The Aha! Moment That Inspired It All
We’ve all experienced a defining moment. That “aha!” moment where everything just clicks. We make a clear connection from something that’s been there the whole time.
Sometimes we realize it right away; other times it becomes clear in hindsight.
For me, it was an aha moment that played out for a month, but it all started with a phone call.
It was 2010, and I was heading a trading desk at Cantor Fitzgerald, the blue-chip New York investment bank. My job was to match big institutional buyers with sellers.
My caller was a friend who managed money at another big bank. He wanted to buy shares of a stock (we’ll call it KDQ) for one of his big clients.
Within a few minutes, I found someone who was selling 100,000 KDQ shares – about $2 million worth – and offered those to my friend. He snapped them up immediately.
“Do you have any more?” he asked.
I went back to work, dug into my “Rolodex,” and by the time the trading day closed, I had sold my friend one million shares of KDQ – valued at about $20 million.
That’s Big Money already. But I wasn’t even close to being finished.
I sold my friend another million shares the next day. And by that point, all the money flowing into this stock was lifting its price.
The same thing happened the third day … another million shares … and another bump in the price.
By the fourth day, I knew this was big – really big.
This “foraging” mission for KDQ shares continued for about a month. By the end of that stretch, I’d sought out, mopped up, and sold my friend every spare share of KDQ that I could find – around 20 million in total.
The stock had surged 70% – and people were noticing. It even made the headlines on CNBC.
I had no idea who the buyer was. I just knew it was my friend’s client.
A few days after I’d finished, I discovered that a $20 billion hedge fund had acquired more than 15% of KDQ. Through me and some of my competitors (who’d been tasked with the same mission), this fund had snapped up an aggregate 50 million shares of this stock.
And the stock price had soared.
If Only We Knew
The “KDQ Affair” showed me the huge gains that were there for the taking – for investors who’d also bought the stock while that hedge fund was buying those millions of shares.
Anyone who owned KDQ on the day of the first order – or who knew what was happening so they could buy it – would have gained 70% in just four weeks.
But how could we have known? Hedge funds and institutions are super-secretive by nature – and do everything in their power to keep their buying quiet. This is Big Money we’re talking about – the money that actually moves stocks – so these players work to diminish the “price-increase effect” even as they keep buying shares. They spread their purchases out by buying in chunks – big chunks, but still chunks – over days or weeks.
The fact is that some people do know. These shadowy Wall Street operators are fully aware of these huge trades before they happen. And they profit off that knowledge.
The rest of us? We’re on our own. At the mercy of all these big operators.
But not anymore.
I didn’t get rich off that trade. But those four weeks and the whole KDQ Affair were a transformative event in my life. That experience put me on a mission – one that culminated in my analytics-based system and my proprietary Quantum Score that evaluates the health and potential of more than 6,000 stocks. And it does so every day the market is open.
It’s a system that lets me spot the footprints of Big Money investors on their own KDQ-like missions. Those footprints are not visible to most other investors – but they are to me.
This system gets me and my TradeSmith Investment Report readers into these stocks early – when the Big Money buying is just getting started.
It’s legal, predictive – and powerful.
Which is why it took years to create and master.
Now We Do Know
After facilitating that trade, I threw myself into the research. I analyzed every piece of data I could find. I asked the smartest people on Wall Street how they decide which stocks to buy… and how they go about buying them.
Over my two decades of investing, I’ve learned how to spot these giant trades that play out over days and weeks. When a Big Money player embarks on a buying spree, it means demand for a stock is spooling up. Since supply is holding steady, there’s only one direction for the stock to move… up.
So, how do I find these best-of-the-best Top 1% of stocks that the “whales” are buying and – most importantly – recommend them to my TradeSmith Investment Report readers for them to make money?
First, I rely on computing power. At any given time, there are more than 10,000 stocks to choose from. Some are illiquid. Some are junk. I eliminate those immediately.
That gets us down to about 6,000, most of which aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. I use my proprietary “filters” – a deep-dive analysis of the technicals and fundamentals – and mix in the wisdom I’ve collected from the best minds on Wall Street.
And this gets us to the Big Money. We look to see which of those remaining stocks that pass our screens are being bought by Big Money players.
That’s the trifecta of investing success. Find business with the best fundamentals in the market whose stocks show technical strength and are being bought by Big Money.
That gives you the highest odds of making money, and the highest odds of outperforming the market. Through years of using this system and back testing it all the way to 1990, about seven out of every 10 stocks it identifies were winners. Independent back testing by TradeSmith also showed that it beat the S&P 500 by an impressive 7-to-1.
Smart investors have a great opportunity to invest in stocks exhibiting these critical characteristics, and ride those share prices higher right alongside Big Money.
These are the kinds of stocks we own in TradeSmith Investment Report, where all 16 stocks in the portfolio are making us money. The stock we added the first week of the new year is already up 26% and has seen eight Big Money buy signals in the six weeks since I recommended it.
The Aha! was not that Big Money moves stocks, but how much it moves stocks. And therefore, how critical it is to your investing success.
Talk soon,
Jason Bodner
Editor, Jason Bodner’s Power Trends