Chicago, IL – September 2, 2009- Kevin Matras goes over a Relative Price Change screen to help you find top performers no matter what the market is doing. Highlighted stocks in this week’s article include Fuel Systems Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ: FSYS), International Rectifier Corp. (NYSE: IRF), Sturm, Ruger & Company, Inc. (NYSE: RGR), Wausau Paper Corp. (NYSE: WPP) and Wintrust Financial Corp. (NASDAQ: WTFC). Click here for the full story exclusively on Zacks.com: http://at.zacks.com/?id=5528.

Screen of the Week written by Kevin Matras of Zacks Investment Research:

Over the last few weeks, I have found myself screening for stocks with the best Relative Price Changes in an effort to determine whether a stock is good or not.

Of course earnings growth and valuations are important. But if a stock is simply not responding, or worse, going down (worse than the market), something's wrong. Or at the very

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Chicago, IL – September 2, 2009- Kevin Matras goes over a Relative Price Change screen to help you find top performers no matter what the market is doing. Highlighted stocks in this week’s article include Fuel Systems Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ: FSYS), International Rectifier Corp. (NYSE: IRF), Sturm, Ruger & Company, Inc. (NYSE: RGR), Wausau Paper Corp. (NYSE: WPP) and Wintrust Financial Corp. (NASDAQ: WTFC). Click here for the full story exclusively on Zacks.com: http://at.zacks.com/?id=5528.

Screen of the Week written by Kevin Matras of Zacks Investment Research:

Over the last few weeks, I have found myself screening for stocks with the best Relative Price Changes in an effort to determine whether a stock is good or not.

Of course earnings growth and valuations are important. But if a stock is simply not responding, or worse, going down (worse than the market), something's wrong. Or at the very

...

Chicago, IL – September 2, 2009- Kevin Matras goes over a Relative Price Change screen to help you find top performers no matter what the market is doing. Highlighted stocks in this week’s article include Fuel Systems Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ: FSYS), International Rectifier Corp. (NYSE: IRF), Sturm, Ruger & Company, Inc. (NYSE: RGR), Wausau Paper Corp. (NYSE: WPP) and Wintrust Financial Corp. (NASDAQ: WTFC). Click here for the full story exclusively on Zacks.com: http://at.zacks.com/?id=5528.

Screen of the Week written by Kevin Matras of Zacks Investment Research:

Over the last few weeks, I have found myself screening for stocks with the best Relative Price Changes in an effort to determine whether a stock is good or not.

Of course earnings growth and valuations are important. But if a stock is simply not responding, or worse, going down (worse than the market), something's wrong. Or at the very

...

Over the last few weeks, I have found myself screening for stocks with the best Relative Price Changes in an effort to determine whether a stock is good or not.

< ?DART(15);?> Of course earnings growth and valuations are important. But if a stock is simply not responding, or worse, going down (worse than the market), something's wrong. Or at the very least, it's just simply not ready to move higher.

I've talked about this kind of stuff in the past. An investor's best stocks are the ones that are performing the best; in other words, the ones that are moving higher.

And it's the same here.

Stocks moving higher have a tendency of moving even higher.

And the stocks I've been looking at recently are indeed the ones moving higher, especially on good volume since the overall market volume has been kind of

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Today's article isn't really a screen (although I do have one at the end).

I want to talk about something that I believe is critically important in light of what's been happening in the market.

And that's about managing your risk -- using stops, cutting your losses -- all of that stuff.

Not a fun topic, but probably one of the most important for right now.

What's interesting is that nobody ruins their portfolio when the market is going straight up. It's when the market goes down that people get into real trouble.

But ironically, it's when the market is going up that a lot of these bad habits are created.

The problem is that even bad decisions are oftentimes rewarded in a bull market. But when the market is going down, there's no mercy for bad decision makers. Sitting on losses in hopes of them coming back can

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This week I want to focus on Sales Growth and Profit Margins.

Everybody understands sales, but margins might bring up a few question marks.

So let's start at the beginning: First and foremost, sales are THE most important thing to a company. Everything else stems from that. Without sales, there really wouldn't be anything else to analyze. Sales Growth numbers show you how the company is growing.

However, just because sales are increasing, doesn't always mean that profits are increasing too. Sales at the expense of profits does not work. So paying attention to Profit Margins is the next thing we're going to look at.

Margin is simply a ratio, and the calculation is Net Income divided by Sales.

So, if a company's margin is 15%, for instance, that means the company's net income is 15 cents for every $1 of sales it makes.

But if a company's expenses are

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