I've been a true 'retail' trader my whole life and am always looking to learn. I started my journey with the Motley Fool as a paid service to their newsletters. I've subbed to probably about a hundred more over the years, only to be disappointing or see the quality drop to a place where it 'feels' like they just have to write things to write things. Or, how can Service A rank a stock a strong buy and Service B rank it a strong sell (e.g. Schwab vs. Morningstar... or pick your poison) Or how can 'analysis' be barely right 50% of the time, esp. when this is supposedly their job.
I've been running analysis on all of the historical and current 'picks' these services provide. One thing I noticed with many of them is the picks are often after a run up, this was from just reading them for years and seeing the same chart pattern.
So I ran this against them and here is a result: 59.1% of buy stocks had >50% run-ups before promotion vs. 12.9% of controls.
The reason I'm posting this is because, my theory is that the 'smart' buyers are buying during the 50% run-up phase and, in all honesty, I'd like to be in that group for once.