Norm,
I will tell you what I like, but please understand it is strictly a
personal opinion, and should not be taken as advice for anyone. People
need to make up their own mind and be responsible to themselves for
their decisions.
After many years of using mutual funds and individual stocks as well as
closed end mutual funds I pretty much have gotten down to using sector
etf's.
As the events have shown this year many unexpected surprises can make
even good companies have issues which are not good for retirement $$$.
I like using indexes, and sectors because they may go down in price
which makes for a buying oportunity but I never heard of an index or
sector going out of business, or being sold to another company after
losing 80% of its value!
I use an Excel spreadsheet (Bill Riedman's http://www.aim-
users.com/aimware.htm) and manually put in the price for each unit.
Bill's spreadsheet is wonderfully simple to use, and if you know a
little about spreadsheets you can do easy testing using Yahoo prices.
You can tune the sensitivity of Mr. Lichellos "Money Machine" for the
particular investment you want to make. This is more work then clicking
a button but the practice of doing it with different investments makes
for valuable experience in using the system and learning little
tricks.
There is a lot of great information on that site (http://www.aim-
users.com/index.html) that allows you to see what can be done with the
system.
The ETF's are better then mutual funds in my opinion because you can
control the trades much closer by using limit orders and intra-day
possibilities as trading oportunities.
You can use the spreadsheet to predict your next buy or sell points and
put in your limit order ahead of time so there is no need to be
watching the market every minute unless you want to. At the end of the
day you can see what orders have been filled, adjust the spreadsheet
and input your next trades. I like Ameritrade, I make my order at least
as large so each comission is equal to 1% or less.
The mutual funds will work also but you are limited to end of the day
and have no control of the next days NAV trade. The shift in the next
days NAV price trade is somewhat self adjusting and will not make or
break you but the overall I find the ETF's superior in performance.
I am leaving a lot of details out but you can read up on the info on
the site, and with practice trades using historical prices from Yahoo
Finance (all free) you can learn the ropes fairly quickly.
The sector funds can be a wild ride that along with Mr Lichello's
system will put a smile on your face. The trick is set up the
sensitivity so you use the cash reserve, but try not to run out!!
Good Luck! :)

Carlos

--- In positioncostaveraging@yahoogroups.com, "nrmoley" <norm3r@...>
wrote:
>
> I am a retired senior citizen and new to the PCA program and I would
> like to know where/how to acquire good stocks to trade with the
> software. I am a complete novice in the stock trading industry
>