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Desperate Housewives
Rating: 0.67 (18 votes)
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I had good news and bad news this week. The first bad news was that my UltraShort Financials and my UltraShort Real Estate sunk to -15.6% and -24.9% respectively. The good news also was that those UltraShorts declined. With circumstances such that these hedges against recession declined, most of my other picks rose, and rose faster than the market in general. Therefore I've gone to an overall SL ranking of about 450 to one of about 250. That may not last. Unfortunately most of my stock picks have not done well on the bear-market days. I'm not selling those UltraShorts because I believe the overall downward trend in our economy and the markets will continue well into 2008. I am, however, selling my small stake in MLAB. Although I still think the company looks interesting over the long haul, microcap stock prices suffer first when people get nervous. The absolutely worst news of the week came when I logged into Reuters to use their stock screener. The free screener I have relied on for so long is gone from their menu! No other free screener began to compare with it for the ability to set your own variables based on income statement and balance sheet items as well as financial ratios and stock price figures. Although other financial Websites have screeners, customization is limited and I really don't care to screen on preset variables or on the collective opinion of analysts. The objective is to make my own mistakes. Are there other people who are as upset with Reuters as I am? They were tops on Fortune's list of screeners and surely many others were also dismayed to find their well-thought-out screens had disappeared into thin air. I'll undoubtedly be writing more, next week, on how best to cobble together results from a variety of limited-ability screeners. | ||
Search for Tomorrow
Rating: 1.55 (22 votes)
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Thoughts on "Tomorrow's Quarterlies" and Analysts Ratings (Short, Frustrated Rant-Of-The-Day): My objective is to play this stock market game using my own judgment; so I try to ignore the experts' ratings. Of course I can't help cheering when somebody else likes a stock I've picked and if many dislike it I do take another look to see if there's something vital I've missed. Ususally there isn't. I look at analysts as a slightly more sophisticated group of gossipers than the people on message boards (see past blog entry). Marketocracy forum postings are an exception because they usually contain viewpoints from all sides of an issue and sometimes include opinions from someine inside an industry. Then, too, I have to deal with the analysts' pie-in-the-sky projections. I grit my teeth and hang on when my pick dips (temporarily) after the quarterly figures are announced because growth or earnings did not meet those "expectations". Who cares? The figures were great and met or exceeded MY expectations. If you have been thinking of selling a stock, conventional wisdom says to do so before the quarterly release and conference call because even if the news is good it will disappoint somebody and the stock will drop. These days, so many people follow this advice that the stock may drop just BEFORE the quarterlies. So to be safe you must sell well in advance. The company's Director of Investor Relations must turn gray watching this. I wish all analysts would just shut up and quietly manage their own portfolios. | ||
The Edge of Elections - Re: Question of the Week
Rating: 2.09 (11 votes)
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I don't expect a big market reaction to the elections per se because everybody already knows the outcome. This will be a boring, unsurprising race with the Democrats again winning sweeping victories. Even here in Colorado, where people usually choose on the basis of the individual not the party, the votes went heavily Democrat last year. It's a pity because there are some talented individuals who happen to be Republicans. I'm glad I'm a registered Democrat so I can vote in the Democratic primaries, the race where the future President will be decided. I need to learn more about the front-runners and their economic savvy before deciding whether to modify my investment tactics and, indeed, before deciding who to vote for. I'm sure the Republicans will do the best they can to keep the economy from worsening between now and election day. Hopefully they won't over-react but will simply soften the inexorable slowdown or recession or whatever you want to call it. So I'm continuing to look for stocks which will hold up well in a mildly bear market. There is a minor business segment I investigated due to the elections. This state, like some others, passed new regulations for voting machines and procedures. I believe these are even stricter than the new federal specifications. No hanging chads or hacked code for us! The machines have been designed and delivered and are in the process of being tested. Even more states should be getting new machines over the course of the next couple of major elections; so I looked at Diebold and competitors for manufacturers enjoying a surge in sales and, therefore, stock price. So far there are no clear winners. E S & S seems to be private. A couple of others are on the pinks. Diebold and NCR stock haven't recovered from the recent plunge; however the stock may now be value priced. As for the independent testing labs, I haven't found any public ones yet. Is anyone here an expert in the voting machine industry? | ||
