Stock Checkup Helps Separate Leaders From Laggards.(MAKING MONEY)(INVESTOR'S CORNER)

Byline: CRAIG SHAW

It's easy to feel overwhelmed as a new investor. Staring at charts and dozens of SEC filings, how can you tell a stock apart from the thousands of others in the market?

IBD Stock Checkup offers an easy solution. Punching in a ticker symbol gives you a snapshot of a stock's fundamental and technical health. Even better, you can see at a glance how it stacks up against its peers.

To access the Checkup, go to IBD's Web site at investors.com. Enter a ticker symbol under "Investing Tools," then hit Stock Checkup. Say you want to diagnose iPayment, which appears in today's Nasdaq Stocks In The News on page B8.

The first thing you see: The online payment processor gets an A Overall Rating. This score rolls together three individual and two group ratings for a comprehensive evaluation. But it's not simply an arithmetic average; the Overall Rating also compares a stock and its peers to the traits seen among big winners of past bull markets.

Scroll down and you'll find the top five stocks in the group sorted by best Overall Rating. It's important to buy leaders in a group, not laggards. The more strong performers in a group, the better.

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