What Can You Add to Your Portfolio?

Investment Ideas & Where to Find Them

There are many sources you can get investment ideas from. You could find an idea in the library, and even in the store that you visit every day. Furthermore, it doesn’t matter if you have enough experience or not. Many investors are searching for individual stocks they can add to their portfolios. However, that sort of quest is sometimes quite tricky, and they don’t even know where to start.

Hence, we’ve compiled a list of four tricks you can use to find investment ideas without too much trouble.

1. Flip through the Standard and Poor’s guides

If you’re struggling, you can always read the financial guides S&P releases every year. There are three of them, and they consist of two pages each. In them, you will get information about 1,500 companies that have different indices: small, mid and large cap.

S&P adds all the necessary information about the companies in their guides. For example, phone numbers, ticker symbols, dividend records, and a short business summary, among other things. You will also get historical data from these guides, which will help you decide if the stocks are a good investment or not.

However, you don’t have to listen to the trading advice S&P gives you in the guides. Instead, you should examine the earnings growth, levels of debt, and the equity rates return in the past couple of years. Then, you can use a simple scratch pad to list all investment ideas you’ve thought of.

Afterward, it would be wise to call the companies and ask for more information about their endeavors. Also, you can always order their annual reports and gain more information about the companies that way.

2. Use the Value Line Investment Survey

If you want to access all the essential facts and figures, you can always use the Value Line Investment Survey. You can subscribe for $500+ and have unlimited access to it. However, if you don’t have the money, just go to your local library – they are bound to have the subscription. Then, you can just read the reports and make a note about the companies you’re interested in.

3. Go to Your Local Store, Mall or Gas Station

You can find incredible investment ideas in places you frequently haunt. Just grab a piece of paper and look for products that might be interesting – for example, Coca-Cola, Hershey’s Chocolate, and Tide. Grab the product and find information about the manufacturer on the packaging.

You can call each company and ask if it’s publicly traded. If the answer is “yes,” then ask them to send you the annual report. They will probably transfer you to a different department (investor relations). Give them your personal details (name and address), and you will get the report free of charge.

4. Ask Your Family

Your spouse and your children probably have a few good ideas as well. If you need an example, then take a look at Peter Lynch. He admitted that his family had given him a few investment ideas.

When his daughter bought a lot of clothes from one store, he began thinking about that store as a potential investment. In addition to that, his wife once bought a pair of pantyhose from L’eggs. Afterward, he decided to invest in Hanes, the manufacturer of that product.

Posted by Judy Romero