respond to these glossy junkmail ads either, I must 
tell you that I will be subscribing to "Scientific Investment".  

I'll try to keep a long story as short as I can....
I know Bill Chidester pretty well.  When I was right out of college (1980)
I subscribed to Bill Chidester's first 3 investment newsletters which he
published under the Orion Publishing name (which was his own small company).  
I was one of his first subscribers.  I was very impressed by the clarity and
intelligence of his arguments - in comparison to many other investment
letters I had reviewed.  His stock selections were above average (although
not dramatically so) but what really caught my eye were his forecasts on
the general market and the economy which is where I felt he excelled.  
He is an excellent writer (and a former Editor of Value Line), and when you
combine that with his tremendous understanding of how free markets operate 
you end up with some very educational reading.

By 1986, he had about 2,000 subscribers to his Orion newsletters when he
decided to shut it down to focus on forming a start-up company with another 
publisher.  I actually met him for lunch in Manhattan during this time
and ended up giving him a VERY VERY small amount of the $1.5 million he
raised for his new venture....called Infocomm.  Much of that money went
to purchase a VAX and customized software from DEC which allowed Infocomm
to produce the first customized investment letter.  The letter was customized
to cover any 20 stocks which a subscriber had listed as the stocks he/she
was interested in.  The letter was published bi-weekly with up-to-date charts
and newsfeeds on the selected stocks as well as other investment opinions
on those companies.  It was quite a feat to produce an investment letter 
which was very different for each subscriber.  Unfortunately, the company
never made it.  Infocomm's first issue was published the week of the Crash 
of 1987 (when the investment publishing industry went into an immediate 
Depression) and they ran out of cash.

I believe that the results which the Hulbert Financial Digest has been 
monitoring "since 1985" was actually Infocomm's Model Portfolios during the
late 1980s and only recently applies to "Scientific Investment" which I 
believe is only about a year old.  So much for truth in advertising, huh?
I will say that Infocomm's letter contained a Relative Strength Portfolio
which had just amazing performance during the time which Infocomm published.
Obviously stocks with high relative strength are likely to have a very
positive Alpha, and I believe this is basically the investment concept which
has been carried over to Scientific Investment.  Also, when I last talked
to Bill Chidester on the telephone (about 2 years ago), he mentioned to me
that he had been working closely on projects with Louis Navalier in California 
who has an excellent performance history with his MPT newsletter.  
Scientific Investment is obviously an extension of that work.

Hope this gives you a good background on Bill Chidester.   - Jeff