Finding Stocks: Screens and Strategies

There are thousands of stocks (about 7,000 and 30,000 if including smaller and foreign exchanges). How can you find the winners? Use one of the simple screens that are available to you free from many web sites (such as the one from your broker) to find a handful of stocks. The filter criteria could be "P/E < 5", "Sales Growth by 20%" or a combination. If the screens consistently find you winners, they are good. It is more complicated than that. Otherwise there will be no poor...
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There are thousands of stocks (about 7,000 and 30,000 if including smaller and foreign exchanges). How can you find the winners? Use one of the simple screens that are available to you free from many web sites (such as the one from your broker) to find a handful of stocks. The filter criteria could be "P/E < 5", "Sales Growth by 20%" or a combination. If the screens consistently find you winners, they are good. It is more complicated than that. Otherwise there will be no poor folks.Strategies are similar to screening except finding stocks without screening such as finding stocks via headline news (Chapter 17). This book also includes when and why you want to sell some of your stocks (Section V). The strategy "Buy and Hold" is dead since 2000.This book is not written by a journalist (unless you enjoy good English only) but by one who uses screens successfully every week. This book was last updated in 2014, not 20 years ago when the conventional wisdom may have been outdated. I provide my amazing results in Chapter 2 (an article in a popular web site in investing) and most were found using screens and all were real trading as opposed to selected screens for selected periods by most other authors.From my real experience, there are screens for different purposes such as stocks for long-term, short-term and momentum. Some screens work better in different phases of a market cycle. We also have to monitor the performance results of our production screens (Chapter 1) to ensure we use are still winners.If you have been using screens already, skip Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, which are geared for beginners.Chapters from 5 to 8 describe the filter metrics such as P/E. Section II describes how to achieve better result from some common screens including a refined Dogs of Dow screen and AAII screens.Section III describes the various strategies using fundamentals while Section IV using technical analysis. Screening is my major strategy to find stocks. You need to perform further qualitative analysis on the identified stocks before you buy them (Chapter 34). When we learn, practice and verify all these topics described in this book, the chance of success is far, far better than buying stocks without these disciplines. Avoid tips and recommendations from the media. Most likely they are not useful by the time they reach you.The strategies described here have been used in my book Best Stocks 2014, According to Me. From 12/16/13 (the publish date) to 3/4/14, the list of all 135 selected stocks beat SPY by 103% and the list of 9 small cap stocks beat SPY by 500%. Past performance is no guarantee to future performance.Updated: 01/2016 235 pages (6*9)