Two ways to make money on Wall Street: Run with the crowd or bet against it. Whatever your preference, the Value Line Investment Survey has statistics that can help you sort out the prospects.

Forty years ago Samuel Eisenstadt created the “timeliness” ranking formula that made Value Line famous. It scores 1,700 stocks for expected performance over the next 6 to 12 months, using a plethora of technical (stock-price-related) and financial factors. The formula, still in use, has had a remarkable run. A hypothetical investor reshuffling his portfolio every Jan. 1 to hold only the 100 top-ranked stocks would have earned a 19% compound annual capital gain over the 40 years, says Value Line, against 10% for the S&P 500. (These numbers exclude dividends.) Transaction costs would have dampened the return, but even so the performance has been strong enough to baffle proponents of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which says that no statistical formula can keep beating the market.

Full story (reg. required) at Forbes.com

In the last year, newspaper and publishing stocks in the S&P 500 are down 9%, versus a 7% gain for the broader index. The selloff has left some print media giants with historically cheap valuations. Still, it’s not easy being a bull on this sector.

“The last three years have not been fun,” says Miles Groves, an economist and consultant to the newspaper business. Groves, who also publishes monthly and quarterly research, cites disappointing advertising results, sagging circulation stats and challenges ahead as readers devote more attention to bloggers, while media buyers send more dollars to the likes of Google and Yahoo!.

Full story at Forbes.com