If making fantastic stock trading picks was easy, wouldn't we all quit our jobs and play the stock market all day? The truth is simple and obvious: The first skill that any investor or trader has to learn is how to pick their stocks but we often don't do nearly enough research.
You will hear all too often that buy and hold is dead and fundamental and technical analysis doesn't matter when such a large volume of part time day traders are moving the market based on trends rather than analysis.
You need to know that if you operate using that reasoning, you will lose money.
The facts are that even with all of the retail investors that are using electronic or web based trading platforms, they are still a small fraction of the trading volume compared to the professionals.
Those are the people that are running hedge funds, mutual funds, and other large scale investment firms.
The professionals move the market and if you want to make superior, money making stock trading picks, you have to trade what they trade.
The pros are using research teams that study the charts and analyze company balance sheets and product cycles.
What this means for you is that if you are going to make money consistently, you have to do the same research as the big name money managers and hopefully, arrive at many of the same conclusions.
This is going to take at least one hour of research per stock per week.
For this reason, don't own more stocks than you have time to research.
Many say that you need a minimum of 5 stocks to be diversified so maybe the minimum is all you have time to research.
It's better to have less but high quality.
If you do your homework each week, your stock trading tips are going to be money makers that heat up your stock portfolio.