Ken G. Winans

Kenneth Grant Winans (born November 9, 1963) is an American investment management entrepreneur, financial history author, and philanthropist. With three decades of experience in the field, he has conducted landmark investment research and designed innovative investment strategies. He has documented track records as a market strategist and portfolio manager.

Winans in the President and Chief Investment Officer of Winans Investments (formerly called Winans International), a capital management and research firm. In 2022, he founded Winans Commodity Trading, LLC in Las Vegas.

Early life and education

Winans was born in Big Bear Lak, CA. At 17, he started trading stocks.

Winans holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Economics from the University of San Diego and a master’s degree in Finance from the University of San Francisco. He is a Chartered Market Technician (CMT) and maintains Series 63 and Series 65 licenses, qualifying him as both a securities agent and an investment advisor representative, registered to work in California, Nevada, and Texas.

Career

Investment management entrepreneur

Throughout a career spanning 30 years, Winans has conducted financial research within the discipline of technical analysis while serving as a portfolio manager, investment analyst, broker, and investor. He has documented long-term track records as a market strategist and portfolio manager. His proprietary research has led to a record of accurate financial market forecasts since 1991.

Winans initiated the development of important investment indexes and technical indicators. The Winans Preferred Stock Index (WIPSI), Winans Real Estate Index (WIREI), and Winans Legacy Stock Index (WILSI) are used by major financial and academic institutions, such as Fidelity Investments, Princeton University, and the Securities Research Company.

While pursuing his bachelor’s, Winans earned his real estate license and worked part-time for California Brokers of San Diego. Later, at EF Hutton & Company, he conducted computerized stock selection for a 45-year veteran stock broker and competed in the 1986 U.S. Investing Championship. He joined the research department of Sutro & Company while doing his master’s.

After completing his academic studies, Winans became a technical analyst for Compass Investment Group, working with the firm’s traders on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in different types of commodity futures. In 1990, Winans joined Merrill Lynch & Company as a Registered Investment Advisor and Commodity Trading Advisor. After leaving Merrill Lynch, Winans founded Winans Investments in 1992, an investment management and research firm based in Novato, CA. Currently, Winans Investments individually manages equity, fixed-income, and commodity portfolios for clients across America, still working with the original seven clients.

From 1996 to 2001, he served as an adjunct faculty member of the Graduate School of Business at St. Mary’s College of California, teaching a self-designed investment management course.

In 2002, Winans co-founded The W Foundation with his former wife. It is a 501c3 nonprofit organization dedicated to public education on the history of space exploration and financial literacy through public exhibits of their collection. He is also the co-founder and President of The Space Station Museum in Novato, CA, and serves as a trustee for several other non-profit organizations, including the USS Hornet Museum (Alameda, CA), The Society of California Pioneers (San Francisco), and The Holland Society of New York. He also served board terms for the Museum of American Finance (New York), San Francisco Fleet Week Association, Chabot Space & Science Center (Oakland, CA), University of San Francisco Alumni Association, and The Institute of Ecolonomics (Ridgway, CO).

Winans is a regular guest on various TV and radio shows nationwide, and his investment research has been published by leading financial industry magazines, newspapers, and websites. He has appeared on several podcasts, including The Investors Podcast and The Best of Investing.

Winans was a producer of Bill Pullman’s space-themed play Expedition 6 at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco in 2007.

Author

• Investment Altas II - Using History as a Financial Tool

• Preferred Stocks-The Art of Profitable Income Investing

• Investment Atlas: Financial Maps to Investment Success

• Preferreds: Wall Street’s Best-Kept Income Secret

• He is a contributor author on Forbes and Technically Speaking

Financial inventions

Winans pioneered the development of five investment indexes (with 28 sub-indices) and technical trend indicators. The data is available through Morningstar, Global Financial Data, Metastock, and Stockcharts.

Winans Legacy Stock Index (Symbol: WILSI)

Developed in 2013, the Winans Legacy Stock Index (WILSI) is an unweighted composite of 300 senior common stocks from diverse industry sectors which comprise the historical leadership of the U.S. economy. Most of the companies have been in continuous operation since 1897 (on average), and most have been continuously traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) since 1970. Since the WILSI’s underlying components remain unchanged over a 40-year timeframe, this provides a baseline to compare current financial conditions to past stock market cycles using the exact same securities. The WILSI provides an alternative means to evaluate stock market activity (past and present), and it eliminates many of the statistical flaws inherent in conventional stock market indices (i.e., S&P 500 Index & Dow Jones Industrial Average) due to their frequent changes in underlying components and data weighting methods.

Winans Preferred Stock Index (Symbol: WIPSI)

Developed in 2005, the WIPSI was the first modern index to track these cornerstone securities. It is an even-weighted index that consists of 85 traditional preferred stocks of US companies that have consistently issued listed preferred stocks on the NYSE. As of December 2018, the industry breakdown was 58% financial services, 22% real estate investment trusts, 12% utilities, and 8% industrials. The issuers’ average revenues are $24 billion. It has price, yield and volume data back to 1890.

Winans Real Estate Index (Symbol: WIREI)

Developed in 2007, the WIREI (Patent Pending 11/670,914) tracks new U.S. home prices since 1830. It rescaled and combined several known government studies of U.S. new home prices into a continuous data set without the gapping and time lag problems found in other studies. The WIREI has several sub-indices: 1. Sales since 1962, 2. Inflation since 1932, 3. Home sizes (i.e., average square feet) since 1973 and 4. Geographic regions (Northeast, Midwest, South, West) since 1975.

Winans Trend Indicator (Symbol: WTI)

Developed in the early 1990s, the Winans Trend Indicator (WTI) (Patent Pending 11/767,880) is key in determining the overall investment strategy for stock investing at Winans Investments. Based on the analysis of years of investment data, it was discovered that a simple moving average (sma) works better for long-term trend analysis. The 200-day moving average was found to be most effective as a selling indicator; while the 125-day moving average was better as a buying indicator. Further studies showed that percentage adjustments used as filters on the 125-sma and the 200-sma significantly improved the indicator’s effectiveness.

Recognition

Since 2017, the internationally recognized rating firm Morningstar has been evaluating the performance of portfolios managed by Winans. As of 2022, the five types of portfolios managed by Winans have posted strong performance versus Morningstar’s benchmarks. All of Winans’ composites are Gold rated or 5-star ranked by Morningstar over multiple time periods.

Winans’ books have won 46 honors in international competitions. In 2019, The World Record Academy has recognized him as the most honored non-fiction author in the world. This literary accomplishment was considered such an achievement that The United States Senate awarded him a Certificate of Commendation.

Other awards won by Winans include:

• Top Global Expert in Investment Management for 2022, IAOTP

• Man of the Year 2021, IAOTP

• Winans’ four investment history books won thirty-three honors in international competitions, setting the new world record for the Most Awards Won in Major Book Competitions for a Finance/Business author in the English Language, according to the World Record Academy.

• World Record Academy's eBook of the Year honor for his book, Investment Atlas II

• Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award by Marquis Who’s Who, 2017

Personal life

Winans lives in both the San Francisco area and Las Vegas.