RSF resident’s book shares investment insights

Rancho Santa Fe resident Bud Leedom hopes to give investors an edge with his new book “Supply and Demand Investing: Spotting Imbalances to Find Wall Street’s Biggest Winners.”

Available on May 1, the book details a process that allows investors to unlock the power of supply and demand to analyze stocks. Specialized charts in the book provide insight on how the large investors, such as Fidelity, Putnam and Janus, of the mutual fund world are trading in stocks.

Leedom, a former Wall Street analyst and president of Leedom Asset Management, moved to Rancho Santa Fe in 2013.

While studying astronomy at San Diego State University, Leedom set upon a course that changes the way investors analyze stocks.

“The core of the book was developed all the way back in 1992 and I’ve used it throughout my investment career,” Leedom said.

Leedom got his start sharing his investment knowledge in 1992, publishing a monthly financial letter called The San Diego Stock Report, which developed a large following.

He became a Wall Street analyst for Wells Fargo Securities, covering many different industries and founded Leedom Asset Management in 2007, an investment management firm for individuals and institutions.

The preface of “Supply and Demand Investing” opens on Leedom’s days as a novice investor in the 1980s where he would eagerly await the delivery each night of William O’Neil’s Daily Graphs, a book of stock charts updating each day’s closing price quote. He tried to determine patterns and learned several hard lessons of the market before eventually creating his process detailed in the book.

“This whole process has really only been available to large institutions and investors but this book brings the process to light for individual investors,” Leedom said. “For the first time, investors can see stocks in a supply and demand light. The process looks at supply and demand equations and tries to find imbalances.”

Leedom said his process allows investors to see information in real time, a “behind the scenes” look at where significant buying or selling is occurring.

“It really allows individual investors for the first time to see what the big guys are doing,” Leedom said.

That transparency, Leedom said, is a powerful tool to have.

The book will also have a companion website, lsicharts.com. “LSI” is a term that goes back nearly 25 years, standing for Leedom Strength Indicator. On the website, users will be able to type in any company and access information about it. Leedom said he looks forward to bringing the LSI investment process and patterns to life for investors as the “key to finding the next big winners in the stock market.”

Leedom has been working on the book for nearly nine years and it wasn’t until he moved to Rancho Santa Fe that he was really able to focus in and complete it. As an amateur writer, Leedom said he went through quite the learning process, using Amazon’s CreateSpace to edit and publish his book. An admittedly harsh critic of himself, he was pleasantly surprised when he received his first copies of the book and found that it had exceeded all of his expectations.

The book is dedicated to his family, especially his wife, Vali, who was always asking him, “Are you ever going to be done?”

“After such a long process, I just feel a different energy,” Leedom said. “I’m happy to be checking a very big box with the completion of this book.”

The book is available for purchase on Amazon.com.