Picking your stocks like your picking your nose.

Members present: Brian and Yousef are watching the markets. 

We have been using http://www.freestockvalueranker.com/ to analyze stocks for being under/over valued, and came across this: 

As you can see, Panasonic has a projected growth rate of 1,298.11%. Their calculations aren't flawed, but it is important to consider how reasonable those numbers are. 

We compared CVS and Walgreens (CVS & WAG, respectively). They both had their ups and downs, but CVS would have been the one to get. 

However, if there were a pharmacy ETF, having a mixture of the two would level out the ups and downs, leaving us somewhere in the middle. We have been having trouble coming up with a single stock to purchase, and perhaps the problem is that at the level we are dealing, it is just too difficult to make a decision. It is important to consider the goal, and for us, it is mainly educational. On the other hand, we are also pretty risk-averse. We have chosen some broad investments (SPY, EWZ, and ATT--solely for dividends). As we increase the size of our portfolio, a single company will become less frightening, perhaps. Maybe we aren't ready for the tenth-grade economy class stock picking game.

Admittedly, this is a more dangerous game that we are trying to play. We aren't ready to quit on it, yet. We have some skin in the game and have something to get up every Saturday morning for, but any losses incurred would be fairly minimal.

Over the past three weeks, we have picked some stocks we know, crunched the numbers and looked at charts to evaluate them. We find some undervalued companies, and then it ends there. When we picked funds we went with an idea or a theme. That might be something to try with this. For example, if we think the Affordable Care act will be good for pharmacies, we then need to pick a company that serves as a proxy for the industry, rather than choose the industry as a whole. The key is to find the company that we believe is best positioned to profit.

For next week, we should choose and research such a an industry.

Profit!