7 Signs You've Found a Winning Stock

Updated

One of the major goals of my Rising Star portfolio is to introduce and explain the various screens I use to find great stocks. I'll be running each screen for you monthly. Plus, in pure Moneyball fashion, I am now tracking and scoring each one so we'll know exactly what's working and what's not. More on that in a moment.

In the batter's box today: my "7 Signs of a Winner" screen.

The windup...
This particular screen was born out of my work with Motley Fool co-founder Tom Gardner for the Motley FoolHidden Gems service. Tom is always studying winning and losing stocks in order to learn how to better find the champions and avoid the dogs -- and I help him as best I can. A few years ago, we studied all of the Hidden Gems winners to find out what they had in common. We found that many of them shared these seven traits:


1.Double-digit rising sales: We view this as one of the most telling indicators of a real growth company. We love earnings growth as well, but earnings are too easily manipulated. Revenue growth, however, is a pretty pure marker of rising demand and pricing power.

2.Rising free cash flow and book value: While earnings can be fudged, cash is where it's at -- and great businesses generate lots of it. A company that's growing both its free cash flow and book value is on the right track.

3.Improving margins: The ability to take in more and more profit from each dollar of sales indicates competitive advantages and efficient management.

4.Rising return on equity: We use ROE as a decent proxy for how well a company allocates capital -- what Warren Buffett calls the most important aspect of management.

5.Insider ownership: This one's no surprise to all you veteran Fools out there. As shareholders of a company, we are part owners of the business, and we'd like a significant portion of management to be our co-owners. That way, there's more incentive for them to act in our best interests. We look for ownership of 5% or more.

6.Regular dividends: Research indicates that dividend-paying companies tend to be better at managing capital and growing earnings. We feel that the pressure of making quarterly cash payments forces a certain discipline on managers and deters them from such destructive habits as "empire building" -- that's when companies in search of something to do with their cash start making less-than-ideal acquisitions.

7.Out-of-the-way success: Many big winners come out of relative obscurity and are never media darlings or hot IPOs.

...and the pitch!
Armed with that information, the natural question to ask is, "How can I find companies that meet these standards?" Well, by screening, of course! Armed with my awesome Capital IQ screening tool, I looked for companies with more than $200 million in market cap that met the following criteria over the past 12 months:

The only thing I can't screen for is out-of-the-way success, but if I feel a stock is overhyped and overvalued, I won't consider it for my portfolio.

Of the 3,499 companies on U.S. exchanges with a market cap of $200 million or greater, only 35 passed the screen.

I'll highlight some new companies on the list this month, including two from the energy sector: RPC (NYS: RES) and Western Refining (NYS: WNR) . RPC provides services and equipment to the oil and gas industry. Western refines crude oil and sells the finished products on a wholesale and retail basis. Both have manageable debt, low levels of goodwill on the balance sheet, and forward earnings multiples under 10.

Main Street Capital (NYS: MAIN) is the highest yielder on the list, paying a nice 7.5% dividend yield. It has also appeared on my Foolish 8 screen, and just missed the Modified Foolish 8 -- meaning it carries desirable characteristics even beyond this 7 Signs screen.

Network services provider Cogent Communications (NAS: CCOI) has had a decent run over the past year, beating the market by some 20%. It flies pretty much under most investors' radar, but gained some notoriety recently as a major holding of Peninsula Capital Advisors. That's managed by Ted Weschler, a candidate to succeed Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway.

Nu Skin Enterprises (NYS: NUS) has good metrics pretty much across the board. However, fellow Fool Sean Williams knows quite a bit about the weight loss/nutrition sector, and feels high levels of turnover and low customer loyalty make Nu Skin and similar companies risky investments.

Tracking time
Those are just a few that passed the screen, but I'll post the full list on my Rising Star discussion board. Also, every new company will be entered as a "buy" on the 7 Signs Motley Fool CAPS page, and those dropping off the screen this month will be "sold" in the CAPS account. That doesn't represent the way we would normally buy and sell stocks; you can see that in my actual portfolio. But this methodology should let us use CAPS to give us an idea of the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the screen.

Main Street Capital is the only high-yielder I mentioned here. Find a few more that our analysts like in our free report "Secure Your Future With 9 Rock-Solid Dividend Stocks."

At the time thisarticle was published Fool analyst Rex Moore tweets but is not a twerp. He runs a real-money Rising Star portfolio based on his screens. He owns shares of Berkshire Hathaway. The Motley Fool owns shares of Western Refining and Berkshire Hathaway. Motley Fool newsletter services have recommended buying shares of Berkshire Hathaway. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days.

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