These stocks are getting hit for a reason. Instead, focus on stocks that show ‘relative strength.’ Here’s how.
4 min
A lot of investors get stock-picking wrong before they even get started: Instead of targeting the top-performing stocks in the market, they focus on the laggards—widely known companies that look as if they are on sale after a period of stock-price weakness.
But these weak performers usually are going down for good reasons, such as for deteriorating sales and earnings, market-share losses or mutual-fund managers who are unwinding positions.
Decades of Investor’s Business Daily research shows these aren’t the stocks that tend to become stock-market leaders. The stocks that reward investors with handsome gains for months or years are more often already the strongest price performers, usually because of outstanding earnings and sales growth and increasing fund ownership.
Of course, many investors already chase performance and pour money into winning stocks. So how can a discerning investor find the winning stocks that have more room to run?
Enter “relative strength”—the notion that strength begets more strength. Relative strength measures stocks’ recent performance relative to the overall market. Investing in stocks with high relative strength means going with the winners, rather than picking stocks in hopes of a rebound. Why bet on a last-place team when you can wager on the leader?
One of the easiest ways to identify the strongest price performers is with IBD’s Relative Strength Rating. Ranked on a scale of 1-99, a stock with an RS rating of 99 has outperformed 99% of all stocks based on 12-month price performance.
To capitalise on relative strength, an investor’s search should be focused on stocks with RS ratings of at least 80.
But beware: While the goal is to buy stocks that are performing better than the overall market, stocks with the highest RS ratings aren’t always the best to buy. No doubt, some stocks extend rallies for years. But others will be too far into their price run-up and ready to start a longer-term price decline.
Thus, there is a limit to chasing performance. To avoid this pitfall, investors should focus on stocks that have strong relative strength but have seen a moderate price decline and are just coming out of weeks or months of trading within a limited range. This range will vary by stock, but IBD research shows that most good trading patterns can show declines of up to one-third.
Here, a relative strength line on a chart may be helpful for confirming an RS rating’s buy signal. Offered on some stock-charting tools, including IBD’s, the line is a way to visualise relative strength by comparing a stock’s price performance relative to the movement of the S&P 500 or other benchmark.
When the line is sloping upward, it means the stock is outperforming the benchmark. When it is sloping downward, the stock is lagging behind the benchmark. One reason the RS line is helpful is that the line can rise even when a stock price is falling, meaning its value is falling at a slower pace than the benchmark.
The value of relative strength could be seen in Google parent Alphabet in January 2020, when its RS rating was 89 before it started a 10-month run when the stock rose 64%. Meta Platforms ’ RS rating was 96 before the Facebook parent hit new highs in March 2023 and ran up 65% in four months. Abercrombie & Fitch , one of 2023’s best-performing stocks, had a 94 rating before it soared 342% in nine months starting in June 2023.
Those stocks weren’t flukes. In a study of the biggest stock-market winners from the early 1950s through 2008, the average RS rating of the best performers before they began their major price runs was 87.
To see relative strength in action, consider Nvidia . The chip stock was an established leader, having shot up 365% from its October 2022 low to its high of $504.48 in late August 2023.
But then it spent the next four months rangebound—giving up some ground, then gaining some back. Through this period, shares held between $392.30 and the August peak, declining no more than 22% from top to bottom.
On Jan. 8, Nvidia broke out of its trading range to new highs. The previous session, Nvidia’s RS rating was 97. And that week, the stock’s relative strength line hit new highs. The catalyst: Investors cheered the company’s update on its latest advancements in artificial intelligence.
Nvidia then rose 16% on Feb. 22 after the company said earnings for the January-ended quarter soared 486% year over year to $5.16 a share. Revenue more than tripled to $22.1 billion. It also significantly raised its earnings and revenue guidance for the quarter that was to end in April. In all, Nvidia climbed 89% from Jan. 5 to its March 7 close.
And the stock has continued to run up, surging past $1,000 a share in late May after the company exceeded that guidance for the April-ended quarter and delivered record revenue of $26 billion and record net profit of $14.88 billion.
Ken Shreve is a senior markets writer at Investor’s Business Daily. Follow him on X @IBD_KShreve for more stock-market analysis and insights, or contact him at ken.shreve@investors.com .
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What a quarter-million dollars gets you in the western capital.
Alexandre de Betak and his wife are focusing on their most personal project yet.
The bequests benefit charities, distant relatives and even pets
4 min
Charities, distant relatives and even pets are benefiting from surprise inheritances. They can thank people without children.
