About

This site was born of a desire to understand what moved stocks. At the beginning of my investing career in the 1980’s I used the standard approach of picking stocks recommended by others or in companies that I was familiar with. When these stocks lost money, I sought to understand what moves stocks, and that became the rabbit hole that is Puget Investor.

The first version of the VFS rating system was developed in the mid 1990’s, based on the limited financial information available. With the huge expansion of financial data available with the advent of the internet, the VFS Ratings have been tuned to use additional information. More recently, I have been focusing and analyzing the technical indicators that move stocks. Historically I have not been a big fan of technical analysis, but based on recent back-testing of certain indicators I have come to believe some technical indicators increase rating accuracy. The stock market does appear to have emotion drive prices, and technical indicators may be able to help understand that factor.

Ironically, one of the driving forces in basing investing decisions off an indicator is to try to reduce emotion in investing. I have often found myself too afraid to buy or too complacent to sell – the VFS Rating system helps evaluate concrete data points (and subjective estimates) to channel my emotions into a quantifiable decision.

Be sure and check out the Technical Model scorecard page which shows how accurate the technical rating system has been recently and since inception. This was born after back-testing a number of the other publicly available stock ratings – and not seeing a good correlation to rating and price performance. I urge anybody who bases investment decisions off anybody else’s indicators to back test the indicator to your actual investing results.  This will ensure the ratings are providing you value.

To be honest, the primary audience for this site is myself. This is a tool I use to base my decision whether to buy, sell or hold a stock. I made portions of this site public only because I figured people may be interested in ‘looking over my shoulder’ at how the VFS Modeling system is doing.

I welcome vistors to the site, and any feedback or questions on any content herein is appreciated – just Contact Me.

Dan Owens