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Monthly Archives: July 2009

MELA: A Speculative Stock with Huge Potential

July 7, 2009
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MELA: A Speculative Stock with Huge Potential

My stock suggestion today is in the spirit of adventure. It’s a medical technology company that doesn’t really have revenues, much less earnings, and it doesn’t have a product approved for sale. What it has is a great idea for a hand-held device that will enable dermatologists to scan skin lesions to determine whether they are melanomas. The company is Electro-Optical Sciences (MELA), and the device-called the MelaFind-uses light at various wave-lengths to scan the suspicious lesion. It then uses its database of melanoma images to calculate a diagnosis. Flash Player 9 or higher is required to view the...

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STAR: The Next Intel

July 6, 2009
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STAR: The Next Intel

Intel was once a superb investment.  If you had bought $10,000 of INTC at the end of 1974, the year Craig Barrett joined the company (three years after the IPO) you would have had about $18.5 million at the stock’s peak in 2000 … or nearly $4 million today. But Intel’s glory days are gone; your job today is to find the next Intel. Ideally, the next Intel is still small, but growing fast.  It makes a product or provides a service that is easily scaled up, so that millions, even billions, can be sold.  It comes to dominate...

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Stick with the Evidence

July 2, 2009
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Stick with the Evidence

You can say all you want that we’ve been in a secular bear market since 2000 … and you may be right.  But secular bear or not, that didn’t stop many big winners from lifting off from 2003-2007, including Apple, Google, First Solar, Crocs, Research in Motion, Coach, XM Satellite Radio, Intuitive Surgical, Potash, Mosaic, Intercontinental Exchange, Nasdaq Stock Market, Southwestern Energy, Ultra Petroleum … need I go on? The reverse is also true.  We might have been in a secular bull market during the 1980s and 1990s, but many investors lost most of their capital during the ’87...

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Is this a Cyclical Bull within a Secular Bear? Who Cares?

July 1, 2009
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Is this a Cyclical Bull within a Secular Bear? Who Cares?

While every investor knows the terms bull market and bear market, every investor seems to have a different definition of each.  Some people consider any period of rising prices a bull market.  Others require that prices generally rise for a certain time–maybe six months–to be called a bull market.  And of course there’s the popular (though highly flawed) view that any 20% move up in an index represents a new bull market, while a 20% decline constitutes a bear market. Adding complexity to these simple phrases is the cyclical versus secular debate.  Simply put, a secular bull market is...

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