What are some of the key identifiers/characters of an undervalued stock?
You can't. If there was a reliable way to identify an undervalued stock, then people would immediately buy it, its price would rise and it wouldn't be undervalued any more. P/E = price per earnings. low P/E (P/E < 4) means stock is undervalued.
Simply put, expansionary capex is seen as an investment and maintenance capex is seen as a cost.  In terms of valuation, free cash flow will not include expansionary capex because you are valuing the company as its current business. It's important to note that this approach will usually undervalue companies with strong investment opportunities.  Also, like /u/scarletham said, please edit out the identifying information to avoid any disclosure problems. "To a certain degree ""the only sure thing I know is the price I paid for the stock is the fair price at the time I buy it"" is absolutely right, by definition, and by the law of the free and efficient market and forces of supply and demand, freedom of public information about share price sensitive information, etc, etc, etc, and you've made a good point that eludes many investors I'd say. However, in practise, the market has many participants, and they will all be arriving at a different idea of what the ""fair price"" is by way of a slightly different analysis and slightly different information. In theory they all have the same information, but unfortunately in practise there is always some disparity. When one participant feels a stock is undervalued though the last thing they want to do is say so, instead they will start buying stock. They might feel it is undervalued by 20%, but that doesn't mean they'll keep buying and buying until it gets to 20%, they might push the price up just a little, then let the price drift down again, buy some more, relax, buy some more, etc. Over time the price will rise of course because the supply will become weaker, but even if the participant is correct about the 20% the price might have only risen 7% by the time they acquire all the stock they want given their risk models, market exposure and margin guidelines, etc, and it might be more than a year later before the price has actually risen to 20%, presumably because more and more other market participants have come to the same conclusion. The opposite can obviously also happen, a participant might dump stock it feels is over valued long before it hits the values it believes in. So right away you can see that pricing might not really reflect value, or ""fair price""." "Once again I offer some sage advice - ""Don't let the tax tail wag the investing dog."" Michael offers an excellent method to decide what to do. Note, he doesn't base the decision on the tax implication.  If you are truly indifferent to holding the stock, taxwise, you might consider selling just the profitable shares if that's enough cash. Then sell shares at a loss each year if you have no other gains. That will let you pay the long term gain rate on the shares sold this year, but offset regular income in years to come. But. I'm hard pressed to believe you are indifferent, and I'd use Michel's approach to decide.  Updated - The New Law is simply a rule requiring brokers to track basis. Your situation doesn't change at all. When you sell the shares, you need to identify which shares you want to sell. For older shares, the tracking is your responsibility, that's all." Generally the number of shares of a U.S. exchange-listed stock which have been shorted are tracked by the exchange and reported monthly.  This number is usually known as the open short interest.  You may also see a short interest ratio, which is the short interest divided by the average daily volume for the stock. The short interest is available on some general stock data sites, such as Yahoo Finance (under Key Statistics) and dailyfinance.com (also on a Key Statistics subpage for the stock). outstanding shares are the shares(regular shares) that are still tradable in the market, where the firm in question is listed. The term is primarily used to distinguish from shares held in treasury(treasury stock), which have been bought back(buybacks) from the market and aren't currently tradable in the market. Wikipedia is a bit more clearer and mentions the diluted outstanding shares(used for convertible bonds, warrants, etc) which is used to calculated diluted EPS. The suffix represents the stock exchange the stock is traded on. N represents the New York Stock Exchange and O represents the Nasdaq. Sometimes a stock can be listed on more than one exchange so the suffix will give you an indication of which exchange the stock is on. For example the Australian company BHP Billiton Ltd is listed on multiple exchanges so is given a different suffix for the different exchanges (especially when the code is the same for each exchange). Below are a few examples of BHP: This is the bird's eye view of how shorting works: When you place an order to sell a stock short, your broker attempts to grab the desired number of shares from any accounts of its other customers and makes them available for you to sell. If no other customers own shares of this stock, then generally you are out of luck (It is more complicated like that in practice, but this is just an overview).    Your odds are better if the particular stock has a large float (i.e. a large number of shares that are actually available for trading) and its short ratio is low (which means relatively few shares   are currently being sold short). Also, a large brokerage may be more likely to have access to the shares than a small niche-market broker.   The example you've given, Angie's List (ANGI) is a $600M small-cap with a comparatively low float, and though I haven't been able to glean the short ratio, it appears that a lot of investors are bearish on this stock and probably already had the same idea to short it.  There is really no way to find out if a specific broker has shares in inventory available for shorting, short of (forgive the pun) checking directly with the broker. http://www.euroinvestor.com/exchanges/nasdaq/macromedia-inc/41408/history will work as DumbCoder states, but didn't contain LEHMQ (Lehman Brother's holding company). You can use Yahoo for companies that have declared bankruptcy, such as Lehman Brothers: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=LEHMQ&a=08&b=01&c=2008&d=08&e=30&f=2008&g=d but you have to know the symbol of the holding company.