This how-to shows how to create a strategy in Equities Lab, and how to do some basic analysis of it. For humor value, we take the point of view of a children’s book character, named Amelia Bedelia, who has no common sense. We have all felt this way sometimes. Create A Screener A quantitative mutual fund is a screener. …
Should you be Scared of the Dow’s 1700 point drop? On the fifth of February 2018 the Dow Jones Industrial Average saw its largest single day drop in history. This drop coming off a market sell-off at the end of January has caused many investors to call for the start of a bear market.…
A lesson on absolute prices versus relative ones You’ve been referred to this page by something saying “You can’t (or shouldn’t) use Close > 5.00” in a stock screener. Imagine you are looking at a share of GoodStock (yeah, I know that’s a lame name for a fake stock!). It goes up and up, and up! …
Highlighting Recent Backtests Even with advanced caching methods and multiple speed upgrades, highly complex screeners still take some time to run over the past 20 years. To combat the wait time – and allow you more freedom to analyze strategies and their underlying companies – we built the “Recent Backtest” section.…
Intuitively, most investors would assume that consistent growth in free cash flow within a company, would result in a high performing stock. Well today we’re going to test out that theory with the “Free Cash Flow Growth Leaders Stock Screener”. With this screener, we’re looking for: · Large and stable companies; companies that have a market cap over a billion dollars sectioned off into their respective sectors.…
How high are “high” dividend stocks? As the markets continue to lack volatility, a number of investors are attempting to find opportunities outside of the traditional growth stocks. This leads many of them to alternatives such as forex, options, etc. However, some investors are still attempting to find gains in the equity markets, and a number of them are doing so through looking for companies with exceptionally high dividend yields.…
Share Buyback Programs A company purchasing back its shares tends to increase the stock price for a couple of reasons. First, it shows that the firm and its employees are confident in the direction the company is heading. Second, it cuts down on the shares available for investors to purchase, driving the price up through restricting supply.…
Sharing a lot of characteristics with the “Ultra Low Market Cap” red flag, looking for companies with a close of less than 2 gives you a number of companies whose market cap ranges from Micro to Small. These companies tend to have extremely poor fundamentals and also have a high probability of causing negative returns in your portfolio.…
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Investment Green Flags – Increasing Sales and High Asset Turnover
Revenue Growth and High Asset Turnover When it comes to finding green flags, sometimes the simplest idea is the best. In the case of our flag–Revenue Growth and High Asset Turnover–we look for just that. It’s self-explanatory that if a company brings in more money and sells units faster, its long-term price should increase.…
How negatively does a bad Beneish score affect your portfolio? With all of the recent articles regarding red and green flags, I realized I should begin writing articles on the flags within the score. One such flag, the bad Beneish score, is a key component of the red flags score.…
If you have been using the Equities Lab system in recent weeks, you may have seen a new error that hadn’t appeared before. ——————————— Stock Server Error:Server Error:Cannot compare split ajusted quantities to constants: greater(Close, 444) Don’t worry! This error message doesn’t mean that the system is down; it simply tells you that there is a split adjusted value in a place it shouldn’t be.…
Green Flags Now that we’ve gone over red flags, it’s time to look at the other side of the equation and learn about green flags. In our previous article, we discussed that red flags don’t necessarily mean that an investment is going to lose money. Green Flags are the polar opposite from a red flag, but it still doesn’t guarantee anything.…
It isn’t uncommon for one of our users to call us up and ask for help. To be honest, there have even been times when I will help a client at their site to get them up and running. In the past two years of working in this industry, I have noticed one major theme among every person(myself included) when it comes to screening for potential investments – we are all far too selective.…
If you’re a short seller, then I’d like to introduce you to the Ohlson O-Score. This is a score created by Dr. James Ohlson of New York University, aimed at predicting the financial distress of a company. The Ohlson O-Score is the result of a nine-factor linear combination of coefficient-weighted accounting ratios that are found from financial disclosure statements that are provided by publicly traded companies.…
The semiconductor industry is an important one, in fact, if it weren’t for semiconductors then you wouldn’t even be able to read this. So what exactly is a semiconductor, and why should you care about them? A semiconductor, in a nutshell, is a materials product usually made of silicon, which conducts electricity more than an insulator but less than a pure conductor, such as aluminum or copper.…
I’ve been seeing a lot of articles recently that are very focused on the idea, that by purchasing the industry or sector that performed best over the past year you are giving you the best chance at making returns. I’m a little skeptical, but just as hopeful to see whether or not this is a potential new avenue to take in my portfolio.…
When investing, for every fairy tale stock like an Amazon(AMZN) or Nvidia(NVDA), there’s an equally disastrous stock like MoSys(MOSY) or Gevo (GEVO). To avoid getting into stocks like these, it’s important to look at their failures and analyze them to avoid getting into the next potential train wreck of a stock. …
Most anytime we analyze a company or build a screen; we use a number of scores that are pre-built in the Equities Lab system. These scores are tried and tested, but they lack that personal touch. I think it’s time we learned how to build our own scores within the software.…
I was recently lurking around an online investment forum when the following post came up – “I recently ran an experiment where I generated random 7 to 50-stock portfolios from the 500 largest U.S. traded companies and measured their performance over the past 10 years. All of the randomly selected portfolios outperformed the S&P500 and BRK.B in terms of compound annual rate of return.…
Monte Carlo Simulation As investors, we all know that each investment we make comes with a certain amount of risk. We can decrease this risk by understanding all possible outcomes. Better yet, we can visualize each outcome through the use of a Monte Carlo Simulation. In a broad stroke definition – a Monte Carlo simulation allows for people to make informed quantitative decisions based on a range of possible outcomes.…