Peter Sander - The 100 Best Stocks to Buy in 2020

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First Adams Media trade paperback edition December 2019

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Welcome to a new decade. Welcome to the 2020 edition of The 100 Best Stocks to Buy.

This is the eleventh edition of The 100 Best Stocks to Buy that weve authored. Many of you have bought this book every year to see whats new, whats changed, and to get fresh investing ideas. If so, youre probably used to a more elaborate introduction focused on how our previous years picks did. That deep introduction is gone this year. We felt that what you repeat readers and especially you new readers sought was the picks themselves, their stories, and the reasons why we picked them. In fact, the individual stock narratives have been gradually expanding, and with limited space we felt you would prefer the expanded narratives.

There is wisdom in this decision. The fact of the matter is that we are future focused. All investors should be future focused. Performance metricswhether ours or those put forth by a companyare measures of the past. As investors, we should not ignore these metrics but rather focus more on whats in store for the company, and those tangible and intangible qualities of a company that shape its story.

After a brief review of the core valuebased investing principles that got us here, we take you straight to the journey through The 100 Best Stocks to Buy in 2020. As you enjoy that journey, we continue to invite you to send your postcards with questions or suggestions about investing to Peter at .

Thanks for your continued support.

Invest long and prosper.

• An IPO, Beyond Meat, with a hot new product with high market acceptance.
• An ETF, Real Estate Index Fund Shares, added as an alternative to investing in individual stocks.
• New companies, from shoe purveyor Skechers to a reformed Microsoft to institutional asset manager BlackRock.

These are just a few of The 100 Best Stocks to Buy in 2020, each one selected for you by our proven investment methodology, one that uses a forward-looking, value-driven investing philosophy to find stocks that consistently perform.

If you bought this book, you may be an astute and experienced individual investor who invests in individual stocks in individual companies. Or perhaps youre a first-time investor and want some guidance about where in the market you should invest and why. Or you may have long invested through mutual funds or a money manager, and youre ready to make a change. No matter how many stocks youve traded or how successful youve been in the past, the 2020 edition of The 100 Best Stocks to Buy can be a core investing tool.

In todays economy, with its trade wars, market fluctuations, and ever-changing technology, this book is an essential guide. Despite market fluctuations, as youll see in the next chapter, we stick to our basic principles: Look for the underlying value of a company; dont buy stock in a company whose business you dont understand; favor dividend-paying and dividend-raising issuing companies. However, weve added some new kinds of stocks for you to consider. Were also increasing our focus on growth and looking at new megatrends such as 5G wireless technology so that we can continue building on our strong record of picking stocks that outperform the S&P 500 index. For each of these carefully selected stocks, which youll find later in the book, organized alphabetically, youll learn the following:

• The reward-versus-risk category (aggressive growth, growth and income, etc.)
• Basic attributes (ticker symbol, Value Line financial strength rating, current yield, dividend raises in past ten years, beta (volatility), etc.)
• A concise company profile and story describing what the company is, what it does, how it has performed and whats in store for the future
• Financial highlights for the previous year
• Reasons to buy the stock
• Reasons for caution
• Compounded earnings and dividend-growth rates
• Eight years of key facts and figures (revenues, net income, earnings per share, dividends per share, cash flow per share, and the high and low stock prices)

As youll see, 100 Best Stocks goes well beyond just being a stock screen or a study of stocks to invest in. After we walk you through our valuation and selection process in the next chapter, youll have the confidence to follow our leads and the knowledge, with further research, to make your own investment decisions. At the end of the day, The 100 Best Stocks to Buy in 2020 is your proven source of solid, dependable advice to begin your analysis and to ultimately take to the bank.

We start with a basic point: Were enthusiastic advocates for the individual investor. We live by the old adage: Nobody cares about your money more than you do. The future for a companyand its financial resultsis driven by the intangible factors like brand, market presence, management excellence, market growth: all things that might be interpreted from information found on the Internet but are not handed down in nicely prepackaged chunks. A human must make sense of it all, must interpret it, to decide whether a company will excel down the roadwhich becomes the basis for buying the companys stock.

The 100 Best Stocks to Buy is an excellent resource for investing ideas, a place to get investing ideas and get started. Our goal is to help you not just keep up with the markets but to exceed their performanceand to collect some dividend income along the way. We want to help you build a portfolio that youre comfortable with, one that allows you to sleep at night. We want to teach you the method for investments that help you achieve your financial goals. In this chapter, youll find our explanation of our investing principles and methodology. Well tell you why we look at numbers when valuing a company but also how we look at intangibles not only of where a company is at right now but where its going. We also generally describe our 2020 picks and the thought process behind themwhy we added 17 new or returning stocks and what each of them brings to the table.