Top 10 Stock Picks For 2011 "go 4 cheap-bucks 2 reap"

Here are BUCKzology's TOP TEN STOCK PICKS FOR 2011 & there are four rules I follow when trading on-line or on paper trades...First, pick stocks under $10 a share; this allows you to purchase a substantial number of stocks at an affordable price with upside potential where small moves can translate into big profit.

Second, remove your ego from the equation every time you place a trade. The stock market doesn't respond well to an ego. When trading stocks online, you need veins of ice and hell with a sense of humor thrown in for good measure. Just laugh it off and relax when you make a bad trade. The markets will force it to happen, so cut your losses and move on to your next trade.

Third, read as much as you can and study every successful trader you can find. This means going to the library and reading up constantly on every single great trader and getting all the information in your head as possible. I spent the first couple months trading doing just this before placing a single trade, and even to this day still read up on it to improve my knowledge of the stock exchange.

Fourth, develop a great system/strategy to trade on. This can be in the form of a newsletter, a series of videos, trading indicators and signals, or a mentor; form some combination of each. When trading stocks online, you need a specific game plan in order to take home profits. Lacking one pretty much guarantees failure. A good strategy relies on good insight!

According to financial reporter Robert Holmes of "The Street", he states: "The following 10 U.S. stocks trade at less than $5 and have garnered the most "buy" ratings from analysts, which could lead to high returns over the next 12 months." ( http://www.stockpickr.com/thestreet-portfolios/portfolio/top-stock-picks-under-5-for-2011/ ) I whole-heartedly agree! Click on the names for analysis by Google Financials:

10. Achillion Pharmaceuticals (ACHN)
Company Profile: Achillion Pharmaceuticals is a biopharmaceutical company that focuses on the discovery, development and commercialization of innovative treatments for infectious diseases.
Share Price: $3.03 (Dec. 17)
2010 Stock Performance: -2.6%
Current Target Price:
High Target Price Estimate 12.00
Low Target Price Estimate 4.00
Mean Target Price Estimate 5.83
Standard Deviation 3.06
Date of Most Recent Estimate 12/9/10

9. General Maritime (GMR)
Company Profile: General Maritime is a provider of international seaborne crude-oil transportation services.
Share Price: $3.18 (Dec. 17)
2010 Stock Performance: -54%
Current Target Price:
High Target Price Estimate 8.00
Low Target Price Estimate 3.50
Mean Target Price Estimate 5.11
Standard Deviation 1.41
Date of Most Recent Estimate 12/22/10

8. Allos Therapeutics (ALTH)
Company Profile: Allos Therapeutics is a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing and commercializing innovative small-molecule drugs for the treatment of cancer. The company's Folotyn (pralatrexate) is designed to treat T-cell lymphoma.
Share Price: $4.35(Dec. 17)
2010 Stock Performance: -34%
Current Target Price:
High Target Price Estimate 10.00
Low Target Price Estimate 3.00
Mean Target Price Estimate 7.28
Standard Deviation 2.53
Date of Most Recent Estimate 11/8/10

7. Vantage Drilling (VTG)
Company Profile: Vantage Drilling contracts drilling units, related equipment and work crews to drill oil and natural gas wells.
Share Price: $2.20 (Dec. 17)
2010 Stock Performance: 37%
Current Target Price:
Vantage Drilling Company has the 7th highest upside potential in this segment of the market. Its upside is 116.2%. Its consensus target price is $2.98 based on the average of all estimates.
High Target Price Estimate 2.75
Low Target Price Estimate 0.75
Mean Target Price Estimate 1.98
Median Target Price Estimate 2.18

6. Quantum Corp. (QTM)
Company Profile: Quantum is a global storage company specializing in backup, recovery and archive services. It provides a range of disk, tape and software services.
Share Price: $3.72 (Dec. 17)
2010 Stock Performance: 27%
Current Target Price:
Possible acquisition by Dell, Oracle or NetApp
High Target Price Estimate 5.00
Low Target Price Estimate 4.00
Mean Target Price Estimate 4.48
Median Target Price Estimate 4.50

