" Those who plead for the low interest rates forever are saying the largest economy in the world is so fragile that the slightest tick up in interest cost will collapse the entire economy. The quantitative easing for almost six years, inflating asset bubbles that must now be deflated one way or another." 

The rapid surge in penny stocks has created a broad margin of gains in the recent upside volatility. The only advise by its very nature is time limited. It will require you to take action before very specific market events happens. Wise guys, bet wisely!

The era of value investing.

Once you could gain money in the markets by looking at value hidden away in financial statements. Thanks for the digital era and its simplicity of access to information, that day is now past.

But there's still a proven way to consistently earn a positive return in the market--you just have to understand why value investing once work and it might never will again.

There's no doubt that Benjamin Graham and David Dodd shaped the modern profession of investor more than anyone in our history. When they posited--starting in 1928 at New York City's, Columbia Business School-- that investors could find companies whose stocks were misprice by just digging through publicly numbers, they set off a revolution. 

First hundreds, then thousands, and eventually millions of investors learned the art of scrutinizing those numbers to find compelling companies trading below their intrinsic value, and their books remain staples on virtually every financial bookshelf in the library. 

Prominent investors all the way up to inimitable Buffet have long espoused the wisdom of the approach. It has evolved over the years as well, moving from focus on book value to focus on earning value of a combination of similar factors. In fact, there are many variations on the theme as can be imagined, thousands of permutations on how to discover the value by crunching the numbers in the right way.

However, value investing has a dirty little secret;

Value. The end game is finally here?

It's always been based on knowing something that few other people could know. In tech speak, it's about an asynchronous or digital communication information advantage.

In other words, value investing is not that different from, say insider trading. In the case of insider information,  the opportunity lies in being able to position yourself in front of some fact that have the potential to re-value a company on the market.

Maybe you know "A" company is going to miss on earnings next month because your friend is on the board. Trading on the information is of course, illegal. But it is a crime that's committed again and again because it works and because it's difficult to prove. 

Value investing, on the other hand, is perfectly legal because in theory it is based only on public information. The catch is that it relies on the information being hard to find or being hard to make sense of. 

In the 1960s, in our country,  of course gathering information on the performance of the company was difficult. Even then gathering information on a public company was tedious, time consuming, expensive and really a task best left to the pros. In order to learn a compelling value, one had to make a significant time and energy commitment. You profit by being ahead of the knowledge of others. Nothing more than information arbitrage.

Value investing  is not alone in its dubious distinction from insider trading, however, the same thing applies to all forms of investing, including technical analysis, in fact, it is the sole basis on which it is possible to make a living, investing, your ability to be right about the future value of the company's paper before others.

As mentioned, it takes only one second for one of those dozens of freely available websites to answer the question for me. Virtually anyone can find these numbers. Every day, millions of investors and punters, hit sites at Yahoo and Google to dig up value stocks. Thousands more to do so in a massive scale across global markets l. Every square inch of statistical information that can be covered, has been one thousand times over , before you and I even started looking. 

Value investing it is, thanks to the internet is drawing its last few breaths. But the underlying principles are not. 

The uncertain games and changing rules. 

Just because of a company is big doesn't mean that market is paying attention and correct. Instead, find growth that is yet to be discovered. Despite the overwhelming number of computer armed stock jockeys now saturated the markets, there are still amazingly huge universe of stocks which get little to no attention. 

Yes, their numbers are crunched by the computers along with every other stock, because it costs nothing more to add a thousand additional companies to an algorithm. But when it comes to estimating revenues and earnings going forward, there's no shortage of " blue ocean". Thousands of smaller cap companies are completely or mostly ignored by prominent IBs and funds because it has a minimum investment size to worry about. 

Now I prefer to find growth. I like to position myself in a company before it announces good news, and wait for the rise, as those computers and hordes of investors behind them inevitably race to snap up a profit in the 15 minutes. But 15 seconds is more like it. That's the value last nowadays. Nothing is more predictable to me.

Either way, success is about finding your information advantage. What you can know before everyone knows it? It definitely won't be an imbalance price/book value in some sectors. But it could be definitely by sales numbers from the company that is no one is watching. 

And when you're right, you'll be glad to see all those value investing computerized robots trade your shares right on up, providing you liquidity all the way. While computer may have killed old fashioned, number crunching value investing, it done nothing to change the rules of the game. 

It just shifted asynchronous information around, making the ones where being human helps better than others.

What can you know, before everyone else knows it?

till then, bet wisely.