It's a little hard to explain how I approached the market. (I'm taking a break from stock watching while I build my house and pay down some medical bills.) I studied accounting to find what went into the financial reports that companies put out, then learned how to backtrack that data, so i could read the reports and see what kinds of decisions were being made, which would then effect how the company would perform the following year. For example, if a company was showing, say, a $300k increase in profits, but their sales revenue only went up $100k, and their wage expenses went down $200k, then i knew that 2/3rds of that "profit increase" was an illusion caused by staffing cuts, and with fewer sales staff, their sales were going to suffer the following year.
That's one extremely oversimplified example.