Kevin Kennedy

With thousands of stocks and mutual funds to choose from, how do you narrow your search and still find winning investments? If you're like many investors, you turn to investment newsletters from CoolcatReport.com to sift through the markets and discover winning stocks.

CoolcatReport.com Publisher Kevin Kennedy, a veteran of more than 20 years in newspaper journalism and the former mayor of his hometown, was used to trying to find answers to vexing questions when he began working to solve one of the biggest mysteries of all in the mid-1990s: what makes stocks go up in price?

Kennedy wondered: Was there a way for the average weekend warrior with a real job to cut the thousands of stocks and mutual funds down to a much smaller number that could then be examined more closely without studying stocks for hours and hours each day?

Early on in his quest, Kennedy was introduced to the ideas of William O'Neil, the publisher of Investors Business Daily and author of "How to Make Money in Stocks," in which he details his CANSLIM approach to investing.

As a numbers junkie, Kennedy found the statistics in IBD fascinating and set out to work on developing statistical ideas that could produce winners. Kennedy found the CANSLIM approach wanting in some respects, but relied heavily on its basic tenets of investing during strong market conditions and using research to isolate the characteristics found in winning stocks.

Kennedy tested and refined his ideas on Internet investment message boards before launching the Coolcat Explosive Small Cap Growth Stock Report in October 1997.

Success came quickly. The Hulbert Financial Digest, the most prestigious independent watchdog of investment newsletters for more than 25 years, added the Coolcat Report to the list of more than 150 newsletters it tracks in December 1998.

Since then, the newsletter has delivered market-beating performance in both bull and bear markets while helping experienced and novice investors alike in all 50 states and more than 40 countries profit from many of the market’s biggest winning stocks.

The newsletter was ranked No. 3 by Hulbert in 1999 with a 151.2% gain, then finished No. 1 in 2001 with a gain of 77.7%. The Nasdaq, meanwhile, was deep in the middle of its worst bear market ever and fell 21.1% in 2001.

The newsletter's portfolios posted an 82.5% gain in 2003 and entered 2010 with an overall gain of 383.2% (+15.4% annualized) for the 11 years from 1999-2010.

That sizzling pace easily ranks the newsletter as America's No. 1 investment newsletter, beating the second-best newsletter by more than 3% per year during that period.

It’s no wonder MarketWatch has called Kennedy “the pre-eminent stock picker of the moment” and “an investment newsletter superstar.” Gushed Kiplinger's Personal Finance: "Kevin Kennedy's stock picks have produced torrid gains. ... Kennedy has proven deft at charting the sometimes bizarre and counterintuitive ebbs, flows and crosscurrents in one of the market's most volatile corners: small-company growth stocks."

The investment newsletter includes two model portfolios with buy and sell signals and focuses on top-performing microcap and small cap stocks with a market cap of less than $1 billion that have the characteristics found in past major market winners.

Among the criteria Kennedy uses to identify leading stocks in the report are new 52-week price highs, high relative strength and increasing volume. The newsletter uses market timing and money management strategies to let profits run and cut losses.

CoolcatReport.com newsletters have been featured in Forbes/Forbes.com, Barron's, The Wall Street Journal, Investor's Business Daily, Kiplinger's Personal Finance, MSN Money, MarketWatch, SmartMoney.com, Seeking Alpha and SmallCapInvestor.com as well as newspapers throughout the U.S. Kennedy has appeared on The Nightly Business Report, Wall Street Week with Fortune and American Scene Radio and has also presented seminars at major investment conferences such as The Money Show in San Francisco, Las Vegas and Orlando.

Kennedy has taken approaches and strategies similar to those developed in The Coolcat Explosive Small Cap Growth Stock Report and used them to create three more great investment newsletters which identify and analyze the strongest small cap, mid cap, large cap, blue chip and technology stocks as well as exchange traded funds (ETFs).

The Coolcat ETF Report began regular publication in June 2004. It includes two model portfolios with buy and sell signals as well as our momentum-based rankings of the top-performing exchange traded funds (ETFs).

According to the Hulbert Financial Digest, the newsletter's ETF Portfolio has averaged an annual gain of 12.2% in the past five years to rank as           Hulbert's No. 1 ETF portfolio. The portfolio is also in the top 5% of all        portfolios tracked by Hulbert during that period.

CoolcatReport.com launched publication of The Coolcat Total Stock Market Report in December 2005. The newsletter’s Larger Stocks Portfolio focuses on stocks with a market value of at least $1 billion, while the Total Stock Market Portfolio is a mix of holdings from our other newsletters—some microcaps, small caps, mid caps, large caps, blue chips, tech stocks and ETFs.

The Coolcat Technology Plus Report was introduced in June 2006. This newsletter features the Coolcat Tech Bubble Survivors Index, which tracks the performance of technology and Internet stocks which burst into prominence during the Nasdaq 1999-2000 bubble before crashing to Earth, then emerging as survivors of the wreckage. The newsletter also has a model portfolio which focuses on the strongest and most innovative companies in the Nasdaq 100.