(If you want a quick guide for beginners how to start investing in the Philippine stock market, you can download your free ebook here.)

Choosing what stocks to buy and sell in Philippine Stock Market is the real game when it comes to investing.

In this post, I’ll be giving you some practical guidance to completing this step.

It’s actually easy to buy and sell stocks in the Philippine stock market (the manual part of it is contained in this tutorial >> How to Buy and Sell Stocks in Philippine Stock Market), but whether the action will give you profits is another more important question.

In fact, this is one common question coming from any newbie investor: What stock can I buy now?

The answer, of course, depends on several factors, but each one of them practically boils down to your target destination. (I shared a video below for some investing tips, tricks, and strategies for new investors in the Philippine stock market.)

What is your target destination?

Your target destination can be one of these two: (1) Target Date         (2) Target Price.

To give you an example, let’s say your Target Date of realizing your stock market gains is on your retirement time – which, for example, may come at least twenty years from now.

In that case, choosing giant companies which you think will outlive all of us can be your candidate stocks to buy using the strategy of Peso Cost Averaging (Check here how this strategy works). The goal here is not really to do timing of the market but using your long-term-projection to accumulate as many sharess of great companies as possible.

So by just knowing your Target Date, you can start streamlining your stock selection and strategy.

Having different Target Date as destination obviously requires different stocks and strategies. As shared in my last blog, the growth of your investments is a factor of Time, Talent & Treasure you allow your investments to have.

• TIME refers to how long you’re willing to park your money in the stock market.
• TALENT refers to your skill in choosing your strategy and stock selection. This can be monitored as percentage growth your investment money achieved.
• TREASURE refers to the amount you’re investing. Since the growth of stocks is reported on a percentage basis, a bigger base or capital will obviously translate to bigger actual net profit.

In the table below, the same ending target (ending value of 7245) was obtained with different variations in these three factors.

With the target date in mind, you can plan how to achieve your goals by looking for the proper combination of your 3T’s – Time, Talent & Treasure.

Now we go to the second type of your target destination – Target Stock Prices.

If you’re investing believing that it’s actually a business, you’d want to invest in a company you believe is going to rise in value fueled by its continuous growth and earnings. This price which you believe a company will achieve some time in the future is called its Fair Value (FV).

More specifically, Fair Value is a company’s estimated worth or fair market value as computed by various ways specific to its industry (i.e DCF, NAV, P/BV, P/E).

This FV kind of target price is different from short-term target prices set by traders who buy stocks to simply ride short-term price fluctuations.

Now, calculating Fair Value is already one complicated animal especially for beginners.

Fortunately, some online brokers provide their own analysis and figures for Target Prices. In addition, some online brokers like COL Financial even give a sample portfolio you may want to imitate.

COL Financial Investment Guide

At this point, let’s tackle how online stockbroker COL Financial can help in determining the Fair Value of candidate stocks to buy (If you don’t have an account yet, you can follow this tutorial to open >> How to Open an Account in COL Financial for newbies and OFWs).

This is as simple as logging-in in to the website and going to its Investment Guide by following the menu: Research >> Fundamentals >> Investment Guide.

Here you’ll automatically see the Fair Values calculated by COL Financial’s analysts which you can use as your target price.

There’s also another helpful data included in the table above called Buy-Below Price (BBP) which you can also follow to give you decent returns when you decide to sell with the FV prices.

The concept of Buy Below Price is very simple –  you only buy when the stock’s current price is below this BBP.

As you will notice, these Buy Below Prices are actually near 85% of the FV, which means that by observing the BBP in your transactions (meaning, you buy only when the stock’s current price is below this BBP) you’re effectively strategizing to have at least 15% expected growth should you decide to sell later on at those FVs.

It’s important to note that computed Fair Values may vary from broker to broker because of the differences in the way they calculate it and the assumptions they make in doing so. Understanding how the FV’s you see were computed is thus important before relying on it. Don’t just follow blindly. Compare using several researches if you can.

The discussion above gives you a Target Price you can use. But more than that, COL Financial also has a model portfolio you can use in screening your stock selection.

COL Financial Model Portfolio

The model portfolio consists of stocks that COL Financial recommends in its monthly strategy report, COLing the Shots. It consists of the stocks they believe to have favorable fundamentals, and are expected to be the major beneficiaries of the prevailing macroeconomic trends.

In short, it’s a “model” portfolio that COL Financial maintains. COL Financial adds/removes stocks to/from the list depending on their performance and market changes. It’s a portfolio you could literally monitor or copy. You can check this post for updates on COL Model Portfolio.

You can access this info still from the investment guide and choosing the Model Portfolio Set-up.

Here you can see the selected stocks in its Model Portfolio together with their Fair Values and suggested BBP.

So, if you’re looking for some free guidance what stocks to buy and when, this is a good start. Again, make sure you understand how the figures were calculated before using it in your strategy.

 

Paid Resources

Of course, there are online resources you can avail to help you in this task.

Pinoy Investor for example gives you already consolidated data coming from comprehensive researches of eight online brokers.

By having access to several FV’s computed by several online brokers, you can easily make a comparison of their estimates and formulate consensus data. You’re also able to validate in case one broker may have a bias to one stock.  Lastly, you can also see how many brokers give buy/sell/hold recommendations to a certain stock.

Once you’re decided with the Target Price you’re going to use, you can then slice at least 15% from it and just use it as your BBP.

You can check in this post a short review of how Pinoy Investor can be a big help both for long-term and short-term investors. In fact, in its latest performance update, it tells of its 10 out of 13 stocks with BUY recommendation from one broker that outperformed PSEi. You can read more about it here.

Truly Rich Club’s Stocks Update is another one that can deliver all this information straight to your email on a regular basis. But as you’ll read in this Truly Rich Club Review, the club is much more than stocks update.

For example, one benefit of the membership called Stocks Alert recently sent just advised the selling of TEL shares after achieving more than 20% growth. This does not include yet the generous dividends TEL has paid out to its owners. You can check the table below and read this post to see how Truly Rich Club of investing works >> Strategic Investing with Truly Rich Club.

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As a last note, it is also advisable to just check your investments once in a while to see how it performs. Maybe once a month will do if you’re not the trader type.

Also, before investing you should see your overall finances in a bigger picture and understand that you have to start with protecting yourself and your dependents before plunging directly to investing.

I suggest you start studying BTID (Buy term, invest difference) if you have the time to actively manage your investments. Get a term insurance before starting investing.

Hope this helps in drafting your own investment plan.

If you have other questions, let me know in the comments below.

Have fun investing,

oMeng 😉

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