Company Research Tools

ADVFN has come up with a very exciting new toy and I'm having great fun using it.

What it's really done for me is make it very fast to research companies. The new tool helps me to tell within seconds whether a company is worth investigating further.

Now - a click of a mouse and a quick scroll down the last company results and I know whether to forget about buying a company, or start some research.

Ok, I won't tease you anymore… it's far too hot for that!

The new tool can be reached by simply pressing this link while you are in your favourite ADVFN pages:

You'll find a box will pop up called "highlighted news phrases"

You can add any number of words or phrases and those will be highlighted down any text you want to read. You can also put the words in any colour you want.

"Well, it's not that exciting!" you may splutter. "What's the use of that?"

I think there are loads of uses and I'm still working out all the potential ones. But here's a start…

I've already developed a traffic light style "red, amber and green" system for looking at company reports. Here's how I did it:

1. Put "challenging" into the first box, in red.
2. Then "Difficult" into the second in red
3. "in line with expectations" into the third in yellow
4. "exceeding expectations" into the fourth in green
5. "positive" into the fifth in green
6. "favourable" into the sixth in green
7. "profit up" into the seventh in green
8. "Excellent" into the eighth in green.

Right - now click on the last report of all the companies you hold in the portfolio and those phrases you will see highlighted.

Now it's really quite simple. Any company report that you see with lots of red is a probable sell or not a buy. Any with amber a hold, any with green are potential buys.

Obviously the more greens the more positive, the more reds the more negative.

Now you may scoff at what might seem an over simplistic idea. And of course my system is only the basis to start some more in depth research. But I don't think you can beat it for a quick judgement.

Try it on some of the companies you hold and see what happens!

You may have really sophisticated software, which reckons it knows when you should buy or sell. Well, quite honestly I don't care! My free and easy to use system has worked for a very long time.

And this new tool from ADVFN is going to make it a lot faster for me to scan reports.

Let's face it, most reports are full of over-written management speak and these are the phrases they tend to go for.

There are going to be plenty more uses of this tool and if any of you can come up with any other phrases worth putting in, or any other uses of this new tool do e-mail me: robbiethetrader@aol.com.

The market's been very kind to me in the last week or so. My portfolio is blossoming well.

XP Power (bought at 425p) produced excellent results and as I write the shares are nicely higher.

VP Group and Burren Energy continue to be stars.

Havelock Europa has rocketed recently as acquisitions improve its value - I bought these at 95p a few weeks ago and the shares are approaching 130p.

I've been having quite good results shorting - with shorts in BskyB, Pearson, 3i, and Close Brothers all paying off.

It certainly looks like the market is due for some summer blues and a short-term shorting strategy may pay off.