[DesertCat]

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Let's assume that I've already assessed the overall usefulness (or otherwise) of this information, shall we? Thank you for your input, such as it is, but these matters are subjective, and in *my* instance I believe that it will be worth *my* time to rank this info. You'll notice that I'm not asking anyone else to devote their time to this task, beyond answering one simple question, which I will reiterate here for the benefit of anyone who still cares -

How long should one hold a "hold" stock for? (Assuming that you have to apply one period of time to all such recommendation). Is six months adequate, or not?

That's two questions. Damn.

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My post was far from content free. You really need to put some more thought into what you are doing since you sound like you are headed for disaster.

Let me relate what the worlds greatest investor (Warren Buffett) does.

- He never listens to tips.
- He never listens to brokers or wall street.
- He never looks at charts or cares about technical analysis.
- He has no opinion or idea whether a stock will go up or down in the short run. He doesn't believe anyone else can predict this either. Same for the market as a whole and the economy.
- He just tries to buy good businesses at attractive prices. He holds them for as long as they stay cheap, and sells them when they get expensive. He'll hold a stock for the rest of his life if it meets those characteristics. He's owned his Washington Post stock since 1972, and his Coke stock since 1987.

Now when you use the word "tip", my mental image is of your broker hissing in your ear and saying "xyz corp is announcing hot news tommorrow, buy as much as you can today". If by tip you just mean reading regular business press on companies, and finding ideas there, sure, that's a great avenue of research.

But you have to be able to value what you find and decide if it's cheap or expensive. You have to assess it's business risks. You have to decide if it's cheap enough to compensate you for those risks.

My (very general) rule of thumb is the more positive PR you read about a company, the worse investment it really is. Often it means it's mgmt team cares more about selling stock to suckers than selling their real products to real customers. Even in cases like GOOG, where they are a great company, they end up getting way over-priced