Interview  |  NOV 2007

Interview: Charles D. Kirk of TheKirkReport.com by Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan

Interview: Charles D. Kirk of TheKirkReport.com by Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan Minnesota-based Charles E. Kirk is an individual investor who has been investing and trading stocks for more than 12 years and who currently trades stocks for a living in addition to writing about the stock market in his blog, with more than 10,000 visitors reading his website on a daily basis; a notable number, considering he has only been blogging since September 2003. His education and work experiences are varied, including a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and a law degree; he worked as a private investigator for a law firm as well as founding and operating the stock newsletter MoneyXperts. Kirk explains that his primary goals for the website and blog are to help the small investor and provide food for thought, not blind recommendations, adding that he lives and breathes the stock market every day and he does it because he loves it. Kirk has received high accolades from many financial publications, including Barron’s, Forbes, Kiplinger’s, BusinessWeek, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as this one. The interview was conducted via email in early September 2007 by Technical Analysis of STOCKS & COMMODITIES Editor Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan. Charles, how did you get interested in trading? After graduating from college, I decided it was time for me to learn everything I could about mutual funds. My wife had started a retirement account at TIAA-CREF and since neither of us knew anything about how to manage these kinds of investments, I decided to learn as much as I could about them. That grew into an avid hobby, especially after I became dissatisfied with the performance of the actively managed funds we owned. It also didn’t take me long to realize that I could do better by using a smart mix of index funds, by picking my own stocks, mostly for long-term buy and holds, and then trading stocks for short-term gains as I learned more about stock-screening techniques and technical analysis.

by Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan