The whole Sunday I spent rereading and polishing my stock pick strategy. Recently I deviated from several rules I originally used. I thought I already remembered them all or I could outsmart the market again. What a costly thinking! This time I, however, wrote them all down on the paper and created a checklist in Excel spreadsheet with data necessary to input manually (in this case I would really remember those rules).

What screening rules do I use?

It’s simple. As the Reverse Scale Strategy defines I use stocks which:

1. Are making new 52-Week Price highs.
2. Have the highest 1-year sales growth possible.
3. Have the highest 1-year price/share growth ratio possible.
4. Have the highest growth factor possible (this one is calculated based on the ratios as in items #2 & #3.
5. The daily volume is above 300k.
6. The stock price is not overextended more than 20% above 50 day MA.
7. The stock is trending upwards without excessive volatility – checked on a daily (YTD), weekly, 1 year and 5 years chart.
8. The stock has a reasonable price to sales ratio P/S – when I add all selected stocks together I calculate an average ratio of all stocks and then check the particular stock’s ratio with the average. For example the screen I ran today has an average of 1.29 and CTL has P/S of 2.73. This number is among those higher ones, but acceptable for telecommunication companies.
9. The company is not among banks, miscellaneous, savings & loans, utility, mining and real estate (REIT) companies.
10. Market capitalization 5B – 10B
11. Sales growth (revenue) double digit growth ratio in the most recent year.

CenturyTel, Inc. (CTL)

CenturyTel is a company which fits my screening criteria. It has sustainable growth, it is trending up (the price is above 50-day MA and 200-day MA), it is not overextended, creating new 52-week highs. Its quarterly revenue growth ratio is at 188%, price growth at 62%. It is a telecommunication company operating a range of communications services, including local and long distance voice, Internet access, and broadband services in the continental United States.

I decided to buy 9 shares of this stock tomorrow at market open.