I swing trade on a short term basis (trades lasting for up to three weeks) and heavily rely on fundamental trade confirmation (after my system signals a long trade, I take it only if the fundamentals are good). Since I enter on pullbacks I look for companies with good earnings, sales, growth, low debt, good money flow... and all that in some composite rating. IBD's analysis seems perfect for that. until now, I used MSN Money's Stock Research Wizard for that, but last week there was a free trial week at investors.com and I tried their Stock Checkup. I noticed that there can be quite a difference of opinion(between MSN's and IBD's staff) which stock has good fundamentals and receives their high composite rating - It is not rare for a stock to have a 99 (A+) rating at IBD and at a same time very low StockScouter rating at MSN Money. Why is that ? Who should I go with ?
Beware........ IBD rates its stocks on performance.... hence the highest rated ones are the ones on stock steroids.... only one problem with that: any news that comes out..... or earnings that just "meet expectations" ... stocks fall hard. When i was trading stocks... i found it safer to get into stocks rated 80-85 .... that were beginning to go up, instead of buying stocks rated 99. I once saw a stock that i had just sold a week prior.. it was rated like 95 or 98... plunge $27 in one day because of news.... lost like 65% of its value. Scared the crap out of me.... and after that i started to look at IBD with a more critical eye. Having said that.... MSN stock scouter is a joke in comparison to IBD.