Before we get into multi-stage analysis, let’s contrast young and mature companies. We shouldn’t look only at how many annual statements a company has filed to determine this; instead we should also use a company’s characteristics. There are plenty of companies that have reinvented themselves and gone from old age to infancy in terms of their growth rates.
Roger Lowenstein’s When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management was first published in 2000 (it was republished with a new afterword…
In 2005, Joel Greenblatt published a book called The Little Book that Beats the Market. Its explicit aim was to “explain how to make money in terms that even my kids could understand (the ones already in sixth and eighth grades, anyway).” Although it used language and examples that were aimed at children, it was widely read by folks of all ages. The first five chapters, before Greenblatt gets into his investment strategy, comprise an excellent introduction to value investing. Clearly written, easy to understand, it’s principled and right.
There are a number of reasons why you might be interested in the future sales/revenue growth of a company. For instance, in order to perform…
This article is the second in a series about screens designed by famous investors. The first, on Benjamin Graham, can be found here; for an…
Benjamin Graham, who has often been called the father of value investing, published The Intelligent Investor in 1949 and revised it several times, most recently in 1972. In that last and fourth edition, published in 1973, he included three different sets of guidelines, which could be called “checklists” or “screens.” The first was for the “defensive investor,” and it’s the most famous. The second was a rule for investing in “Net-Current-Asset (or ‘Bargain’) Issues.” And the third was for the “enterprising investor.”
This article is an overview of screening; in subsequent articles I will be doing deep dives into some classic screens such as those by Benjamin…
Last year I created a screen on Portfolio123 that invests in companies in the Russell 3000 that spend heavily on R&D. (To access this screen,…
A lot of investors talk about “market regimes.” This term can have several different meanings. Classically, a market regime is characterized primarily by four measures: interest rates, inflation, GDP growth, and unemployment; often added to these are characterizations of government fiscal and monetary policy. But one can also talk about a market regime in terms of which stock factors work and which don’t.
It has long been established that stocks with low variability in prices tend to outperform stocks with high variability. I’ve explored this in a few…