Getting Back Into The Swing Of Things, My Investing Book, Sold $STRT Up 75%, And What Have I Missed?

Since my last post almost two months ago now my brother and I have been working very hard in our business Black Hills Tech Solutions so I have had almost zero time to look at the stock market since then.  We are doing relatively well so far and are working on building a company’s website right now.  Okay well my brother and his buddy are doing the bulk of the website building since I have no idea how to do any of that.

I have also gotten off of my allergy shots, which have made me feel quite a bit better consistently and have also been forcing myself to take time off from things and relax every once in a while.  I do not know which has helped me the most but I have not been sick in about two straight months since I have started the above and have generally felt pretty decent most of the time.

Since I have been feeling better, (i.e not getting sick all the time mainly) and since I have had a bit of free time with less going on at the business I have had some time to fill my want/need to research companies, learn about investing, and work on my investing book in the past week or so.

In the past week so far I have finished up another two chapters in my book and tonight I will start on another chapter.  I also have been looking for a company to start research on but have thus far had no luck.  It seems that the market has continued to get even more over heated in the past couple months as a week ago I took cursory looks through about 250 companies to potentially do research on and the only ones I found to be even a little undervalued or interesting were Chinese nano caps.

If you have been following this blog for a while you know that Chinese small caps terrify me because of the fraud, misreporting, lying, etc and that I lost a lot of money on them when I first started investing.  Suffice it to say that if I am not comfortable buying into Chinese small caps that I won’t consider even looking into Chinese nano caps.

I have also sold out of Strattec (STRT) in the portfolios that I manage due to it reaching the higher end of my valuation range and I sold out up 75% since December when I originally bought into them.  If, and more likely when, the market crashes I will definitely think about buying into them again as I still really like what they are doing now that they have fixed the bulk of their problems and their management.  The portfolios that I manage are now sitting around 55% cash because of how overheated I think the market is.

I will continue to look for a company to do research on and continue working on my book and hope to post again a bit more regularly now that we have slowed down and settled in a bit more at the business.

Having said that I now ask you if there are any links, websites, articles, etc that have come out in the past couple months that you think are fantastic.  I pretty much blacked everything investing related out in that time frame to concentrate on opening and starting the business so I am sure I missed out on some pretty good information.  I would very much appreciate it if anyone has anything to share that you think I would like to learn from and might have missed in the past couple months and would really appreciate if you were able to share some of those with me.

Until next time.

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Updates, Looking For Anyone Who Might Want To Write A Guest Value Investing Article or Articles, And “Becoming So Good That You Cannot Be Ignored”

As you know over the past couple weeks I have been doing in depth research on a company and written an article that I planned to post on Monday.  I have several other companies I want to research and since in my personal account I am unfortunately fully invested at the moment, I need to make the best possible buy decision of the companies I am looking into before deciding which one(s) to buy into and came up with an idea today.

When I first started my blog and posting articles on Seeking Alpha I did a series of posts on Dole, Chiquita, and Fresh Del Monte comparing them and figuring out which one was the best buy at the time.  I have wanted to do another series of posts like that for a while now and decided that this is a perfect opportunity to do that.  Up to this point I have completely finished up one article, done a lot of research and probably will start to write an article on the next company next week some time, and have at least one for sure and maybe another company I want to do research on and write full articles on after that before I make my final buy decision(s).

As you might expect with the amount of research I do this process and my posting of articles may take a while so this is where I ask for some help from you.  While I am researching and writing my articles I am still going to keep posting links, but would like good content to keep flowing at least somewhat regularly on the blog while I am concentrating on researching and writing.

