Ian Woodward's Investing Blog

Wherever you go in the investment community, you’re likely to hear of Ian Woodward, one of the most sought after experts on high growth stock (HGS) investing. For the past 20 years, he has criss-crossed the nation, enlightening new and seasoned investors about high growth stocks with his own brand of logic, wit, and practical experience. His workshops and forums have helped thousands of investors learn the principles of HGS Investing and the ingredients required to, as he puts it, “Buy rockets and sell rocks!”.

With over 30 years experience in Strategic, Business, and Technical Planning with Xerox and Univac Corporation, Ian was naturally attracted to high growth stock investing. He balances his investment interests in two types of portfolios – one for small cap high growth, which tempers high profits and risk with quick action; and one for large cap, blue chip high growth stocks, which are held for intermediate to long-term gains.

Ian’s expertise is manifest in many ways. He co-developed the ERG Factor, a popular HGS screening strategy that balances an evaluation of fundamental and technical factors with an analysis of market momentum to select leading stocks and discard laggards. He also pioneered the concept of “surrogates” as a way to identify strong HGS industry sectors and groups. (A surrogate is a subset of leading stocks from a particular industry group.) His ability to assess a group’s speed and strength, coupled with his simple “stop-light reporting” technique (in which red, yellow, and green tag the phase of the stock), enable him to vividly demonstrate how groups rotate in and out of favor – and peg which ones have the most promise.

More recently, Ian has concentrated his attention in evaluating the statistics relating to the S&P500 and Nasdaq over the past 50+ years. His focus is to find the illusive indicators relating to Market Tops and Bottoms. To this end he has introduced several proprietary HGSI indicators including High Jump, Eureka, Kahuna, Tsunami, Hindenburg Omen (based on other’s research), and Bingo, Bango and Bongo! As he says, “There is no Silver Bullet Indicator, but two Lead Bullets are better than none”.

Ian’s most recent contribution is to pinpoint when a Market Rally is confirmed through a confluence of his Impulse Indicators of Eureka and Kahuna signaling simultaneously with the Bollinger Bands %B going up through the Bandwidth for at least six Market Indexes and as many ETFs of the XL_ series. Likewise, he is also able to pinpoint Market Tops through this process, which he calls BullsEye!  His most recent contribution is the Management of Fear and Greed using  the Woody Indicator which is %B x Bandwidth.

His latest focus is to pinpoint tops and bottoms by using the 200-dma from the Market Indexes at 4% intervals.  In doing so, the magic point in time to be cautious is when the S&P 500 (say) is 12% above the 200-dma, as one should expect some form of correction.  The next levels are 16% and then 20% which latter is very rare.