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Kirk Finished Windsurfing in Palo Alto, CA - Mo Gunn

With my writing, I hope to help you too reach AND MAINTAIN critical mass where your investments earn enough money that you don't have to work unless you want to! I was taught that the best way to get better at something is to teach it! click for a FREE sample of my newsletter

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I have been living off my investment portfolio and my writing since I left Hewlett Packard in 1998. I live in California on the beautiful San Francisco Peninsula. I manage my investments (very little trading) and write about this in the mornings and windsurf, bike ride and garden in the afternoons. What a life!

I advise a "Core and Explore" approach to investing.

Core means place 80 to 99% of your money into a CORE portfolio of well diversified, buy-and-hold, no load mutual funds, ETFs and or blue chip stocks then Explore with the remainder as you learn.

In my newsletter I have specific recommendations for aggressive and conservative core portfolios. My newsletter explore portfolio gained 217%, more than tripling every dollar invested, between 12/31/1998 and 1/1/2006 while the S&P500 and NASDAQ were only up 17% and 7% respectively!!! My two core portfolios have beaten the S&P500 by over 20% since their 2001 inception.

Send me an email if you want to get on my mailing list for FREE STUFF & A FREE Sample Issue of my Newsletter.

I designed optical transceivers (fiberoptics and infrared at Hewlett Packard) for a salary for nearly 20 years while investing about 20% of gross salary each year. Now (as of March 2006) I make a living from the return on my exceptional investments, working with a few individual "students" teaching them how to manage their own investments, writing an investment newsletter, consulting as a stock analyst, some engineering special projects and doing interesting things on the internet such as my Daily World Market Graphs and Information Page and ForBestAdvice.com . I turn 50 years young in April 2007.

Profile:

I graduated from UC Berkeley with a BS degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1979. While a student in 1978, I started working for Hewlett Packard doing research and development in the Optical Communication Division. I designed and led teams for many types of products that involve semiconductors and light-wave components. This gave me a unique understanding of technology and how it affected our productivity.

Here is a patent I was awarded while at HWP (now called Agilent Technologies).

I designed products at HWP for 20 years and taught myself investing to supplement my income. In March 1997 I started working on this web site as a way to share Best Practices for investing. The last few years at HWP I made 2 or 3 times more in the stock market than I did working so I semi retired in Dec 1998 from HWP to work on my new passion, internet projects (Suite101.com) teaching others about investing. Nothing beats working for yourself and setting you own hours though I still love engineering design and may go back to it someday.

My investment style is to buy out of favor growth companies when nobody wants them using an asset allocation strategy.

My first success was paying off my first new car loan I got when I graduated UCB and not stopping payments to my credit union when the balance reached zero. I continued to pay myself car payments which has allowed me to buy all my other cars with cash from this "car fund" including my 1994 Corvette. I also do NOT pay credit card interest: if I don't have the cash to pay off my credit card balance each month, I don't buy anything.

Ever since my high school algebra class over 20 yrs ago, where I learned what compounding will do, I've been an investor. It took me many years to get good at it and I like to think of my early losses as "tuition". I've been helping a few friends the past several yrs make good, reasonably safe (for the given level of risk) investments and they have been very pleased with the results. Now they pay me and I was asked to write a newsletter to help even more people. In 1999 my newsletter stock portfolio did over 110% return!

I stress having a balanced, global portfolio with no major positions in a single company and prefer that the majority of assets be in no load mutual funds.

Much of my personal success has come from identifying major growth companies in the high tech industry and buying them when they are out of favor. In 1993 and '94 I only bought a few companies: Intel, Microsoft, IBM, Syntex and HWP.I lost 20% in Syntex and made 3 to 20 times my money in the others.

While it is fun to hit the home run with an individual stock pick, I believe the majority of people should have portfolios with good, no load mutual funds and let the experts do the work for them. If you want to do it yourself, start with a small percentage of your portfolio and see how you do compared to the experts. A good portion of my personal portfolio in invested in good, no load mutual funds. If you want some of my help identifying stocks and funds to help you try to outperform, then click to check out a sample of my newsletter where I have put together a pretty good record of success beating the market.

Today

These days you find me windsurfing, helping private clients one-on-one and writing about investing while I continue my passion of inventing new technologies which may someday come to market.

Note: "CORE & Explore®" was coined by and is a registered trademark of Charles Schwab & Co., Inc.

Best CD Rates -- FREE sample of 'Kirk Lindstroms's Investment Letter"