I am the author of the Investment24 stock letter, Bernd M. Otto (BMO).

I will, for once, write the following using the first person, and I will try to give you an insight into my experience on the stock market.
I hope these things do not sound too much like self-praise (which is far from my intention)


Experience
I have had experience on the stock market since 1994, first of all with investment funds, then with shares and share derivatives
I am a professional trader and have tried and tested just about every available trading strategy in order to broaden my knowledge and my experience and to test which strategies yield most and are best suited to me.
All in all I have already performed more than 20,000 trades and can therefore consider myself to be a very experienced trader.

Trading-Strategien
I focus on day trading and swing trading (1 to 30 days), as well as on value investing on the basis of favorable fundamental data
Depending on the market, I also trade with futures to both hedge off the entire portfolio and profit from total market movements.
I do not think much of the pure buy-and-hold strategy, because earnings are much higher if you frequently (but not too frequently) regroup your portfolio
The stock letter focuses on swing trading and value investing

Performance before the launch of the stock letter
In order to show what is possible with professional trading, I opened an account with E*TRADE brokers and deposited 4,000 €, which is the amount available to the average small investor
From these 4,000.00 € (the balance on 3rd January 2007), I then achieved a balance of 525.183,57 € by 6th March 2007, see Performance confirmation.
Meanwhile this account has reached a 7 digit amount.

If you have doubts
In case you are thinking “that cant be”: Well, yes, it can ;-).
I have achieved this performance by carrying out approx. 1,000 trades. I had several trades which doubled and, more importantly, only very small losses due to strict risk and money management
The compound interest effect has an even greater impact at high performance, and a bit of luck also played a part in it.
This performance was achieved with real money.
Should you have any doubts, you can ask E*TRADE to confirm the correctness of the performance.

Suitable as author for a stock letter
Whether I am a suitable author for a stock letter is up to you.
At least I can assure you that I will only recommend shares which I consider to be promising, and I will not let any fiscal incentives influence my recommendations.
Furthermore, you have the certainty that the Investment24 stock letter is being written by a proven and successful trader.
Sadly this cannot be taken for granted.

Other stock letters
Most of the stock letters are unfortunately written by authors who are very eloquent or who are good at promoting themselves, but they are not good traders.
Have you ever seen a performance confirmation or any other proof of an author being a good trader, except at Investment24?
If you take the herd instinct effect out of many other stock letters (recommended shares increase in value due to the subsequent purchases by the readers), then not much performance is left.
Or, the price of those recommended shares then collapses following a short upmove, so that only a part of investors will take away profits from that share.
I achieved the above mentioned performance without herd instinct effect, which can assure you that I am actually capable of detecting good shares.

What you can expect
I will always try to find shares for you which will increase in value without “external help”, and you and I will just profit from taking advantage of these movements on the stock market.
At the same time this means that I will not limit the number of subscribers, but I will always take care that the readers of the stock letter do not buy and sell at considerably lower prices than the virtual portfolio of the stock letter.
This unfortunately is quite common with other stock letters, but it certainly does not make sense for you as readers.
My aim is for you to achieve a really good performance, therefore I will choose the shares according to the number of readers.
If need be, I will focus more on America (NASDAQ, NYSE) where, with a bit of good research, you can find a lot of stocks and shares which are volatile, but still have sufficient liquidity.

What you cannot expect
If you expect the stock letter to perform in the same way as my above mentioned portfolio, then I will have to disappoint you.
The stock letter will carry out approx. 3 trades per week.
For the above mentioned performance, however, I often performed 30 trades per day and more.
It is not possible to represent this within the format of a stock letter, particularly when most of us do not have the opportunity of trading with shares on their PCs all day.
Therefore, the stock letter will only capture an excerpt from what I am trading privately, and I will try to adopt for the stock letter what is in my opinion most suited from the opportunity-risk ratio point of view.

Performance target
Please do not, therefore, expect exorbitant performance. I will try to achieve the best possible result with the opportunities the stock market has to offer.
If you want a guaranteed 1,000%, then please subscribe to other stock letters -- only to realize that promises are not kept or that such a performance only takes place in the virtual portfolio and not in yours.
For my part, I only strive towards 100% + X.
The size of X will remain to be seen ;-).

My motivation
There is no question that I am also happy about the income from the subscription fees of my stock letter.
As you may see from my private trading performance this, however, is not my motivation for writing a stock letter.
In fact, the point is that I presently cannot see any stock letter on the market which would meet my requirements.
In my opinion, it is therefore time to publish a stock letter from which you can benefit and, above all, which you can rely on.
This is why there are no long contract terms, etc. In fact, everything is customer friendly.

If you are satisfied, then I am, too!


Yours sincerely,

Bernd M. Otto