Winning with the Dow's Losers : Beat the Market with Underdog Stocks

Rating:
Summary: Sound Investment Advice For These Times
Review: Charles B. Carlson's Winning With The Dow's Losers is an excellent resource for today's investor. The wealth of information provided between the covers is both unbiased and rich in content.

Carlson provides extensive charts and graphs displaying key statistical information where anyone can easily evaluate for their own purposes. The section where Carlson evaluates each of the 30 DOW stocks is quite exemplary. Even though the information is pretty current, Carlson keeps into account the trends of the market. He is conscience that such DOW Stocks as Eastman Kodak and AT&T might not be in touch with the current market conditions. Therefore, it may not be profitable to investment money in thoses stocks even after a battered down prior year. He also provides insight on future changes in the DOW and possible new candidates in the 30. Further analysis into the DOW Transport and Utility stocks are given as well.

The main focus of the book is to guide the reader on the simple stragegies of investing in reliable DOW Stocks and to turn over your portfolio systematically from year to year. However, the supplemental points as illustrated above certainly make this book fully loaded with valuable information. Therefore, I say keep this one handy on your shelf.

Rating:
Summary: Consider Commissions, Taxes, etc.
Review: Charles Carlson's recent book is a variation of the "Dogs of the Dow" and like the Dogs books, this one also is flawed in the overall strategy. I suggest one take the data as presented in Carlson's book and calculate what percentage advantage the worst-to-first stocks have in order to double the DOW 30 from 1931 through half of 2003. When I checked out the ten worst price performers, Carlson's top performing portfolio, I found that the advantage only amounted to 1.22%. That means Carlson's strategy of selecting the ten worst performers by price as the stocks to purchase the follow year, outperformed the DOW 30 by 1.22% per year. This small advantage results in a portfolio that is doubles the DOW 30 over a 72 year period.

What Carlson fails to tell investors, or at least does not emphasize, is that commissions, taxes, bid/ask spread, and market impact will more than use up that 1.22% advantage. Therefore one is significantly better off to purchase an index of the DOW 30, sit back and do nothing. This is an investment book where you can save your money and invest in an index. You will be further ahead seventy years from now.

Rating:
Summary: Simple Winning Strategy Using DJI Losers
Review: Charles Carlson, the author of seven previous investment books, has uncovered a simple strategy using the worst calendar-year Dow performers to beat the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) at its own game! Carlson's strategy is a twist to the Dogs of the Dow (DoD) strategy presented in Beating the Dow (1990) written by Michael O'Higgins. O'Higgins selected the ten highest paying dividend stocks in the DJIA and bought them at year-end and held them for a year, and then bought the next batch of highest yielding stocks, etc. That strategy did great in back-testing, but has not done well in the past few years.

For the uninitiated, Carlson provides the historical basis of the DJIA and devotes an entire chapter to the DJIA components, developments, and changes in the index. At least one page is devoted to each stock in the index with complete information on its historical significance and business. Another chapter is devoted to counterpoint arguments against the naysayers of his strategy.

Carlson's strategy does not use dividend yield as his selection criteria, but instead focuses on those stock(s) that have the worst yearly percentage price performance. He simply buys the DJIA stock(s) with the worst annual performance at the end of the year and holds it for one year, then he selects that year's worst performer and buys it, etc. In addition to the one stock portfolio, Carlson also shows the comparative results using the worst performing 3-stock, 5-stock and 10-stock portfolios. The 5- and 10-stock portfolios show the most consistent performance and have less risk than a one stock portfolio.

The book focuses on the performance of the worst 1-, 3-, 5- and 10-stock DJIA portfolios, and provides statistical information showing how these different stock strategies compared to the DJIA annually since 1931 (using back-testing) on a dollar-term, percentage, annual return, and percentage difference from its 200 day moving average basis. He also provided comparative results for last 30 year, 20 year, 10 year and 5 year periods. In addition, there is as 37-page appendix containing the performance of each DJIA stock since 1931 as far as annual performance change, the DJIA annual change, and the performance of each of his stock strategies in each of the years.

In a separate chapter, he even compares his strategies with the Dogs of the Dow and indicates their superiority over the DoD since 1999. The performance before that time showed mixed results depending upon which of Carlson's strategies are used.

Overall, the author presents a credible case for considering his DJIA strategies. He warns investors that they should only invest a portion of their money in any of these strategies, and to be sure to have a diversified portfolio overall to be successful. This book offers investors a mechanical stock selection process that takes the emotion out the investment equation. In that respect it has much to offer.