Desperate Housewives - Episode Two
Rating: 1.69 (26 votes)
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The first alternative free screener I tried out was Morningstar's. Below are their custom screening choices. Stock Basics Morningstar Stock Grades (A thru F on each): Stock Performance (Choices are Any, >= Sector average, >= S&P 500, >= 0%, >= 20%, >= 40%, >= 80%, >= 100%, <= 0%, <= -20%, <= -40%.) Valuation I hoped that some of the screening items might help me find stocks fulfilling my To begin with, I didn't set any criteria under "Stock Basics". If only I were able to choose a MAXIMUM market cap this would help me screen for Magic Micro Caps. The Morningstar Stock Grades are useful, though I'd rather set up my own grading system. Screening just for companies rating "A" in all 3 areas, Growth, Profitability and Financial Health, nets 147 prospects of all sizes, styles, types and sectors. To trim down the 147, I tried adding criteria under Company Performance, Stock Performance and Valuation. This brought the list of prospects down to Zero! Therefore, I kept only Financial Health, adding a grade of "B" to the choice, and then experimented with variations on performance and valuation. Once you have a group of stocks via the screener, you can look at them in the following views: Snapshot, Stock Grades, Company Performance, Stock Performance, Valuation. These views show the figures for ALL the criteria listed in the screener, regardless of whether you had screened on them or not. Although the Morningstar screens, on the whole, did not produce the kind of results I wanted, they did provide some data for some decent companies. As it is easy to merge databases of stocks, matching on their ticker symbols, the objective is to combine the Morningstar data with that of Yahoo, MSN, etc. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to download all the Morningstar data. It is possible to copy a chart from a Web page into a file as straight text and eventually turn the whole thing into a database; however that's a whole blog topic in itself. Next stop, Yahoo, MSN and other leading screeners. Footnote: | ||
One Life to Educate
Rating: 1.45 (154 votes)
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While trying out the Morningstar stock screener recently, I ran into an interesting trend. One screen variation brought up Strayer (STRA) a private college which has been doing OK recently. STRA's Yahoo headlines featured a story explaining that for-profit education stocks tend to outperform the market during a slower economy and sluggish labor market. This makes sense. When someone is laid off in a declining industry he'll go back to school to retrain for another field. Searching Yahoo for STRA's competitors I developed the following list: Over the last year, YTD, 6 mo., 3 mo. and 1 mo. the price of every, single one of these stocks has been up! Moreover, all but CECO were up over the last 2 years; and CECO wasn't down by much. All but COCO were up over the last 3 years. (COCO has had some ups and downs.) A slightly different category is a Chinese-based school: New Oriental Education & Technology Group (EDU) 2.87B Mkt.Cap. This school hasn't been traded for very long, at least not in the US, but the stock has soared during that time. A smaller company, Lincoln Educational Services Corp. (LINC) 349.91M Mkt.Cap., has not enjoyed the same rise in stock as the larger companies but is perhaps also poised to make money in a slower economy. Another smaller company, Princeton Review, Inc. (REVU) 221.19M Mkt.Cap., is in a similar category. REVU does hold classes but is more in the area of training students to pass tests, producing supplements to education and supplying materials for classes. REVU's stock, unfortunately, has had ups and downs. However, this led me to wonder if a really large textbook publisher might not reflect the same profits as educational institutions. But no, McGraw Hill (MHP) 17.50B Mkt.Cap. and Pearson plc (PSO) 12.40B Mkt.Cap. have not enjoyed the same immunity to bears as the private schools. Why have the larger schools been doing so well, not just during the recent bear market but longer-term? Could it be that the Boomer generation is retraining at night, looking forward to a second career after retirement? Maybe I am onto something here! Last Minute Strategy Lab Fund Note: Bad news caused me to sell steel maker PKX. Hopefully it will sell quickly enough, and sink slowly enough, that it will keep a little bit of the profit it showed while I held it. To keep metal in the fund, I bought Freeport McMoran Copper and Gold (FCX) which I'd added to my prospect list after the Morningstar Screening. | ||
