Like many private investors, Dr Bart DiLiddo learned about stock market investing the hard way. But for the affable American chairman of VectorVest Inc, applying strict rules on how and when to back company stocks has turned his own winning strategy into a system shared by tens of thousands of private investors around the world.
Dr DiLiddo launched the VectorVest system in the form of a small weekly book back in the late 1980s. Since then it has adapted to evolving technology and the increasingly sophisticated requirements of its users to become an internet hit that gives investors market information in an instant. At its heart, VectorVest offers information to investors on when to buy, hold and sell stocks as markets rise and fall. “If you are making a profit in a stock you should never allow it to turn into a loss,” says Dr DiLiddo. “You have got to protect profits on the way down even if that means selling the stocks.”
After establishing a loyal following in the US, Dr DiLiddo and his team branched out into Canada before turning their attention to the UK, Europe and other territories. While doing this, he says it became clear that UK companies shared much more commonality with their US counterparts than those in the resource-dominated market of Canada. However, he believes that both investors and companies on this side of the pond are hampered by a lack of available stock information and that investors in particular need much better access to fundamental data, interpretations of market movements and how company performances on a wide range of metrics compare across the market.
In an interview with Stockopedia, Dr DiLiddo talked over the early days of VectorVest and shared his thoughts on the common mistakes made by investors, the best trades he ever saw and his advice for aspiring stock pickers.
Dr DiLiddo, when did you first begin investing in the stock market and how did that evolve into VectorVest as we see it today?
Well, it goes back a long way, I have been investing in stocks since the early 1960s. I got into investing because I was an engineer by training and I got to a point where I realised that I would never get rich being an engineer! So in the early…
I recently came across VectorVest at the Master Investor conference. It seems to have many similarities to the Stockopedia QVM approach, although a clear distinction is that VectorVest offers buy and sell signals. If anyone has experience of VectorVest it would be interesting to get feedback on it.
