One fine day in early 1999, Bill Griffeth named IntelligentSpeculator.com, our first online adventure, the CNBC Power Lunch site of the day.
It all began the previous year when Teresa began hosting a free trader’s chat room at the new website. Pete was one of the first people to arrive. Because we both worked in the investment industry, we did our best to educate people about risk, to remind them that the stock market is an unforgiving Darwinian mechanism that transfers hot money to the smart money. In the long run, most people lose.
The venture was not conceived as a means to make money, but as a way to connect traders from around the world. Mutual funds were hot then. The Dot-com Bubble was inflating fast. It was a time when people dreamed of quitting their jobs to trade, attracted to it by the promise of instant riches.
Markets have had some big ups and downs since then, and we are still here. Along the way, Teresa’s trading adventures were featured in several books. She has written many articles on technical trading techniques for industry magazines, and created add-on tools for TradeStation and eSignal charting platforms.
From Trader to Investor and Back
After concluding a 12-year career in the investment industry, Teresa began day- and swing-trading for her own account before devising a responsive asset allocation algorithm that made it possible to invest with more gain and less pain. With the completion of the 2023 research program, she has come full circle back to stock-picking with an efficient means to identify groups of promising stocks.
One might wonder, with so many people working on Wall Street and doing research in academia, how it is possible for one person to improve upon managing a portfolio, trading methods and stock picking?
The answer is deceptively simple: there is no need for a hundred people to “brainstorm” for ideas. Ultimately, a first-principles thinker with money on the line is better able to find solutions to vexing problems and to execute them well. Meanwhile, the industry sticks to what worked in the past because their real job is sales, that is, to gather “assets under management” and to collect fees.
To celebrate our 25th anniversary online, we sat down with fellow investor and author Leslie N. Masonson for A Conversation with Teresa Lo. The interview is featured in the December 2023 issue of Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities magazine.