Desperate Housewives - Episode Three
Rating: 1.00 (33 votes)
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(Previously: Although the Morningstar screens did not produce the kind of results I wanted, I did find Freeport McMoran Copper and Gold (FCX) for the Strategy Lab fund.) I had much better luck with Yahoo's new Java-based custom stock screen with over 150 criteria. The main search categories are: Descriptive, Share Performance, Trading & Volume, Valuation, Analyst Estimates, Ownership, Dividends, Margins, Balance Sheet, Income Statement, Profitability, Growth and Cash Flow. For each criterion you can search with "Between", =>, or <=. Although you cannot type in the value to search on, the drop-down menu gives you logical choices. For example, I can choose "Market Cap. <= 250" in order to find prospects for my MagicMicroCaps fund. If I want to extend my search to a Market Cap of 300 I have to select the next highest dropdown choice of 500. However, the results page allows me to sort ascending or descending on each criterion; therefore I can sort by market cap and easily ignore the companies which are too large. The results page shows you the criteria you have searched on. Will the results page show all 150+? Maybe not; however I did not run into problems. Plus, My results showed ROE, ROA and Forward P/E even when I did not search on those figures. I did not do enough experiments to see if it always gives you that extra information or if it depends on your search choices. In addition you want to see figures which are not part of your screen, you can always search on => (or <=) and choose the lowest (or highest) drop-down choice so as to include all companies.. Speaking of limits, you can get 200 results at a time. Ordinarily that's plenty, but if you are creating your own, large database you could find a criterion which allows you to bring up your prospects group by group. And, thank goodness, you CAN export your results to a spreadsheet! So although Yahoo's program can't handle an equation such as "Rev.Est.Next Qtr." > "Rev.Est.This Qtr.", you can convert your results to a database, allowing further screening there. Yahoo allows me to screen on enough of the criteria I like that I quickly pulled up a group of 31 microcaps. As with most screenings, a lot were eliminated because they were in an industry, such as finance, which I don't think will do well in the immediate future. Of the final dozen I looked at in depth, I chose the one which in some ways is riskiest because I can't get current information quickly and easily. Trinity Biotech plc is located in Ireland, though most of their stock trades on NASDAQ. Since Yahoo covers only the annual figures for smaller foreign companies I have to dig farther to keep up with quarterly developments and may miss timely news. A year ago this would have stopped me but today I will do whatever is necessary to try global investments. Although Yahoo fails to post a lot of quarterly foreign data, I do hope the data in their screener is up to date! I can only hope that EPS(ttm) and EPS(mrq) are truly current. In addition, I haven't yet experimented with their program enough to know if a lot of good foreign companies are excluded because there is an "NA" in a critical field. This is a problem with a lot of screeners. I am still mourning the loss of my Reuters screen where I could specify "EPS(ttm)=>X OR EPS(ttm)=NA". Footnote: Earlier, my Morningstar Screen led me to investigate a group of larger, established educational companies which do well in bear markets. I decided on Apollo Group (APOL) as the best bet to add to the Strategy Lab fund and bought it Friday. Next: Onward to the free Microsoft Money screener. | ||
Desperate Housewives - Episode Four
Rating: 1.67 (18 votes)
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Microsoft's free screener is a formidable competitor to Yahoo's, reviewed previously. It is more flexible; however it is not Java-based. You must download the screener software. Also, you will need to sign up for Microsoft's .NET Passport if you haven't already. The download process will also ask you to get ActiveX control if you don't already have it. To do all this, you must use Explorer as your browser. At the bottom of the basic, limited, screening page you will see a link saying "Supercharge your search. Upgrade to the more powerful, easy-to-use Deluxe Stock Screener>". If you use Firefox you won't see the link! At this point I would like to strangle Bill Gates (Grrrr). In the long run, though, the process is not that hard and it is worth it. The screening has lots of options. The criteria are organized into the following categories: Company Basics, Investment Return, Price Ratios, Mgmt. Efficiency, Financial