Friday, January 8, 2010

How To Find HOT Stock Picks!


Finding those stock picks can be a tough task.
I am very familiar with the frustrated feeling that you can get when starting your trading/investing career, that feeling of being clueless when it comes to finding those stocks that are skyrocketing and on the move, and not just sticking with the boring ones we all know, ie:Google, yahoo, Walmart ect…
So how do you find those stocks that have had huge gains, breaking out or coming across those good momentum plays or finding stocks that have been on the run for several days? I will show you one small simple tool that you can check on a regular basis that is free and is pretty darn handy! It is right here at yahoo’s finance page, Located in a small section called “Market Movers”.


Go to Yahoo’s Finance page.
Scroll down and on the left hand side of the screen you should see this-


Click the Most Price % Change link, which i highlighted in the picture.
You are then taken to a screen that looks like this one below (this is a sample and not real time).


The List!!!
Presented here is list of the top market movers through out the market day. As you can see it creates a list with 6 columns, to me the most important columns to pay attention to are, they ticker symbol(the company), the percentage change, and most important the volume. They key to using this list is paying attention to how many shares have been traded and the gains the stock made that day. Let’s pick one from the list as an example, i will choose “Zygo Corporation (ZIGO)”. ZIGO made a huge 45% gain or $3.34 “dollar gainer” move today. Now as i mentioned earlier the most important factor to look at is the volume or the amount of shares traded in that day. In this case ZIGO traded 1,381,709 shares which indicates this stock is liquid and can be easily traded in and out of if you wish. If you take a close look at “Community Central Bank Corp (CCBD)” they made a 38% gain BUT only on 2,097 shares traded, that is way to low to trade in and out of and not a popular stock to get in on unless you like to watch your money sit there and do nothing.


How can this make you money?
These high percent gainers did not make there huge gains from thin air, they obviously had something happen for this to take place. This list is the starting point in the research process. Take those tickers and plug them into your favorite charting software and do some technical analysis on them, or plug that ticker right back into yahoo finance and do some fundamental research and find out what others think looking at there message boards, all this to determine if it is worth trading or not. Before you know it you will have a nice watch list for the next day with stocks you know will be moving.

This tool is one of the ways i find my stocks and build my pre market watch list, this could be very helpful with yours. Stay tuned for more tips and tools you can use when searching for stocks.  :).

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