The Bull Hunters Guide

Lately in this blog, we’ve been talking a lot about stock picking strategies. When you get right down to it, the whole essence of investing in the stock market boils down to being able to pick the right stocks at the right time. This is largely a matter based on “luck”, but that doesn’t stop people from trying to devise systems to make it more comprehensible and certain. And some of those systems, as we’ve seen, actually do make a lot of sense.

Handling Your Investments

Starting with this entry, though, we’re going to shift gears a little bit. We’re going to begin taking a more in-depth look at topics related to how to handle your investments once you’ve actually identified the stocks that you care to put your hard-earned money into.

The first of these techniques that we’re going to explore is known as short-selling. If you’ve been investing for a while, then there were probably a few occasions on which you just knew that a stock was about to collapse under its own weight. Maybe you wondered if it was possible to profit off of a situation like that, increasing the value of your portfolio substantially, even during a bear market?

Short Selling Is The Answer

Well, it’s entirely possible. What’s more, it’s something that is done every single day on the market by confident traders who know how to make the most of a “bad” situation. What makes it possible is short-selling.

Short selling works almost the complete opposite of a typical investment. When most people buy stocks, they try to buy at a low price, and then hold onto their investments as their value grows over a period of time. Once the value has risen, they sell their investments (hopefully for a profit). Short selling, however, is when your purchased stock earns you money only when its value goes DOWN!

How does it all work? We’ll take an in-depth look next time.

See you next week for part 2 of Short Selling.

Sean Rasmussen
The Bullhunters Guide
Universal Wealth Creation © 2004 - 2008

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Today, we’re going to wrap up our series on stock picking strategies. Over the course of this series, we’ve looked at the stock picking strategies that are most commonly employed to great success by those who’ve been in the investment game for a while. While we recognize that no one strategy is going to produce a winner every time, we thought it was worthwhile to look at these notorious techniques to see what each one had to offer in comparison to the others.

As is fitting for a series like this, the last stock picking strategy we’re going to look at is one that is completely different in every possible way from everything that came before. While up until now, the underlying basis of every strategy we’ve covered has been the principle of fundamental analysis, today we’re going to turn that on its head by looking at technical analysis.

Technical Analysis

Technical analysis is focused almost entirely on the view of the market as a whole, with an eye towards its predictable trends and future prices, rather than the makeup and foundation of any one company. As a result, it’s the most predictive of stock picking methods, and in some ways the most radical. It is not without those who swear by it, though.

Technical analysis asserts that just by looking at the prices on the market, we can learn a lot about where that market is moving, because prices tend to move in trends. Working from the maxim that history tends to repeat itself, technical analysts often invest in those companies that show good trends based on market charts, rather than the intrinsic value of the company behind a stock.

Lookout For Market Movements

For that reason, many decry technical analysis as a stock picking strategy with no long term usage. And indeed it isn’t. That said, it never claimed to be. Because a technical analyst is constantly on the lookout for market movements, he or she tends to spend little time sitting on any one stock for very long. They prefer to soak up the profits (or losses) from rapid movements, and then move on, rather than worry about the long term gains to be had from any one stock.

That wraps up our series on the most popular and arguably effective stock picking strategies. Hopefully by now you’ve learned enough to start developing your own strategies, and that they’ll pay off for you in the long run. Join us next time as we embark on an all new avenue of exploration in the exciting world of stock market investment.

Thank you for hanging around for Bullhunter’s second investment series: Part 1 – 10 of Stock Picking Strategies.

Sean Rasmussen
The Bullhunters Guide
Universal Wealth Creation © 2004 - 2008

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Last time in this blog, we began to discuss the CANSLIM method of choosing stocks. Something of a complex system for choosing, CANSLIM involves the study of 7 different criteria in an attempt to pick stocks that are most likely to generate profits for the investors. It differs from other systems in that it doesn’t depend very much on forecasting an uncertain future, but rather on the objective analysis of the current status of a stock. That’s why it has to cover so many variables, and consequently, why we needed to split it up over two entries!

Last time, we mentioned that CANSLIM has to take into consideration the current and annual earnings of a stock, as well as how the company is adapting and making changes in the marketplace, whether it be in terms of new management, new products, or just new policies on how they will conduct business. That covers the CAN part.

Supply, Demand and Leader

The S in CANSLIM stands for “Supply and Demand”. This is a very basic rule of economics that applies to all economic markets and should be very well understood by all investors, even beginning ones. How supply and demand relates to CANSLIM is that CANSLIM strategies hold that, overall, it’s easier for smaller companies to show greater profits. This is because larger companies require a greater demand in order to push the kind of supply that should show huge profits.