Condition, Dividends, Trading Volume, Growth Rates, Stock Price History, Profit Margins, Current Financials, Analyst Projections, Advisor FYI, Stockscouter Rating. (StockScounter is MSN's own system of ratings in various areas.) Rather than choosing from a drop-down list, the search's "value" can be set to your own figure. For example, looking for additions to the MagicMicroCaps fund I can search on exactly Market Capitalization <= 300,000,000. Or you can search on another variable! For example, you can specify "Last Price >= 52-Week High". The logical operators are <=, >=, =, High As Possible, Low As Possible, Near, and Display Only. When you run the search the results will show figures for all your criteria. Like Yahoo, the Results display can show the top 200 companies in your search. You can sort up or down on each criterion and customize in other ways. Like Yahoo, it is possible to easily get the results, up to 200 at a time, into a database. Under "Edit" the screener has the option "Copy Results to Clipboard". Therefore, the results can be pasted into Notepad as a chart, tab delimited, thereby creating a text file which can easily be imported into a database. There is not time or space, here, to summarize the differences between the Yahoo and MSN critera. Let's just say that between them they give me the kind of data I want for larger, mid-size, or so-called "small cap" (really mid-size) companies. However, when searching for microcaps, with the only criterion being Market Capitalzation equal to or smaller than 300, MSN returned only 41 companies! A lot of those ended with Q on their ticker (gone bankrupt) and were on the Pink Sheets. So Microsoft does not include microcaps except for a few who were larger but have fallen on hard times. Among the recent winners in SL screenings, was yet another steel company Harsco Inc. (HSC) of Pennsylvania, founded in 1742. Also on my list as a "definite maybe" is General Cable (BGC), producing copper, aluminum, and fiber optic wire and cable products, located in Highland Heights, Kentucky, founded in 1992. Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (RIO), which I already have in my Strategy Lab fund, popped up, as it does again and again on most of my screening experiments. It has performed quite well for me so far. People are beginning to ask, "How high can it go?" Well, judging by the published data it is still quite fairly priced or even value priced. I hope the figures are right! NEXT: Onward to screeners at MarketWatch, NASDAQ and AOL. | ||
Desperate Housewives - Episode Five
Rating: 1.40 (10 votes)
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Here are 3 more free custom stock screeners which, although not as comprehensive as Yahoo and Microsoft Money, reviewed previously, each has a unique focus and a decent number of criteria to choose from. CNBC SCREENER There are 10282 stocks included and, good news for my microcap fund screening, these include 6187 under 300 market cap. A fair number of these companies and funds are on Canadian exchanges. There are 3 results views: Overview, Performance, Earnings. You can view 25 at a time and export 100 at a time. The results can be a bit squirrily. For example, I screened with only one criterion: "Net income TTM greater than $0 Million" and got only 666 matches. Trying a very small fraction of a million resulted in the same thing. Now. I don't believe that there are only 666 companies in the US who are profitable. When I screened with the sole criteria "EPS ttm greater than 0" I got 5,565 matches. That's more like it. I am guessing that this screener does not have TTM figures for all companies and eliminates companies with an NA (not available). The really bad news is that the darned software periodically resets everything back to zero! I could not find any reason for this. Could the Website be constantly updating for new data from around the world and refreshing ALL page views when this happens? As a result, this tool is almost impossible to use. A great pity because potentially this is a really good screener. I'm hoping this is a temporary bug and will try the screener again later. MARKETWATCH SCREENER PRICE Show me stocks: You can view up to 100 results at a time and the results page can contain: Company Name; Symbol; Price; Last Trade Time; Change; Change %; 52-Week Low; Volume; P/E Ratio; Market Cap; More Info. (ie. link to chart; link to news). There's no way to export to the data other than copy and paste into Notepad. As you can see, this may be a great screener for people who like momentum trading and technical analysis but it is not usable for my detailed screening on fundamentals. Also, when it comes to my microcaps fund it offers only 588 stocks with 300 Mil. Mkt. Cap. and below. NASDAQ SCREENER For each criterion you fill in a figure for "low" and one for "high". I think that to save time if you fill in a "low", you can leave the "high" blank to count as infinite (and vice versa); however I can't be sure this works in all cases. I