Highlights of April's picks

Hello investors,

The April competition has begun .Most of the times I would write about definitions and analysing numbers of some company's financial statement but today I will look at some of the interesting competitors that you included.

To be honest ,I was quite impressed by some of the picks that you submitted . When the committee looked at the list of 32 stocks , we barely knew some of them , such as CPLP or NCR . Clearly , all of you have used different tactics and this is obvious by the diversity I spotted  - market cap , industry , debt ratios,etc. I even saw that someone picked exchange traded fund.

Today was not a great for NASDAQ(1,22%), Dow (0,83%) and S&P 500 (0,96%) (7.4.2014 18:30) . They were all down that as we know these measurements show the overall performance of market .

Let's look at the first few hours after the opening of the US market (have in mind that each day from Monday to Friday it opens 14:30 GMT and 9:30 US time zone ):

Clearly , there are a lot more picks that down than the " red coloured boxes" . Later today NASDAQ went even further down to 1,60% . Looking at your picks , most of them are down because of the volume , you can see that today investors are selling their shares , for example ESV ,BA , IGLD , NCR , EVK and others. But this should not discourage you - today's down can be tomorrow's up and clearly there are quite clever ideas in this list . The committee of the society is going to write and discuss about your picks for the rest of the competition , so keep yourself updated as it is important to understand one thing -if you are losing why you are losing and if you are winning why you are winning as well . Do not trust on your luck !

I will say what my first impression was but this post is not about specific information .  Let's look how diverse in your choice you were:
1) Market cap.- there are two groups that clearly stand out - the really small companies with market cap between 100M and 500M ; the second group is the medium size , which is like from 500M to 5B . So , statistically. It is not that they are newly founded , but they have relatively small market capitalization .

2) Industry - you are really diverse here as well . There several tendencies that can be spotted .
A) First , there are several companies in "Oil and Gas" drilling . To be honest , most of the articles for this year that concern crude oil will start like "...Expectations of an improving economy and bullish supply data have strengthened oil prices to around $100 per barrel..."(zacks.com) . I think we could make a comparison in the future for those picks , which are SYRG ,EPD ,SU , ESV ,HERO .
B) There are two companies in "Steel and Iron " GGB and PKX, which to be honest I traced the whole day that they were moving together , although their headquarters are in two different countries- I would be interested to see how this story goes on .
C)Two "Drug manufacturers" PRAN and PFI . Actually it is surprising that we have PFI in our list . We will look at it but I found something interesting on PFI case . They are working on a new drug called palbociblis, treating breast cancer .And guess what ... I found it on today's Wallstreet Breakfast , so do not forget to check it out regularly ( here is the whole article if you are interested in PFI
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/07/business/breast-cancer-drug-shows-groundbreaking-results.html?_r=0

Of course there are a lot more tendencies that could be noted in your choices but again , we will make comparison between the different industries in the future.

3) EPS Q/Q- Most of you chose it strongly positive , above 50% , so this is the first sign that most of you have been looking for growth stocks .I even found that VTNR has EPS Q/Q of about 1770% , this number is huge but we will look what stands behind it in the mere future .

4) Current and Quick ratio ; debt to equity - the surprise is that pretty much all of you have the sustainable numbers .

5) P/E ratio - again you chose the this ratio to be below 20 , what would most good investors do if they are looking for growth stocks .

There is a lot more than that to look at such as you mostly chose positive operation margin , positive insider's transaction , good analysis recommendation ( which can be quite misleading) ,etc.