5. Synovus Financial (SNV)
Company Profile: Synovus is a financial-services company that provides commercial and retail banking services, financial management, insurance, mortgage and leasing services.
Share Price: $2.54 (Dec. 17)
2010 Stock Performance: 24%
Current Target Price:
High Target Price Estimate 4.00
Low Target Price Estimate 2.50
Mean Target Price Estimate 3.02
Standard Deviation 0.46
Date of Most Recent Estimate 12/15/10

4. SatCon Technology (SATC)
Company Profile: SatCon delivers power-conditioning services for large renewable-energy installations.
Share Price: $4.27 (Dec. 17)
2010 Stock Performance: 51%
Current Target Price:
High Target Price Estimate 7.25
Low Target Price Estimate 4.50
Mean Target Price Estimate 5.70
Standard Deviation 0.83
Date of Most Recent Estimate 12/20/10

3. Ariad Pharmaceuticals (ARIA)
Company Profile: Ariad Pharmaceuticals develops cancer treatments by regulating cell signaling with small molecules.
Share Price: $4.57 (Dec. 17)
2010 Stock Performance: 100%
Current Target Price:
High Target Price Estimate 7.00
Low Target Price Estimate 5.00
Mean Target Price Estimate 6.00
Median Target Price Estimate 6.00

2. Sprint Nextel (S)
Company Profile: Sprint Nextel offers a range of wireless and wireline products and services.
Share Price: $4.16 (Dec. 17)
2010 Stock Performance: 14%
Current Target Price:
High Target Price Estimate 8.00
Low Target Price Estimate 3.00
Mean Target Price Estimate 5.15
Standard Deviation 1.32
Date of Most Recent Estimate 12/20/10

1. Citigroup (C)
Company Profile: Citigroup provides a range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit cards.
Share Price: $4.70 (Dec. 17)
2010 Stock Performance: 42%
Current Target Price:
High Target Price Estimate 6.90
Low Target Price Estimate 4.00
Mean Target Price Estimate 5.37
Median Target Price Estimate 5.50

(sources: yahoo.com, google.com, hotstocked.com, thestreet.com)

Millionaire By Age 65 Saving $100 A Month?

The magic of compounding interest...the younger you start saving for the future the better...if you start at age 20 investing $100 per month you can be a millionaire by age 65...the catch is find a way to get an annual rate of return at 10.25%...parents, if you start saving $100 per month for your kids at age 1 they could be millionaires by age 65 with an annual rate of return at 6.00%...the point is...start the savings plan as early as possible...here is a link below to a calculator for planning out your time frame for that first million in savings:
MILLIONAIRE CALCULATOR

Warren Buffet "Rules To Live By" Apply In 2010

Ever wonder what Rules Warren Buffett Lives By when it comes to investing? Here from an article by Stephanie Loiacono via Investopedia.com is the answer... "Warren Buffett is arguably the world's greatest stock investor. He's also a bit of a philosopher. He pares down his investment ideas into simple, memorable sound bites. Do you know what his homespun sayings really mean? Does his philosophy hold up in today's difficult environment? Find out below.
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"Rule No. 1: Never Lose Money. "

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"Rule No. 2: Never Forget Rule No. 1."

Buffett personally lost about $23 billion in the financial crisis of 2008, and his company, Berkshire Hathaway, lost its revered AAA ratings. So how can he tell us to never lose money?

He's referring to the mindset of a sensible investor. Don't be frivolous. Don't gamble. Don't go into an investment with a cavalier attitude that it's OK to lose. Be informed. Do your homework. Buffett invests only in companies he thoroughly researches and understands. He doesn't go into an investment prepared to lose, and neither should you.

Buffett believes the most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. A successful investor doesn't focus on being with or against the crowd.