counted 45 total choices in the categories: Company Basics, Technical Analysis, Fundamentals, Ratios and Stock Market. The results page shows figures for all the criteria you have screened on. (I don't know if it will take all 45 at once.) If you want to see figures for a criterion you haven't screened on, just screen from 0 to 1 billion (or trillion, or whatever). A word of warning, though -- an NA (not available) seems to keep a company from showing up! So, if you fill in ALL unused criteria with 0 to 1 trillion to get all available information, you probably eliminate everybody instead. Handling an "NA" is a common problem with most screeners. The one negative: you can't export the results. However, unlike other screeners, all the resulting companies show up on one page, even if there are hundreds or thousands of them! Therefore, it is easy to to copy and paste results into a Notepad file (which with a bit of work can eventually be converted into a database). Using the NASDAQ screen I found a couple of "maybes" to look at for my small stocks fund. Virco Manufacturing Corp. (VIRC) looks good but is in retail (a business furniture company). I expect retail sales in general to be flat in the coming year. ATRION Corp. (ATRI) looks good and is in the medical & healthcare industry; however the stock has been a roller coaster. Late Addition: Searching medium/larger companies for the StrategyLab Fund, the NASDAQ screen came up with a group in which 2 companies haven't done badly in the recent bear market weeks: WD 40 (WDFC) and Watson Wyatt Worldwide (WW). Neither of them are up as much lately as the microcaps, VIRC and ATRI. For my purposes, the biggest lack in the NASDAQ screener is the inability to search on revenue (top line) growth and stock price growth. NEXT: I had planned to review AOL's screener, here, but substituted NASDAQ because I ran into error messages with AOL. I hope this was temporary and will try to review AOL later. | ||
Desperate Housewives - Episode Six (finale)
Rating: 1.00 (1 votes)
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This week, my second visit to AOL continued to generate error messages. However trying out the less-publicized screener at ZACKS was a rewarding surprise. AOL's custom stock screener gives you 22 criteria in: Company Basics, Profile, Fundamentals, Performance. You have drop-down choices or you can specify a from-to custom range. It is best to add 1 criterion at a time, otherwise you're likely to get an error message and have no idea which choice caused the error. Unfortunately it will only do 5,000 results and if you are trying 1 criterion at a time can come up with an "over 5,000". error message When customizing your results view, you can choose any of the categories listed above or show only your selected criteria. To get all the categories you can choose "All"; however this will bring up an error message. Choosing "Basics" also causes an error message. You can choose to sort up or down on any column. You can see 300 companies at a time per page. There is no way to export the data; so to save it you need to copy and paste into a Notepad file for conversion to a database later. Searching for microcaps with solid financials and revenue growth brought up a huge number of banks and other financial companies. Out of 123 screened microcap prospects there were only 21 non-financial. My non-microcap screening, also, contained many financial companies. ZACKS Zacks screener offers 84 criteria in the categories:Company Descriptors, Ownership, Pricing ChangesRating Changes, Industry RankValuations, EPS Surprises, Estimate Uncertainty, Growth, P/E Ratios, Fundamentals, EPS Actual and Dates, EPS Est. Annual, EPS Est. Quarterly, Pricing Info., Miscellaneous. It is not surprising that the Zacks screener employs many figures from analyst predictions because that's the focus of their Website. However, there are plenty of other variables to make the screener usable with my criteria. I suggest choosing your criteria a few at a time. You will not get error messages but, as with most screeners, it is easy to simply eliminate everybody very quickly. Especially when lookning at microcaps, the many "NAs" will discard companies you may want. Zacks screener is especially useful because, as you add each criterion, it tells you how many stocks will remain when you run the screen! Zacks also makes it easy for you to delete any choices that unexpectedly wipe out most of your group. When you run your screen, you can see the results with as many of the criteria as you like, even all 84. Although there is not an easy way to export, all the results show on one page, even if there are hundreds or thousands; so it is relatively easy to copy and paste into Notepad for future conversion to a database. Zacks has 4184 stocks with $250M market cap or smaller; so is another good resource for my MagicMicrocaps Fund. This concludes my review of the free customizable stock screeners available on the Web. If I discover more I'll do a follow-up. | ||
