In the last week – Aurobindo Pharma had two BUY calls, a number of IT companies also had a BUY and there was one REDUCE for Ranbaxy. The following is the list

But, I learnt that this top-down approach is not the most effective way since the news papers, sites, analysts and brokerage firms can and will cover only a small percentage of the companies listed on NSE/BSE and you miss out on the bigger percentage where some of the best opportunities lie hidden. And you basically just follow the crowd since everyone have the same information as you!

So, the obvious (which was not so obvious till a week ago) question was “is there a better way?.”

And the answer is yes, that’s what I got while reading a book yesterday and it’s called stock screening. Stock screening, simply put, is the process of filtering/identifying companies, from thousands across sectors and industries, based on parameters that meets an individual’s risk, expected returns, and even taste. One example could be searching for companies with a dividend yield of 4% or more. Of course, this will only help you cut down the number of companies to look at from 1000s to, possibly, few 10s but then one needs to analyze each company further to better understand its business, past and future(expected) performance before making a decision of whether to invest in it or not.

Since we are lucky to be living in an internet age this screening process is not as daunting as it could sound like. There are several tools, limited for Indian stocks but numerous for US listed ones, that help with this and some of the good ones are really free! The following is the list of some sites and tools that provide free tools to screen NSE and BSE listed stocks.

IDBI Paisabuilder
http://www.idbipaisabuilder.in/Market_Content/CMcorpinfo.aspx

I had used this site in the past and I really like it. It provides a decent number of parameters, more than equity master which comes next in the list, to filter stocks on and the research section of the site also includes various other useful tools that can be really useful. The following screenshots shows the search form and the results for a search on stocks in NSE 500 that have a dividend yield of more than 3%

Screenshots of IDBI, other stock screeners information and comparison…

yourmitra

The title was “The Little Book That Beats the Market” and I almost screamed aloud “what the ****!!”

Rest of the blog post can be found here

Page Industries: A small company that makes a small product with big margins

Pidilite Industries: Pidilite has brands like Fevicol, M-Seal, car polish Motomax and other assorted consumer art materials and specialised home paints

Dabur: This company has focus. Five years ago, Dabur got out of the pharmaceutical business and put all its effort, like the best brand companies, behind five of its brands

Procter and Gamble Hygiene: Over the last three years, the money that P&G invested did not translate into market cap gains

Marico: Till 2008-09 came by, the company’s sales and profits had grown for 30 consecutive quarters, indicating a stable track record

Blue Star: Two decades to reach Rs. 1,000 crore in sales; two years to reach Rs. 2,000 crore in 2008

For the rest check out this post

Microsoft said on Thursday that it will soon release free anti-virus software so people on tight budgets won’t skimp on protecting
their computers from hackers.

A beta, or test, version of Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) will be publicly available for download beginning June 23 in Brazil, Israel and the United States. It is to be rolled out in other countries later in the year.

“Cost and performance barriers prevent many consumers from using up-to-date security software to protect their PCs,” Microsoft said in a statement.

The US software giant described MSE as “a no-cost anti-malware solution that provides consumers with quality protection from threats including viruses, spyware, rootkits and trojans.”

The technology firm said that effective anti-virus protection is a “must-have” for computer users given increases in the number and severity of attacks by cyber criminals using malicious software to infect machines.

Paying to buy and routinely update computer security software “does not meet the needs of many consumers,” including those in emerging markets where money and resources are scarce, according to Microsoft.

The Redmond, Washington-based company said it will automatically update MSE for users.

1. no-interface session beans
2. Singleton session beans
3. Asynchronous invocation of Session beans
4. Global jndi names
5. TimerService enhancements
6. EJB Lite
7. Packaging enterprise beans within a WAR
8. Embeddable EJB containers

More details at

http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.tss?l=EJB3-1Maturity

1. SingleThreadModel has been deprecated since 2.4 specification

2. Servlet’s init method should throw UnavailableException if it cannot complete its initialization

Smart and funny ways to save money during recession

Smart and funny ways to save money during recession

1. Configure Hibernate’s hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto property in the persistence.xml to one of the allowed values. e.g. The following configuration tells Hibernate to create the tables as per the given JPA/Hibernate mapping

<property name=”hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto” value=”create”/>

2. Place additional tables/sequences/trigger creation scripts and the test data insert statements in a file with name import.sql and place it in the runtime class path. In case of eclipse, put it directly under build/classes.

3. Make sure the insert statement has no newline character

That’s it!!

YM