How to select shares...

[bambi]

I've been doing some researching into TA and am interested in basing my investing/trading off of trends. My goal is not to trade too often, months-years in a trend only shorter if stopped out or trend changes quicker. Now I could just pick any stock that is in an up trend but I feel this isn't the safest. I'd like to ensure I can sell when I want without having to wait days for someone wanting to buy, so I figure I need a certain amount of liquidity in the stock. I also figure it's best to be in a stock that actually is making money, sure a company can be losing money have it's share price can increase but it doesn't seem like a long term winning strategy for the company, I'd like to avoid companies like this if possible.

I'm looking at putting somewhere between 10-20k in per share.

So what do others do to restrict the companies they buy into when using TA?
Volume/value traded per day?
How many shares are available? (If 3 owners own 75% of the shares is this an added risk for TA?)
Is profitable?
How long it's been traded for? (If it's only been round a year then it's hard to see what the share price has done in the past.)
Certain types of companies to avoid? Are some stocks/industries better for TA?
Should it be paying out a dividend?
Certain market capitalization?
Certain amount of debt or lack of it?

Any ideas or suggestions or comments on what you've done would be helpful.

[bambi]

So no one else does any sort of fundamental analysis on which shares they plan doing TA on? I thought this would be a common thing.

I don't plan on trading Briscoes as it has shareholder that owns 75% from memory and in the last month no more than $40k worth of trades was done on any one day. For me this seems too small, if I want to sell $20k of shares I might have to wait a week and will probably influence the share price due to the size of my sell order.

Surely others do something similar, I'm keen to hear what others do so that I might learn how to improve my system.