Not having children is becoming more common, both among millennials and older people. A July Pew Research Center analysis found that 20% of U.S. adults age 50 and older hadn’t had children.
And many of these people don’t have wills. An AARP survey found half of childless people age 50-plus who live alone have a will, compared with 57% of others that age. Those without wills have less control over what happens to their money, which often ends up in the hands of people who don’t expect it.
This phenomenon of a surprise inheritance is common enough that it has a name: the laughing heir .
“All they do is get the money and go, ‘Ah ha ha, look at that,’ ” said Michael Ettinger , an estate lawyer in New York.
Kelley Gilpin McKeig, a 64-year-old healthcare-industry consultant in Ridgefield, Wash., received a phone call several years ago saying her cousin Nick Caldwell left behind money in a savings account. They hadn’t been in touch for 20 years.
“I thought it was a scam,” she said. “Nobody else in our family had heard that he had passed.”
She hunted down his death certificate and a news article and learned he had died about a year and a half before in a workplace accident.
Caldwell, who was in his 50s, had died without a will. His estate was split among cousins and an uncle. It took about two years for the money to be distributed because of the paperwork and court approval involved. Gilpin McKeig’s share was $2,300.
Afterward, she updated her will to make sure what she has doesn’t go to “just anybody down the line, or cousins I don’t care about.”
There are trillions of dollars at stake as baby boomers age.
Most people leave their money to spouses and children when they die. A 2021 analysis of Federal Reserve survey data found that 82% of heirs’ inheritances came from parents.
People with no children say they want to leave a greater share of their estates to charity, friends and extended family , according to research by two Yale law professors that surveyed 9,000 U.S. adults.
Rebecca Fornwalt, a 33-year-old writer, created a trust after landing a book deal. While her heirs are her parents, her backup heirs include her sister and about a half-dozen close friends. She set aside $15,000 for the care of each of her two dogs.
Susan Lassiter-Lyons , a financial coach in Florence, Ariz., said one childless client is leaving equal interests in her home to her two nephews. Another is leaving her home to a man she has been friends with for a long time.
“She broke his heart years ago and she feels guilted into leaving him property,” Lassiter-Lyons said.
A client who is a former escort estranged from her family is leaving her estate to two friends and to charity.
Lassiter-Lyons, who doesn’t have children, set up a trust for her two dogs should she and her wife die. The pet guardian, her wife’s sister, would live in their house while taking care of the dogs. When the dogs die, she inherits the house.
In the Yale study, people without descendants—children or grandchildren—intended to give 10% of their estates to charity, on average, more than triple the intended amount of those with descendants.
The Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles, which manages $1.3 billion of assets, a few years ago added an “heirless donors” section to its website that profiles donors and talks about building a legacy.
“Fifteen years ago, we never talked about child-free donors at all,” said Lew Groner , the foundation’s vice president for marketing.
In the absence of a will, heirs are determined by state law . Assets can wind up in the state’s hands. In New York, for example, $240 million in unclaimed funds over the past 10 years has arrived from estates of the deceased, not including real estate, according to the state comptroller’s office. In California, it is $54.3 million.
Financial advisers say a far bigger concern than who gets what is making sure there is enough money and support for a comfortable old age, because clients without children can’t call on them for help.
“I hope there is something left to leave,” said Stephanie Maxfield, a 43-year-old therapist in southern Colorado. “But if there isn’t, I think that’s OK, too.”
She said she would like to leave something to her partner’s nieces and nephews, as well as animal shelters and domestic-violence shelters. Her best friend is a beneficiary.
Choosing an estate executor and who would handle money and health decisions on your behalf can be difficult when you don’t have children, financial advisers say. Using a promised inheritance as a reward for taking care of you when you are older isn’t a good solution, said Jay Zigmont , an investment adviser focused on childless people.
“Unfortunately, it is relatively common to see family members who are in the will decide to opt for cheaper medical care (or similar decisions) in order to protect what they will be inheriting,” he said in an email.
Kirsten Tompkins, who is from Birmingham, U.K., and works in consulting, along with her husband divided their estate among their dozen nieces and nephews.
Choosing heirs was the easy part. What is hard is figuring out whom to ask for help as she and her husband get older, she said.
“A lot of us are at an age where we are playing that role for our parents,” the 50-year-old said, referring to tasks such as providing tech support and taking parents to medical appointments. “Who is going to do that for us?”
