Posts Tagged ‘good’
What Stocks are Good Investments?
January 28th, 2009
How to Research Individual
Stocks There are good research resources available to the individual investor, many at your local library. In addition, if you hire a full-service broker, you can indirectly avail yourself of his or her research department.
In our opinion, the two most basic, cost-effective, and objective research tools are the Value Line Investment Survey and Standard & Poor’s Stock Guides. Both may be available at your local library.
The Invaluable Value Line
The basic Value Line service covers approximately 1,700 stocks. For each stock, Value Line provides two rankings: timeliness and safety. Of the two, pay particular attention to safety. Stocks are ranked on a 1-5 basis, with 1 being the safest. Don’t consider any stock with less than a 2 rating.
Value Line also provides scores for four other key indicators:
Financial strength
Stock price stability
Stock price growth persistence
Earnings predictability
In addition to the rankings and key indicators cited here, Value Line includes a great deal of relevant statistical and narrative information. Value Line reports are updated regularly. The individual company write-ups will take some getting used to, but after a while, you will find that you can easily determine a company’s earnings growth rate and the consistency of that growth rate.
Use Value Line to help you select at least 25 stocks that:
Are safe or very safe (that means a ranking of 1 or 2)
Are growing at an above-average rate
Are growing consistently and steadily
What does "above average" mean? We suggest you look for a minimum of 8 percent and, ideally, 10 percent growth. And keep an eye on consistency. For a 10 percent grower, 10 percent a year is perfect but rarely achieved. A range of 8-12 percent is consistent. From 6-14 percent is acceptable. But if the company’s earnings swing between 0 percent and 30 percent, for example, it’s too volatile to be in your portfolio unless you know exactly what you’re doing.
S&P Stock Guides
Standard & Poor’s Stock Guides (Bond Guides are also available) are an excellent research tool. The guides come out monthly and cover over 6,000 stocks, 700 mutual funds, 600 closed-end funds, and 800 preferred stock issues.
Newspapers
Finally, two newspapers, Investors Business Daily and The Wall Street Journal, do an excellent job of tracking the stock market and individual stocks. Either may be available at your local library.
If you simply must follow the market during the day, both CNBC and Bloomberg Information TV do a good job of keeping you current.
For a nightly wrap-up, check out PBS’s Nightly Business Report.
How I Made $6 Million in the Stock Market
amazing report from a trader who made $6 Million trading stocks. By Mark Crisp
Own these Stocks CSCO,EBAY,FCX,GOOG,IBM,INTEL,RTP
Stockpickr.com founder James Altucher shares his picks that will make 2009 a fiscal year to remember.
Stocks jump on reports of plan for bad bank assets
Financial stocks surged on the notion that the government could take soured debt like defaulting mortgages off the hands of banks and place them in a so-called bad bank to hold toxic assets.
U.S. stocks stay under water after new home sales
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — US stocks remained entrenched in losses early Thursday after data showing the sale of new homes fell to the lowest monthly level on record.
Stocks open lower on fresh worries about economy
Wall Street has turned cautious as weak profit reports and record unemployment claims offer the latest evidence of the economy’s struggles.
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