Information is even more important than timing.
When you find a company that looks promising, you don't have to buy the stock today or this week or even this month. Good stocks tend to stay good, so you can take the time to investigate before you invest. The information you need to size up a company's prospects in many places, and a lot of it is free. The secret to choosing good common stocks is that there really is no secret to it. The techniques don't work all the time, but they work often enough so that the methods employed by successful stock investors tend to be more alike than different.