The Lifecycle Trade: How to Win at Trading IPOs and Super Growth Stocks Paperback – December 21, 2018

After taking up an interest in investing more seriously (beyond simply holding a target date ETF, or the mutual fund de jour) I read this book as part of a small list someone recommended to me to get started in my learning journey.(the others, which I will mention here, since they were also very good were: Trading in the Zone, How to Make Money in Stocks, and 2 of Mark Minervini's books, and Technical Analysis on Multiple Timeframes)I would buy this book again in a heartbeat. My copy is marked up with underlines, and comments in the margins on many pages. It is short enough to be digestible in a few sittings yet inclusive of research, and clear rules for buying, selling, and different types of IPO stocks. So many books (including ones I listed above) are full of fluff, stories that add to the page count but not to the actual substance. This book does not have fluff. Props to the authors for that. They get straight to the point.Further, it they use high quality paper, and large color graphics to demonstrate their points. Have you ever looked over black and white or small stock charts where it's hard to follow exactly what the point is? yeah, me too; it's annoying. They didn't do that in this book.Having just finished the book I plan to go through my own portfolio now to try to see if I can identify the stage and various type of the various stocks I own.My only constructive comment would be that it would be interesting to see a future edition or online appendix of some sort include their thoughts on how to apply this thinking to SPACs, particularly around how to read the chart of SPACs which don't really have an IPO date per se.I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in investing and wanting to use intelligence, not hype when investing in new issues.

This is an excellent book. I am a trader of about 30 years and have been a practitioner of the O'Neil Methodology for the majority of that time. For years I have recognized the IPO market as a good source of leading stocks. I always chalked it up to structural issues, that despite having big potential, IPO's will often suffer horrible losses and those loses often did not seem consistent with the prospects of the company. I simply left it at that and paid special attention to honor my stop. In The Lifecycle Trade, the authors have framed context to IPO stocks that puts this all into perspective. The book offers statistics that I have never seen on IPO stocks, that are justification enough for buying the book, and shed light on how you need to operate these vehicles.The book goes further to provide strategies to effectively capitalize on the initial IPO base, and separate strategies to capitalize on the longer, more sustainable, trend that can develop once institutions have been afforded the time to do their due diligence on the stock. As the book points out, and something I had never considered, these two phases must be handle differently.I would recommend this book to any serious trader, whether you have focused on IPO stocks in the past or not. The special risks that IPO stocks bring can scare investors away. But the IPO market is home to "movers", those companies that are in their entrepreneurial growth stage, often with new and exciting products, and this book provides a framework to understand the unique characteristics of this market, and helps prepare you to operate more effectively in this market.

I saw this book mentioned on Twitter shortly after it came out, and ordered it immediately. I am an individual investor and utilize the Canslim growth stock investing system (developed by Bill O’Neil). I also lead an IBD (Investors Business Daily meetup group) to help others study and learn canslim investing.I have been studying IPO bases for over 3 years, and am working on formulating a set of buy and sell rules for IPO base breakouts. I have the IBD home study course on IPO bases, which is excellent. However, there is not much else out there for growth stock investors on the true IPO base—until now.This book fills an existing void for those studying IPO bases. The book is the product of 4 authors, and it was a bonus that the four authors are very experienced with growth stock/canslim investing. Three of the four authors list Bill O’Neil as a mentor at the beginning of the book.While the title of the book is “The Lifecycle Trade”, there is a very heavy concentration on the beginning of the lifecycle for many stocks—the IPO base. The material in the book is drawn from an exhaustive study of 25 years of IPO bases. The research and ensuing statistics are given in great detail. The authors break down the IPO bases into several distinct categories, and then develop four distinct sell rules specific to IPO bases. They explain which sell rules work best on which type of IPO bases. Then they give us numerous marked up charts showing on the same chart where each of the 4 sell rules would have triggered and the percentage gain and timeframe for each exit.Bottom line—this is a worthy addition to the library of any growth stock investor wanting to study and learn IPO bases and a system for analyzing the bases and trading them. It is one that, like O’Neil’s books, will be re-read and studied on a regular basis. I recommended this book to some fellow traders who are interested in IPO bases, and the feedback from them has been overwhelmingly positive. And I look forward to the kindle edition, so that I can cut and paste passages and statistics into my personal spreadsheet studying and establishing rules for trading these IPO bases.Easily 5 stars.Greg Morton