About Me & My Trading

My name is Scott Carl. I am a full time employee and a graduate student. I don't have a ton of time to monitor the markets during the day, but I developed an interest in the stock market in 2003 after reading a couple of Motley Fool books. In particular The Unemotional Investor: Simple System for Beating the Market piqued my curiosity. It detailed how a simple unemotional trading plan could consistently beat the market without any unpleasant decision making. I dove into the market with a few thousand dollars and instantly made 20% in the first couple of months. I was a genius.

Success was fleeting as I continued making trades based on my own ideas about companies. I followed recommendations from just about every source out there, magazines, TV, trading newsletters, and just my own gut feelings. 2003 was a good year for stocks and it pumped up my ego.

In 2004 I discovered The American Association for Individual Investors through a reference in a Suze Orman book. There was a ton of good advice and information on the site and I became particularly interested in their computerized stock screens--in particular the Zweig screen--which was destroying all of the other screens with ridiculous returns year after year.

I started following the screens and paper trading different strategies on Smartmoney's excellent website. During that time I subscribed to AAII's Stock Superstars newsletter. I followed the newsletter's trading suggestions for over a year and learned a lot about stock screening, risk, and portfolio management. I did OK during those two years making a bit more than the market as a whole.

But I noticed that my screening strategies were making a killing compared to my returns. Worse yet, the strategies involved none of the "homework" that I was doing to try and find good prospects. So for 2006 I decided to pick one strategy and stick with it for the whole year. The strategy that I chose involves a group of about 5 stocks that are rebalanced on a weekly basis if necessary. The stocks are a combination of the Zwieg screen and Zack's #1 rated stocks each week.

The screen did very well in 2006 as you can see in my portfolio return for that year. Compared with the Zweig screen alone (which made around 17%) the combination screen screamed. I am following some other strategies in 2007 while continuing to use the Zweig and Zack's combination which I call ZZ #1.

I am not smart enough to be a chartist, and fundamental analysis bores me to tears. So this method works very well for me. The computer does the number crunching and I follow what it tells me to do without worrying about all the jibber jabber going on in the market and the world.