William J. O’Neil’s name may not be as well-known as Warren Buffett’s, but his impact on stock pickers is almost as legendary.
O’Neil, who died recently at age 90, once turned $5,000 into $200,000 in a year’s time. He did so by employing his self-made method of quantitative analysis, which called for intensive data and lots of charts. He set aside emotions and listened intently to what those mounds of information were whispering to him. His work led to several proprietary investment systems, including one known as the O’Neil Methodology.
He started several companies. The first of which, William O’Neil + Co., which he founded in 1963, is an institutional investment advisor and brokerage that was known for producing extensive chart books each Friday to be delivered to money managers’ desks by Monday. The following year, at age 30, O’Neil became the youngest person at that time to purchase a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. A year later, he launched the O’Neil Fund, which in 1967 was ranked No. 1 after achieving a nearly 116% return.
In 1984 he started a newspaper that eventually became Investor’s Business Daily in Santa Monica. Serious investors considered it a needed supplement to, or replacement for, the Wall Street Journal. His 1988 book, “How to Make Money in Stocks: A Winning System in Good Times or Bad,” was the best-selling investment book that year. It is still in print and has sold 4 million copies.
One more trait about the Oklahoma-born O’Neil: he had a pioneering nature. When other young prodigies migrated east to Wall Street, he decided to move west to Los Angeles. The reason, he explained: “That’s where a lot of the future would be.”
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You know Los Angeles County is huge with its nearly 10 million people and all. But do you ever wonder how its economy would stack up not against other counties but against other states?
Robert Lee, a labor market consultant with the California Employment Development Department, recently answered that question. If measured by its gross domestic product, L.A. County would be the sixth-largest state.
That makes L.A. County’s economy bigger than such relatively large states as Pennsylvania, Ohio and Georgia but smaller than Texas, Florida, New York and Illinois, Lee wrote in an EDD report recently.
GDP is the total value of all finished goods and services produced or rendered in a year. For L.A. County, that amounted to $712 billion in 2021. The county’s GDP understandably dipped in the pandemic year of 2020. But it grew 7.9% in 2021 and exceeded the pre-pandemic year of 2019, when the GDP was $700 billion, Lee wrote.
The Insider is compiled by Editor-in-Chief Charles Crumpley. He can be reached at [email protected].
