Annual Growth:
Annual
earning increase of a company. The growth of earning in the past few years
confirms the financial strength and stability of a company. The higher the
growth, the better. When you compare two different companies the company with
higher growth percentage and lower P/E ratio would be a better selection.
Concentrate on stocks with established records of considerable earnings growth
in each of the recent years plus strong quarterly progress. Remember to find out
what is the source of the growth. You can't just look at a chain of past growth
rates and believe that they'll predict the future. If investing were that easy,
money managers would be paid much less. There are four sources that cause
healthy growth for a company: selling more products or services, raising prices,
selling new products or services, and buying another company.
Relative Price Strength:
Relative price strength is a benchmark in which you
can compare the price performance of different stocks. In order for a stock to
be a leader in a particular industry its price action should outperform other
stocks in that industry. When selecting a stock as a momentum play you
should look for companies with high relative price strength. The absolute number
one market leader is not the biggest company or the one with the most known
brand name; it's the one with the best quarterly and annual growth and price
action. In a bull market, strong stocks with higher RS usually decline
the least in the market corrections.
Profitability:
Profitability is the amount of profit that a company is generating relative to
the amount of money invested in the business. This is the best way of separating
great companies from average ones. Return on assets (ROA) and return on equity
(ROE) are two tools that can be used to asses how efficient a company is.
Industry Leader:
The top two or three stocks in a strong industry
group can have incredible growth, while others in the group may barely move. You
should buy the best companies, the ones that lead their sectors and are number
one in their particular field. The number one market leader is not the
biggest one. It is the one with the highest annual growth, earning per share,
and price relative strength. It’s a company that has competitive advantage over
its competitors. A company that is offering the best product.
Financial Health (Company's Debt):
Once you figure out how fast a company is
growing and how profitable it is then you need to find out about its financial
health. The bottom line about a company’s financial health is its debt. If the
company’s debt is increasing and company is growing fast at the same time, the
extremely high earning of the company is high enough to cover the fixed cost of
debt repayments. When business is bad, however, the cost of debt pushes earnings
even lower.
You
should asses the financial health of a company before buying its stock
especially if the interest rate is increasing. Financial statements of a company
provide the information about the amount of company’s in comparison with the
earlier quarters/years.
Management:
Great management can make a difference between
an average business and an extraordinary one. Your goal as an investor is to
find management teams that think like shareholders; executives who treat the
company as if they own a piece of it. One way to find out about the management
and how much they really care about share holders is to check the top
executive’s compensation plans. We review the compensation detail in a document
called proxy statement. Big bonuses are always better than big base salaries.
Bonuses mean a chunk of the income is always at risk and depends on the
performance of the management.
P/E Ratio (Price/Earning):
Most popular valuation ratio, which can take
you pretty far as long as you’re aware of its boundaries. An easy way to use P/E
is to compare it with a benchmark, like another company in the same industry,
the entire sector, or the same company at a different point in time. A company
that is trading at a lower P/E than its industry peers could be a good value,
but remember that even companies in the same industry can have very different
money structures, risk levels, and growth rates, all of which affect the P/E
ratio.
If a company has a
P/E higher than the market or industry average, this means the market big
expectation from the company over the next few months or years. A company with a
high P/E ratio will eventually have to live up to the high rating by
considerably increasing its earnings, or the stock price will need to fall.
Competitive Advantage:
Success attracts competition and eventually
laggard companies come into competition and cause the stock price of a company
that has been a leader for a while to drop. Generally, there are different ways
that a company can create sustainable competitive advantage:
1. Creating a real different product (Apple iPod)
2. Creating a strong brand (Tiffany)
3. Keeping costs down (Dell)
4. Locking in customers by creating high switching cost (Cisco)
5. Locking out competitors (Using patent for drug companies)
Institutional Sponsorship:
The key to know about the institutional
sponsorship is the number of financial institutions that have bought or sold the
stock in the recent months. Technically, it is considered to be a good sign if a
company has increasing number of institutional owners over several recent
months. Financial institutions can not hide since they usually trade huge number
of shares. By following the buy and sell volume in a daily chart you can notice
if mutual funds and banks are buying a stock.
Market Trend:
Detecting the current trend of the market is the first and most important part
of our
stock pick system. More than 75% of your trades will end up in a loss if
you fight the trend. As part of our stock pick strategy we constantly
review the conditions of the market averages.
Insiders Trading:
It is always good if you monitor insider’s
transaction when you are picking a stock. You don’t want to buy a
stock when insiders of the company are selling a significant amount
of the company’s stocks. Insiders usually sell their shares for
various reasons but when the number of shares and the frequency of
unloading them are unusual you should be more careful. On the other
hand, there can be only one reason when they buy their company's
shares, they want to make money.
Insider trading is a
term that most investors have heard and usually relate with unlawful conduct.
But the term actually includes both legal and illegal conduct. The legal version
is when corporate insiders such as officers, directors, and employees buy and
sell stocks in their own companies. When corporate insiders trade in their own
securities, they must report their trades to the SEC.
Since insider trading weakens investor confidence in the fairness and integrity
of the stock markets, the SEC has treated the detection and prosecution of
insider trading violations as one of its enforcement priorities.
Industry:
Industry is a grouping used to describe a company's
main business activity. It is generally determined by the major source of a
company's income.
A hot sector is a sector of the economy experiencing a higher than regular
growth rate. If companies across an industry show solid earnings and revenue
figures, that industry may be showing signs that it is in its growth phase. Our
goal is to select securities that are a in a hot industry.
Psychology of Trading:
By studying the psychology of the individual, as
well as the psychology of the group, we can understand how educated traders can
profit by investing against the crowd or by not following the crowd. A visionary
trader should also look for a number of psychological reasons that can push the
price of a stock higher in the future prior to buying it.
Support Resistance:
The price action of a
stock over a period of time will create strength at certain price levels. These
levels are recognized as resistance at the top and support at the bottom end of
the trading range. This trading range may develop different time frames; it can
take from weeks to years or a support and resistance level to develop.
As
the price of a stock breaks through the resistance level and moves to a higher
level, the level of resistance now becomes the level of support. A new level of
resistance will then be formed at some point in the future. On the other hand,
as the price range falls below the support level, that level then becomes the
new resistance level.

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