i sent several medical related SSG in PDF format.

These SSGs are done by individuals or small groups of individuals and reflect their opinion and what they learned (limited to extensive) concerning the SSG software.

Once some SSG are gone through and finalized there is another portfolio evaluation sheet where a summation of the SSGs are placed to compare different stocks.
http://biwiki.editme.com/PERT
http://bob-adams.net/Documents/Putting%20it%20all%20Together%202ppColor.pdf


Other clubs
http://www.naicspace.org/index.htm

Thanks! I will look at them later. I have been working 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the last month. Good thing it it 95% in my office at home, so I can take a break, help out with chores, and not waste time driving to a client site.

Take your time. I just wanted to show you what some members do with the "Tool Kit 5-TK-5 (discontinued) and TK-6 software.

I didn't want to claim this process is great, beats everything else, but that TK-5 or TK-6 is a tool to be considered unless one finds something better.

Lou

Lou,
I did some looking at what you sent and posted.
Next is playing with their online software tools.
I don't want one of these complex trading tools, because I am not a day trader. I don't have time to keep up with that. But I do invest for the short term, take a profit, and get out.

I am trying to find simple tools that will screen stocks based on my (or other smarter analysts) methods and criteria, then let me start tracking them against expectations, set alerts for buy-in points (not just price), and alerts for sell-out points (not just stop loss price).

Years ago, I was working for a very large firm and went to a Christmas party attended by a bunch of heavy investors in this firm. I got into a conversation with a broker who had made fortunes for their clients in this firm and other biotech and technology in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He told me to come by his office and get a book, which I did. It was self-published, "typeset" on an IBM typewriter, with examples out of date, but the evaluations were great. I was so out of the look for the next 15 years that I never tracked this author. His book was picked up by Dow Jones, he was hired as a columnist for Forbes, and he grew his personal nest egg of a few thousand dollars into more than $2 billion. His name is Kenneth Fisher, and the book is "Super Stocks".

http://search.forbes.com/search/colArchiveSearch?author=Fisher

I looked online for some of Fisher's books.

Lou

Fisher's methods of valuation are used by a lot of people today, but they have just become another ratio or two in the mix of ratios. It is like reducing the ideas of Sigmund Freud on a subject to one sentence, or HNHN and the LB books to a 3x5 notecard. It's fine for the person who has read and understood the entire program, but the person who just has the 3x5 card is kidding themselves to think they have all they need to know.

Another thing about really great investors seems to be that they had mentors. They come from a line of thought, of knowledge passed down by working for someone great. Then they go off and develop their own ideas, like Warren Buffet, or Ken Fisher or Charles Schwab, or Peter Lynch have done.

I read one big book about buffet's mentor.

On another note I got an email from the moderators to not post links to other marriage type websites.

Lou

I looked at all those analytical sheets you sent me, but only briefly. My first impression is that they use enough factors to be generally useful, but I think you have to use different analytical methods for different industries, and even different methods within a sector, based on what the condition of the company is - size, age, growth strategy, etc.

Right now, I am looking for a tool that will let me set up different screens across an entire market (NYSE, NASDAQ, etc).
Then, once I find a portfolio to watch based on several major criteria, I would customize the analysis further for each individual company, or a set of few similar ones, to see if they behave as expected, and dip into a BUY range. In 2009, there were a lot of opportunities to make 300% and 400% returns. I was just too consumed winding down large projects put on ice because of the FUD created by Washington, and I missed most of them, even ones I knew about, but just didn't bother to make the buy in. That was not smart. There will be a lot of opportunities in 2010 and 2011, but right now the investors seem to be selling off and the traders moving in.

Right now, my business is such transition due to the destruction of so many sectors in which I work. I am trying to redirect my efforts into multiple small markets by developing new products to fill an unmet demand.

My second strategy is to revisit industries where I once had a large consulting practice when my expertise was uncommon and highly paid. As I educated my clients, they no longer needed me. That was expected and I planned for it. Now, the crazies in Washington have created chaos. My clients don't know how to handle the abnormal. Their knowledge base is fine for incremental improvement, but unsuited to creative solutions to a rapidly changing set of challenges, essentially where they were when they retained me 20 or 25 years ago.

All this has me working 12 hours a day, 6 and 7 days a week, but I am twice as efficient as I was 20 years ago. I am trying to allocate 30 minutes a day to researching screening tools.

Not just talking to LOU, but asking everyone else: how about real estate in this market? I got started 35 years ago investing in old houses in a once-nice Victorian neighborhood, because they were affordable. I could pay cash for one with about 1/4 of my annual income.

