- High flyers and fast movers?
- Stocks with big earnings momentum or aggressive growth?
- Or maybe solid companies with dependable growth?
- Or mature companies with income producing dividends?
- Maybe you’re looking for deeply discounted or undervalued stocks. - Low P/E ratios and Price to Sales ratios?

- To make fast money by getting in and getting out quickly?
- Or to find long-term core holdings?
- Are you looking for stocks to generate income?
- Or are you looking for a medium-term trading strategy to actively pick stocks and grow a portfolio?

These are great questions to ask yourself.

You may also want to reflect on your current holdings and ask yourself if your answers are consistent with what’s actually in your portfolio.

To make it easier to identify what kind of trader you are, let’s define what the 4 main fundamental trading styles are:

Momentum
Aggressive Growth
Value
Growth & Income

Momentum:
Momentum traders look to take advantage of upward trends (or downward trends) in a stock’s price or earnings. They believe that these stocks will continue to head in the same direction because of the momentum that is already behind them.

And there’s a lot of evidence to support the idea that stocks making new highs have a tendency of making even higher highs. But, this style of trade will likely carry with it a higher degree of volatility.

Aggressive Growth:
Aggressive Growth traders are primarily focused on stocks with aggressive earnings growth or revenue growth (or at least the potential for aggressive growth).

You’ll often times find smaller cap stocks in this category. Expect volatility in this style as well.

Value: Value investors and traders favor good stocks at great prices over great stocks at good prices. This does not mean they have to be cheap stocks in price though. The key is the belief that they’re undervalued. That they are, for some reason, trading under what their true value or potential really is. The value investor hopes to get in before the market corrects the price, or in other words, goes higher.

The value investor will typically need have a longer time horizon because if that stock has been undervalued, i.e., ‘ignored’ for a while, it may take a bit of time before that stock gets noticed and starts to move meaningfully higher.

Growth & Income:
Growth and Income investors and traders are looking for good companies with solid revenue that pay a good dividend. Often times these are more mature, large-cap companies that generate solid revenue. These companies then pass that revenue along to their shareholders in the form of a dividend.

This kind of investor will also have a longer time horizon, especially since you’ll want to hang onto your stocks long enough to receive the dividend.

‘All Style’ Style:
This combines the ‘best’ of any and all trading styles together into one. This is probably the category most will fall into.

Combining the best of different styles can be a style unto itself, like Growth and Value for example.

Simply put, it’s important to identify what kind of trader you are so you and your trading strategy are in alignment.

Risk Management

This also is part of knowing who you are as a trader.

Nobody ruins their account when the market’s going straight up. (Well, maybe some do.) But usually it’s when the market is going down that people get into real trouble.

Ironically, most of our bad habits were developed in good markets. Because when the market is going straight up, even some of the crummiest stocks and dumbest decisions can get rewarded in a bull market. But in a bear market, they will get absolutely punished.

One portfolio ruining bad habit is hanging on to your losers too long.

In a bull market, many pullbacks were met with rebounds and then higher prices.

But last year, many pullbacks were met with even bigger pullbacks and then even bigger pullbacks still.

Unfortunately, many traders are reluctant to sell a stock at a loss. 1) They don’t want to take a loss. 2) They fear that if they get out, and it goes back up, they’ll miss out on any potential gain.

But, if you’re unwilling to cut a loss at -10% or -20% or -30%, do you really feel better with a -50% loss or having to cut your losses at an even bigger and more painful amount once it reaches a point where you just can’t take it anymore?

This is something every investor has to get over.

Consider this:

Additionally, if you know you’d ultimately sell your stock if it fell -30% or -40%, etc., why not just sell your stock at a more painless area prior to that, without doing any real damage to your portfolio.

It’s easier to recover from.

And don’t worry about missing out on a stock if it start’s going back up. Simply give yourself permission to get back in if there’s a good reason to do so.

But understand where you’ll pull the plug on a failed trade and move on to something better.

This will also help you stay focused and not get down on yourself or get gun-shy on your next trade.

But this is why you need to know what kind of trader you are and what your risk tolerance is along with where you’ll get out if a trade doesn’t work. If even the slightest loss on a stock has you tossing and turning at night, you likely will not want to be filling up your portfolio with momentum stocks or aggressive growth stocks.

Know Thyself

• Determine what kind of trader you are.
• How often do you want to trade?
• How many stocks will you hold in your portfolio?
• What’s your risk tolerance and where will you get out of a loser?
• Where will you get out of your winners?
• What are your goals in your investing? Is this for fun? For retirement? Kids education? Income? In other words, what are you investing for?

Once you can answer all of these questions and more, you’ll be on your way to being a more successful investor.

And have more fun in doing so.

Here’s an example of a Momentum stock: Central Garden & Pet Company (CENT). They are a leading innovator, marketer and producer of quality branded products for the lawn & garden and pet supplies. It’s a Zacks Rank 1 (Strong Buy), with exciting growth rates. CENT is up over 113% in just the last 24 weeks. They’ve been a spectacular performer already with many expecting even more good things in store for them.

Wellpoint, Inc. (WLP), is a good example of a Value stock. WLP is the largest publicly traded commercial health benefits company in terms of membership in the US. WLP is a Zacks Rank 3 with a Zacks Indicator score of 29 (just 10 points shy of missing the cut-off to be a Zacks Rank 2- for now). With increasing growth rates over the next several years coupled with below industry P/E and PEG ratios, it might be just a matter of time before Wellpoint breaks out and starts trading at higher prices and loftier valuations.

Find more stocks in all of the different investment styles. Or zero in on the ones specific to your own.

Whatever your investing style is and regardless of the market, you can learn how to become a better investor today. And start achieving the goals you set out to achieve when you got started in investing in the first place.