Follow the trail to your earning potential.

For the firm believer that an investor should follow the trends to see real success in investing, it is important to know what the winners are doing right now. To understand that one needs to understand what they are looking at in the market. The first two things you must watch are real estate and unemployment. These are the absolute keys to a real recovery in the market and the economy. Until losing jobs is a thing of the past and until real estate prices stop going down, there will be pressure on our economy, end of story.

The current market is creating one of the greatest opportunities for building permanent real wealth if an investor can see the bargains. It is important to continually look for bargain-basement opportunities in the form of rock bottom prices. In addition to your own screening and research, it is important to pay attention to what those successful long-term investors are doing with their money.

Securities regulations make this very easy to do. Most finance managers are required to publicly release their holdings at the end of each quarter. By tracking portfolio changes and holdings in correlation with locations of investments, you effectively establish a makeshift research department composed of the best minds in the market. You should always do additional investigation of your own, but good research of what investors are already succeeding with is a good meeting of the minds, so to speak.

Just as an example, let’s look at Third Point LLC, the distressed and activist fund managed by Daniel Loeb. It is reported to have earned 16% or so annually without the use of much leverage, if any, just since its beginning in 1996. In his recent letter to shareholders, Loeb said he was less pessimistic about where the economy would be at the end of the quarter. The firm is letting go of what Loeb referred to as “doomsday positions” such as gold, the investments that will not stand as firm as they have once the economy moves forward. As we have established before, there is a relatively negative correlation between gold and Wall Street, simply because when Wall Street is doing poorly, gold has become the industry hiding place. When Wall Street bounces back, people bail from gold and ride the stock market back up, reducing the price of gold once again. (This explains why places like Cash4Gold are advertising the best ever prices of gold. Every active investor has bought some recently.) He said the fund is also finding long positions that offer what he called attractive opportunities.

Third Point established a new position in the home health and hospice company Amedisys in the quarter. As baby boomers age, this is going to be high-growth industry for years to come. Earnings and stock trades are up. Third Point also opened a position in Life Partners Holdings, a life insurance settlement business. Basically, it buys life insurance contracts at a discount from policyholders who are in need of funds. Life Partners then resells these contracts to retail and institutional investors. The company acts as an agent and receives a fee for its services. Earnings and stock trades are up for this company too, because death is truly recession-proof. It does appear that Third Point is leaning toward an aging population. In the last quarter it bought Wyeth, Schering-Plough and Pfizer with Pfizer coincidentally as one of the top investments right now.