The stock market will swing up and down. But in good times and bad, Buffett stays focused on his goals. So should we. (This esteemed investor rarely changes his long-term investing strategy no matter what the market does.
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"If The Business Does Well, the Stock Eventually Follows"
The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham convinced Buffett that investing in a stock equates to owning a piece of the business. So when he searches for a stock to invest in, Buffett seeks out businesses that exhibit favorable long-term prospects. Does the company have a consistent operating history? Does it have a dominant business franchise? Is the business generating high and sustainable profit margins? If the company's share price is trading below expectations for its future growth, then it's a stock Buffett may want to own.

Buffett never buys anything unless he can write down his reasons why he'll pay a specific price per share for a particular company. Do you do the same?

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"It's Far Better to Buy a Wonderful Company at a Fair Price Than a Fair Company at a Wonderful Price"

Buffett is a value investor who likes to buy quality stocks at rock-bottom prices. His real goal is to build more and more operating power for Berkshire Hathaway by owning stocks that will generate solid profits and capital appreciation for years to come. When the markets reeled during the recent financial crisis, Buffett was stockpiling great long-term investments by investing billions in names like General Electric and Goldman Sachs.

To pick stocks well, investors must set down criteria for uncovering good businesses, and stick to their discipline. You might, for example, seek companies that offer a durable product or service and also have solid operating earnings and the germ for future profits. You might establish a minimum market capitalization you're willing to accept, and a maximum P/E ratio or debt level. Finding the right company at the right price -- with a margin for safety against unknown market risk -- is the ultimate goal.

Remember, the price you pay for a stock isn't the same as the value you get. Successful investors know the difference.

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"Our Favorite Holding Period Is Forever"

How long should you hold a stock? Buffett says if you don't feel comfortable owning a stock for 10 years, you shouldn't own it for 10 minutes. Even during the period he called the "Financial Pearl Harbor," Buffett loyally held on to the bulk of his portfolio.

Unless a company has suffered a sea change in prospects, such as impossible labor problems or product obsolescence, a long holding period will keep an investor from acting too human. That is, being too fearful or too greedy can cause investors to sell stocks at the bottom or buy at the peak -- and destroy portfolio appreciation for the long run.

You may think the recent financial meltdown changed things, but don't be fooled: those unfussy sayings from the Oracle of Omaha still RULE!

More from Investopedia.com:

• The Buffett Philosophy

• Baby Buffett Portfolio: His 6 Best Long-Term Picks

• Think Like Warren Buffett

More from Yahoo! Finance:

• Warren Buffett's Worst Mistakes

• 10 Things Millionaires Won't Tell You

• Watch Out for New Credit Card Traps

Top 10 Stock Picks For 2010 (and then some)

According to The Motley Fool, here are some stocks to consider for investment in 2010...this is based on readership suggestions that these particular companies will do well this year. So try these out if you dare. This year's selections will do well as companies, and hopefully as stocks, in 2010; CAPS, the Fool's investor intelligence database will help you rate them as either outperform or underperform in the year going forward. Click on each company link below to get The Motley Fool's take on the particular stock:

• Akamai Technologies
  


• Apple
  


• ATP Oil & Gas
  


• Berkshire Hathaway (optional)
  


• Costco
  


• Exelon
  


• Google
  


• Intel (optional)
  


• Intuitive Surgical
  


• NVIDIA
  


• Silver Wheaton
  


• Smart Balance (optional)
  


• UPS
  

"Year Of The Bailout (2009)" - Top 5 Worst

Here is another good article I found on SeekingAlpha.com (this one by Rick Newman)...

"Has anything good come from $3 trillion worth of bailouts over the last 18 months? To be fair, probably. After Lehman Brothers failed in September 2008 and other Wall Street firms began to founder, urgent government intervention forestalled a deeper financial panic and perhaps even a depression. Instead of talking about a recovery today, we could be facing steep double-digit unemployment and many more months of misery.

