Meet the relatives: Charles Kirkpatrick’s strategy for finding cheap growth on the move

Over the past 50 years, Charles Kirkpatrick has earned a reputation for being one of the most respected names in trading. Yet for a long time, his ideas were completely at odds with the theory that stock markets are efficient. It was only through dogged determination that he showed how emotions like fear and greed influence markets – and how they can be exploited by savvy investors. Kirkpatrick’s path to prominence began in the late 1960s when he worked with an academic called Robert Levy. Their research showed how relative price strength could be used successfully to pick shares. But Levy’s findings didn’t go down well with everyone. He was ridiculed by efficient market theorists who rejected the idea that markets could be irrational. Kirkpatrick didn’t relent. He stuck with Levy’s ideas and in 1982 started tracking them in real time on a weekly basis. A full 17½ years later, he wrote about the experience in an award-winning paper that laid out how brilliantly a strategy based on price momentum had performed. Kirkpatrick’s career as a prolific writer and educator led to numerous books spanning technical and fundamental analysis through…