Today’s post comes from a guest blog, New Rules of Investing:

Institutional investors have powerful tools at their disposal to screen through reams of data.  Part of the institutional investment process entails screening through thousands of securities looking for a needle in a haystack — stocks that fit certain investment criteria.  From thousands of stocks, analysts can filter through a couple of hundred that fit these so called screens.  With a couple of hundred stocks in hand, analysts set out to do the hard work analyzing these companies, comparing them to one another, speaking to management and whatever else hedge fund and mutual fund analysts do when looking at prospective investments.

If I’m a value investor, I’m probably going to use some metrics that focus on Return on Capital (RoC) or Return on Equity (RoE) and Earnings Yield (E/P).  Growth investors might

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It's time to start doing your gift shopping. Here are some great investment, finance, and stock market books to give your friends and relatives. These are in no particular order other than the approximate order that I wrote about them, within the categories. You can click on the title of each book to get more info about them. And if you aren't sure what books are right for gifts, how about an a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00067L6TQ/ref=nosim/?%5Fencoding=UTF8tag=antiquestocka-20linkCode=ur2camp=1789creative=9325"Amazon Gift Certificate/aimg src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=antiquestocka-20amp;l=ur2amp;o=1" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /.br /br / center span style="font-weight:bold;"Fiction/span /centerbr /br /a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0804119120?ie=UTF8tag=antiquestocka-20linkCode=as2camp=1789creative=9325creativeASIN=0804119120"A Conspiracy of Paper/aimg src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=antiquestocka-20l=as2o=1a=0804119120" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" / by David Lissbr /br /a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FDay-Trader-Stephen-Frey%2Fdp%2F034544325X%2Ftag=antiquestocka-20linkCode=ur2camp=1789creative=9325"The Day Trader/aimg src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=antiquestocka-20amp;l=ur2amp;o=1" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" / by Stephen Freybr /br /a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FSet-Up-Paul-Erdman%2Fdp%2F0312968051%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1194850092%26sr%3D1-1tag=antiquestocka-20linkCode=ur2camp=1789creative=9325" The Set-Up/aimg ...