An Update, New Translation Page, and Links

As you might have noticed at the top of the page is now a translation page where you can translate the entire blog into many different languages.  I found something similar to this a few days ago but could not get it to work on the blog so I enlisted the help of my brother and he got the translation page working, thanks a lot Kev.  This also means that the short-lived Mandarin Value Investing Journey is also not now needed and will be going away.  I am sure the 20 of you who visited the mostly untranslated site will miss it dearly :).

A quick update on where I am at with the process of my article series.  I have now finished up the first two articles of the series and as you know I had planned to write articles on one or two more companies and then do a conclusion article.  Two of the companies I was planning on writing articles on I have been asked not to by the person who recommended them to me because he is planning on writing articles about them.  I am still going to read those companies annual reports and other filings but will not be writing articles about them so this has turned into a three-part series covering the two companies I have already written articles about and the conclusion article where I decide which of them to buy.  I will hopefully have the whole series posted as soon as possible.

“Things do not happen–they are brought about by careful planning, diligence, application, and direction.”George Mecherle, Founder of State Farm Insurance.

Valueprax-This One Is Personal.

25iq.com-Charlie Munger On The Importance Of Worldly Wisdom And Consistently Not Being Stupid.

CP-Africa.com-Meet 31 Year Old Ashish Thakkar-Africa’s Youngest Billionaire.

OTC Adventures-International Wire Group Is Cheap, But Is It Safe (ITWG)

Valuewalk-Baupost Group’s Seth Klarman Sees “50 Shades Of Value” In The Market.

Valueinvestingblog.net-CASA Holdings and Fiamma Holdings.

CSinvesting-A Reader’s Question On Case Studies.

Santangel’s Review-Benjamin Graham On Staying Small.

Motley Fool-Charlie Munger Info From A Board Poster.

Valueprax-Notes-Nintendo Back In The Saddle?

CSInvesting-Valuation Case Study HVAC.

OTC Adventures-Value Investing Strategy and Unlisted Securities Part 2.

CSInvesting-ValueUncovered Philosophy; Treat Everything As A Case Study.

Wexboy-2013: The Great Irish Share Valuation Project Part 2.

Credit Bubble Stocks-Horizon Kinetics, Owner Operators, and the Predictability Arb.

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Catching Up On Some More Links

Farnam Street-The World Is Much More Interesting Than Any One Discipline.

Wexboy-Tetragon Ready To Be A Star.

Sahara Investing-The Luxury Goods Market.

Oddball Stocks-Thoughts On Quantative Value Investing.

Valueinvestingblog.net-Investing In Japan: Late To The Party.

Valuewalk-Insurance Companies, Where Buybacks Are Key: Travelers.

Farnam Street-Mastery.

OTC Adventures-Value Investing Strategy And Unlisted Securities Part 1.

Whopper Investments-The Best Values Are Over The Counter Stocks So Is $OTCM A Great Value Too?

Ragnar Is A Pirate-Changing 13D’s At Trinity Place Holdings.

The Aleph Blog-On Insurance Investing Part 2.

Quotations Page-Persistence Quotes, my favorite is the Calvin Coolidge One:

Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

Absoutely love that quote.

Mises.org-Cartman Shrugged: The Invisible Gnomes and The Invisible Hand In South Park.

CSInvesting-The Secret To Investing Success (Munger Tip).

Valueconferences.com-Adib Motiwala: Your Instructor At Small Cap Investing Summit 2013, hour long interview.

Update, Learning a Language in 22 Hours and Links from Geoff Gannon, Student of Value, Distressed Debt Investing, Valuewalk, OTC Adventures, and Others.

I have been doing research on another company over the weekend and to my surprise I have found it to be undervalued by at least 30%, which is my required minimum margin of safety, and a hurdle that has been hard to clear this year.

The company is a micro cap with daily volume of around 2,000 shares being traded, it is profitable, has decent margins, and looks to have at least minor sustainable competitive advantages up to this point in my research.  The company appears to be very promising thus far and I have been continuing my research by reading every annual report since 1999 and looking into its competitors.  I hope to have an update as soon as possible and until then will be posting links.

How I learned A Language In 22 Hours.  I have always wanted to learn a language and after reading this article I decided to try out Memrise.  After only an hour or two, I can already recognize more than 100 Chinese words, committed them to my long term memory, and have been learning how to say them.  I am enjoying this site immensely so far and would highly recommend the site to anyone looking to learn a language.

Student of Value-Studying With The Help of Free Online Courses

Geoff Gannon-The Most Time Efficient Way To Find Cheap Stocks

Geoff Gannon-What Is Your Required Rate of Return

Distressed Debt Investing-OSG, A Lot Of Questions

Valuewalk-Interview With Dan Miller, PM Of The Gabelli Focus Five Fund

Geoff Gannon-What To Do When Good Stocks Aren’t Cheap

OTC Adventures-Mexican Restaurants Inc-CASA

WEKU.FM-Why Coke Cost A Nickel For 70 Years

Geoff Gannon-How Much Time Do You Spend Researching A Stock?

