Discovering some useful stocks every week. Found Amazon interesting this time.
As traders/investors, one of the most important things we need to do every day, every week, every month is to figure our which stocks to follow and what is interesting. What ideas we begin with plays an important role getting us started in the right direction. Sometimes you may be looking for a day-to-day signal and sometimes a longer horizon, but whatever the case may be, picking the right stocks is a very important part of the investment process. Of course it doesn’t end here. You have to follow-up the right choices with correct analysis thereafter and get-in and get-out of trades at the right time to make sure your investment bears fruit.
While we can use a variety of methods to discover stocks of interest, some of the popular choices tend to be - following people you like on StockTwits and Twitter, looking at daily heat maps on your brokerage system, talking to friends, advisors and peers with similar interests as yours, and using screener platforms that let you do your own research on the broad market.
On each of these fronts there are multiple tools and platforms available that can be used.
- There’s an annual list of influential traders on Twitter. Yours truly was at the second spot this year!
- Your typical heat map on your brokerage terminal or dashboard will give you insights such as which stocks are doing well and which are doing badly in the markets. And you can do these discoveries by sector and as well. So pick your sectors of preference and dig into analyzing which stocks are moving in which direction. Do your analysis to see if they’ve moved completely or if there’s still room. I love to do technical
- I’ve been looking at Stockal.com as a screening tool and find it quite interesting.
Discovering and analyzing Amazon
I’ll just take the example of Amazon to show a discovery process. And make it interesting by searching for themes or tags instead of a traditional industry heat map.
1. Go to StockalPro on Stockal and search for things like “ecommerce” or “retail & ecommerce”
2. As a few stocks come up, I go to Filters and choose “Price/Sales” ratio to be between 1 and 5. I club this with Confidence Meter between 50 and 100. The idea is to find stocks where I’m getting a good price multiple along with strong Wall Street indications.
I can, now, add some of these stocks to my watchlist, or dig deeper and research more from the perspective of news, analysis and social media. I will obviously, go back to my technical analysis of AMZN and see what that says. Note that I could have chosen to analyze some other stock as well. Say ZEN could be a good bet!
Stockal is a modern investment management platform that brings analysis, news, social media and fundamentals together in one place for investors. You can also import your portfolios from brokerages like Fidelity, TD Ameritrade, DriveWealth etc into Stockal and trade from within Stockal (where your investing intelligence will be anyway). The Stockal iOS and Android apps are pretty cool as well.
1. Go to StockalPro on Stockal and search for things like “ecommerce” or “retail & ecommerce”
2. As a few stocks come up, I go to Filters and choose “Price/Sales” ratio to be between 1 and 5. I club this with Confidence Meter between 50 and 100. The idea is to find stocks where I’m getting a good price multiple along with strong Wall Street indications.
3. So I get AMZN, NFLX, SSTK, ZEN, MSFT and a few others
