Waiting for Great Companies

I always have a running list of great companies I would buy if they were priced a whole lot differently- my wish list you might say. Being value investors we all spend a lot of time trying to differentiate between garbage and gold. Usually when I am looking at a company it has hit my screens because it is suddenly cheap – my job is to find out if there is a good reason or a bad reason for this, and invest accordingly. This activity can take some time, days, sometimes even weeks. Some opportunities simply don’t last that long though, they can dry up in a matter of a day, an hour or even mere minutes.
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Dell- a Dud

Before any investment in a company I try to do business as a consumer with that company. Balance sheets can only tell you so much about the “true” story of a business. When the option came up to buy a new laptop for my wife I thought, Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) stock has been interesting to me for some time, let’s give them a go.

Let me tell you, it wasn’t pretty. After going through far too many pages and a number of strange web errors on the dell site my order was lodged. Content to write off these bizarre website errors I went over to the track order page. To my surprise I discovered my estimated delivery date for an off the shelf, uncustomized, mass manufactured, laptop was over a month away.
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Fannie Mae?

Benjamin Graham often wrote of distinguishing the difference between investing and speculating. Fannie Mae, in its current state, sits in the speculating bucket. Investing has to fun though, sometimes it is interesting to window shop, so lets look.

Evaluation based on Buffet’s Criteria

When looking at a business I often ask myself what other investors would think? So lets apply Buffett’s criteria and see if we can’t look at it through his eyes.
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Fad Investing

This article originally appeared on The DIV-Net

About two years ago I was speaking to a friend who was very excited about an investment opportunity. “This company is a sure thing, my kids all have these and I see Oprah was wearing a pair of them last week so they are going to have a huge quarter.” He was right and saw his money double, and then a year later fall 20% below what he had paid for it.
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Buffett and Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Continuing our series on the four filters of Warren Buffett today’s topic is Sustainable Competitive Advantage.

Buffet often talks about finding sustainable competitive advantage (S.C.A.) in businesses. What is it, and why is it so important?

A competitive advantage  is a trait or feature of a business that gives it an advantage in dealing with its competition.  If it is sustainable then that advantage is likely to continue into the future.
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The Four Filters of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger (Review)

As investors we are well advised to study the styles of those that are successful at our craft in the hopes that we may emulate them.  Two of the most studied characters of recent memory are Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger.  With their unparalleled returns the two have achieved almost pop culture celebrity status.
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Value Investing Four Filters

I am always looking for good high quality companies that are trading at a discount. Finding these companies is both challenging and time consuming. Finding cheap companies isn’t hard- finding cheap good ones is. A professional investor will spend the entire day researching company after company trying to find something the market has overlooked. As an amateur investor I don’t have that kind of time so I needed a method to reduce the number of companies I examine every week to a small handful that merit my further investigations.
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