Our Success Story

We’ll admit that we had something to prove when we first opened the doors to Woman with Portfolio and invited other women to join us in our investing quest. We launched this site around Thanksgiving, 2007. It was like setting out in a new sailboat, knowing that storm clouds were on the horizon, and that we would be testing our sailing skills during a hurricane. The market was plummeting, and we had to adjust our strategy and make some key decisions to stay out of trouble and keep moving ahead.

We’re happy to say that we have not only outperformed the market; we’ve been gaining steadily, even at times when nearly everyone else was losing. During the darkest days of winter, when the bears left their dens to roam around, scaring lots of investors, our Fairest Shares portfolio stayed in the black and actually gained. Our percentage of gain never dipped below a positive 10%, when many stocks, mutual funds and fund managers, including some of the best in the business, were racking up losses of up to 25% and 30%. By the middle of May, our average percentage of gain for our Fairest Shares portfolio had climbed to nearly 25%. A year later, we emerged from the worst market drop since the Great Depression with an average gain on our shares of nearly 33%.

*Our Brazilian superstar oil company was up over 40%!

*Our green power company more than doubled!

*Our smallcap ETF (exchange-traded fund) climbed more than 50%!

*Our ETF following the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) gained more than 50%!

Our Method

We regard the key to our success as finding safe harbor in the strongest sectors and strongest stocks, using our trend-spotting abilities to get in early, before the rest of the crowd arrives. We use our Women’s Early Warning System to alert us to danger and possibilities as well as our VALUES method of shopping for stocks. Yes, we do crunch numbers, but that’s only one part of the strategy that we talk about on this site. (For math fans, we toss in a little chaos theory in addition to the usual ways of evaluating stocks.) We look at the whole picture, including global trends, so that we can find stocks to capture the benefits of those trends. We do our research, using some unusual sources. We happen to be enthusiastic data miners, and we’ve discovered some obscure stocks that have brought us great returns long before other analysts catch on. 

Our Outstanding Stocks

When the bottom dropped out of financial stocks, we were buying agriculture stocks and ETFs, including a fertilizer company and two agriculture-related ETFs, which kept going up like corn in Kansas. We even made a quick 25% gain in regional banks, when we saw an opportunity, and we found a safe real estate ETF that kept gaining when bricks-and-mortar real estate was tanking. We also foresaw that Brazilian stocks were going to start doing the samba, and we started the samba parade with our Brazilian energy superstar. And who says that girls and trucks don’t go together? We made a gain of more than 55% in a month on a diesel engine maker going green.

The following year, we called the bottom on the market in March, and we called the bottom of oil prices at $40, and we made strategic purchases that have strongly boosted our portfolio. We felt that alternative energy would rise along with oil prices, and we purchased an ETF (exchange-traded fund) that tracks global alternative energy companies. It has gained more than 60%. Our smallcap ETF has gained more than 50%.

By the way, several men have joined the site, and they’re welcome. Our purpose is to create a community of investors who can help each other on our investing journeys. We think we’re on the verge of one of the best times in years to invest in the market. We can look all around the world for emerging opportunities, and the prices of some great stocks are really cheap, as we saw with our quick 50% gain in Equinix, which we featured in our Bargain Stock section. Join us as we take advantage of a rare opportunity!!

June 1, 2009 • 7:38 AM