I've been lurking here for a few months, but just became a member specifically so that I could add a recommendation to lizgdal's latest posting, and to his Portfolio-123 work in general. I will be following future posts on this subject with great interest.

I was active on the MI board at TMF many years ago, and did a lot of trading in my IRA based on MI screens. I did pretty well for a while as I recall, but eventually lost interest (probably in a long down market), and turned the IRA over to Fidelity to manage, and mostly ignored it for many, many years.

Recently I noticed that Fidelity was charging me 1% per year to mostly stick my money in an 'all market' index fund. This is a level of portfolio management that I feel comfortable handling myself, so I took back control and chose my own index funds. This happened just after the start of the new year, and naturally all my funds are now under water, but I would have been no better off if I'd left things as they were.

Having taken control of the IRA, the thought occurred to me that I ought to consider investments other than index funds. So, remembering the old days, I went looking for the MI community, and eventually found it here. (Thanks Manlobbi).

I began by reading through a lot of the archives. But having done that, I still had no idea of how to evaluate screens. The Gritton backtester doesn't seem to be working. GTR1 is pretty intimidating, and apparently will no longer be updated. After seeing some talk about Portfolio-123, I signed up for a 21 day trial. My impression of the site is generally favorable, but creating good screens is not something I am able to do.

I was starting to think that maybe I would just stick to my index funds when lizgdal posted the P123 rules for what he called 'screen296'. This screen backtests well on both GTR1 and P123, and now that I have the P123 format rules, I can generate the picks if I decide to follow it. For now, I've just got a watchlist.

Lizgdal has indicated that he will be posting additional screens for P123 in the coming months, and I will be looking forward to that. I anticipate signing up for the $25/month plan, so I'm hoping that he will share the results of longer backtests.

It was good to find the community still chugging along after all these years.

--Peter