Does this seem tedious? Another long list of stocks? Well, this blog is about personal finance, and my personal finances are heavily skewed to dealing with two things: deciding what to do with the proceeds from my house sale, and prepping for my semi-annual portfolio exercise. And my thanks to those who are already asking for the update. I typed ‘two,’ but three is more appropriate. I also am maintaining my One Company One Story series on YouTube. Let’s start with that.

The YouTube channel has been building out, one video per month. That was true until last month when my change of address upset my schedule and the computer’s technology. (MyTinyExperiment.com) Connected! But two things are getting in the way of getting a video out this month. 1) The software I pay for no longer records my videos. It tells me that After I finish the episode. Grr. 2) The list of candidates to study shrunk to almost nothing. Years of episodes will do that, but so will the traumas that small companies experience. Startups don’t always do much more than start up. Sometimes, they’re stopped up. (Imagine the size of that plunger.) 

For those who are new to reading my main blog, every six months, I write short (ha!) synopses to remind myself why I own what I own, and whether anything has significantly changed. I’ve been doing it for years, so some companies like MVIS and GERN had lineages. Product lines shift. Expectations shift, too. I’ve owned shares in both through the Internet Bubble, the bursting of that bubble, the Great Recession (which I think is the Second Great Depression, but only for folks who aren’t rich), and Covid, and now politics and wars and oy. Here we are nearing the end of June, so I’ve been drafting the synopses, adding as I’ve added holdings, and generally doing my regular exercise. My apologies this year as the move has encouraged me to rely on copy and paste for some stocks where nothing much changed. Still got about a week to go, more like a week and a weekend. There’s work to do.

There’s also work to do that is also part of my regular exercises, or maybe more correctly, my irregular exercises. For the videos and for my regular research I’ve waded into some stock screening sessions. (For folks who are unfamiliar with stock screeners, stock screeners are websites that allow you to apply criteria to stocks, reducing the list of thousands of publicly traded stocks down to one good one (ha!) or at least a much smaller list. It rarely provides a definitive answer, but it is a nice invitation to potential candidates. If you like, consider it like dating; lots of profiles, some look too good to be true, some may only have one mark against them, some – well, you probably get at least an idea, depending on your dating history.) 

So, because this blog is public, I used a free public stock screener: Yahoo’s. In my opinion, there is no one master stock screener. They’re all just software packages and different providers package the criteria, the stocks, and the results different ways. 

I am most interested in companies I can understand, typically tech.
I am most interested in small companies with large potential that may be overlooked and, therefore, underpriced.
I am also more interested in stocks that are traded often enough that my buying or selling won’t affect the price much. 

Here’s my list.

You may have noticed that, while the stock screener was Yahoo’s, I loaded up those stocks into Google. Different companies. Different approaches. One size does not fit all.

My next step, which I’ve already begun is to take a list of about 200-300 stocks and break it down to about two or three dozen. This can be subjective then objective. Or, objective then subjective. I’ve done this for so many years that I recognize several stocks. “Hey, there! How are you doing? What are you still doing down here? Still trying to start up?” 

The step that will follow working within Google switches from free and public to more private. When the list is down to less than a dozen, if necessary, I’ll switch the Schwab, which I’ve been using for decades. They aren’t perfect either, but they are more detailed, more reliable, and more secure – and I can buy directly from their screens, or compare candidates to my official holdings.

Isn’t this how everyone spends a Friday night? Actually, I usually working on words as I write my books (my Amazon Author page), or going dancing (fun is more important than technique, for me.) But, as I said at the start, there’s a lot to do, so I do.

Unless something dramatic and positive happens, I do not expect to buy or sell in what remains of this month. I’m just too busy. (There’s a podcast to record, too. IntriguingCreativity.com .) And there’s life maintenance. I do intend to shrink the long list, but just enough to provide candidates for the videos. As my household finances adjust to my new old big tiny house, which needs work, then I may look at that list for new holdings, or maybe I’ll bolster existing holdings.

So much of personal finance media and offerings make the process seem only for professionals, or mathematically mechanical, or simply fancy gambling, or whatever. This may sound strange to some, but the world fascinates me, and I see no reason to act as if there isn’t drama and story because money is involved. Personal finance doesn’t have to be drudgery, and the way a person spends their time doesn’t have to be an expense. My book is Dream. Invest. Live. This isn’t a sales pitch for it, but the title is a reminder that investing is one way to possibly connect dreams to living. And that chance sounds pretty good to me.

Stay tuned. There’s a lot going on. Hopes, drama, struggles, successes, etc. Why be a spectator?