ICLUBcentral provides several different tools and services that assist investors in evaluating stocks for their portfolios, such as Toolkit 6, our Windows software for stock analysis; the Investor Advisory Service, our award-winning, market-beating stock newsletter; Take Stock, our "instant stock analysis" tool available on our StockCentral.com web site; and the Roster of Quality Companies, a weekly rating of all public US stocks.

While, each of these have features that rate or evaluate companies for investors, they are designed for different purposes or for investors of varying levels of experience. Comparing the conclusions reached by each tool about the appropriateness of investing in a particular company at a particular price may differ, even if you analyze a company at the same time in our different programs.

Unique to all of our software is a basis in the long-term, growth-oriented investing methodology first developed by the non-profit investor education organization BetterInvesting more than fifty years ago. Many of our tools go above and beyond the BetterInvesting orthodoxy, but the roots in this fundamental approach to stock analysis will be apparent in all of our tools.

StockCentral

First up is StockCentral. StockCentral is a subscription-based web site that caters to stock investors. The site features tools for screening stocks, analyzing stocks, comparing stocks, getting ideas about stocks to study, discussing stocks, tracking portfolios of stocks, researching stocks, and learning how to invest in stocks. The web site is data-rich with more tools than I can describe even in just a few paragraphs -- I suggest that you take a tour of the site to learn about all it offers to investors for less than $50 a year.

Take Stock

Next is Take Stock, an online stock analysis program that's a part of our suite of investment tools available at StockCentral. Take Stock is a completely mechanical tool for analyzing a stock. As such, it is rigorous and very conservative in its calculations, and relies solely on the numbers without any human input. It doesn't "know" anything about the economy, or about the overall market, or about a company's management team, or about the situation in a current industry, or about the factors that affect a company's profitability - all it knows is what the numbers say. If a one-time event has a negative impact on a company's performance, all that Take Stock knows is that there has been a recent change that has had a negative effect, and if that negative trend continues, then the stock will likely not perform according to your expectations. To Take Stock, it's better to be safe than sorry, so it will always err on the side of caution.

Knowing whether an event is an isolated incident or the start of a long-term trend can be difficult to discern, particularly for beginning investors (though experienced investors will sometimes decide wrongly, as well). For beginning investors, the Take Stock tool can help you from falling into the trap of buying stocks of companies that don't have consistent, long-term growth; stable profitability; and a share price that provides for an adequate return.

For more experienced investors, the Wizard in the Take Stock program can allow you to override the default judgment items, so that you can decide for yourself if a company is worth considering based on your personal assessment of its circumstances.

For any stock you analyze in Take Stock, you can drill down through the many pages of the analyses and learn why Take Stock has a positive or negative view of the company. Any negative elements are highlighted in red throughout the Quality, Mood, and Price considerations.

Take Stock is grounded in the methodology of BetterInvesting, but emphasizes particular characteristics of company growth and quality, such as the consistency of growth and a company's recent performance, more heavily than in the BetterInvesting orthodoxy. You can learn more about the Take Stock approach to stock analysis in the 3rd Edition of Take Stock, available for purchase from ICLUBcentral.

Our subscribers use Take Stock in many different ways. Some use it as a tool to conduct a "first look" at a new investing idea; if Take Stock is particularly negative, then they might decide to move on immediately to another idea. Others may use Take Stock to "confirm" their own stock analysis or as a second opinion after they've carried out their own stock study, to bring to light issues they might have missed or to provide reinforcement to their conclusions. Very conservative investors can use Take Stock alone as their sole source of stock analysis, only buying companies that are favorably rated by the program.

Roster of Quality Companies

Each week, we publish a list of all publicly-traded US companies that meet a set of minimum criteria for quality. We call this the Roster of Quality Companies, and it's available as part of StockCentral. The Quality Index used in this screen comes right from the Take Stock tool. The Roster of Quality Companies is intended to be a starting point for finding new companies to explore. Many of the companies will not be reasonably-valued at their current prices, but the tools is valuable nonetheless in the most important aspect of long-term investing -- buying well-managed businesses.

