Screening

One major problem of serious but amateur investor - like me - is to decide which stock to analyze.

Yes, your eyes are correct. I said "which stock to analyze", not "which stock to buy".

It is not difficult to learn how to valuate a company. There is no shortage of book in this area. The problem is, however, it takes (a short) time to gather the data for any company that you are interested in. Let's assume you need 10 minutes for a stock. How many of them can you examine, say, during a Easter holiday ?

The scenario is similar to doing study on genetic polymorphism. If you have a candidate gene (and mutation) in mind, there is no difficulty what so ever to prove whether it has any effect. But, in the sea of human genome, which one should you pick ?

We need some kind of microarray for stock analysis.

PS. In genetic study, the other difficulty is, of course, how to get the result published if it turns out to be negative. That's another story.