I am thinking this market, while terrible for some investors heavily leveraged in existing properties, could be a gold mine for investors making new purchases of older properties to fix up and sell or to rent. I enjoy doing that work, and am still young and fit enough to do all of it, so I am thinking of getting back into it.

Real estate depends so much on the local market and location. I would have a difficult time speculating on real estate even in my area.

What I know it is down a little but only after a 100% or more run-ups. Several fulltime business men and women are working just the "fixer up" market and buy most of the distressed properties.

I have real estate companies as customers and they get calls several times a week from people looking for deals and fixer-uppers. Before I would do something similar, I would want to know more about my potential competition and actually how many distressed properties were usually available in a year.

I can do the repair, modernization work on older houses but the how much to pay and spend, the people skills, making connections, and deals is where I fall short.

Lou

I am like you, LOU. I have had my hand out of buying houses and rental properties for so long that I would have to study it. There are surely some deals, but with more than 6,000,000 homes in foreclosure, the prices could be coming down further.

Also, I am afraid to own anything that the government can see, because they will try to grab it. Property taxes are going up, and all taxes are going up to keep government running at pre-recession levels.

I didn't know there were 6 million homes in foreclosures.

Property taxes? I pay 4X more property taxes than when I bought my house. If my house was in the better part of town instead of out in the country, my property taxes would double. People in my area have turned down increases in the school levies for about 8 years. Finally one of the 4 school building maintenance levies passed.

I feel sorry for the retired people that have a home in a U.S. resort town or high demand area that have to pay $1,000 a month in taxes.

Lou

The news media doesn't report that there are more bank failures in 2010 than in 2009, double the foreclosures, 1 in 6 homes in payment arrears, which is not surprising with 20.7% unemployment.

The liberals in Congress are still pushing for amnesty for 30,000,000 illegal aliens. They want to bring in another 30,000 low-salary contract IT workers from overseas, because big industry tells them there is a shortage. How do they explain the 290,000 degreed U.S. IT workers who are laid off?

Home sales fell another 2.7% last month. Starting salaries for college grads are down 34% from 2007. How are they going to buy a car, much less a home?

I have an IT friend that has been laid off for over 6 months. He has only had a few interviews that were close in pay and benefits to his old job.

I am glad to see Arizona is not backing down on their ID checks.

You are right In your above post. If I had to start over and go back to being 24 again, I couldn't afford a house half of the size I have now and it is 1,300 sq ft on the main floor with a simple basement.

Lou

Lou,
I am a member of the AEA, American Engineering Association, which has for years had experts, like professors at business schools (Stanford, UCLA) studying and tracking the impact of public policy on engineering jobs. They testify before Congress, but those politicians only listen to the "donations" paid to them by the big technical firms.

There are 300,000 legal foreign H1B IT workers in the US right now, and another 500,000 workings illegally ( like on a student visa but working cheap instead of going to college). There are 290,000 degreed US citizens who have much better skills, laid off and out of work. That's no coincidence. It is intentional. And this is just one sector. Is it any wonder there is no recovery.

On May 1, this level of unemployment set a record for the worst 27 weeks in history. That record has been broken every week since then. Last week, Congress refused to extend unemployment benefits, but began funding supper at public schools. If the parents had jobs, the children wouldn't need to be fed at school

It's been three months for me, now. Not one interview. Several rejections, however.

I'm staying sane by working like the dickens to help get a startup off the ground. No paycheck, no health benefits, but some cool technology and the opportunity to meet a lot of interesting people.

When the savings start running out, THEN I'll panic.

Fred,
If you feel like it, email at my MB address.
I have designed and run projects in everything from embedded real-time to Wall Street trading, all over the USA. You can keep it confidential and anonymous. Just what you want to do, what you are good at doing, and the location is all I need. I might not be able to help, but I'll try.

mbretread@yahoo.com

Fred, if you are a writer or programmer I can direct you to a website that you can use those skills on.

The site takes 10% of what you are paid, but I consider that fair.

Thanks, KR. I last made a programming living writing COBOL. Today's computer languages make me "C sick."

Back then, writing efficient, well-documented code was highly regarded. It offends my sensibilities that Java has a feature called "garbage collection." Ugh.

I have done a bit of writing. I used to be a music reviewer, and one of the requirements of a job I had was to write technical documentation. The company liked my tech notes so much they modified my job to set aside a full day per week to write them. It's not as satisfying as writing about something one really likes, but I know how awful poorly written documentation is.

If you're thinking of freelancerunion.org, I'll admit to having looked at it. If you have a different suggestion, I'm open to further choices...

How about some upbeat news?
Is anyone investing in some new opportunity created by this recession, such as a dramatically cheaper rental property?