No. of Recommendations: 11
Yup, made a potload of money with FOG (FlareOut Growth). ... I even created a web page called "The House That MI Built", when we used those profits to build our 5 bedroom "retirement cash cow" house.
Until 2000/2001 when everything stopped working. :-(
Yep, I have a similar story. I double-majored in EE and Computer Science in college, and remember the thrill of logging on to AOL over dialup and a 9,600 baud modem on my Atari ST :) Got a job building software, and started putting money in the hot funds of that era: Fidelity Magellan and 20th Century Ultra. The year after Windows 95 came out, I stumbled on to the Motley Fool site. Their pitch was that you could do better than a fund by picking your own stocks. Made sense to me.
Opened an account at ETrade and started buying boatloads of shares in AOL, Amazon and Iomega in 1996, following TMF Rulebreakers. Got my hands on every investing book I could find, and read Bill O'Neill's "How to Make Money in Stocks" cover to cover.
From 1995-98 I was compounding my net worth at 35% CAGR thanks to the Rulebreaker stocks plus Dell and the Ultra fund. I was in my early 30s at the time, gotten married, had a 1-year old, and was living in a 2-BR apartment. My wife said we needed more space, so I started looking at 3-bedroom starter homes. In 1999, Jon Markman's "Online Investing" book came out. He described his FOG screen, and showed a backtest where picking the top 3 stocks in that screen each year turned $10,000 into $5 million starting in 1986 and ending in early 1999.
I was sold. At that time, Microsoft had launched their MSN Money Central site where they were listing the stocks from Markman's "Supermodel" screens for free. I had already been buying Yahoo, Altavista, Network Solutions and Infoseek in early '99, then went all in and bought Qualcomm, CMGI and Broadvision in Sep. 1999 at 33% position sizes each. Wound up tripling my net worth with a 230% return that year.
Found a builder to build a custom 5-BR 5,000 sq ft home in a wooded cul de sac on 1.5 acres of land. Paid for the house almost all in cash after selling 2/3 of my portfolio in July 2000. Still had enough left over to set aside and fund 4 years of college for 2 kids plus start a safer allocation in bonds. The 1/3 that I still had in stocks started crashing in the latter part of 2000 through 2001. Wasn't fun watching that. But I had life's 2 biggest expenses taken care of.
Despite the McMansion, we lived frugally in all other aspects. Never cared for fancy cars or showy stuff, always drove Toyotas. My employer had a 401K and I kept making automated monthly contributions from my paycheck straight into an index ETF that compounded tax free over the next 20 years.
I retired early in 2020 thanks to that index ETF plus a supersized allocation in Amazon that had snowballed over the years, and by following Saul's board. I estimate Saul accelerated my financial independence by 4 to 5 years. He absolutely nailed the correct sector during 2017-2021.
BTW, my father had died suddenly while I was a freshman in college, leaving our family well below the poverty line. I worked part time jobs at McDonald's and gas stations to pay my way through school and support my mother and brother. If I can make it, anybody can.
Mechinv
P.S. Re: the FOG screen, it has actually started working again since 2013. If you look at musselmant's Nasdaq screen from earlier this year, the formula used is based on the FOG formula, which is looking for a recent flattening out of momentum. This is also known as a "bull flag" in Technical trading.
