Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Women's Intuition?

One of the first things I notice as I delve into the world of investment opportunities, is there are a zillion tools people use to make their stock picks. There are the fundamentalists, the techy-geeks (no offense, I'm jealous I can't read charts yet!), the copy-cats, the followers, etc. I'm sure you get the picture. I had decided early on, I'd base most of my choices on the fundamentals, mainly because I did not understand the technicals. One of the first books I read was Rule #1 by Phil Town and I thought his "rules" seemed simple to follow and effective for choosing stocks. I studied his formulas and started some spreadsheets. I used the tools on his website. Using his process I realized what sectors I was interested in and found some nice stock picks. I followed them on paper for a while. Then I started to get bored.

Shortly thereafter, I discovered stock screeners. I decided that in order to build my capital up as quickly as possible I had to find some big gainers that were very affordable (we are talking $1-$5 stocks) as my entire future as an investor was starting out with the minimum $500 you need to set up a Scottrade account! So I discovered a few good ones this way. One really good one was YTBL. It did some amazing things as some of you may be aware of and my good friend profited huge from it.

So basically, I'm finding some good picks by doing some very unconventional methods, such as screening for stocks in what I consider to be "not the correct" way to do it and also using my "women's intuition". I look for what I like to call "signs". Such as finding a stock in my screener and then the very next day reading about it in Business Week. Or hearing about a company from a friend at work and then my screener picks it up that night. These are not proven methods but so far they have led me in the right direction and now I feel almost confident enough to start snatching some of these picks up! And I did with my purchase yesterday!!

So in part, this blog will be a diary of my learning curve but also will demonstrate the possible differences that may exist between men and women investors, and which one really "get's it"!

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