stock picks

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. recently announced that it will buy the 77% of U.S.-based railway Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. that it doesn’t already own. The company will pay $44 billion U.S. to complete the takeover. Burlington Northern owns one of the largest railroad networks in the U.S., with about 51,500 kilometres of track. ...

I hope you are enjoying and profiting from my daily updates on TSI Network. Aside from the daily updates, TSI Network offers a range of other benefits, including over 2,000 articles on individual investments and how you can use our time-tested approach to maximize and protect your profits. Finding what you’re looking for couldn’t be easier. TSI Network gives you a wide range of easy-to-use tools to help you zero in on specific investment information. One of these is the handy list of 27 investing topics on the left-hand side of the site’s homepage....

Some advisors like to use sports or military analogies to describe their investment approach. They see a great stock pick as the equivalent of a touchdown or home run, and a series of them as a successful military campaign. This, however, puts too much emphasis on excitement and glory, and pays too little attention to risk. In contrast, if we had to compare our approach to anything outside the investment business, we’d choose chess. (You can learn more about our value-investing strategy for selecting stocks in our new free report, “Canadian Stock Market Basics: How to Trade Stocks and Make Good Investments in Canada.”)...

You’ll find one of our six Successful Investor ratings displayed next to every stock we cover in each of our four investment newsletters. These ratings are a key guide we use to manage the portfolios of clients of our Successful Investor Wealth Management service. And they can give you a leg up in adding winning stock picks to your portfolio, too. Our top rating is Highest Quality, followed by Above Average, Average, Extra Risk, Speculative and, at the bottom of the scale, our riskiest, lowest-quality rating of Start-up....

We’ve had a lot of success over the years with the aggressive investing stock picks we recommend in our Stock Pickers Digest newsletter. Aggressive picks have the potential to give you bigger gains than your conservative selections. Even so, aggressive stocks are best suited to investors who can accept substantial risk in the portion of their portfolios that they devote to these types of investments. You can be wrong on any of your stock picks, of course. But when you’re wrong on a speculative stock, your losses are likely to be larger than they would be with a well-established company....

When analyzing any new investment, including value stock picks, one key question we ask early on is, “What can this cost us if something goes wrong?” (You can learn more about our value-investing approach to selecting stocks in our new free report, “Canadian Stock Market Basics: How to Trade Stocks and Make Good Investments in Canada.”) There is no simple rule for calculating cost-if-something-goes-wrong. It takes common sense and guesswork. For instance, to determine the cost of a warm winter to a ski-hill operator, we need to see how many ski centres it operates, and if they are in the same or different weather systems. In fact, geographical diversification plays a prime role in most calculations of the cost-if-something-goes-wrong. [ofie_ad]...

When Inner Circle members ask us about specific investments and growth stock picks they’re considering buying or selling, we start by putting all the important information we know about a company into perspective. That new invention may be a marvel, but how does it compare to what the competition is doing? The new project sounds impressive, but how much impact will it really have on the company’s profit? The debt sounds high — will the company be able to keep up its agreed-upon interest and principal repayments? Investors intuitively understand this, but they often find it hard to apply when they are looking for strong growth stock picks. You can tackle the job with financial ratios, but the answers you get can be ambiguous, if not misleading. ...

Small caps are companies with a “market cap” (the value of shares they have outstanding) below $250 million, or some other arbitrary figure. Many investors think of the “small cap group” as the place to look for aggressive investments, such as junior companies that will develop into seniors and make huge gains for investors. Some small caps will indeed turn out that way, but they’re a minority. In fact, small caps are a widely varied bunch. The top small caps are well-established giants within small but growing fields. However, many small caps are start-ups that have yet to make their first profit. Some succeed brilliantly, and these are the hot small cap stocks we aim to help you spot in our Stock Pickers Digest newsletter, but lots of others go broke. Then too, some small caps are former large-cap companies that have terminal problems. They trade as small caps on their way to zero....

Aggressive investing stock picks can give you bigger gains than conservative selections. But they can also give you bigger losses. Aggressive stocks are only suitable for investors who can accept substantial risk. You can be wrong on any of your stock picks, of course. But when you’re wrong on a speculative stock, losses are likely to be larger than with a well-established company. Here are three key ways to cut risk in your aggressive stock picks: ...

A stop is an order to sell a stock if it falls to a specific price. If an investor owns an $18 stock, for example, they might tell their broker to sell it “on stop” if it hits $16. This may limit their losses if they paid more than $16; if they paid less, it may preserve some of their profits. However, the triggering of the $16 stop-loss order merely means the investor will automatically put in a sell-at-market order. There’s no guarantee that anyone will bid anywhere near $16 for the stock. As well, if other holders put in stops at $16, and multiple sell-at-market orders hit the market at the same time, everyone may wind up selling for far below $16. The funny thing about this stock trading strategy is that after all the stop-loss generated sell orders have been filled, the market may turn around and push the stock back up to $16 or higher....