The first step in using the Hedgefolios database begins with a self-evaluation. Do you know what kind of investor you are? Large Cap? Value? Growth? Aggressive? Conservative? Before you do anything else with Hedgefolios or any other tool for stock research, please get your investment profile figured out by researching the web or talking to your financial planner or broker. Once you know who you are, portfolio management gets less hard (it’s never “easy.”) Each investing style has its benefits and limitations, but primarily, it’s just important to stay true to who you are as an investor. Just ask all the value investors who finally caved in and bought momentum tech stocks in 1999.

Now that your self-evaluation is complete, it’s time to identify stocks that match your investor profile. The EVALUATE section of Hedgefolios allows you to use the 9 most common portfolio styles or customize your search by drilling down with more detailed criteria. Hedgefolios is designed to rapidly exclude stocks that do not fit your investment criteria so that you can focus your decisionmaking on a shortlist that is worthy of your further analysis.

Let’s walk through an example where you want to find Large Cap Value stocks that have a High Yield in the Basic Materials sector. In the left box of EVALUATE, the first One-Click folio is called “Large Cap: Value.” If you click on the words “Large Cap”, the database will give you search results for approximately 405 Large Cap stocks that include both value and growth styles. To narrow the results to Large Cap Value stocks, click on the word “Value” in the first One-Click folio and your search results will be reduced to approximately 231 stocks.

In the right box of EVALUATE called “Custom Folio,” you can narrow your search with additional criteria. Based upon your selections of the One-Click folio, “Large Cap” should be showing in the Size box and “Value” should be showing in the Style box. From the Income box, select “High Yield,” hit search, and you now only have to look at 82 stocks. By selecting Basic Materials from the Sector box, your shortlist of Large Cap Value stocks with a High Yield in the Basic Materials sector should result in 6 stocks. In a few seconds, Hedgefolios found the stocks that met your criteria and now all you have to do is decide which, if any, you want to add to your portfolio. Note that long-only investors would restrict the search results to Up signals while hedgers might want to look at “Any” or “Down” signals.

While this was only one example, hopefully it will guide your use of EVALUATE. Please spend some time practicing the One-Clicks or Customer Folio box with as many permutations of the search criteria as you can. Sometimes its beneficial to retain the search criteria and at other times, it helps to clear all the criteria and start new searches from scratch. Note that your last search results will remain on the screen until you conduct a new search.