Two Hour Buffett Interview, Loss Aversion, Ted Weschler, Toll Bridges, And Amit Wadhwaney on Martin Whitman

I am almost done with Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets and would highly recommend it to everyone.  It covers topics from history, politics, and the financial markets and gives you reasons why you should be skeptical of people in power and especially people who say their ideas will help better the world.

I should finish up the book today and then tomorrow it is off to researching companies again.  While I love learning new things and seeing ideas that I haven’t thought about before, I have become kind of a 10-K junkie and even though I have found the book very interesting and entertaining, my mind has been continually wandering thinking about companies I want to research and how to expand my knowledge about companies.  I think I am sick :).

Anyways on to the links.

Warren Buffet Two Hour Interview On CNBC from Valuewalk.

Selling Stock At A Loss and Our Loss Aversion Bias.  Very important lessons for investors.

Ted Weschler Rise From Grace Leads to Role Advising Buffett.  This is from Bloomberg and profiles Mr. Weschler, one of the people who might take over for Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway after Buffett steps down.

I Don’t Want To Be  A Toll Bridge, I Want To Be Its Meaning.  This is a very interesting article from the Fundoo Professor.  This is about Buffet’s metaphor about how he wants to invest in toll bridges, pay special attention to the discussion in the comments section as well.

Amit Wadhwaney on Martin Whitman.  This is an interview of Mr. Wadhwaney about Third Avenue Funds approach to investing.

Some Fantastic Links

Before I get back into research and finishing up my checklist I wanted to give you some links that I thought held some kind of insight or knowledge that we all could learn from.

Warren Buffett on his Investment in See’s. See’s is one of his favorite all time investments and I think his reasons for investing should be studied by every investor. Article is from Valuewalk, @Valuewalk on Twitter.

The Secret’s of See’s Candies is an extensive profile of the business, why Buffett bought it, why it is such a good business, its new expansion plans, and how Buffett and Munger almost blew the investment.

Visiting Warren Buffett are notes from someone who visited Berkshire Hathaway on a trip from Columbia Business School in 2006.  These notes are from an interview and speech that was given while on the trip where Buffett gives some very valuable lessons.  The most fascinating thing to me was that Buffett was the following quotes from the article: Emphasis mine.

Question 12: What would you pay for a solid company that is growing earnings at 8-10%/year?

Not many companies will do that. You see a lot of garbage about EBITDA. Depreciation is the worst kind of expense in that it is prepaid. He looks at EBIT/EV. He’ll generally pay 7x for a decent business. For insurance companies, he looks at float and the cost of float.

Looks like that could be a very good starting point for valuations.

Masters of Compounding: Walmart ($WMT) 1968-2012 is an exceptional article from Student of Value on the history of Walmart and what has made it such a fantastic company over time.  I would also recommend following @dgenchev on Twitter if you would like to see his future write ups as they have so far all been fantastic.

How an Average Business Can be a Great Investment by Oddball Stocks has some interesting thoughts about average businesses and their investment potential.  There is some great back and forth in the comments section as well.  I would also recommend reading his two write ups about Hanover Foods that he links to in the article as the analysis he presents is very detailed.

4 Mistakes When Valuing Companies With Large Cash Holdings, and How to Avoid Them is another fantastic write-up by Simple Value Investing.  I would also highly recommend following him on Twitter @SimpleValue as all of his write ups thus far have also been fantastic.  His write ups on Ibersol were very detailed and he laid out a very good investment case for them. Part 1 and Part 2.

I hope you enjoy the links over the next few days as I am now off to finish up my own investment checklist and to research some more companies.

Update on what I am doing, an aritcle on ALEX from a CFA, and two free digital magazines

What I am currently doing

I have been researching a new company and just finished up the valuations today.  It is a boring company that most have probably never heard of, which I like, has good margins, no debt, decent amount of cash, and best of all the company is currently valued about where I could be a buyer.

I still need to finish up my research and hope to have an article up within the next few days on this promising company.

I have also been looking through some of the sites from Jae Jun’s free digital magazine that I posted about yesterday, and have found a lot of good information.  I am going to incorporate some of the sites into my daily reading and hopefully I will not only learn a lot, but maybe even find some potential companies to research and invest in.  Again, I encourage everyone to at least look at the magazine to find some great investing, search, and analysis websites.

Alex article from a CFA

A CFA is a Certified Financial Analyst. The CFA designation is incredibly hard to get and the last time I checked there were only either 100,000 or 200,000 in the entire world.  They generally know what they are talking about.  The article talks about ALEX and how he has been an owner since before the spin-off, and that he is very interested in the post spin company mainly for the real estate assets they hold.

The writer pretty much comes to the same conclusion about ALEX that I stated in my two articles about ALEX, here and here.  I am just putting his article on the blog because it lets me know that I am doing something right if I come to the same conclusions as a CFA.

Two more free digital magazines

The first free magazine is the Valuewalk Daily.  It aggregates information about world news, business, the economy, investing, etc.

The second free magazine is from the CFA Institute.  It mostly talks about things that are going on in the investing world, companies, analysis, the Chinese economy, etc.  Looks to have some very valuable information in it.

I hope you enjoy.