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Compared to a full work day of 8, 10, or even 12 hours long, half an hour is really not all that much.
But thirty minutes every day could make you a healthy return on investments.
I always say that to be successful in investing, you cannot follow the "trend of the day" as everyone else fails out there.
Instead, when you find very simple strategies that you can repeat every day, you'll have much more consistent gains for your portfolio.
I've developed one habit which seems at first not just bizarre but totally unnecessary, yet it's helped put me at the top of the markets with a perfect track record.
To make extraordinary gains like that, you have to do something out of the ordinary.
My routine is one no one else does, but it's so simple you can make it a daily habit.
And what I do for a few minutes every day can make you money, lots of money.
How I Find the Big Money Winners and Avoid the Losers
Every day I read over the filings at the SEC.
It might sound crazy and not so fun, but I don't do it blindly, as I look for very specific details.
It becomes as easy as reading a map, knowing exactly how the markets are headed. I'm not the only one with a successful routine either, just look at the system Garret Baldwin made.
His proprietary system allowed him to escape his dingy studio apartment in NYC to his beachfront property in Naples, Florida – one of the richest zip codes in the U.S.
He takes the vast and complicated network of unfathomable finance data and reduces it into 4 profit-making stages.
Once you see how much money it's made him, you're going to be dying to see how much money it can make you!
For myself, I check what's going on in the insider buying space.
I do this for the same reason that I read reports released by the Federal Reserve and FDIC.
It's not because they are riveting literature, I can tell you that.
But it can be highly profitable when you put in the time and effort to find the nuggets.
The 13D filings are made by activist investors who have accumulated 5% or more of a company's stock.
Activist investors, or what we used to call them in the good old days "corporate raiders," quite often succeed in forcing management to cut costs, buy back the stock, or even sell the company.
I've studied these investors for almost all of my time in the markets.
Now I have a pretty good knowledge of who wins and who loses in this space and whether or not a particular campaign will work.
Pirating ideas from these stock market buccaneers has made me quite a bit of money in the past and selectively jumping board with certain activists should continue to be profitable.
I don't follow Carl Icahn as carefully as I did years ago, since he has made so much money over the years that he is limited to which companies he can buy.
Every once in a while, however, I see an Icahn play that looks like a high probability win, so I am willing to get my money alongside Carl and take the ride with him.
Last week he filed a 13D announcing that he bought an additional several million shares of Conduent Inc. (NYSE: CNDT) bringing his total ownership to more than 29 million shares of the former Xerox division.
Conduent is the perfect target for Icahn as it is bloated with businesses that should be doing well but simply isn't.
He's been very successful in forcing management hands in the past, and I feel pretty good about this campaign's chance of success.
Conduent is in all sorts of businesses that should be doing very well right now, including things like digital payments, claims processing, benefit administration, automated tolling, regulatory compliance, and distributed learning.
Instead, revenue is declining.
The company recently reduced its forecast for 2019, and the CEO resigned, sending the stock down sharply which is what inspired Mr. Icahn to step in and buy more shares.
However, this has already turned ugly.
Mr. Icahn had a representative on the board who resigned in April when the company tried to end matching 401K contributions to its over 10,000 employees to manage earnings and prop the stock up.
Mr. Icahn has since demanded the chairman resign, but so far only the CEO has been shown the door.
With the additional stock purchase, I think the heat is about to get turned up, and we could see some sort of deal that moves the stock price a lot higher.
Follow This Method for Bigger, Easier Gains Ahead
About the Author
Tim Melvin is an unlikely investment expert by any measure. Raised in the "projects" of Baltimore by a single mother, he never attended college and started out as a door-to-door vacuum salesman. But he knew the real money was in the stock market, so he set sights on investing - and by sheer force of determination, he eventually became a financial advisor to millionaires. Today, after 30 years of managing money for some of the wealthiest people in the world, he draws on his experience to help investors find "unreasonably good" bargain stocks, multiply profits, and build their nest eggs. Tim tirelessly works to find overlooked "hidden gems" in the stock market, drawing on the research of legendary investors like Benjamin Graham, Walter Schloss, and Marty Whitman. He has written and lectured extensively on the markets, with work appearing on Benzinga, Real Money, Daily Speculations, and more. He has published several books in the "Little Book of" Investment Series and a "Junior Chamber Course" geared towards young adults that teaches Graham's principles and techniques to a new generation of investors. Today, he serves as the Special Situations Strategist at Money Morning and the editor of "Max Wealth" and Heatseekers.