MARKET WISDOM IN WEEKLY DOSE: INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY BIDS TO BOOST SUBS BY GIVING TIPS

For investors poised on the edge of their chairs to hear the philosophy and stock-picking methods of guru William J. O’Neil, founder and chairman of Investor’s Business Daily, the moment is at hand.

And at hand. And at hand.

Beginning today, Mr. O’Neil will give tips from his 45 years divining the market in a feature to appear weekly on the newspaper’s front page — for the next six months.

“Twenty-six issues,” muses Marshall Loeb, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and former managing editor of Fortune and Money magazines. “That seems rather a lot. I hope he has good research, that the world is waiting to hear the philosophy of William J. O’Neil.”

Two current front-page columns will be shoved inside to make way for the owner’s opus. But Mr. O’Neil says his series will offer facts based on experience, not just philosophy: “This is an educational venture.” Of course, he adds, “readers who go through this will, we think, be a lot more apt to renew subscriptions.”

The five-day-a-week newspaper, launched in 1984, touts itself as the fastest-growing business publication of the decade. According to Audit Bureau of Circulation figures, circulation swelled 133% from 1990 through 1997, to a current 285,000, compared with a decline of 4% for archrival Wall Street Journal, which still can boast a circulation of more than 1.8 million.

With the paper finally turning profitable last year, the 64-year-old Mr. O’Neil and his editors recently beefed up staff (based in Mar Vista, Calif., near Los Angeles). They plan to add new features by the end of the year. And in early 1999, IBD, as it’s known, will launch a brand-imaging ad campaign, Mr. O’Neil says.

The boss’s six-month series offers some natural marketing opportunities, too: It will be turned into a book, joining his other book, the best-selling “How to Make Money in Stocks: A Winning System in Good Times or Bad,” first published in 1988.

Mr. O’Neil used his early stock-picking success (including a big win on the birth control pill Syntex) to buy a New York Stock Exchange seat at age 30. From there, he started an institutional investment research firm bearing his name, which made him even more money. His research products include O’Neil Datagraphs, a chart service for institutions, and Daily Graphs, which provides information for individual investors.

The charts, the newspaper and his stock-picking concepts — all are grounded on a database of information about U.S. public companies that Mr. O’Neil began to assemble in the early 1960s. He gathered stock prices, volume figures, earnings and other revealing numbers in library newspaper stacks and entered them into a computer using the medium of the time: punch cards.

Today, the database tracks “a couple of hundred variables” on every company, says Mr. O’Neil. His goal is to find companies that become winners, then to understand why. The distilled wisdom is sold through the research division and also provides stock tips and statistics that help fill the newspaper.

Not exactly newS

IBD is densely packed with investment information, but it is also eclectic. On the day Mr. O’Neil announced his series, a front-page column detailed Ben Franklin’s secrets of success — a dozen virtues ranging from hard work to humility.

Not exactly news, but some see a kind of charm.

“It’s a throwback to the family-owned newspaper, where the owning family ran stuff that it thought was important,” says George Harmon, director of the news-editorial program at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Much of the first column in the six-month series gives Mr. O’Neil’s take on how to cut losses when stocks head south. “You can get into a lot of trouble if you don’t have some mechanism to recognize when you are going to make a mistake,” he explains.

Next week, he tells readers how to get started. Future columns will explain his C-A-N S-L-I-M system, which refers to Mr. O’Neil’s key investment considerations (“C” is for Current Quarterly Earnings, “A” for Annual Earnings Increases).

How is the chairman at meeting newspaper deadlines? “We’re going to be OK with that,” says Mr. O’Neil, who has several assistants “cleaning up” his dictation.

Of more concern is the pain of cutting text to fit the space. “That’s misery,” he says. “You just hate to cut out those golden words.”