RP Wang Investment

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‘SOFT’ FACTORS

The first thing to consider about investing isn’t technical at all. EPS, P/E, P/S, MA and EMA, RSI and dozens of other indicators are all important. But start at the beginning by looking not outside, but in.

What kind of investor are you? Young with a little capital to risk but a large earnings potential over several decades? Retired, or near it, with a healthy savings but living on limited income?

And, more psychologically, what’s your temperament for research and your tolerance for risk? Are you comfortable with statistics or intuitive? Are you detail oriented, or tend to look at the big picture? Not mutually exclusive categories, to be sure.

All these factors will influence your investment strategy. You do have a strategy, right? If not, go back to square one and develop that first.

‘HARD’ FACTORS

PEG – Projected Earnings Growth

Traditionally, Price to Earnings (P/E) ratio was a helpful indicator of value. Low price, relative to large earnings (per share) suggested a company’s share price would likely rise in the future. But that was before thousands of new companies entered the public markets and when investing meant buying Coca-Cola share.

But P/E isn’t entirely useless, even today. Just supplement it with a little more information to calculate the PEG – Projected Earnings Growth.

Calculate PEG by taking the P/E and dividing it by the projected growth in earnings. For example, a share with a P/E of 20 and projected earning growth next year of 10% would have a PEG of 2 (20/10 = 2). The lower the number the less you’re paying for a unit of future earnings growth. Therefore, a company with a high P/E may still be a value if it has a high projected earnings.

Of course, the key is getting accurate projections. While no one can predict with certainty, many Internet sites provide those numbers and over time, with diligence, you can find one you trust.

Just as deciding to buy is, in small part, finding a large PEG share, electing a time to sell means estimating when PEG is likely to take a turn downward. So, tracking PEG over time in the form of a simple chart should be a weekly (or more often) task on your research list.

ROE – Return On Equity

Some companies can make silk purses out of pigs ears, others couldn’t make a profit if they were given Apple’s engineering and marketing teams for free. Return on Equity is one measure of how well a company uses its assets to produce earnings. (By the way, silk comes from worms, not pigs.)

Easy to calculate, simply divide Net Income by Book Value (assets minus liabilities). Both numbers needed are easy to obtain from Internet sites. Three percent is low, 15% is healthy – but be sure to compare to other companies in the same economic sector, and track the number over the long term.

Obviously, when projected ROE is high (based on historical trend) you want to buy. Timing the sell is a matter of estimating when ROE is trending downward.

Some factors to consider for the latter involve major mergers which look to be unwise (HP acquiring Compaq is one example), major technology or management changes (this can be positive or negative), lawsuits initiated or settled, and general economic factors influencing that company more than others.

Continually add to your database and your toolkit. Track the numbers and add new numbers to track. MA – moving averages and RSI – Relative Strength Indicator are two of the more common technical indicators used, for example. After you’re comfortable with those, seek out some of the methods of quantifying risk.

And don’t forget to develop that strategy. Tools are useless if you don’t know what you want to do with them.

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As with gamblers in Las Vegas so it is with stock investments, ‘everybody’s got a system’. The goal of research, however, is to make the activity a lot less like gambling and a lot more like investment.

For those without the time or temperament to carry out research themselves, there are full time research services available – for a fee, of course. Full-Service brokerages, such as Merrill Lynch and other large, well-established firms offer research as part of their value to clients.

But there are firms, both traditional and the newer online variety, that offer research without the advice available from the broker. Whether the research (and the advice) are worth what it costs is an ongoing debate.

For those who see research not as a necessary evil or time-consuming burden, but as part of the process or even an adventure, there are now more sources than could be used in a lifetime.

Starting with the source of data is always a safe bet, since it’s the most unbiased, thoroughly audited information around. That source is the legally required filings of individual publicly traded companies.

In the U.S. those are 10-K’s – more or less equivalent to lengthy annual reports – which can be viewed or downloaded from the SEC’s website (www.sec.gov). (10-Q’s are filed quarterly, 8-K’s for significant financial changes in between.) Other countries have their equivalents, such as the Hong Kong Securities Regulatory Commission (HKSRC).

In those reports you’ll find recent (as of the filing date) financial data about income, expectations, competition and lines of business, current senior management listings and other information useful to those inclined toward Fundamental Analysis. 

Quarterly reports and annual reports are sent automatically to share holders, even those with only one share (though they’re usually traded in lots of 100 or more.) But, they’re often available free by calling or emailing the Investment Relations department; after all, companies want you to buy their stock. They contain the same factual data as 10-K’s and 10-Q’s but occasionally wording differs, for those interested in subtle details.

For a modest annual or one-time fee, a blizzard of chart data is available that matches any produced by the in-house research departments of the large brokerages. (Sometimes they’re produced by the same people.)

Newsletters are another potentially good source of information, though opinions about the market vary so widely that researching whom to believe takes as much time and care as researching individual stocks. Sometimes they’re a few dollars per year, sometimes many hundreds – and price is no indicator of quality here.

One direct source of one kind of information are the in-person, on TV, or on the Internet interviews of company senior managers, usually by one or a panel of analysts.

CEOs, CFOs, and others often talk to the financial press and brokerage stock analysts to give their views on where their company stands, what challenges they face, and where they expect to be in the near to long-term future. Often they’re asked about specific pending lawsuits or legislation and to assess its potential impact.

Of course, executives have an interest in painting a rosy picture, but analysts have often heard it all and are very adept at keeping the ’spin factor’ to a minimum. If nothing else, it tells you what the executives want you to believe, which in itself is useful.

