Shares: How to pick them; with a safety device.

Shares, I can do that.

I've been dealing on the stock market for 13 years, nothing big at the beginning, to scared I suppose.

I'd popped into the local supermarket, with my wife, for a few things on the way home. Now as we know when we men go to the supermarket were in and out in 5 minutes; but the girls start picking things up and looking at them, like budgie seed when we don't even have a budgie, you know what their like.

So I ended up perusing the magazine stand where I happen to pick up the Investors Chronicle (a share magazine). Just flicking through the pages fell open at an article that read:
'A Private Investor is in a much better position to make money than a fund manager'.
I knew nothing about shares but I kind of had an idea what a fund manager was.
I read a few paragraphs, it was interesting so I bought the magazine, read the magazine, bought a book that was recommended in the magazine, half read the book, opened an 'Execution Only Account' with a broker and thought I'm ready.

To get to the point

All I'm saying is it works for me.

I'm going to put a number of shares through a number of sieves/screens/tests, call them what you will. We'll use a spreadsheet with each column having a screen as a heading, information about the share will be entered under the headings then given a score; each score of the 25 screens will be added up to give a total.

The best thing that can happen here is for you to get involved.
Even if you've never had anything to do with shares but always thought you'd like to try; there's no money involved so there's nothing to loos; pick three, just to see which comes out on top.
If you have dabbled in shares may be you'd like to add a screen, just stick in what you'd like to see, want to know, or do, in the comments capsule at the bottom.

It will be over a number of Hubs to introduce you to the 25 screens we have at the moment. If you wanted to introduce an other it could be more.

Just three screens

	Debt	Cash	Directors Buying	Total Points
Share No 1	2m	0.2 m	yes
Points	0	0.2	10	10.2
Share No 2	1.5m	0	no
	0	0	0	0
Share No 3	0	3m	yes
	10	3	10	23

You don't have to think, once you've filled in the information which is all on the internet, unlike when I started.

Never Fall Out with Your Neighbours

I had my first share picked well before I opened the broker account, I bought 300 which cost around £150.00 with trading fees.
The only thing I had then to monitor my progress with any degree of consistency was teletext; not knowing it only updated three times a day, I was looking at the T.V. every five minutes.

I remember so clearly the shares went down 1p. I felt as sick as a dog, oh no what had I done, the wife will kill me!

A few months down the line the shares had gone up and I was £50.00 in the black, but the same feeling came over me again. This is it, should I sell! What should I do! How do I sell, I only new how to buy; I forgot to look into selling.
I sold making £52.00, I felt like a millionaire, I'd done it, made money on the stock market, but I was drained.

The internet started gaining ground around 1995 and personal computers were doubling in sales; every year; it was 1999 a couple of years before the 'The Dotcom Crash'. I happen to mention my fantastic profit to my then next door neighbour, who at that time worked as a computer systems programmer. He told me to look out for a company called ARM Holding who make computer chips. Over a period of time and growing in knowledge I bought in and out of ARM Holding until I had amassed 8000 shares.

I have to admit what happened next was definitely unforeseen with no skill on my part and don't forget it wasn't even me who came up with ARM Holdings. The shares rose over a period of two weeks from around £5.00 to £49.00, I sold at £48.45.

Enterprise Resource Planning ERP

What is ERP?

ERP:

ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning..

It means the tools, techniques and concepts for the integrated management of businesses as a whole from the viewpoint of the effective and efficient use of management resources to improve the efficiency of enterprise management.

ERP packages are integrated (i.e they cover all the business functions ) software packages.

Traditional System:

Traditionally, organizations were divided into different units based on the functions performed by them. For example the production department, finance department, distribution department, etc.

These departments had their own goals and objectives, which from their point of view were in line with the organizations goals...Each department functioned in isolation from each other and had their own system of data collection and analysis and hence no-one knew what the other was doing and this led to chaos in the organization,,,

Enterprise System:

An enterprise can be defined as a group of people who have a common goal and has certain resources available at it's disposal to achieve these goals.

Now, in the enterprise system, the entire organization is considered as a system and all the departments as it's sub-systems.

Information about all the aspects of the organization is stored centrally and is made available to all the departments...this transparency and access to information by every department ensures that the departments will not work in isolation from each other anymore and pursue their own independent goals...

They all know what the others are doing, why they are doing it and what needs to be done in order to achieve their common goal..

Integration-Importance

As everyone knows in today's competitive business environment , the resource to any organization is information...

In order to for the decision makers to make the right decisions, an effective and efficient mechanism to get the right information at the right time needs to be implemented..

The three fundamental characteristics of information are accuracy, relevancy and timeliness..

Information needs to be accurate, relevant and available whenever required...

As mentioned earlier since traditional systems work in isolation, getting information about some aspect that is dependent on more than one department is a difficult task.

Even if the information (say reports) are acquired, valuable time is lost that could've been spent in decision- making..

ERP

An ERP system helps make this task easier by integrating the information systems, enabling smooth and seamless flow of information across all the departments, automating business processes and functions, thus helping the organization to work as a single entity.

ERP software is designed to model and help in the automation of most of the basic processes of the organization from finance to the shop floor with the goal of information integration across the organization getting rid of expensive links between computer systems that were never meant to talk to each other..

Data and information should flow seamlessly to all the departments in the company, automatically once a task is completed, no matter where they may be located globally..

ERP helps in prediction and balancing demand and supply...

It's an enterprise wide set of forecasting, planning and scheduling tools, linking customers and suppliers into supply chain management, employs processes for decision making, coordinating sales, marketing, logistics, finance, purchasing and even human resource..

ERP is basically a package of softwares put together to help automate most of the processes in an organization like finance, accounting, inventory management, etc...

ERP Implementation

ERP implementation consists of a lot of people, each playing different roles..there are the company employes, the package vendors, the hardware vendors, communication experts, implementation consults, etc etc...

A successful ERP implementation depends on dedication of the software vendors, the consultants, the dedication of the company's personnel and employees.