[RedJoker]

[ QUOTE ]

There are basically no 20 year olds who know what they are doing in the market.

[/ QUOTE ]

I turned 20 last month.

This is what I look for when researching fundamentals (I use Valuelines).

• A high industry rank, ideally top 25%
• A good one year timeliness rank
• Safety (low volatility compared to other stocks)
• Low debt, ideally less than 3% of capitalization
• Beta, ideally between 0.95 and 1.1
• Sales and earnings growth ideally greater than 15%
• Consecutive years of sales and earnings growth
• Good projected revenues, dependent on size of company
• Projected sales and earnings, ideally greater than 19%
• Earnings growth faster than sales
• Dividends less than half E.P.S.
• Estimated price appreciation for next 5 years greater than 15%
• Low P/E ratio
• Strong management, increasing profits, have handled past challenges and are anticipating future trends
• No impending lawsuits

This is a conservative strategy but not all criteria have to be met. No; I can't read a balance sheet but I can read the Valueline reports.

Next I look at the technicals (I use TeleCharts):

• Place trendlines, identify channels and areas of support and resistance.
• Look for divergences and leading divergences in volume and price/volume indicators.
• Check that stochastics, MACD and RSI are oversold (or at least not overbought)
• Use candlestick patterns, Bollinger bands and moving averages to time entry point.
• Use trendlines to determine stop-loss position, unless selling covered calls.

I feel that I have a better trading knowledge than the 'average' investor. If this is 'not knowing what I'm doing in the market' than I apologize for making you read this long post.

The point of this post was to show that not all 18-21 year olds are clueless about the market, we may be inexperienced but we learn quickly [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img].

Naturally I respect your accomplishments and trading ability, all your advice has been excellent and I have enjoyed reading this thread. As such any recommendations for improving my trading strategy will be greatly appreciated (from all posters).