Orders to buy

I should mention that the rules for selling apply also to buying.  If the next earnings announcement is a week away or less, use a market order, else a limit order.

The one thing that's different is that there should be less urgency to act to initiate a position than to close one out.  You know what they say, the best way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it back in your pocket.

The best order form for selling a stock

So you've decided to sell, for whatever reason.  What form of order should you use?

Normally, I like to put in a limit order a little bit above the latest trade price.  There is a certain amount of natural fluctuation from day to day, or within a day.  If you put in a market order, you'll probably get the current price or maybe a little lower.  The limit order will in most cases get you more.

How much is more?  I'm thinking a little bit above the most recent day's high.

BUT if there is an earnings announcement due soon, then this misfires.  Stocks will go up if it's a good report and down if it's bad.  If a bad report, your limit order then won't be filled and you'll own the stock at a lower price.  If it's a good report, you'll get your price alright, but then it will trade higher and you'll miss out on that.

If there's an earnings report due within the next week, then use a market order to sell.  Yahoo! Finance will show the next earnings date and it's free.  I'm sure there are other sites as well.

Some folks advocate using a trailing stop order, so that if the stock continues to rise, they'll get in on that.  This has never worked well for me.  There are too many flash crashes these days.  Just yesterday a hacked AP tweet caused one.  So no more stop orders for me.

SharePost - Private Stocks

I found another place to buy and sell private stock - SharesPost. They also have the nice feature of listing the stocks they deal in, without you needing to register or log in.

S&P Highest Yields

Like a nice dividend?  These stocks have the highest yields of the S&P 500.  (EPS1 is this year's estimated earnings, EPS2 is next year.) Not that they are necessarily a good investment, just saying.

Ticker Price EPS1 EPS2 Div Name Yield PBI $13.87 $2.08 $1.95 $1.49 Pitney Bowes Inc. 10.74% RRD $10.82 $1.81 $1.84 $1.04 R.R. Donnelley & 9.61% DO $59.12 $4.22 $5.20 $3.50 Diamond Offshore 5.92% AVP $16.12 $1.02 $1.19 $0.92 Avon Products, In 5.71% POM $19.43 $1.24 $1.31 $1.08 PEPCO Holdings In 5.56% PBCT $11.43 $0.77 $0.90 $0.63 People's United F 5.55% LEG $20.43 $1.31 $1.57 $1.11 Leggett & Platt, 5.43% HCBK $5.98 $0.57 $0.54 $0.32 Hudson City Banco 5.35% RAI $41.12 $2.95 $3.17 $2.18 Reynolds American 5.30% HCN $55.18 $3.61 $3.93 $2.91 Health Care REIT, 5.27%

Downloading Yahoo! data

One of the things I like best about Yahoo! Finance is the ability to download data from it to a spreadsheet.  Here's a page of tips on downloading Yahoo! data. As an example, I prepared this table of data from today, showing the lowest Price/Earnings ratio among S&P 500 stocks, based on estimated earnings for this year and the latest quoted price.

Ticker  Price      EPS    Name                 P/E
FSLR   $12.28    $4.08    First Solar, Inc.    3.0
HIG    $16.10    $3.63    Hartford Financia    4.4
LNC    $19.34    $4.11    Lincoln National     4.7
GT      $9.44    $1.96    Goodyear Tire & R    4.8
BBY    $18.22    $3.62    Best Buy Co., Inc    5.0
HPQ    $21.06    $4.07    Hewlett-Packard C    5.2
MET    $27.82    $5.22    MetLife, Inc. Com    5.3
CLF    $45.74    $8.40    Cliffs Natural Re    5.4
TSO    $22.17    $4.06    Tesoro Corporatio    5.5
VLO    $20.37    $3.72    Valero Energy Cor    5.5

Yahoo! Finance

My favorite site for (free) stock market data is Yahoo! Finance.  It's really complete and well organized, one of Yahoo's best services.  Type in a ticket symbol to get a quote and the quote page has a menu on the left of all sorts of information. The reports I find most useful are Summary, Profile, Key Statistics and Analyst Estimates.

Name change

I've decided to rename this blog.  The word "Fundamentalist" is most often associated with religion and not the stock market, so it was confusing.  I hope the new title better reflects what I'm writing about.