Expert: Paul Henneman - 1/29/2008

Question
Are there any Solid Companies that i can invest in that won't have bigs ups and downs? If so what are they?

Answer
Justin,
  Thank you for your question!
There is no real answer to your question, but perhaps I can provide some guidance. The problem is what you mean by 'big ups and downs'. Any stock that exists has risks associated with it, and even the most stable of stocks will see rises and falls. Even a good company's stock sometimes takes a hit if the rest of the market is doing poorly, essentially dragged down by everything else.
  However, there are things you can do to minimize the ups and downs as much as possible. The S&P500 is typically the most stable of the major stock market indexes, so I would suggest that you focus your attention to the stocks in this index. Also, big cap, large companies are typically much more stable than smaller ones. So, perhaps a minimum of several billion for the market cap would be a good idea.  
  But even these companies can see fairly significant price moves up or down, so my main advice is that any investment in the stock market has risk. For example, go to http://finance.yahoo.com and pull up a chart on major companies like GM, GE, Microsoft, or Apple to see what I mean. Utility companies may be a place to look, their stock price is generally fairly stable when compared to other sectors.
  Using my companies research (www.ValuEngine.com), if I do a search for companies that we rate highly and also have a fairly high market cap level, I get ticker symbols such as:

AAUK, TOT, CEO, BP, STO, OGZPY, RIG, MSBHY, NILSY, LUKOY, BASFY, HAL, SSL, CNQ, VLO and others. 40 stocks resulted when I searched for companies that we have a strong buy rating on, and are in the top 10% of the overall market when it comes to market cap size.  To many to list here, but perhaps the 15 top ones I list above will get you started.

I hope that this is helpful, please do not hesitate to follow up with me if I can be of any additional service,

Sincerely,
Paul Henneman
President
ValuEngine Inc
www.ValuEngine.com