Credibility of CANSLIM and William O'Neil

[ms33]

I'm getting there. I'm concerned about aligning what I do with intelligent trading practices - buying into weakness instead of strength - but that will take me some time. I do feel greatly enthused to be showing some sizeable daily returns. You should take the two month deeply discounted trial to MarketSurge; it is mind-altering versus what we amateurs do on our own.

 

[almx]

Thanks for the advice that I will follow!
I'm already subscriber to IBD and was busy digesting and understanding all the information they give while at the same time building my own process.
Now that the dust settles, I think I will soon get that trial.

 

[ms33]

I know I sound like a broken record by maintaining a previous post similar to this, but I came across an article from CBS News back in 2010 which called into the question the claims of great performance from CANSLIM and seemed to insinuate a question of O'Neill's credibility too. I hate to be that overly skeptical guy but I want to be damn sure that I am not wasting my time by reading "How To Make Money In Stocks" and learning CANSLIM.

I think you're asking the wrong question. Can you earn a positive return using Can-Slim? That's not as easy as you might think since Can-Slim will expose you to stocks that lose 3-5% before you ever earn a nickel. If you are singlemindedly focused on making money from trading and that's close to your mission in life, you might outperform the market. I've put everything I could into learning Can-Slim / MarketSurge over the last three years and I can't recall a trade where I made money over 73 bets. Maybe ten names barely eked out a profit. I did earn the subscription price by following Mark Minervini into couple trades. My current assessment is that it will take me three more years to get comfortable holding losing positions for more than a couple days. So why not hold the indexes? It's not so easy to do that either. Losses derange me. I currently day trade and use MarketSurge primarily as a filter.