What is your stock picking method? Are you happy with it
? These are questions that you need to be 100% sure of if you are going to make excellent returns. People that do well have and method and they stick to it. A lot of people float from one system to another and therefore don't get good returns.
Newspapers often have reports about different companies and give buy or sell recommendations. Believe it or not, this is possibly the most common stock picking method. I don't believe that you will make great returns this way. From my experience these are probably incorrect over 50% of the time.
A better way of doing it would be to use a stock trading newsletter. They too will offer recommendations but will go into a lot more detail about the company. The two advantages of this method are firstly you get to learn from the analysis that the professionals do and secondly you often get to view their track record. They often have a portfolio where you can see how their picks have performed over time.
A further way of stock picking would be to use technical analysis. Up to now we have only really looked at areas that really focus fundamental analysis for their recommendations. Rather than look at the companies books you look at its charts and make a judgement on where you think the price will go.
As you can imagine, with a name like 'technical analysis' it can be a little difficult to get your head around. I would suggest a technical analysis course before you started to implement this method. Your returns will undoubtedly get better if you can madter and use some of the techniques.
There are lots of different stock picking methods that you can use and we have been over a few here. You should not that that you should only stick to one the ways we have mentioned. Why not experiment in combining a couple and seeing how you get on with that?