About Our Stock Investment Newsletter
The ShockTrader™ Report is one of a very few online stock trading newsletters to publish an equity curve showing how
well their picks are performing. We actually trade the stock market with our own real money so we know how
important an equity curve is!
An equity curve shows the account balance in dollars versus time as a graphic. It is in effect a picture of how
well a trading method is working. Our equity curve begins on 4/15/2005 with a balance of $10,000. We could
have started with any amount of dollars, but $10,000 seemed to us to be an amount that is within reach of most of
our customers.
There are many things that are important to us as stock traders and an equity curve is the only way to see those
important things.
As a simple example, let’s assume that someone says they doubled their money in two years by trading stocks.
That sounds good on the surface, but could you have achieved those results without suffering too much pain.
- How big was the drawdown in the equity curve expressed as a percent of the account balance?
- How much time goes by between new highs in the account balance?
- How many weeks in a row does the account balance go down?
- How many weeks in a row does the account balance go up?
- What percent of the time in weeks does the account balance go up?
These questions can only be answered by an equity curve!
Here at The ShockTrader™ Report we track and publish our equity curve so that you will always know where we stand! And unlike some stock picking services, we never use margin; if we buy a stock, we have the cash in our account to buy it!
About Ed Heising
Ed Heising is the stock picker for The ShockTrader™ Report, the industry’s best stock investment newsletter.
Ed became interested in the stock market in 1965 when he got an incentive stock option from a company he was
working for. That stock option kept moving higher in value day after day. Every employee of that company was
very interested in the stock market at that time.
The good feeling lasted until early 1966 when the company’s stock–and the stock market as a whole –started
going down. Ed watched helplessly as his option value went down to zero. Ed could not cash in his option
because the company granted the option with a five year vesting program – Ed had to be an employee for five
years before he could exercise his option. As it turned out, Ed was an employee for only three years.
After this experience, Ed (an Electronics Engineer by training) decided to apply his mathematics knowledge to
trading the stock market. This led to a lifetime of work as an independent stock analyst!
The ShockTrader™ Report is one of the results of this lifetime of work. Ed uses a combination of fundamental and
technical analysis to pick the five best stocks to own each week. Fundamental analysis looks at the company’s
financial results, while technical analysis looks at the price and trading volume statistics of the company’s stock.
A simplistic statement of the method is:
If stock price, trading volume, and company earnings are all increasing then we should own the stock!
The actual rules for evaluating stock market top picks are somewhat more difficult than that, but you get the results of Ed’s work each week in The
ShockTrader™ Report!
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