But the Year of the Bailout also entailed some disturbing moments, and there may still be unhappy consequences. Here's my list of the worst bailouts:

AIG. Did the Federal Reserve know what it was getting into on Sept. 16, 2008? That's the day AIG would have collapsed if the Fed hadn't issued $85 billion in credit to the huge insurance company in exchange for a 79.9 percent ownership stake. The problem wasn't AIG's insurance units, which constitute most of the firm, but an internal hedge fund, AIG Financial Products, that was basically backing huge gambles with solid insurance assets. When the hedge fund bet wrong on billions in mortgage-backed securities, it imperiled the entire company.

The Fed's intervention may have prevented deep losses throughout the banking system, but it also committed the government to a tawdry, open-ended bailout that's easily the single-biggest corporate rescue in U.S. history. The March 2009 revelation that AIG paid $165 million in bonuses to executives at the same Financial Products division that sank the firm became the hottest flash point in the Year of the Bailout and the darkest stain on bailout architects like Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Barry Ritholtz, author of Bailout Nation, contends that the government could have taken over the Financial Products division and treated it as a failed bank, imposing losses on every firm that did business with the unit. "You're supposed to suffer pain and agony when you put money into a company that's as corrupt as that AIG hedge fund," Ritholtz says. The insurance units, he argues, could have been spun off as a new stand-alone company, freed from the albatross of Financial Products.

Bernanke has argued that since AIG wasn't a bank, the federal government lacked a legal and practical mechanism for taking over and dismantling the company. That's why the Obama administration wants Congress to grant the Fed new powers to take over "systemically significant" institutions like AIG when they fail. Meanwhile, the AIG bailout could wind on for another three or four years, and there's a good chance taxpayers will never get all their money back.

Citigroup (C). When other banks become insolvent, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. swoops in, fires management, zeroes out the stock, pays bondholders a portion of their investment, and either sells off the bank in pieces to other banks or runs it until a buyer is found. But not Citigroup. This lumbering giant would have collapsed on its own, but instead of a takeover, Citigroup got $25 billion in bailout funds in October 2008, then another $20 billion three months later. Plus taxpayers are on the hook for a big chunk of $301 billion in mortgage-backed securities and other dodgy assets on Citigroup's books. It could be years before Citigroup is healthy. CEO Vikram Pandit has said that the fazed bank will pay back the taxpayers in full. But there's no deadline, and Pandit himself could be long gone before taxpayers get a dime back.

Bank of America (BAC). If this North Carolina-based bank hadn't picked up ailing brokerage firm Merrill Lynch in September 2008, it might be out of the woods by now. But the Merrill acquisition saddled BofA with billions in losses and made CEO Ken Lewis a corporate pariah. One of the most tawdry episodes in the Year of the Bailout was the battle between Lewis, who reportedly wanted to renege on the Merrill acquisition when he learned that the brokerage would post a $28 billion loss for 2008, and Bernanke, who threatened Lewis with the disapprobation of the Fed if he backed out, which basically equates to death by bank examiner. Lewis caved. Then a couple months later he got to explain why Merrill executives earned $3.6 billion in bonuses while taxpayers were providing $45 billion to keep the firm afloat. Go ahead. Scream.

Goldman Sachs (GS). Wall Street's toniest firm got $10 billion in TARP money in October 2008, along with eight other big banks that got government checks. Eight months later, Goldman was the first big bank to pay back its bailout money, with interest. Hooray for them. But Goldman also got a stealth bailout that will never be returned to taxpayers, courtesy of AIG. When the feds propped up AIG last fall, that allowed Goldman to ease its way out of nearly $6 billion worth of deals with AIG that could have been worth pennies on the dollar in a normal bankruptcy case. And later, Goldman got almost $14 billion of bailout money that went to AIG's trading partners, effectively redeeming Goldman's trading bets with AIG at 100 percent of their face value.

