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Apprenticed Investor: Six Keys to Stock Selection

I almost forgot! The latest "Apprenticed Investor" column is up, and its titled Six Keys to Stock Selection.

By now, you've had it with all the theory. I know what you really want: some advice on how to select stocks. So that's our goal today. We start with a simple checklist:

1. How's the Chart?

2. How's the Sector?

3. What's Your Thesis?

4. Stop-Loss

5. Risk-Reward

6. News and Earnings

I have several future columns queued up that focus on helping you develop a methodology for own stock selection -- a full set of tools to see if a stock is worthy of your attention.

Prior Apprenticed Investor columns can be found here.

Friday, August 12, 2005 | 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)
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Comments

Some questions: shouldn't the checklist also ask "what's your time frame?" After all, there are stocks you might be looking at expecting some kind of short term movement up, and others which are going to be good long term investments with much more short-term risk or volatility. It would seem the decision whether to sell at any given time would be highly dependent on this factor.

Second, what about "Is the stock cheap relative to its expected future earnings?"

Third, in an age of ETFs, "is the probability high that the stock will outperform the average of all other stocks in the same sector or capitalization?"

Posted by: royce | Aug 12, 2005 10:31:47 AM