Chapter 13
Miscellaneous Ways to Check on Stocks
Here's the first in checking on any stock should like. Start saving the first issue each month of Barron’s. Wow, have times changed since I wrote this in the late 80s. You don't need to do hardly anything with paper anymore. You can easily look up the historical prices for any investment at Yahoo Finance. All you do is type in the symbol for the stock or ETF that you wanna look up. Then you will get the summary page showing the basic information on that stock or ETF. Just look in the left-hand column and you'll see a hot link that says historical prices. Click on that and then you can review any time you want by day, week, or month or just look up dividend payments; it's a really useful tool that I highly recommend.
When you find a stock you like, look it up in Yahoo and look at the closing price for the stock or ETF. I think you can even print it out if you want to. I also offer a monthly newsletter. And all buyers of my e-book will get a free one-year subscription to my monthly newsletter that has price and other important information on stocks I recommend to help you. Then if you want, make a spreadsheet on the stock and charted to see how it would have done under the system for the last 12 months or so. Of course you should pick as your starting month, a month with a price was at or near the 52 week low, this is the cardinal rule for picking stocks in the system. As you get more experience, you'll be able to just glance at monthly prices and see if the stock is the kind of fluctuations that work best. In the example shown, Barron’s had an article on oil stocks, so I jotted down all the oil stocks they mentioned and checked back on the prices to find the best ones for the system.
As a personal note, on the other page in this chapter, I jotted down my ideas for this book one night at Camp Humphreys, Korea at a local Korean hotel while on TDY that was near the DMZ; those ideas led to this book. Never ignore an idea. They can lead you to a whole new life.
