Share your best stock ideas with us
On a quiet day roughly monthly, Intelligent Investor analysts engage in a 'research Friday'. Now that I write the words, it seems rather poorly titled given every day is a research day for us. But let's not get stuck on semantics.
What's unique about these Fridays is that we cease spending our time digging deeply and instead gaze widely. On these days, we briefly scan dozens of potential investment opportunities, mostly those that are completely new to us, with the aim of finding a handful to pursue more vigorously in the weeks ahead.
It's about finding the feedstock for future Dragons' Dens (our internal review process where an analyst presents their upgrade idea to a panel of risk-obsessed, fire-breathing 'dragons') and, hopefully, the next generation of buy ideas. Two buy upgrades and another extremely high quality stock on our watch list are directly traceable to my own research Fridays in 2012.
How we spend our day is up to the individual analyst. Sometimes, I run a filter (high return on capital employed, low price-earnings ratio, low price-to-book ratio or a combination of such filters) and spend my day working down the list. Other days I focus on a specific corner of the market—earlier in the year I ran through all listed interest rate securities (which resulted in one upgrade in June, and another near-miss). Other days I'll pick a few letters from the alphabet and try to look at all listed companies beginning with those letters. Variety counts, as we want exposure to new ideas we might otherwise miss.
In the interest of variety, I'm going to let Doddsvillagers dictate how I spend this coming Friday. If you have any investment ideas you're happy to share with our blog readership and myself, please leave a comment below. I'll commit to taking a brief look at everything mentioned, subject to a few quick caveats outlined below.
If your suggestion prompts us to look at something not already on our radar and the stock gets upgraded to a positive recommendation anytime over the next six months, I'll give you a free 3-month membership to Intelligent Investor Share Advisor (or a 3-month extension for existing members).
There are only a few simple guidelines. I'll only be looking at stocks listed on the ASX (no foreign or unlisted stock suggestions), and I won't be looking at companies with a market capitalisation of less than $100m (too illiquid for us to recommend even if we like it). That's it for the hard and fast caveats.
Also, I won't personally be looking at anything resources-related, but if you have anything to suggest in that area, submit it anyway because our resources analyst, Gaurav Sodhi, should be able to find time to take a look at these too.
Please feel free to provide justification behind your suggestion. By outlining the investment case, it reduces the chances of me overlooking what's drawn you to the stock—thus increasing your chances of a free 3-month membership.
Thank you in advance for any suggestions you care to make.