When you start looking for good stocks, you often come across these terms like large cap, mid cap, small cap, growth and value. Let’s discuss these terms for a moment. Capitalization or cap refers to the combined value of all the share of a company’s stocks. The division between large cap, mid cap and small cap are often blurry and not sharp.

However the following divisions are generally accepted: Large caps are companies with over $5 Billion in capitalization. Mid caps are companies with $1 to $5 Billion in capitalization and small caps are companies with $250 million to $1 Billion in capitalization. Anything below $250 million can be considered as micro cap. Now the most important term that you come across is growth stocks and value stocks. How do you determine this is a growth stock or a value stock? Perhaps the most important ratio is the Price to Earnings Ratio (P/E).

You must have often heard of the P/E ratio of a stock being talked about the analyst on CNBC or Bloomberg. Perhaps the most important ratio is the Price to Earnings Ratio (P/E). Now the most important term that you come across is growth stocks and value stocks. How do you determine this is a growth stock or a value stock?

Now the higher the P/E ratio, the more growth the company is supposed to have. So it can be either the company is growing real fast of the investor have high hopes of its growth. Now these hopes can be realistic or foolish, you never know!

Eugene Fama did seminal research on stocks and stock market s in’70s. Most of his results were startling and broke many myths. According to Fama and French, two famous researchers who did ground breaking research on stocks, over the last 77 years, large growth stocks have only seen 9.9% annualized rate of return as compared to 11.5% for the large value stocks.

Now intuitively you might have thought that growth stocks are better. What can be the reason for their lower performance over the years? The most probable cause seems to be their immense popularity. Since most of the headlines are captures by high growth companies, investors seem to think that they are the best investments.

Think about Google, how its stock price shot up within a matter of weeks after it hit the market. Weeks after that it began to cool off. So large growth stocks tend to get overpriced before you are able to buy them!

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What would make a stock rise so much? The whole point of investing in stocks is to choose one that has the greatest chance of a rising share value. Don’t we all look for a stock that we could buy for $10 and later on sell for $300 per share? Well, how can we proceed to accomplish such a feat?

So if the company does well, its stock will go up in price and if the company does poorly its stock will go down in price. Buying a stock is essentially buying a small piece of the company and its future potential for growth and profits.

Now why does the stock goes up and down with the performance of the company. Actually the real force behind the stock rise and fall is the market place. The marketplace is in fact buyers and sellers, individuals and organizations that want to buy stocks or sell them.

Any place where buying and selling takes place can be considered This buying and selling of stocks can only take place in exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange and over the counter markets like NASDAQ. If there are more buyers of the stock, its value will go up and if there are more sellers in the market, the stock price goes down.

Sometimes you will find that the company does well and is posting good quarterly earnings but still its stock price goes down. What’s the reason behind this? Now it doesn’t mean that if the company does well and is showing good profits and earnings, its stock price will go up.

In reality the price of stock depends on the investor’s expectations. The price of a stock goes down because there are more sellers than buyers. So why is it so? The stock price does not go up or down just based on the company’s present performance. Stock price goes up and down because of what the buyers and sellers expect will happen with the company in the near future.

However, the performance of the stock and the performance of the company over the long term have a logical relationship. In the short term, the behavior of the stock price is irrational and it can behave in crazy and illogical ways.

Stock investing is all about doing good research before you make your final decision to invest in a particular stock. Focus on finding companies that are strong, well positioned in the right industries and have solid fundamentals like a good management, good product, good service, growing industry, rising sales, increasing profits and so on. The bottom line is don’t worry about the short term gyrations of the stock price. Sometimes the industry and the economy matters more than the company. Picking a stock doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Understanding the company’s industry and the overall economic environment is critical to stock picking process. It would be interesting for you to know that Warren Buffet, the world’s greatest stock investor has over the years been a value investor. His famous investments were in insurance and manufacturing. He buys companies that have fallen on bad times but inherently their business model is sound, just maybe need a good management.

Mr. Ahmad Hassam is a Harvard University Graduate. Try these cash printing Forex Signals from heaven. Discover a revolutionary Forex Robot System! This and other unique content ‘forex’ articles are available with free reprint rights.