Making the right stock trading picks isn’t easy. Here, we uncover the one area that new or inexperienced investors often ignore.

If making fantastic stock trading picks was easy, wouldn’t we all quit our jobs and play the stock market all day? The truth is simple and obvious: The first skill that any investor or trader has to learn is how to pick their stocks but we often don’t do nearly enough research.

You will hear all too often that buy and hold is dead and fundamental and technical analysis doesn’t matter when such a large volume of part time day traders are moving the market based on trends rather than analysis. You need to know that if you operate using that reasoning, you will lose money.

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The facts are that even with all of the retail investors that are using electronic or web based trading platforms, they are still a small fraction of the trading volume compared to the professionals. Those are the people that are running hedge funds, mutual funds, and other large scale investment firms.

The professionals move the market and if you want to make superior, money making stock trading picks, you have to trade what they trade. The pros are using research teams that study the charts and analyze company balance sheets and product cycles.

What this means for you is that if you are going to make money consistently, you have to do the same research as the big name money managers and hopefully, arrive at many of the same conclusions. This is going to take at least one hour of research per stock per week.

For this reason, don’t own more stocks than you have time to research. Many say that you need a minimum of 5 stocks to be diversified so maybe the minimum is all you have time to research. It’s better to have less but high quality.

If you don’t have the time or don’t feel confident that you can make the best investment choices, consider subscribing to a service like Action Alerts Plus where an expert like Jim Cramer is doing your research for you and all you have to do is buy and sell when they tell you to execute the trade. My secret is that I don’t have enough time to do all of my research so I let Action Alert Plus do it for me.

Are you tired of watching others make money in the stock market while your portfolio remains lukewarm? Click here to set your portfolio in to overdrive.

The first book I ever read about investing was Jim Cramer’s Real Money. Click here to go to the elementary finance bookstore to order your copy. You can also take a look at the book in the box above. Although the first book, it is still the book I reread once every year.