Trade Like an O'Neil Disciple: How We Made 18,000% in the Stock Market

8.1. MISCONCEPTIONS

As well, there are many misconceptions and myths about O'Neil and his organization that we find preposterous, particularly those that are promulgated for the sole purpose of bringing the man and his methods down. A lot of it is born of envy, but most of it is just plain and deliberate ignorance of who and what O'Neil is. For example, in the midst of the grimness of the 2000–2002 dot-com bubble-bursting bear market, a professional portfolio manager was asked on financial cable TV when he thought the brutal bear market would finally come to an end. His response was immediate and contemptuous, "This bear market will be over when that momentum investor's newspaper, Investor's Business Daily, goes out of business!"

In most cases ignorance is bliss, but in this case ignorance was little more than ignorance, as such a statement reflects a profound misunderstanding of Bill O'Neil and the O'Neil organization, which includes not only Investor's Business Daily, but also the institutional investment advisory and research firm of William J. O'Neil + Company, Inc., a nationally recognized and ranked publications firm called O'Neil Data Systems that prints much more than just chart books, and several other, smaller and not-so-smaller sister companies.

If you were a portfolio manager at William O'Neil + Company, Inc., as we were at that time, you knew that the last thing that would ever happen during the bear market of 2000–2002 would be IBD going belly up. The O'Neil organization ...