Welcome to Trading Decimal Places

Almost exactly a year ago (September 17, 2004) I compiled a list of 16 companies I wanted to watch on the stock market.

For this list I chose competitors of Intuit. I have no affiliation with Intuit except that they make Quicken, a product that I use and like. My search for their competitors gave me a list of over 200 companies, which was a far bigger list than I wanted to deal with. Using two criteria, I whittled the list down to 16.

My first criterion was totally subjective - I selected only those companies that I had heard of or thought that I had heard of. The second criteria was more objective - the company had to have a positive P/E ratio.

Symbol	Company	P/E Ratio
ADBE	Adobe	27.76
BEAS	Bea Systems	26.38
CHKP	Checkpoint	22.04
COGN	Cognos	21.04
CTXS	Citrix Systems	27.29
ERTS	Electronic Arts	45.78
HUMC	Hummingbird	N/A
INTU	Intuit	22.51
MACR	Macromedia	68.47
MERQE	Mercury Interactive	33.47
ORCL	Oracle	19.46
PRGS	Progress Software	31.38
PSFT	PeopleSoft	N/A	PeopleSoft has been merged with Oracle
SY	Sybase	31.61
SYMC	Symantec	25.55
TTWO	Take Two Interactive	16.65

I will be monitoring these companies and will be using this blog to test and evolve an options trading system. I will also use this blog to track my "paper trading" results.