Stock market analysis: tech, oil, biotech and more

CodyWillard

A few themes run through my new ebook called "Stocks Wanted for 2016" that are worth noting. First, despite all the carnage in the last few months in a lot of individual stocks, there isn’t but a handful of stocks rated 7/10 or higher in the book. In my own personal portfolio, I own about a dozen names and have a handful of short positions. My long names are almost all rated 7/10 or higher. Specifically, there are no 10/10 or 9/10 rated stocks. There are three 8/10 rated stocks (GOOG on page 11, FFIV on page 40, QCOM on page 45), and a dozen 7/10 rated stocks including Amazon on page 12, Netflix on page 13, Akamai on page 34 and Twitter on page 51. That lack of strong buy names is reflective of the fact that the markets just aren’t cheap right now as well as that earnings and topline growth just aren’t strong for many sectors. Speaking of sectors, I was disappointed but not surprised that every single energy and other commodity stock requested for me to analyze for this book was highly leveraged and in trouble of being able to handle that debt in the next few quarters. There were a lot of requests for smaller cap biotech stocks and most of those were rather like venture capital investment opportunities, as the companies have huge upside potential but tremendous risk of total failure too. I wouldn’t suggest investing in biotech stocks in general as the sector faces pricing headwinds going forward. But if you do enough homework on an individual company and its prospects in its industry and you speak to doctors from that industry and get strong feedback and so on, there are always 10-bagger and bigger opportunities in individual stocks that get approval and distribution for new cures, tests and other biotech products.