As suspected, you think you're special and you think you're different. And you're ignoring the advice of people who once were in your shoes and have years and years of experience.
Everyone has their own methods of trading. The purpose that I created this thread is to gain some insight into what others feel and suggest about the market taking the position of a young adult. Whether or not I actually apply one or most of the advice is my personal decision. I will take into account what I consider to be meaningful or new into my studies. Think about this, if you can start over your life, would you truly be listen only to your parents and your peers who you believe are more knowledgeable, or would you consider each perspective, try them, and stick with the ones that actually works for you? Every one of us is unique, what works for you would not work for another industry/country/type of financial securities. If you truly believe that I should intake all of the comments mentioned by various people, then please disregard this thread and move on.
I have read through your instructions on the website, and it is quite insightful. For your comments about researching 25-30 companies, is the reason behind it to find the "most undervalued companies" on the market and stick to them even during volatile times? It surely takes a lot of effort to conduct fundamental analysis as you described. Please don't be misunderstood that I would fall back after reading through your article. I am genuinely interested in hearing your thoughts regarding the question.
No. The 20-30 names was a ballpark for students on the site. Most hedge fund analysts are covering between 50 to 150 names (or 50 primary coverage on a universe of 100-200 companies). Covering the stock means you build a detailed financial model and have a daily/week workflow to update your views. You only trade the stocks where you have such a process, or you end up with a lower hit rate — don’t make bets on things you don’t know enough about. Once you have your coverage setup, on any given day there might be information that is incremental to a scenario embedded in the stock. For example, with Apple right now there are multiple scenarios/thesis such as: (a) major phone refresh cycle driving higher shipments, (b) shipment neutral but positive on service revenue driving higher LTV, (c) skepticism of u/g cycle and worries about China revenue headwinds. For each scenario there’s a revenue impact — e.g. scenario (a) would imply perhaps a 40% higher sales growth over the next two years. In scenario (a) stock is worth $320 today, (b) it’s worth $245, and (c) it’s worth $160. Coming out of the WWDC event last month, the street set their “view” and now we are starting to get incremental data. Last week we saw (1) data from China showing better sales than expected, (2) and a report that Apple increased their production orders by 10%. Based upon the incremental information, which scenarios do you think are tracking and where does it mean the stock can go? Would you go long or short? Then; if next week new data comes out showing that Apple’s AI product won’t get released until next year, how will that shift your view & estimates? Would it track to a different thesis or delay an existing one? This is what fundamental equity research and analysis looks like.
So it uses fundamental analysis plus real-time data to forecast the future momentum of company performance and leverage the information based on degrees of importance that link directly to the stock price. That's clever, I definitely still have many things to learn.
Many newbies are here not really to learn. They have mental filters and they filter out what they don't like to see. Some newbies are here to teach/preach. They get agitated if we were to give advice to them. Interestingly, the majority of the newbies follow the trading books and Investment Gurus very very very seriously. So if our advice contradicts those gurus, we are labeled as troublemakers. They didn't know that we were hopeless foolish newbies a few decades ago. Last week, there were about 5 such newbies.
Somewhat. It's a discretionary process, which means it requires good judgement, creative reasoning (to understand scenario outcomes), and strong reading comprehension in addition to the quantitative and financial toolkit (also need to know how to create a model in excel!).