Stock Screen Revisit - howz that doin' anyway?

I posted back in February about a stock screen I ran using Google Finance - to pick stocks which seemed to have gotten beat up in the market while still having no debt and consistent income growth. (if you look at that link now - it will show the current stocks which meet the criteria I set, not the same stocks as on Jan 27th when I originally ran it).

I realized today that I hadn't revisited that to see how that list of stocks has performed against the market...
Well - here's the deal.

On Jan 27th, 2009, the Dow was at 8174. The S&P 500 was at 846.
On May 8th, 2009, the Dow closed at 8575. The S&P was at 929.
That's a total increase of: 4.9% for the Dow and 9.8% for the S&P 500.

On Jan 27th, 2009, my list of stocks was valued at: $21,929.
On My 8th, 2009, that list of stocks was valued at: $27,351.
That's a total increase of: 24.7%.

oh. ok. So now what? I'll just hop into my time machine - go back to Jan 27th and actually invest? nah. I'm so tired of that time machine. I think it's time to try that same screen a few times... basically it says that stocks that were beat down, which still have some fundamental value and no debt, MIGHT perform better than the market as a whole... Or, at least it did in this one instance... by a healthy margin.
(and, again, I'm not giving any financial advice here, and if historic results were any indication of future results, you might get lucky once or twice, but in the long run you'd lose your shirt most likely).
[Update: here's a link if you want more info on the spreadsheet itself]

My Dad would have loved this... he would have played with it for hours and then he'd go check in on his friends at Silicon Investor to see what they thought... and then he'd make some pretty great trades. I only mention that because I'm thinking about him all day today, this 2nd anniversary of the day he left us to toil away in the markets (and this life) without his incredible love and guidance. Damn.

Stock screening and watching for now

I figure there are some stock market bargains out there - somewhere - if you can find companies who's stock price is beat down but who have solid fundamental business measures... and, of course, if you'd otherwise be in Vegas, but can't afford to get there given the economy... So I tried something fun that seemed worth sharing...

I used the Google Finance stock screener to look for companies with:
- stock down more than 50% in the past year.
- Price/Earnings ratio between 0 and 10 (well priced (?), but still positive).
- Positive 5-year Net Income growth rate - still growing earnings.
- No Debt (debt to assets ratio of zero)

It's a really fun thing to do - since you can slide each of the screeners and see the number of companies change in real-time - and you can add criteria from a pretty large pre-selected list of data points.
Here's the exact stock screen I used.

On Jan 27, that screen produced 28 companies...including some old favorites like Ann Taylor, Build-a-bear and Garmin, amongst the others.

I copied and pasted the data into a Google spreadsheet (you knew that, didn't you) - and added a few columns to see what would have happened if I bought a bit of each...
For this first test, I didn't bother trying to weight the different stocks according to anything, not even to even out the amount invested - I just went simple and theoretically bought 100 shares of each... theoretically investing around $21k... and then I added a column to pull the current stock price of each of those 28 companies.

(see the whole spreadsheet here)
Results so far? Well - since Jan 27 through Feb 20, I'd have lost around $1,400 - or 6.5% of my investment... In that same period, the Dow lost 9.9% - so, as Bill Murray says, "uh, I got that goin' for me".

I just like the process - not sure I'll actually act on any of these self-found "tips" - but I like that I can easily find stocks which fit my own dreamed up criteria and then watch them easily in a spreadsheet...

If you want your own copy of that spreadsheet, go to this page where the spreadsheet itself is fully described.

(and, of course, I'm not giving any financial advice here, and if historic results were any indication of future results, you shouldn't listen to me anyway)