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Stock Analysis

I receive emails from Morningstar. This company provides statistics and analysis of just about every publicly traded stock company you can think of as well as voluminous information on mutual funds around the world.

You can ask them about a company's sales, management, marketing plan, their performance within a corporate sector, ratios of all kinds, etc, etc. The have it. After you have gleaned all these facts and analyzed them there is still one unanswered question. If I buy this equity will it go up? You definitely will not get that answer and that is the only answer that means anything. It is the bottom line for all research.

Brokers and financial planners use this type of service to determine if a stock or fund is a "good" buy. When it comes right down to it you must ask, "If I can get this information then so can everyone else so why is it any good?" It isn't. After you have been doing this a few years you will find that it is a useless exercise. Brokerage firms want you to do it so that if the stock goes down they can say to you that it was your decision to buy it based on all those "facts". Yes, you had all that information, but it is nothing more than disinformation.

They tell you that every conservative investor does his homework, his research. The term conservative investor is an oxymoron, like military intelligence or honest politician. There is no such thing as a conservative investment if there is the slightest possibility that you could lose all or part of your money. And that is true in just about everything whether it is stocks, bonds, real estate, collectibles, you name it.

Their ad stated that every month they would have information on the best and most popular mutual funds. Since when has popularity got anything to do with a stock or a fund going up? Fidelity Magellan is one of the most popular mutual funds in the world yet it dropped from $145 to $73 (a 50% loss) and is now trading at $100 still down 31%. Janus Balanced Fund dropped from $25 to $17.50 and has since rallied to $20. TR Price Japan Fund hit a high of $16, fell to $5 and is now $8 still a 50% loss. Did any of their "information" ever tell you to sell? Popularity is not a yardstick for profits.

And they also will give you the hot picks of 150 analysts. You might as well use a dartboard as listen to those guys. They are high priced guessers who put you in and never get you out when something starts down. Morningstar is providing you with information. The information is not worth the paper it is written on.

Their facts are useless even though they are facts. Bottom line: research is worthless.

Al Thomas' book, "If It Doesn't Go Up, Don't Buy It!" has helped thousands of people make money and keep their profits with his simple 2-step method. Read the first chapter at http://www.mutualfundmagic.com and discover why he's the man that Wall Street does not want you to know.

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In The News:

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Sony on Tuesday showed a digital media hub that uses Wi-Fi to connect its PCs, tablets, smartphones and PlayStation game consoles, a product that it hopes will be part of its comeback.

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Google said Tuesday morning that it has closed the deal to acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion

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A pair of Microsoft-backed industry groups applauded the ultimatum European Union antitrust regulators issued to rival Google over alleged anti-competitive practices.

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The Supreme Court on Monday declined to consider the petition of Joel Tenenbaum, a former doctoral student at Boston University who faces a fine of US$675,000 for illegally downloading 30 songs.

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Now that Google has gotten permission from China's Anti-Monopoly Bureau to acquire Motorola Mobility, the companies are expected to complete their merger by the middle of this week.

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Silver Peak today upgraded the software for its WAN appliance to handle automated optimization for TCP and non-TCP traffic, 512,000 simultaneous connections for 10 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) infrastructures and support for a bunch of common hypervisors.

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Version 3.4 of the Linux kernel was officially rolled out Sunday, in what maintainer Linus Torvalds called a "calm" release cycle.

Google has "a matter of weeks" to address four antitrust issues identified by European Union antitrust regulators. If Google addresses these issues the case can be solved by a so-called "commitment decision" instead of formal antitrust proceedings resulting in a fine, said JoaquAn Almunia, Vice President of the European Commission responsible for Competition Policy.

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IBM is offering employees who are nearing retirement a one-time opportunity to take advantage of a program that would guarantee their employment through Dec. 31, 2013.

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Pakistan late Sunday reversed a block on Twitter in the country over material it considered anti-Islam, the country's interior minister said.

Technical problems at the Nasdaq exchange affected the trading of Facebook shares on Friday, the much-anticipated day of its IPO (initial public offering), Robert Greifeld, chief executive of Nasdaq OMX Group Inc., told reporters on Sunday, according to published reports.

Chinese regulatory authorities have approved Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility, paving the way for the deal to close within the week, company officials confirmed Saturday.

In the latest move in a complex series of patent-related cases, Apple filed a motion in a U.S. district court late Friday to ban Samsung Electronics' Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the U.S.

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Twitter has announced support for "Do Not Track," immediately implementing it to halt online tracking of users who trigger a setting in their browsers.

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A hacker who claims to hate both Anonymous and notorious file-sharing website The Pirate Bay has claimed responsibility for the DDoS attack that the bittorent website has been suffering for the last 24 hours.

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Three winners of an academic competition at the University of Rochester to create the most innovative and useful applications for IBM's Watson cognitive computing systems were announced yesterday by Big Blue.

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HP is looking to cut at least 25,000 jobs in a bid to reduce costs and return to growth, according to media reports.

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In retaliation against Internet Service Providers (ISPs) blocking some video-sharing and torrent websites like The Pirate Bay under Indian court orders, Anonymous, the "hacktivist" organization, today took down the websites of the ruling Congress Party and the Supreme Court of India. Anonymous, which in the past has been credited with taking down the websites of the MPAA, RIAA, the FBI, the US Department of Justice and child pornographers, took down these sites in what is understood to be DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.

The University of Kentucky says it has reshaped its business intelligence capability by adopting SAP's in-memory system, HANA.

The head of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office tells a congressional panel that the landmark reform bill signed last September is already yielding significant results, but defends litigation in tech sector as a sign of vigorous innovation.

If you haven't developed a corporate Bring Your Own Device policy, or if the one you have is out of date, these tips will help you address device security, IT service, application use and other key components of an effective BYOD policy.

With Facebook's long-anticipated IPO expected to hit on Friday morning, the company set its initial share price at $38 today.

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