Legendary mutual fund manager Peter Lynch was famous for finding winning investments by walking through shopping malls and grocery stores and observing clothes his children were wearing.
His thesis was you have to get out into the real world to see what’s hot and what’s not.
He once said: “Never invest in any idea you can’t illustrate with a crayon.” That’s about as simple as it gets. Forget Fibonacci retracements and PEG ratios (although I love investing in stocks with PEG ratios below 1), and invest in something you can explain to your ten-year-old daughter.
Lynch was criticized for making investments based on anecdotes, and not empirical data, but the results speak for themselves…
And truth be told, after all the stock charts I analyze, after all of the balance sheets I pore over, and after reading a mountain of mundane press releases, nothing excites more about a stock or investment trend than a good story.
That’s why one of the first things I read in the morning isn’t the Wall Street Journal, IBD, or Forbes. It’s local newspapers like the Bismarck Tribune and the Midland Daily News.
Let me give you an excellent example…
You know that North Dakota is going great guns because of the oil boom in the Bakken.
In fact, nine counties in North Dakota recently recorded unemployment rates of less than 2%. That’s full employment — meaning if you live in one of these counties and you don’t have a job, it means you don’t want to work. Period.
Unemployment statistics are excellent sources of data because they combine anecdotal evidence with hard, raw numbers.
But here are the kinds of stories I love reading. Take a look at this one from the Bismarck Tribune a few days ago:
BISMARCK, N.D. — North Dakota airports recorded their highest June boardings to date, spurred by a tripling of passengers flying out of Williston since June of last year.
The North Dakota Aeronautics Commission said Dickinson began jet service to Denver and Minneapolis in June and set an all-time monthly boarding record. The eastern airports also posted big numbers, with Grand Forks showing an increase of 1,546 passengers and Fargo increasing by 3,439 from last June.
Statewide numbers are up 9 percent.
Aeronautics Director Larry Taborsky said parking lots are full and rental car agencies are busy, indicating that passengers are traveling to whatever airport that can support their business and vacation travel plans.
This doesn’t happen unless the region is booming. And booming it is.
North Dakota shattered another record, producing over 810,000 barrels of oil per day in the month of May.
The state is producing more oil than the entire nation of OPEC member Ecuador, with its 485,000 barrels of oil per day.
The gross numbers from the Bakken are staggering. As I write this, WTI oil is trading for nearly $106 a barrel. So every single day, a gross resource value of $85 million of oil is being produced in North Dakota. That amounts to $601 million every week. $2.5 billion every month.
But just when you think it can’t get any better, it does…
You see, the U.S. government recently doubled the estimated amount of recoverable oil reserves in the Bakken to over 7 billion barrels.
The gross resource value now sitting beneath the 200,000 square-mile area of the Bakken is enormous.
And the United States government has done everything in its power to hide the true amount of oil in this field, perhaps one of the largest of its kind in modern history.
Fortunately, they couldn’t hold back the investment tide for long, even admitting to the public a few months ago that the field holds twice as much crude as previously disclosed…
Although we’ve been on top of this story for years, there are still substantial profits to be made in the Bakken.
As it happens, we’ve uncovered three stocks neck-deep in this oil patch. These companies represent the three best chances for both veteran and rookie investors alike to finally hang that elusive tenbagger on their portfolio wall.
Each is trading for under $10 a share. But I don’t expect them to stay that cheap for long, especially once Wall Street jumps into this pool with both feet…
Forever wealth,
Brian Hicks Brian is a founding member and President of Angel Publishing. He writes about general investment strategies for Wealth Daily and Energy & Capital. For more on Brian, take a look at his editor’s page.
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