Since 01 February 2001, the Investors Business Daily newspaper has published a number that preceeds all others in their pages of stock listings (except for the AMEX stocks). That number is called their SmartSelect^® composite number that is based on 50 years of research. You can read all about it at the beginning of their NYSE listings. Each week this author scans the pages of IBD for all those stocks that are in the top two percent (i.e.: 98's and 99's), and from these thirty to fifty, he selects a dozen or so stocks that have exceptionally terrifically wonderful astounding charts. (Compare with Bottom Fishing.) Most of the weight he places on the 3-month charts, but occasionally he inspects their 1-year and longer charts. Additonally, this author only selects those which are in the 90 percentile or higher in both corporate profitability and stock price appreciation. Thus, these stocks are not only high-fliers, but they are also among the top ten percent of "value stocks" as well ('value' means they are making money hand over fist!)!

Of particular interest to the reader would be to notice how well these stocks did during the year 2000, which was a year of disaster for the market as a whole. Many of these stocks climbed steady all during that period of time as well as fore and aft that time. It was as if there were no chasm of dispair for these. To convince yourself of just how high these are flying, compare their charts with such stocks as Lucent (LU), General Motors (GM), Dominion Resources (D), IBM (IBM), 3M Company (MMM), or, horrors!, highly touted Enron. You will soon be wondering: "Where have I been?-!"

Let us look at the charts taken as a whole.

How well are the stocks doing? In the first column of the Index Stocks, and complete rows in the individual stocks, the redder an item is, the worse it is. The colors go from white (probably okay!) to light pink (three weeks of consecutive losses), to ever darkening reds and finally to black. The reds will lighten back to white on the Index Stocks as more gains accumulate. But on the Individual Stock chart, if a stock goes pink and does not rise the next week that stock is eliminated from the list. (This rule is sometimes ignored when the whole market is doing terribly. But at those times you probably should be cashing out of the market and not holding the stocks.)

Now let us look at the various columns.

The Rank is how the stocks stack up based on their percentage rise in the past three months. The change in rank from the previous week is shown. / Stars indicate the relative smoothness of the 3-month curve. / If there is a red heart, the stock is in the current Top One Hundred in the IBD, and its rank in that list is given with the change in rank from the previous week. A blue heart indicates that it was in last week, but not this week. As the hearts "age" they fade to pale blue merely to indicate that they were once in the list.

The Symbol column: the symbol is appended with the stock's Friday closing price. Also appended are "+" and "-" indicating a increase or decrease in the price over a week's time. Several such signs show a trend (the most recent week is to the left and previous weeks run to the right). If the writing is purple, the stock rose more than 10% during the week, and if red it dropped more than 10% that week.

The Name and business columns are self-explanatory. If the stock went up the past week, the Name column will have a blue background. The more blue you see in this column, the better the picks were.

The column labelled "IBD's numbers" requires three levels of explanation.

• If the second number is less than 100, that stock is on the AMEX and the SmartSelect^® does not apply. However, the two numbers given indicate the percentiles of both corporate profitability and stock price appreciation.

• For those with second numbers greater than 100 (actually, they must be greater than 180 (the sum of two numbers greater than 90)), the first number given in the table is the SmartSelect^®, and the second large number is the sum of the two profitability and appreciation percentiles.

• The third item to note is that if the two numbers are followed by a plus or minus sign, that indicates whether those numbers changed in the past week.

  The last column indicates how the percent rise that stock made in the past three months. This number is also appended with plus or minus signs to indicate if the rise is accelerating or leveling off. Again the most recent sign added is the left one. / Parenthetically, is the percentage increase for the last 12 months. If the current three months increase is greater than 30% of the annual increase (stock is speeding up), the 3-month number is purple; if less than 15% of the annual number (stock slowing down), you see red. / Stars: one star means the chart looks good for the whole of the past year; two stars mean the chart looks good for the previous TWO years.

Bottom Fishing is the opposite of what is above. Bottom fishers would say that 99's and 98's have nowhere to go but down (not true: they can still keep going up). And they will say that those stocks that are 1's and 2's have nowhere to go but up (not true: they can go bankrupt).

Let's take a look at which stocks can populate the bottom of the pond.

• The buggy-whip makers who are going out of style and on their ways to bankruptcy (bad!)
• The very newest companies whose founders are just getting them out of their garages (good!).