Sehan

Cheers for the replies guys. It has certainly been eye opening. I've been pouring over articles on Investopedia and fundamental analysis seems to be the subject of a huge proportion of the material so I decided to try my hand at that to begin with but as you guys have mentioned....one person with a background in computer science is unlikely to out perform a team of qualified investors....especially seeing as how I have exactly 5 days of experience at this I'm going to continue fooling around on the simulator at investopedia for a while more I think and especially up until I've done a good bit more research. Thanks for the help.

I was browsing the stocks people are watching over at Investopedia and one that came up was Atmel Corp. I decided to investigate them a bit further and after doing a few quick calculations in my head and looking at the P/E, ROA, ROE and ROI data calculated by Reuters I thought they were nothing special and seemed to be underperforming versus the rest of their industry and over priced. That was fine until I looked at the Reuters rating and it was 'Buy' and quite highly recommended at that. It was about this point that confusion set in Seeing as I've only been looking at this stuff for about a week I'm assuming that they have it correct and I've messed up but for the life of me I can't tell why. From the data here though I don't see why this would be an attractive purchase at all. I had a look at their balance sheet and income statement and while they have their dept well covered I can't see anything that makes me think I should buy. I made an attempt at calculating their ROCE but came up with approx. 1/120 so I think I did that wrong. Going on what wikipedia told me I had pretax operating profit (10) divided by total assets (1713) - current liabilities (562) which gave me my result...which in my rather inexpert opinion seems like a pretty crap return if it's correct. Any suggestions on how I've misread the data and/or miscalculated the ROCE are appreciated. Cheers