An integral aspect of fundamental analysis involves performing what many would call “ratio analysis”. This involves calculating a number of different industry standard ratios and comparing them to various benchmarks. The benchmarks can be the ratios of other competitors, industry average ratios, or industry “rules-of-thumb”. There’s no set procedure for performing ratio analysis because it all depends on the type of company you’re analyzing – certain industries have industry specific ratios. Regardless, this article will give you an overview of some of the standard ratios and what they may tell us about a company.

In this article I’ll group ratios into four categories used to evaluate the different facets of a company’s performance and overall condition: liquidity, operating performance, leverage, and equity valuation.

I realized I never really covered a particular notion in detail, for what it really was: stop-loss, specifically the stop-loss order. A nice term, isn't it? Nice to know you're doing something that STOPS one from a LOSS. Well, if you're trading or investing, nothing will stop you from a loss every now and again. The idea here is to stop it from being too large. Setting stop-losses, and later, trailing stops, can be a relatively simple business, but it's an art more than science, unfortunately, and not near as difficult as planning exits on the upside...

Fundamental analysis is a VERY broad topic. At its core, fundamental analysis is essentially a philosophy, or approach to investing that is principally concerned with determining the true value of a company, and by extension, its stock price. In this article, I am going to give a brief lay of the land to help those who are new to investing understand what we mean when we talk about “fundamental analysis”. Again, like most “introduction” articles, this article will be pretty high level… it’s the sub-topics of fundamental analysis, which I will cover in future articles that will most likely be more interesting/applicable.

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to find myself out on a peaceful trout stream, with no one else around and the car long out of site I found myself at peace and that my mind was starting to wander. Even though the weather was cold and windy and to top it off the fish weren't biting, I was still able to leave with something I hadn't brought in, peace of mind and a couple of ideas for articles. I know that it has been said a hundred times before, but minimizing your costs while investing can make a big difference in your overall returns. This concept is especially true for mutual fund or index fund investors, but stock investors can gain from this advice as well.

Technical Analysis in its core is about supply and demand and how that drives stock prices up and down. Technical Analysts (also known as Technicians or Chartists) use charts and graph patterns derived from price history and volume data to try and predict what a stocks behavior is going to be like in the future. Market psychology (behavioral finance) plays a big role in technical analysis because most technicians hold to the fact that people are not rational and more often then not the majority of investors will make trades based on emotions, and it is this behavior that influences a stocks price to move in a predictable manner.

Risk management is another cornerstone to any active investor’s strategy. I’m sure I could fill several books with endless ramblings on risk management, (indeed, countless books on trading already explore the topic extensively) but I’ll try to keep this general.

So what does psychology have to do with successful trading? Well, think of groups of traders who, over the course of a few months, say, follow the exact same trading system, trading the same financial vehicles, but all manage to get different results. Well, it's not the system making the trading for them, it's them! And between the rules of execution and the keyboard lies their psychological makeups, in all their strengths and weaknesses. One legendary trader once said he could print his incredibly successful trading strategies in the newspaper, and only a small percentage of people who read it would see the same kinds of success. Luck? No. Psychology.