The L in CANSLIM stands for “Leader or Laggard”. This refers to the fact that a CANSLIM strategist asserts that one should look at the difference between those companies that lead the market and those that lag behind. Investors are always looking for the next big thing, which is just another way of saying that they’re looking for those companies that lead the market. In order to determine this, one should look for stocks that perform better than 75% of their competitors in the same industry.

Institutional Sponsorship and Market direction

The I in CANSLIM stands for “Institutional Sponsorship”. This means that a CANSLIM strategist looks for companies that demonstrate some kind of sponsorship from important and well-backed institutions. This is generally a sign that an industry has faith in a company, and that it’s going to be around, generating profits for the long haul.

The M stands for “Market Direction”. This means that a CANSLIM strategist must look not only at the stock in question, but at the entirety of the market in question. Whether or not the market as a whole is moving up or down has a big effect on the profitability of a stock. Even if all the other six factors seem sound, the company will probably not succeed and generate profits in a failing market.

Phew. That’s it for CANSLIM. Next time, we’ll continue our look at the most popular stock picking strategies out there. We’re nearly at the end, folks! Until then, happy trading!

See you next week for part 9 of Stock Picking Strategies.

Sean Rasmussen
The Bullhunters Guide
Universal Wealth Creation © 2004 - 2008

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Over the last few entries, we’ve been looking at different stock picking strategies and how they measure up, as well as the fundamental principles that inform them. The purpose here isn’t so much to find one magic strategy that always picks winners, but rather to inform the reader to be able to look at strategies and tell how sound they are based on the principles that form the backbone of those strategies.

Value and Growth Investing

In the last two entries, we talked about value investing and growth investing. In other words, investing based upon the perceived value of a stock, and investing based upon the projected growth of a stock over a period of time. Today, we’re going to expand upon both of those slightly by looking at a new kind of strategy that forms something of a hybrid of the two, taking the advantages of both are trying to meld them together into a cohesive whole. This is called GARP investing.

The GARP Strategy

The GARP strategy basically involves looking for companies that are undervalued by the market as a whole, yet have solid potential for sustainable growth in the near future. In particular, those who employ the GARP strategy tend to look for those companies that fall into the gap that’s overlooked by pure value or pure growth investors. In other words, a GARP investment would probably be not as undervalued as the pick of a pure value investor, but would still qualify as undervalued enough to earn a profit based upon its future growth potential.

The True Nature of The GARP Method

There is a lot of criticism about the GARP method out there, because of its perceived unwillingness to commit to one method or the other. This conception, however, betrays a misunderstanding of the true nature of the GARP method. The claim that it fails to establish meaningful standards of worthiness for an investment don’t hold water, because if one looks at GARP in isolation from other strategies, it still defines a very specific set of characteristics that adherents should look out for.

GARP = Growth At a Reasonable Price

See you next week for part 6 of Stock Picking Strategies.

Sean Rasmussen
The Bullhunters Guide
Universal Wealth Creation © 2004 - 2008

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Last time in this blog, we discussed value investing, which is essentially the strategy of finding a company that looks to have good prospects but is undervalued by other onlookers who are playing the market. One then buys stock in that company while it’s at a low price, and then enjoys the returns when their prediction pays off and the company’s value increases despite prevalent opinion to the contrary.

Growth Investing

Today, however, we’ll be looking at a competing strategy that has enjoyed just as much success and notoriety over the years: growth investing. Whereas value investors look at the present state of a company in order to forecast the wisdom in investing in them, a growth investor more or less ignore that in favour of attempting to assess a company’s future growth potential, regardless of its current price. In other words, while a value investor would ignore a high priced stock, regardless of the company behind it, a growth investor would not. He or she would look at the factors that would let them realize that that high priced stock is about to become a super-high priced stock, meaning they’ll be making just as much of a profit as the value investor would have in his or her value priced stocks.

Sudden explosive growth

Since a growth investor relies heavily on companies that experience sudden explosive growth, it makes sense that they would look to the two arenas that see that kind of activity most often: new businesses, and businesses in industries related to new technologies. There’s no hard and fast formula for determining whether or not a company that matches this criteria will actually experience the explosive growth that growth investors are hoping for, but by looking at certain matters of fundamental analysis such as whether or not the company has grown in the past, and matters of qualitative analysis such as how their current position in the market is looking, one can put together a reasonable assessment of a company’s potential future growth.

Risk levels for the investor

There is some sense in which growth investing is said to be riskier than value investing. While this may be so, it’s certainly a strategy that has met with a lot of success over the years, and continues to do so for those who know how to wisely employ it.

Join us next time as we look at more time-tested strategies for choosing the right stocks, at the right time.

See you next week for part 5 of Stock Picking Strategies.

Sean Rasmussen
The Bullhunters Guide
Universal Wealth Creation © 2004 - 2008

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