An eye for investing

Every weekday morning, Robert Freedland, MD, watches CNBC and logs onto
http://MarketWatch.com/ before heading out the door to the Mayo Clinic Health System, La Crosse, WI, where he sees patients.

Robert Freedland, MD, said the real fun comes from crunching numbers, researching national or global trends, and predicting how they may affect a company’s growth or bottom line. (Photo courtesy of Robert Freedland, MD)

As a stock market investor for the past 43 years, Dr. Freedland, 56, recently gained some celebrity status in the investment world. Although he's not an investment advisor or licensed broker, trading stocks has been a passion since childhood.

Sharing advice

Ever since he was 12, Dr. Freedland followed the stock market. Each afternoon, he would read the closing stock prices published in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner to his father. At age 13, he invested $300 of his bar mitzvah money in an offshore oil driller, a suggestion made by his future brother-in-law. That investment acted as a crash course in the dangers of risk-taking and following people's advice. It didn't take long before he lost most of his money.

Surprisingly, the experience didn't sour Dr. Freedland on the stock market. Whenever he had spare cash—whether it was money earned from pulling the neighbor's weeds or his college loan—he would try his hand at investing.

"Investing has always been a hobby," he said, adding that he completed one year's worth of economics courses while attending Princeton University for his bachelor of arts degree. "But I don't claim to be a brilliant speculator."

While his financial skill may not match that of Warren Buffett, Dr. Freedland has developed an industry reputation. In 2003, he began writing a blog—Stock Picks Bob's Advice (http://bobsadviceforstocks.tripod.com/index.html)—that describes his investment strategies and personal experiences in the stock market. The blog caught the attention of Seeking Alpha, a stock market news and financial analysis Web site, and Yahoo!, which sometimes feature his strategies and company analysis in financial news stories.

"I never try to hype anything, just make intelligent observations about individual companies and why I bought or sold their stocks," said Dr. Freedland, who bases his investment decisions on extensive research, magazine articles in Fortune, Forbes, Investor's Daily, and Money, and comments made by TV analysts, such as Jim Cramer.