Warning: Stock picking post.
I read a good book last month - David Dreman - "Contrarian Investment Strategies".
This book + some double checking of some of the commentary (about low PE investing outperforms) has lead me to sell out of my remaining Index funds (held >12months) and go purely into individual companies.
I've invested in about 20 companies, US and Aus, and have used a mixture of Dreman and also Ben Graham / Warren Buffet style approaches. I had a pretty big chunk to do this with as sold an apartment, and the 20 trades were all free using Nab.
Roughly my approach has been grabbing out of favour stocks with low PE compared to their industry that is unjustified, with good balance sheets (current assets compared to current liabilities), not paying a premium on book value compared to industry, some EPS growth, no -EPS in recent history, no risk of obsoleteness due to the internet, with extra points for media hysteria on the company. I'm aiming to rebalance yearly unless things get way out of wack on the info that lead to the initial purchase.
I've been doing this for years but my approach had been 80% index, 20% stock picking. Now I'm 100% individual companies. I just hit the 12 month mark of last's years purchases are have now rebalanced, they were PRY, CSR, ORG which had phenomenal returns. My purchases over the last few months have been, AUS: AYS, BKW, CLX, CWN, MXI, SDI, TPM, UOS, VOC, VRT, AGI, FXL. USA: IBM, AAPL. I've bought in "chips" of either 10k, or "half chips" 5k. As an e.g. Apple was a chip, MXI was a half chip. If I'm convinced, I'll buy a chip, if I think it's risky, I'll do a half chip. Anyway, this is probably going to be a yearly post, people may be interested in how I'm going as an experiment.
Any feedback welcome. Also, does anything know any smart tools on tracking performance? I'm talking auto comparison to an index, working out various ratios etc. I've got spreadsheets for taxation purposes, but calcs on performance are very manual and time consuming.