I am looking for anyone who would want to contribute an article, or articles, to be posted as guest posts on this blog.  I will give you full credit for the entire article and write an introduction introducing you a little bit to get you some recognition.  You will retain full ownership of the article and can post it anywhere else that you like.  I would really like to have newer investors who may want to start a blog some day but for some reason haven’t, to submit any write ups you might have to get you some recognition and some feedback on your articles so you can learn faster.  I wish I would have started writing my ideas down in depth a lot sooner because as I have talked about before I am shocked by how much better I have gotten just since last June when I stated this blog. I will consider any articles as long as it is a VALUE based investment idea, if it is of good quality, if it is your original written and researched idea, and you do not already have a blog.  Sorry value bloggers but I want to help new investors or people who do not have a blog already get better and get some recognition.

I do not care if you have just started out investing (Would actually prefer newer investors to get you some recognition and to help you learn faster) or have been doing this for years and may not have a blog but you would like to post something here to get a taste for blogging.  As long as I think the article is of good quality, you show some passion, and want to get better as an investor I will consider any article submitted.  The article does not have to be as in depth or as long as my articles either.  If you have multiple articles you would like to submit you are more than welcome to submit as many as you like.  I know that I am a bit weird in welcoming public criticism of my articles but it helps me learn faster.  To alleviate some of this concern I will also help you out by reading the article before posting it on this site and sending you an email with any thoughts, feedback, or advice I might have and keep them private just between us since I know a lot of people are afraid of public criticism, especially beginners.

As you know if you have been following the blog for any length of time one of my other passions is bettering education and helping others out as much as possible because of all the advice and help I have received from others online.  I have been thinking about this for a while and have finally decided that this is a good time to start this program and I hope a lot of you submit articles.  This is also going to become a regular thing so if you come up with an idea a month or months from now that you would like to submit for publishing please feel free to submit it.  Again, I would highly encourage especially newer investors and investors without blogs to submit articles not only for the recognition, but the sooner you start writing your investment ideas down the faster you will get better.

For any questions or if you would like to submit an article email me at my email address provided in the Contact Me page above and I hope to hear from many of you very soon.

Another quick update is that last week I received an email from the Value Investor’s Club about my application and that I had been rejected for admission to VIC again.  Once again this just serves as further motivation (As if I didn’t have enough already) to keep learning and getting better. On a side note Whopper Investments posted on Twitter that he has been accepted into the Value Investors Club so a big shout out and congratulations to a fellow value blogger for this impressive accomplishment.  I have heard that VIC accepts fewer than 10% of all applications received, I know most of the people on VIC are professionals, and I know of at least a couple individuals who have had their funds seeded by Joel Greenblatt (The founder of VIC and world renowned value investor) so getting accepted into VIC is a huge goal for a lot of us value investing bloggers and it is extremely impressive to get accepted.

I have always been the type of extremely competitive and self motivated person where I always pushed myself so hard (sometimes too hard and I have occasionally paid for it with health problems) to get better at whatever I was doing.  A couple examples are that 1) I remember when I was a teenager mowing the lawn and that I would time myself just to see if I could mow the lawn more efficiently and faster.  Not so I could go play sports, hang out with friends or a girlfriend, or do whatever else I was doing at the time, but just to get better at it. 2) When I worked at Burger King in high school, even if I was just washing dishes I always tried to figure out ways to get faster and better at it, even timing myself doing this as well.  This is how driven, some would say crazy including probably my wife, lol, I am about everything I do and when I saw this quote from Steve Martin it really resonated with me. Emphasis is mine.

“Nobody ever takes note of [my advice], because it’s not the answer they wanted to hear,” Martin said. “What they want to hear is ‘Here’s how you get an agent, here’s how you write a script,’ . . . but I always say, ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’ “

The article is from Lifehacker and you can click here to read the whole article about becoming a “craftsman” and how Mr. Martin went about becoming a comedic craftsman.  So my new favorite quote and goal as it pertains to me getting a job in the investment world, opening my own firm, learning Mandarin, or whatever else I do is to become so good at it that I cannot be ignored.

I will post some more links over the coming days as I have gotten way behind in sharing some of the sites I have been learning from and think that you could possibly learn from, and I hope in the mean time to see that a lot of you have submitted articles to be posted on the blog.