Even armed with nothing more than an inexpensive online trading account, the average investor has access to charts of historical and current data, future expectations, and a wide variety of statistical information which would keep even the most technically inclined busy for quite some time.

Be sure to use it all, or as much as you can absorb in the time available, when formulating a trading strategy. And remember, opinions ‘on the street’ are a dime a dozen – including mine.

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The question in the title is misleading. Most individuals have no choice whether to use a broker, since they’re not members of an exchange. Those members (their employees, really) are the only ones who can actually execute a trade and they don’t take calls from individual investors.

They’re called Floor brokers and they’re the one’s who actually buy and sell securities on the floor of a securities exchange. You can watch them on TV waving their hands vigorously and yelling at one another.

So the question really should be: “What Kind of Broker Do You Need?”

Prior to 1975, Full-Service brokers were about the only choice. Then the world gave birth to discount brokers and life changed. In the 1990s, it changed again with the beginnings of Internet trading for average investors. Note that trading over networks had already been going on between large investors for decades.

Along with the changes in technology, making trades as easy as a few mouse clicks, came changes in the kind, amount and availability of research. Now any investor could, sometimes for free but rarely for more than a modest fee, get up-to-the-minute information about a company’s earnings per share, historical profits and dividends, along with a bewildering array of more technical data.

Those two facts – technology and research – are the basis for deciding what kind of broker you need.

Some are comfortable with executing trades by making those few mouse clicks, others want some human contact – even if nothing more than an efficient-sounding voice – before plunking down a few thousand.

Full-Service brokers, if you find not only the right company but that special individual, can provide you with more than an efficient-sounding voice. Good brokers, and they do exist, offer their clients sound advice based on good research.

No one can predict with certainty any particular price for any stock five hours from now, nor five years from now. But massive statistical studies are undertaken and research analysts do conduct and study them then pass on their recommendations to brokers.

When those brokers are astute they can make reasonable judgments about the likelihood that long rock-solid Acme, Inc will fold in three months, or that newcomer Whizzard Techno-Babble is about to skyrocket.

If that kind of advice and ‘partnering’ is worth the commissions you’ll pay, then a Full-Service broker is for you – especially if you have neither the time nor the temperament to undertake that research yourself.

Others, with more time or analytical interests – or perhaps, just more chutzpah – may find it not only financially worthwhile, but intellectually and emotionally satisfying to take the reins themselves. This is especially true for short-term traders, day traders even more so.

To these types, research isn’t a burden or a bafflement it’s an adventure. And the deep discount brokers, or pure Internet trading accounts, are the perfect fit for them. Reports, some free others available at varying cost, can be had in greater abundance than even they have time or desire to study.

So, along with determining how much money can be saved by using the broker behind Door #1 vs Door #2, study yourself and decide which kind of trader you are. That’s the best way to choose which kind of broker you need.

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There are two basic ways to trade the stock market – shooting in the barrel or using strategies to determine which stocks to buy, when to sell, and how to protect your investment dollars. Needless to say, strategies outperform barrel shooting by a large margin. There are, however, hundreds of trading strategies to choose from. Of all of these there are a couple of tried and trued methods that have worked well for investors over many years. The beginning investor is advised to investigate some of these basic strategies and see for himself how they perform. New strategies can be explored once the basic ones are well-understood.

Hedging
Hedging is a way of protecting an investment by reducing the risks involved in holding a particular stock. The risk that the price of the stock will drop can be offset by buying a put option that allows you to sell at the stock at a particular price within a certain time frame. If the price of the stock falls, the value of the put option will increase.

Buying put options against individual stocks is the most expensive hedging strategy. If you have a broad portfolio a better option may be to buy a put option on the share market itself. This protects you against general market declines.  Another way to hedge against market declines is to sell financial futures like the S&P 500 futures.

Dogs of the Dow
This is a strategy that became popular during the 1990s. The idea is to buy the best-value shares in the Dow Industrial Average by choosing the 10 shares that have the lowest P/E ratios and the highest dividend yields. The companies on the Dow Index are mature companies that offer reliable investment performance. The idea is that the lowest 10 on the Dow have the most potential for growth over the coming year. A new twist on the Dogs of the Dow is the Pigs of the Dow. This strategy selects the worst 5 Dow stocks by looking at the percentage of price decline in the previous year. As with the Dogs, the idea is that the Pigs stand to rebound more than the others.

Buying on Margin
Buying on margin means to buy stocks with borrowed money – usually from your broker. Margin gives you more return than if you were to pay the full cost outright because you receive more share for a lower initial investment. Margin buying can also be risky because if the stock loses value your losses will be correspondingly greater. When buying on margin the investor should have stop-loss orders in place to limit losses in the case of market reversal. The amount of margin should be limited to about 10% of the value of your total account.

Dollar Cost and Value Averaging
Dollar cost averaging involves investing a fixed dollar amount on a regular basis. An example would be buying shares of a mutual fund on a monthly basis. If the fund drops in price the investor will receive more shares for his money. Conversely, when the price is higher, the fixed amount will buy fewer shares. An alternative to this is value averaging.  The investor decides on a regular value he wishes to invest. For example, he may wish to invest $100 a month in a mutual fund. When the price of the fund is high he puts a higher dollar amount in the fund and when the price is low he spends less money. This averages out his investment to the original $100 per month. Value averaging almost always outperforms dollar cost averaging as a percentage return on the money invested. When used as part of a broader trading strategy it can help secure the growth of your investment fund.

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