Other banks got a 100 percent redemption out of AIG too, but Goldman got the most. And the fact that Henry Paulson, who was treasury secretary during the first four months of the meltdown, had come straight from a stint as CEO of Goldman Sachs raised the awful prospect that billions in taxpayer money was going to favored Wall Street fat cats. Nobody has ever offered a convincing explanation for the delicate treatment Goldman received, which fuels the worst kind of speculation. Please, say it ain't so.

Bear Stearns. Nobody knew how momentous it was at the time, but the $30 billion deal in March 2008 to keep Bear from completely imploding set the stage for every bailout that followed—and some other disasters as well. Bear was one of the biggest players in the market for mortgage-backed securities, and it fell first when that market began to crumble. The Fed brokered a deal in which JPMorgan bought most of the firm for $1.2 billion, a fraction of Bear's former value, with the Fed taking on $29 billion worth of toxic securities nobody else would touch. The bailout helped calm markets at the time—partly because it created the expectation that the government would rescue any other Wall Street firm that got into trouble.

That led Lehman Brothers to turn down financing offers from Warren Buffett and others when it needed cash, presumably because the firm felt it could hold out for a better deal—from the government, if necessary. When the feds let Lehman fail in September 2008, the chaos that followed partly stemmed from deep confusion over who deserved a bailout and who deserved a bullet. In retrospect, it's plausible that if the feds had let Bear Stearns fail outright, they could have done a better job of forcing Wall Street to work out its own problems—while saving taxpayers several hundred billion dollars. Of course, we'll never know. You only get one chance to get an epic bailout right.
Disclosure: no positions "

(source: article by Rick Newman "The Five Worst Bailouts" from seekingalpha.com)

September - Worst Month For Stocks?

On this past Labor Day Weekend (2009), I was catching up on some investments reading and came across this article by Vitaliy Katsenelson, a contributing writer at SeekingAlpha.com... here is his take on the historical stock investing record for the month of September:

"October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February. -Mark Twain

September 1st is a very strange day for me. In Russia the school year across the whole country started on September 1st. I vividly remember myself as a child on that day throughout my childhood. The sun always shined brighter that day, the cleanliness of my uniform was at the year’s high. It was the custom to bring flowers to teachers on that day thus the school smelled like a botanic garden. Every year I promised myself that I’d be more serious, to smile less and make fewer jokes. Teachers did not like my smile or my jokes, always called me a class clown. Every year I failed at these goals. Thank God!

This introduction has absolutely nothing to do with what I am about to discuss except that September has just begun and it has historically been the worst month of the year for investors. After looking at the data from 1900 to 2008, it is safe to conclude that September historically was the worst month for investors, period. Stock averages and median returns were -1.16% and -0.56%, respectively. Far worse than any other months. In fact, with the exception of June where median returns were down 3 basis points, no other month of the year had negative median returns other than September. In 63 out of 108 years, September brought negative returns to investors, greater than any other month.

It gets worse: Returns in August were greater than 2% average and median returns in September were -2.29% and -1.44%, respectively. I’ll be honest and say I have no idea why this happened or what this September has in store for us. Maybe investors don’t like the end of summer and the first months of fall? Maybe if some of your stocks are hovering close to fair value you sell now? Or maybe if you were looking to buy a stock you wait a little?" (source: seekingalpha.com)

Wallstreet Brokers And Their Fabulous Lives

Some people seem to be insulated from the financial crisis...here is a look into "The Fabulous Life of Wallstreet Brokers". Ever thought about how those Wallstreet Brokers lived, while speculating with your money and burning it in the financial crisis? In this 44 minute documentary you see the homes of Billionaires and multi Millionaires who earned their money on Wallstreet. But they don’t only have huge apartments and residences, they have their own private jets, luxury yachts and so on. Not even thinking about the small investors they made billions of dollars off of and enjoying their lives. And you - what are you doing now??? (source: documentary24.com