In today’s guest column, Oxford Club Chief Investment Strategist Alexander Green outlines how to identify individual stocks that have the potential to outperform the market.

Recently, Alex discovered the biggest healthcare innovation in half a century. And this incredible opportunity checks every box of his investment criteria. Longtime member of The Oxford Club Bill O’Reilly is even calling it “humanity’s next great leap.”

Get in early on this little-known company – which only recently went public and is already taking in tens of millions of dollars – before it’s too late…

Trading for well under $10, this stock could be your ticket to major gains in 2022 and beyond.

Click here to learn more.

– Ryan Fitzwater, Associate Publisher

I’ve written often about how the best investors beat the market.

It’s not by guessing whether to be in the market or out. It’s by owning individual stocks that give higher returns than the broad market.

Ask an auditorium full of investors “Who’s the greatest stock picker of all time?” and you’ll get a variety of good answers (starting with Warren Buffett).

But ask that same auditorium “Who’s the greatest market timer of all time?” and you’ll hear some low murmuring and then… crickets.

It validates Vanguard founder Jack Bogle’s famous quote…

After nearly 50 years in this business, I don’t know anybody who has [timed the market] successfully and consistently. I don’t even know anybody who knows anybody who has.

If market outperformance is your goal, drop your subscription to the psychic network and pull out your calculator instead.

Because analyzing businesses is partly about evaluating products, processes and quality of management. But it’s mostly about numbers.

Companies that experience rising sales, increasing market share, double- or triple-digit earnings growth and high returns on equity see their share prices rise.

Those that don’t… don’t.

However, just as individuals experience an awkward start (adolescence), a period of mastery and success (maturity), and then a slow or sudden decline (old age), companies have a limited number of prime years too.

We saw this in June 2018 when the last original Dow Jones Industrial component, General Electric (NYSE: GE), was dropped from the index after more than a century.

Hard as it may be to believe, someday other corporations will replace market leaders like Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN), Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) and Google’s parent, Alphabet (Nasdaq: GOOGL).

But almost certainly not anytime soon.

Readers who have run businesses of their own recognize that companies often find a profitable niche and work it for all it’s worth, then something changes that completely alters their outlook.

That “something” could be a disruptive new technology, the rise of tough new competitors or just changing consumer tastes.

But once a company starts losing market share – for whatever reason – it is often difficult (if not impossible) to get it back. That’s why few companies are worth hanging on to forever.

(Just ask any buy-and-holder of Montgomery Ward, Circuit City, Borders, RadioShack, Shearson Lehman, Kodak or Sears, to name just a few.)

The two things every investor needs to beat the market with individual stocks are a strict set of criteria for what to buy… and a strict discipline for when to sell.

In my 37 years in the business, the three best methods I’ve found for selecting stocks are momentum investing, value investing and riding the coattails of industry insiders.

Momentum stocks are companies that lead the market in sales and earnings growth, product innovation, and price action. They tend to rise faster in a bull market and fall harder in a bear market or correction.

Value stocks are companies that are cheaper than most on the basis of price-to-sales, price-to-earnings and price-to-book value. They often pay bigger-than-average dividends too.

These stocks may rise less in a bull market but hold up better in a bear market. They are a fine example of why the tortoise beat the hare.

But there’s no better indicator than insider buying…

Insider stocks are ones where the officers, directors and beneficial owners are buying substantial amounts of their own companies’ shares with their own money at current market prices.

Given that these individuals have access to all sorts of material, nonpublic information about their companies’ business prospects, it’s no surprise that these stocks tend to outperform in good times and bad.

These are three different approaches requiring entirely different metrics. Yet they all work over time… and none involve trying to outguess the market.

But how about a stock that encompasses all of these qualities and more?

Humanity’s Next Big Leap

Investors should always be on the lookout for new technologies and innovations – that’s often where you’ll find some of the most drastic moves in the market.

This stock is one of the most promising investment opportunities I have come across in my 37-year career as an investment analyst…

It checks off all of the boxes I’ve discussed in this article and more.

As I write, the stock is trading for less than $6 a share… providing incredible value for investors.

The company is also gaining momentum fast. In the quarter that ended in December 2021, revenue at this company rose 21%.

Moreover, net income exceeded Wall Street’s consensus estimate by more than 69% – as it did in each of the two previous quarters.

The problem – or rather opportunity – is that there are only two prominent Wall Street analysts following the stock.

(Though others are starting to catch wind of the opportunity.)

The vast majority of investors have never heard of the company. And the information vacuum is creating a big opportunity for folks who jump in now.

Management estimates that sales will increase another 33% to 41% this year as the firm sees growth in each of its markets: health systems, medical education institutions and veterinarians (both here and abroad).

And last month, there was a surge in insider buying activity. While insiders may sell shares of their own companies for several reasons, they buy for only one reason: They believe the share price is going to rise.

While the company – which has a market cap of just over $1 billion – is not yet profitable, it thinks its product and services have the potential to dominate the $8 billion ultrasound market.

This will dramatically improve healthcare around the world – and drive this company’s sales and earnings substantially higher...

Putting early investors in a better position to capitalize on an eventual rebound in the stock – one that may come sooner than you think…

Go here for the full story.

Good investing,

Alex

Fun Fact Friday:

It’s a cliché to blame U.S. presidents for the health of the stock market, but the degree of their economic impact is fairly tame. The president does have the power to appoint cabinet secretaries, such as the head of the Department of Commerce, as well as trade representatives.

The president also nominates the chair of the Federal Reserve, who sets monetary policy, along with the other Fed governors and members of the Federal Open Market Committee. The Fed is an independent government body with a mission to set monetary policy that ensures economic growth, low inflation, and low unemployment. Those monetary policy measures can impact the stock market, although the Fed typically does not consider the performance of the stock market as an isolated factor when making its decisions.

So while the president can influence the economy through policies and economic agendas that can impact the stock market, the president probably gets too much blame when the market goes down and too much credit when it goes up.