Days of crisis

The first and second working days of the month are days of crisis for me, regardless of the state of the market. I spend them opening and closing spreadsheets, copying and pasting data and inserting it into articles I write for Money Observer, and producing performance tables and charts.

When the deadline for my monthly Share Sleuth column coincides with the quarterly Nifty Thrifty column, I'm caught up in a double witching that leaves me blind to numbers by the end of the first day. So I sleep on them, and check everything again on the second day of the month.

That's where I am today. And the end result of that inelegant (but improving) process is something elegant like this Nifty Thrifty screen:

The Nifty Thrifty portfolio is the Magic Formula inspired, Piotroski augmented screen I described earlier in the week, and the Nifty Thrifty column is the only place you'll find me targeting large companies. I get the data straight out of Sharelockholmes but rank it in a spreadsheet, a process that sometimes causes confusion among readers who want to do something similar entirely in screening software. You can see how I do the ranking in the last four columns of the data tab in my Nifty Thrifty screen spreadsheet. 

The Nifty Thrifty is a mechanical portfolio, so I don't know much about the companies in it. But as the algorithm grinds its way through the months I'm getting to know some of the better and if I weren't such a poor judge of retailers I'd say Halfords looks particularly interesting at these levels.

You can follow the performance of the Nifty Thrifty here, and the magazine, with two pages of niftyness included is out nearer the end of the month.