It has been a busy time around Chez Melvin this month. We have had birthdays, holidays, end of school year stuff, a rash of favorite authors releasing new books and of course, baseball season. In the midst of all this I have been busy crunching numbers and running test of various approaches to successfully invest in the markets. I have always been a geek and love testing new ideas and concepts but continued technology makes it so much easier today. Problems that used to take me weeks and months of building huge bulky spreadsheets and caused the air in my office to turn blue and heavy and now take just days and sometimes even hours. Instead of torturing code like a Spanish Inquisitor I can now just click buttons and type simple commands and accomplish tasks much easier and faster. The office air is still turning blue but that has more to do with the fact that I do much of this while watching the Orioles who are off to a bumpy start.

As I mentioned in Tuesdays video message I have pretty much determined that there four ways for individuals to get rich in the stock market. They are:

• 1.Deep Value Investing
• 2.Conserving cash to buy a market crash
• 3.Buying community bank stocks below book value
• 4.Momentum investing

I have the first three pretty well covered but momentum is not my thing and never has been. I tested some momentum models and they worked okay but eventually I took my head out of the very dark place I had jammed it into and remembered that I am actually friends with Louis Navellier and am well aware of his free stock picking tool Portfolio Grader. As he told me when I interviewed him on Benzinga.com not too long ago this ...

Today is going to be my more or less annual or close to it investor education rant. I was at a meeting of a prominent individual investors association last night and while I enjoyed meeting and talking with some folks ...

Small bank stocks are the place to be right now. There are powerful social, economic and demographic trends that are going to create an ongoing merger wave. There is an enormous amount of money to be made by patient disciplined ...

The idea of the Trade of the Decade in small banks is not something I cooked up just to sell subscriptions. I have been investing in small banks for more than 20 years and I follow the industry closely. Talking ...

One of the best lessons I have learned over the years is that although I am a pretty smart guy, there are plenty of people smarter than I am. I have learned to set aside ego and be smart enough ...

It is official. We are all just screwed. Janet Yellen told us that stocks are overvalued and potentially dangerous. Warren Buffett said that if interest rates go higher we will find that current stock valuations are high. Of course interest ...

It has been an interesting week and it looks like it will get even more interesting. Later today I have to run to the airport to drop my son and his steady girl off for their flight to- you guessed ...

As I sat thinking this morning about what to write about this week I decided to sit out back,have a little coffee and decide what to talk about. As he so often does, Jacob Wolinksy saved me with a tweet. If ...

Don’t take my word about the trade of the decade. Below are some of the articles dealing with small bank merger and acquisition activity that have appeared since the first of the month. This is real and it is now ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7__fP_Pwzmw

This week former hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller made some headlines as he compared the current environment to 2004. He said ““I just have the same horrific sense I had back in ’04. Our monetary policy is so much more ...

I am a big newspaper reader as well as tracking news across a variety of web sites. If you follow the news today the only possible conclusion is that the geopolitical situation right now is just ugly. The conflict between ...