In these sessions you’ll acquire the tools to help you react quickly, making wise investment decisions that protect your gains and boost your returns.   How to Pick Winning Stocks Fleming Meeks, editor of the new Barron's Daily Stock Alert newsletter, outlines three strategies for picking long-term winners. Investment styles go in and out of fashion, and what works in a momentum-driven market can kill your returns when investors suddenly change gears, as they have in recent months. But a handful of tried and true approaches to stocks can keep your portfolio moving in the right direction no matter which way the market goes. Evaluating ETFs: A Fundamental Approach With investors increasingly turning to ETFs as alternatives to investments in single stocks, questions naturally arise: how does one separate the wheat from the chaff in the ETF universe? Which is the best growth ETF? Foreign ETF? Dividend-paying ETF? Jeffrey Ptak, Morningstar's director of exchange traded securities analysis, shares his approach which is unique in its breadth and rigor. He will walk through Morningstar's distinctive approach to valuing ETFs and provide a run-down of Morningstar's best ideas. thinkorswim Market Forum ’08: Tom Sosnoff’s Favorite Stock Picks and Option Strategies for an Election Year Wednesday, May 14 • 7:00 pm – 10:00 pm Sponsored by Need some trading ideas for 2008? Are you a contrarian? Or do you try to catch a trend? Either way, we can show you how to combine the power of technical analysis with professional volatility tools to create complex, inter-market option trades in this new lively evening event. Thinkorswim founder Tom Sosnoff will lead you through the methods he uses to trade successfully whatever 2008 holds. How to Get Started in Options Wednesday, May 14 • 3:15 pm – 5:00 pm Sponsored by Join Optionetics instructor Peter Zomaya as he shows you how to use options to diversify your portfolio and generate significant returns in all markets. Discover the basics of options trading and see why they are one of today's best-kept secrets for making hefty returns with limited risk. Here's your opportunity to learn how professionals use options to control risk and maximize earnings—and how you can too Profit from the Quantitative Stock Picking Strategies of Buffett, Lynch, Graham, and Others John Reese, CEO of Validea and Validea Capital Management, will discuss multiple guru strategies, the benefits of removing emotion from the investment decision making process, how combining strategies can lower risk and maximize returns, and other methods using the proven stock picking strategies from history’s best and most successful investors. Your Next Great Stock Tomorrow's top-performing stocks are leaving clues today. The best way to search for those clues is to scan the entire market in seconds using stock-screening software. In this workshop, SmartMoney columnist Jack Hough introduces two simple but powerful screens that anyone can use to find winning stocks. Spectacular Profits from Shorting Stocks Michael Shulman, editor, ChangeWave Shorts, will discuss how to use puts—historically a trading tool—to short companies and stocks that are failing and falling based on fundamentals. He will review his outsized success in shorting homebuilders, banks, retailers, and restaurants long before Wall Street is wise and how this approach works in up or down markets. Mr. Shulman will present the latest proprietary survey data from ChangeWave and share some of his best positions going forward with attendees.   BetterInvesting Presents: An Introduction to Fundamental Investing Tuesday, May 13 - Thursday, May 15  Sponsored by BetterInvesting is the leading national, nonprofit, tax-exempt organization whose membership consists of investment clubs and individual investors. Its mission is to provide a program of sound investment information education and support that helps create successful, lifetime investors. In this series of special topics classes, you will learn the BetterInvesting approach to stock analysis, including tools to identify quality growth stocks and to determine their fair prices. These classes will help you determine industry leaders, how you can evaluate them, and how to manage your portfolio for quality and long-term growth. Using Volatility and Option Products: Portfolio Protection, Market Prediction, and Contrary Indicators Larry McMillan, president, McMillan Analysis Corporation, explains how the advent of volatility trading products (options and futures) allows traders to directly use volatility in their trading decisions. The products are surprisingly useful in predicting movements of the broad market as well as a useful indicator is often the premium in the near-term volatility contract. Also, these contracts and other broad-based index and equity options can serve as useful contrary indicators, in order to predict the market on an intermediate-term basis. How to Pick Managers That Deliver Just as critical to investing success as stock picking is manager selection, because after all, they will be making important decisions and allocating your hard-earned money. There needs to be a synthesis of goals and perspective for a manager to be successful for you and the portion of your portfolio you allow them to make decisions about. Ken Kam, portfolio manager, Marketocracy Masters 100 Fund, will clearly explain the important things to look for when trying to strike this delicate balance with a money manager Scanning Stocks for Dummies: Stock Scanning for Beginners Wednesday, May 14 • 2:15 pm – 5:00 pm Sponsored by Scanning for stocks use to mean either complicated formula languages or canned limited choices. In this workshop we will show you that anyone can scan for stocks based on any conditions imagined. We take you step-by-step through dragging items from your charts and instantly transforming them into conditions that can find stocks in seconds based on your own ideas. We will scan for stocks moving this minute on strong volume, stocks with earnings growth and even stocks experiencing accumulation by institutions. This is just the beginning. It’s worth coming to class to jot down the stocks we uncover with unprecedented drag-and-drop two-second scanning technology. TradeStation: The Technology of Technical Analysis Monday, May 12 • 12:30 pm – 2:30 pm Sponsored by The ‘technical analysis’ approach to markets and trading can be mysterious to those unfamiliar with the concept. In this session, you will learn the basic concepts of technical analysis and how traders apply them. These concepts include organizing price information into various types of charts, and their potential significance, using indicators to identify and try to gauge market direction, examining price sequences (bar patterns) and coordinating several techniques that work in concert. TradeStation allows users to observe these methods in action. Its tools for strategy development and trading can create, test, refine, and even automate the execution of buy and sell rules based on your technical analysis. This makes working with technical tools easy and accessible to the beginner while providing a robust and customizable palette for more experienced technical and strategic traders.