Howard Marks’ latest memo is a good read and discusses two very interesting topics 1) Role of luck in investing and 2) Are market efficient? I’m not going to cover the role of luck in investing in this post, but I do believe luck plays a role and luck happens to people who position themselves to take advantage of it. Market Efficiency The theory of efficient markets makes sense, as the more freely and quickly information flows, the market can incorporate that information instantaneously always providing “accurate” pricing using the latest information. However, humans still play a role in the...
Good Reading from the week of January 20th 2014
Below are a collection of links that I have saved from my reading over the past week. Want a list of current EV/EBIT and EV/EBITDA ratios by industry? Click here and you’ll see an updated list of industries with their EV/EBIT and EBITDA ratios as of this month. The data is available as a download also from the link. This comes from the great professor Damodaran. This article by Warren Buffet was dug up this week, and was written in 1999. Remember 1999? That was the during the first internet stock market boom, and it is worthwhile to...
Business Idea – Virtual Credit Card Number
From time to time I have business ideas, and recently I have captured my ideas and saving them in a folder on Evernote. Like most good business ideas, I usually encounter a problem or inefficient process and think that there has to be a better way. This particular idea I am writing about is something that I have encountered a few times in the past, but don’t think I will ever build a solution myself, so I’m putting it out there in case someone else can build a solution. I would be interested in supporting anyone that has a...
My Recent Experience with T-Mobile vs AT&T
I’ve recently had to update my cell phone situation due to work and a change in the cell phone policy. What I thought would be something quite easy, to move the phone number to my personal account, turned out to be something more complicated and ended up giving me an excuse to try T-Mobile. Some people may read this account and think that I’m being harsh with AT&T, but I couldn’t receive what I wanted as an end result, and now AT&T opened up the door for an existing customer to move to a competitor. I’ve been intrigued by...
Find the Metric
I was first introduced to the idea of finding the one (maybe two) most important metric that means the most for a particular company when I was attending SMU pursuing my MBA. I took a personal investing class that was taught by an adjunct professor and it was one of the top classes that I took. He didn’t cover the standard financial and portfolio theory that you hear in traditional finance classes. Instead, he ran his own investment outfit and used was in the investment group that owned the Texas Rangers with George W Bush. I learned a lot...
Useful Links for week of January 13th 2014
It’s becoming more difficult to find investments that are worthy of buying at current prices, so in the meantime, it’s never a bad idea to keep reading useful information. Below are a few hyperlinks that I have collected over the past week that I found interesting and/or useful that I thought would be useful to others. Stock Grader Stock Grader wanted to sort companies by the Quality of the company and their earnings. The result was a simple sorting of companies using dividend adjusted book value and volatility to determine the quality of the company. More simply, it’s just...
Investment Checklist Reading
I’ve collected a list of blog posts related to value investment checklists. I thought I might aggregate all the posts that I have saved and put them in a blog post in case other investors would like to review other investor’s checklists’. Portfolio 14’s Investment Checklist Frank Voisin covers Bruce Berkowitz’s Investment Checklist Guest Post on Old School Value – 40 Point Checklist Ben Graham Investment Checklist ...
2013 Year End Review
The year 2013 is now complete, and the stock market overall had a very good year and so did my investments. I wanted to write-up a few of the mistakes that I made throughout the year and include a top 5 post list. I’ve come to appreciate the publicizing of my mistakes because it requires that I review my decisions and to have a public record of the mistakes so that I do not make the same mistakes again. Mistakes made during 2013 Do not attempt to invest in areas that are outside of your knowledge – I attempted...