From time to time I attend stock meet-ups and listen to members opine about how useless the IBD 100 lists are. People just like to denigrate things without examining the evidence and these untruths tend to get passed on unchallenged. Each Monday, IBD publishes a list of the top 100 growth stocks that meet their technical and fundamental criteria. I feel a lot more confident buying stocks on this list because IBD’s stock selection criteria are based on analyses of their comprehensive database of the best stocks over the past 100 years. Imagine that–they actually analyzed the characteristics of past market winners to design an empirically based system for selecting winners BEFORE they take off. Because human trading psychology is pretty stable, one can discern lasting technical patterns (which are really trading decisions) that are characteristic of winning stocks.
So, one of the exclamations that I have heard from self-proclaimed experts is that by the time that a stock gets to the top of the IBD 100 list, it is too late to trade it for a profit. The table below shows this assertion to be nonsense, at least for the top ten stocks on the list published on