Investing in the stock market can be overwhelming for a beginner but the potential financial rewards are enough to motivate many people to learn how to invest in stocks.

How do we create a confidence building Stock Selection Universe? Simply operating on blind faith with one of the common definitions may be too simplistic, particularly since many of the numbers originate from the subject companies. Here are five filters you can use to come up with a listing of higher quality companies:

Updated version of the 'men with hammers' presentation.

During his infamous “Psychology of Human Misjudgment talk” Charlie Munger had a surprise for audience members.

Link to a PDF of the complete Chan and Lakonishok 2004 article. From the abstract: "The evidence suggests that, even after taking into account the experience of the late 1990s, value investing generates superior returns. Common measures of risk do not support the argument that the return differential is a result of the higher riskiness of value stocks.

Humans, no matter how hard we try, act in ways that cause us to make the wrong investment decisions almost all the time...

In the great majority of cases the lack of performance exceeding or even matching an unmanaged in index in no way reflects lack of either intellectual capacity or integrity.

In a number of settings, researchers found that consumers who think about the pros and cons before making decisions reported that they were more likely to exercise and consume healthy foods. They had lower rates of alcohol abuse, procrastination, and overspending. They were also more likely to be saving money for retirement.

Read what is happening in Lyric Jeans, Inc. (LYJN.PK).

In this series of blog posts, I will walk through all 25 of the biases Mr. Munger identifies, and then adapt them for the modern entrepreneur. In each case I will start with relevant excerpts of Mr. Munger's speech, and then after that add my own thoughts.

Dueling economists take to the pen to debate an age-old question: Are we dumb or smart? For Thaler and Sunstein, authors of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, it is obvious that people, if they’re not dumb, are at least poorly wired for making some of life’s most important decisions.

A look at the sunk cost fallacy and how it can negatively impact the way you respond to mistakes in your portfolio.

What can we learn from the history of recessions and depression in the US. Learn about the 1929 crash, the great depression, oil crises and stagflation.
Discover recession stock tips, ways to benefit in a recession and historical economic events.

Wall Street spins reality in whatever manner it can to make most investors unhappy, thus increasing new product sales. Your confusion, fear, greed, impatience, and need for a quick panacea fuels their profit engines, not yours. Learn how to deal unemotionally with Wall Street events and shun the herd mentality.

It’s not unusual to hear prognostications of doom and gloom when the markets are in disarray, as they have been for several months now. A front page article on the Wall Street Journal this past week would indicate that stocks might be in store for a ten year lull, in other words, dead flat performance. If you read the headline alone (“Stocks Tarnished by Lost Decade: U.S.