The Quality Index measures the consistency of historical growth, the strength of historical growth, and the stability of the company's pre-tax profit margins. (For those of you familiar with BetterInvesting's Stock Selection Guide, companies that are highly-rated for Quality will look great in Sections 1 and 2 of the SSG.)

As with any other automated stock screener, the Roster of Quality Companies doesn't know about current events -- all it knows is the numbers. Occasionally you may see a company on the list that has been caught up in a current scandal or controversy that might prevent cautious investors from buying that stock. As the scandal's implications get memorialized in the company's future earnings reports, that stock would fall off the Roster of Quality Companies.

Toolkit 6

Our Toolkit 6 software is used by more fundamental investors than any other program. For nearly 20 years, the program has helped BetterInvesting members, investment club members, and individual investors to analyze any stock's growth, quality, and value. The program is grounded in the BetterInvesting methodology, and will help you to develop a model of a company's most likely future performance and how it should be fairly valued.

Two of the innovations that we added to version 6 of Toolkit were a "First Impression" screen and a "Default Judgment" tool. When you start a stock study of a new company, the First Impression screen displays a quick overview of a company's quality characteristics, and suggests whether or not the stock is a reasonable buy at the current price. The quality rating displayed on the First Impression screen comes from StockCentral's Take Stock Quality Index.

On the First Impression screen, there is an option to apply "Default Judgment" to the stock and instantly complete a preliminary stock study without any further user intervention. The default judgment feature uses a set of fairly strict rules based on the company's fundamentals to complete a stock study. Like Take Stock, however, Toolkit 6 is only a software program, and doesn't "know" anything about a company other than what it reads from the numbers. As such, a company that announces that certain problems are likely to adversely affect future performance will likely see its share price decline -- however, Toolkit 6 may well interpret the decline in share price as a buying opportunity, ignorant of what other investors see as a reduced future potential for the company.

Unlike Take Stock, though, Toolkit 6 is not designed exclusively for beginning investors. Users of Toolkit 6 are expected to do their homework and draw their own conclusions about a stock's likely future performance. The Default Judgment and First Impression tools are intended to give users a "leg up" on starting their analysis, but are not meant to replace common sense or an individual's own judgment. As a result, the default judgment is somewhat less rigorous than a Take Stock analysis, since the program expects the user to override any canned judgment values that are out of range of reasonable expectations that may be drawn from current circumstances.

Investor Advisory Service

Finally, there is the Investor Advisory Service, our stock newsletter has been published since 1973. IAS is written by professional, expert stock analysts. Each month they provide three stock picks for subscribers, based on the same criteria of quality and growth used in our other tools, with completed Toolkit 6 Stock Selection Guide studies.

However, since IAS is written by talented humans whose job it is to know how to interpret the numbers as well as how to evaluate all of the other considerations that go into making an investment decision, the conclusions reached by IAS analysts may certainly differ from conclusions reached by our automated stock analysis tools (or by other investors or analysts).

The IAS analysts will review recent issues affecting a company and decide if they create a buying opportunity or a warning sign. Our analysts stake their reputations on their stock selections and have a track record of outperforming the overall market that backs up their extensive expertise. They are sometimes more "aggressive" in their selections than beginning investors would be taught, but they are actively tracking all of their selections and so will make sell recommendations as soon as would be required if a particular selection isn't working out.

At this point, if you're still confused about all of our tools, then an Investor Advisory Service subscription is probably for you. You'll get expert advice that you can use in your personal or investment club portfolio, and sell recommendations when necessary. While every IAS pick doesn't necessarily work out, the IAS track record of outperforming the market during every bull and bear market since 1998 (only one of six US investing newsletters that can boast this accomplishment according to the Hulbert Financial Digest) certainly accounts for plenty!