Working in the 1980s as a top futures broker for Richardson-Greenshields, Colin realized that traders and investors alike needed a comprehensive plan in order to make money. "Everyone says you must have a plan," he says, "but no one seemed to have one that actually worked in the long run. Therefore, it was necessary to make one."

The search for that elusive goal of a really profitable long-term trading system proved long and arduous.

From a practical standpoint, Colin Alexander has now accomplished that goal with the methods laid out in his two books Five Star Futures Trades (Windsor Books, 1997) and, most recently, The Streetsmart Guide to Timing the Stock Market (McGraw-Hill 1999). This latter book shows how to use futures trading techniques when buying and selling stocks. Rigorous computer testing of the Five Star system shows that it is consistently profitable over the long term. There is one reservation however, the one identified by hedge fund manager George Soros: You have to go for the jugular when you are really right. In the final analysis this means superimposing outside knowledge on the technicals. There will always be a requirement to differentiate between an emerging Microsoft and a stock going sideways to nowhere, often because it is in an industry that is mature such as automobile production in the 1980's and 1990's.

Colin stopped trading for many months while working on his latest book. In early 1999, he started the Stockscom advisory service and for that year, Colin's techniques for identifying stocks led to a return of about 75 percent despite holding a significant amount of cash. His primary concern was to preserve capital by investing in prominent stocks in Information Technology such as Nortel rather than in some of the more risky, if more spectacularly, advancing stocks in the dot.com world.

Colin has a Masters degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Magdalen College, Oxford. He immigrated to Canada in 1963 and traveled to the Arctic to work initially for the Hudson's Bay Company. In 1967, he purchased a newspaper in Yellowknife, the News of the North, just as that city was becoming the new territorial capital. He sold the paper and moved south in 1976. After leaving Richardson-Greenshields, he started the Five Star Futures advisory in 1990. This service now sends out daily trading recommendations by e-mail.