Every month, I go through a list of FTSE 350 value stocks and dividend-paying stocks. I start off with all 350 stocks, and I rank them in different ways in order to whittle down the numbers towards a lower amount by following a set of criteria. This helps me review what is going on in the UK stockmarket, as I see the ups and downs of every stock’s data. I can then choose stocks that I would like to research more, in order to invest, but first I have to get rid of those that I probably wouldn’t like to invest in. To see how I do this, check out my stock selection criteria.

Dividends are one of my strategies for wealth through passive income. I’ve only recently started investing more seriously, after several years as a student. In the intervening years, I mostly used p2p lending as a strategy to earn money. Now, I’m returning to the stockmarket as a way of diversifying our income streams, because I believe that certain stocks and markets are cheap right now.

February Brings More than Just Snow

It’s a short month and a cold month. It usually brings snow, but it also brings opportunities for us to get some stocks on the cheap. There are often storms and plane crashes in the Northern Hemisphere, so certain stocks might look cheap due to temporary circumstances. As always, the list is just a way of finding stocks that might be worth investing in; essentially it’s a place to begin our research , after having eradicated companies that are more obviously not worth looking at, according to our selection criteria.

February 2015 Value Stocks and High Dividend Stocks Watch List

FTSE100

FTSE 250

Comparisons with January’s List

FTSE 100

There are noticeably less stocks in February’s list compared to January’s. We now only have 12 stocks to look at, compared to 15 last month. BG, Johnson Matthey, and Reckitt Benckiser are out of this month’s list.

FTSE 250

This is much more dramatic, as we are down from 31 stocks in January to just 23 for February. However, I did decide to implement my own criteria a bit more strictly, as in the previous month I allowed JD Sports and Carillion to remain in the list, even though they didn’t actually match up 100% to my own pre-defined criteria. Yes, I was just a bit slack basically. Even so, that would still have resulted in a loss of 6 companies from our list, had I left two of my favourites (of which I also own shares) in the list again.

N. Brown, Croda International, Domino Printing Sciences, HICL Infrastructure, PZ Cussons, and UBM are out. Since I can’t actually be bothered to go back through all my filtering and selection criteria, I can’t really say exactly why these are all out, although I am supposing that if they price has gone up, then the PE is not going to be within my criteria necessarily any longer. I think this is what happened with PZ Cussons, although I can’t be certain.

So, what stocks are on your watch list for this month? Do any of them match mine?! Let me know, leave a comment below