Today's stock pick is Apco Argentina Inc., ticker symbol APAGF.  This stock has several properties that caused me to choose it over many others.  First, I focused on one of the industries that helps to shape the course of the economy, namely the petroleum industry.  At this time, I believe there's money to be made in the oil sector.

After choosing the overall sector, I started looking over the fundamentals for the stocks in alphabetical order.  Out of the first 47 stocks, I picked this one by a straightforward process.  The first step was the "non-negative" test, i.e. stocks that had negative numbers in ANY of the fundamentals, as well as stocks that had "N/A" in place of a number, were rejected instantly.  APAGF was one of the stocks that passed this test.

The second step was to look at the percentages under "Management Effectiveness" and "Profitability".  If these percentages look weak, I usually reject the stock.  Another thing to be wary of is a listed profit margin that is greater than the gross margin (how can the company have more profit than gross revenue?) In the case of APAGF, the listed returns on equity, assets, and investments average around 18.7%.  Also, the gross profitability is 82.40%, while the profit margin is 56.80%.  These numbers are attractive to me; they tell me that this stock has growth potential.

The third step looks at the price-to-earnings ratio, the current price, and the 52-week high/low range as a whole.  Taking into account the indicators of growth potential from the previous step, we now note that for APAGF, the price-earnings ratio is 13.40, the 52-week low is $20.88, the 52-week high is $49.34, and the current stock price is $27.57.  Since the current price is closer to the low and the profitability / investment return percentages are strong, this stock has a good chance of gaining in value over time.