Biography
William O'Neil started out in 1958 as a stockbroker. During his three years in the job, he made a careful study of the top-performing mutual funds - the US equivalent of our unit and investment trusts. He discovered their success was entirely due to buying stocks that were setting new highs in price. In the language of chartists, they were 'breaking out' of previous holding patterns or 'consolidations'. Many of them would then go on to make advances of many tens or even hundreds of percent.
He decided to copy this method. Within a year or so, he had turned $5,000 into $200,000. In 1963, he bought a member's seat on the New York Stock Exchange and founded the firm he still runs today. He was one of the famous 'performance' fund managers of the Sixties, and a pioneer of database-driven stock selection. His company still supplies a wide variety of statistics and data to professional investors.
In 1983, he launched a financial newspaper to rival the Wall Street Journal, called
Investor's Daily. Against the odds, this has become a widely-read and well-respected alternative to its venerable competitor. Part of its appeal rests on its unique data tables, which also underpin his own investment approach and his advice to clients.
O'Neil's track record has had its ups and downs, particularly during and just after the 'go-go' years of the Sixties. But he is thought to have averaged an annual return of over 40% on his personal account in the ten years up to 1989.
One of O'Neil's earliest coups was in the drug stock Syntex. The company was the first mass manufacturer of the birth control pill at the start of the 'sexual revolution'. It had just announced quarterly earnings growth of 300% when he bought the stock in 1963. As the market woke up to the potential, the price rocketed from $100 to $550 in 6 months, making him enough money to set up his own business.
Like
Jim Slater, O'Neil relies on a mixture of quantitative and qualitative criteria to pick stocks. His method has to be adapted for use in the UK, to allow for differences in accounting practice and the lesser availability of financial statistics. But his basic approach to trading is as applicable here as in the US. The key idea is to seek out only those growth stocks that have the greatest potential for swift price rises from the moment you buy them. In essence, buy the strong, sell the weak.