This weeks interview is with Covestor member and rising star Patrick Jo Smith. Patrick has a background in finance, now working as a venture capitalist in Colorado, and spends ten to fifteen hours a week actively managing his portfolio.

Patrick has a dual investing approach, about half of his investments based on fundamentals and the other half on swing or momentum trades. For his momentum trades he follows short term technical indicators, attributing much of his success in the recent volatile markets to the latter approach.

In his interview Patrick provides more detail about his investing style, in particular the technical indicators he uses for his momentum trades. He also talks about the rationale for his current position in Frontier Oil, providing a valuable outline of the types of fundamentals he looks for.

Patrick has outperformed his chosen benchmark, the S&P 500, for all of the six months since he joined Covestor. He was out of the markets for a while and his recent performance in Frontier has reversed this trend but he is still ranked seventeenth on the site by Annualized Sharpe Ratio. You can find his interview with The Wall Street Transcript on the right hand side of his fact sheet.