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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J Mako who wrote (44882)	10/10/2011 9:53:05 PM
From: E_K_S	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 78656

Hi J Mako - Maintaining Watch Lists - I use Schwab's Street Smart Edge platform. In the program you can create multiple watch lists defined by Tab names. Within each watch list I can track up to 100 companies. My watch lists cover sectors, themes, trading baskets I have created: E&P and Ag,REITs, Preferred stocks, pending Buys and several others. The nice part with these watch lists, I can add other data for each company in my list. Other data includes PE, Dividend yield, BV, and other value/financial metrics. The watch lists allows me to sort the list based on any one of the fields too. Each company in the list gets tagged with news as it is announced daily so I can monitor significant events. Therefore, as long as my theme(s) are working, I can monitor my lists compare how the companies are tracking vs BV, PE's, dividend yields etc. I initially buy a tracking position when the company comes into my value range, Finally, I also have one of the Tabs set to "My Positions" which is a watch list that have all of my active positions along with cost basis data. Much of the same company financial data is loaded in this watch list including PE, dividend yield etc. I can sort this by position size to arrive at my top 10 positions or sort by dividend yield to find my top dividend payers or even a PE sort gives a quick look at what % of the portfolio is priced at 10 PE or lower (my fast look at value). I also use this SI thread as an archive for previous ideas and value thoughts. I try to index each post I make with the company name and stock symbol along with one or two key words. I can use the "advanced search" feature to call up the post and read the replies. I also find it helpful to track other Buy's and Sell's posted. For example, when Paul Senior makes a buy on a company in my active watch list, I can easily pull the date of the post and look at the Yahoo Finance "Historical Price" tab to see the approximate price paid. This is helpful when I believe there is a good entry point for a Buy. I will first scan the value investing thread w/ the stock symbol find out who made recent buys (w/i the last year) and see what they paid (by scanning the Yahoo historical price for that date). If I can get in at a lower price, I generally start a tracking position or add more shares to my current position. We can both be wrong on our entry points, but more often than not I have noticed that the group here is more right than wrong when a "value" stock comes into Buy range. I use a similar approach when selling and/or peeling off shares. Selling seems to be a much more personal thing than strictly "value". I tend to hold my position(s) a lot longer. Others play the revision to the mean and sell at or near this range. There are some who will also take the quick 2-3 day swing trade gain. That's the strategy I have been using with watch lists. I also have set up some Google Doc spreadsheets specifically when tracking my two stock baskets: E&P and AG. When you use the CHROME browser, it works quite well (especially w/ the new changes made by Google). The real time updating is a bit slow but still acceptable. EKS

To: J Mako who wrote (44882)	10/11/2011 12:46:50 AM
From: Jurgis Bekepuris	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 78656

I maintain Excel spreadsheet. Right now I have ~600 stocks that may be interesting to me in the right circumstances and 3800 "not interesting" stocks that I have looked at in the past (might have been a 2 second look though :)). The ~600 "interesting" stocks have their own spreadsheets that I update more or less regularly. I'd like to automate more of the data updating functionality, but there is value in manual update too, since it forces you to look at things instead of relying on button pushing. I do not maintain portfolios on Yahoo/etc. I did it some time ago, but somehow abandoned it. My actual positions and their performance are tracked by the broker tools (Fido mainly) and Quicken at home.

To: J Mako who wrote (44882)	10/11/2011 10:57:48 AM
From: Paul Senior	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78656

"After you guys have researched a stock and decided the value was not there yet, how do you keep track of it?" J Mako, if you are a person who puts a lot of time & effort into researching individual stocks, then I guess you would want to keep alert to such stocks even if your decision has been to not buy at the current time and/or price. For me, I spend very little time in researching a potential stock (but I do look at a lot of stocks), and so I keep no records for 98% of the stocks I look at and dismiss. The other 2% that I look at that I might want to revisit, I list at the top of a watch portfolio. Of course, I keep tracking records for the stocks I already own -- and I maintain positions in at least 200 stocks. For my purposes, I find it pretty easy to monitor at least several hundred stocks at a time. As I say, I use Yahoo. My purposes are to be alerted to news about each company and see price change and percentage change (20 min. delay), I partition the stocks into various Yahoo portfolios -- real estate, bdc's, tech, retail, industrial, food, watch, etc. I can easily get Yahoo's metrics that I want for each stock or portfolio by making use of Yahoo's "custom" button for a portfolio. One drawback is that I do miss small changes in stock prices that accumulate. That is, I may be watching a stock that moves up 1/4 point a day for a few days, and I don't realize the stock's moved up a big percentage or dollar amount over a couple of weeks. I try to catch that on the downside by looking at new lows list. I like to know what kind of mistakes I am making in selling, so I add all the stocks I sold out of to the bottom of my watch list.