I've been a value investor for approximately 10 years. I try to do things the Warren Buffett way and I learned my technique through a great Value Investor in the US called Phil Town. He's written a series of "how to" books and you can find all his stuff here. Last year I finally made the trip from Switzerland to Peachtree City to put myself through the intensive but rewarding 3 day, free (yes FREE) workshop that he runs several times a year. I would recommend it to everyone and Phil and his family also put on a great BBQ on the Saturday afternoon.
Since the end of 2017, I've added writing options as a complimentary strategy to the original strategy from his first book Rule #1. A great way to get your stock and cash working for you! The best book I've found for learning the option strategies is, the unfortunately titled, Getting Rich with Options by Lee Lowell Sources for getting the raw data has changed a lot over the last 11 years, I've constantly had to scour the internet for new sources as websites change and/or disappear. You can simply use Phil Town's official toolbox that he mainly created for himself, it can be found on his main site at https://www.ruleoneinvesting.com - the cost is $30 a month and it's very good for the exact strategy that he describes in his books. If you're looking to learn how to work out MOS, growth rates and where to find specific line items, you might initially not want all the work done for you. It was definitely like this for me 10 years ago when I started, I wanted to figure everything out myself and get spreadsheets up and running. The books, certainly earlier edition ones, mention using Yahoo Finance and MSN, however, in recent years, the sites have changed, MSN no longer delivers 10 years worth of numbers and analyst estimates. Now you can get analyst estimates from Yahoo instead (ironically). Gurufocus is a great site, you have to pay to get 10 years worth of numbers and all the additional guru analysis is excellent. http://www.stock2own.com is done in a slightly different way, trying to deliver a solution out of the box, originally designed and put together by Alex Bugrimenko who read Rule #1 and attended the workshop in Peachtree. You can read about how he puts the numbers together in the FAQ http://www.stock2own.com/About/FAQ With the free morningstar subscription https://www.morningstar.com/ you can receive some numbers, I'll often double check 10 years worth of PE ratios here. My favourite site at the moment, and my GOTO source of information has to be https://stockrow.com/ - this site has 10 years worth of numbers for all metrics required for the Rule #1 MOS calculation. It's simply fantastic. Any of these sites, or companies that host these numbers can change in an instant, without warning or notice. The 10 years worth of numbers on MSN disappearing was a big pain for years. It can take a while scrambling around for new sources of information. I used to use Google Finance to track my portfolio, last year they killed it. I've now moved everything to spreadsheets (ironically, again - Google Sheets) where the =googlefinance functions allow you to track your portfolio live without having to open your trading account. And always remember the numbers from all these sites are not guaranteed, the golden source of information are still companies' 10k reports which you can find on the SEC site or the company's investor relations part of their website. I would be interested to know if anybody else knows any other good sources that they have found invaluable over the years.
2 Comments
A couple of weeks ago, I was in London for a birthday party, after planning out my trip, I realized that I would be travelling through Liverpool Street Station in London. I've been meaning to go there for a while, while living in Wädenswil and taking the dogs walking in Reidholz, we met a fellow dog walker who became a good friend, and told us that her husband also speaks "a bit of English". Turns out his English is better than most native English speakers. As we got to know them, we found out that, as he is quite old, he had to escape the Nazis in Cologne during World War II. His story is quite remarkable, most of his family were murdered by the Nazis and he and his sister managed to escape on the Kindertransport He was essentially a refugee coming into the UK with zero English back in the early 1940s. He was quite young, no adults were accompanying him, apart from his sister who was also very young, his family was gone, his future was completely unknown and he had no immediate prospects. Over the years he built a successful business in the UK, employing dozens of people. Eventually he had children, multiple-fold more successful that he was who employed thousands of people. Today he lives in Switzerland helping young artists around the world chase their dreams through his art foundation in Zürich. I've attached pictures of the beautiful monuments at Liverpool Street Station, created as a thanks to the UK people for saving 10'000 German speaking children during WWII. The monuments are beautiful and poignant and I would recommend anyone to go and check them out. May he live many more years, and may we continue to be kind and warm hearted to those that need it in times of crises! I was watching Microsoft Build 2017 with some interest Sunday evening, listening to how much their Cloud offering had been taken up by 90% of the companies in the Fortune 500, which for me, means most of these companies must be using both Microsoft Azure as well as Amazon's AWS. My assumption, from this kind of very high uptake, is that there's a lot of experimentation and "pilots" going on within Fortune 500 companies as Amazon AWS has the Cloud lead by a margin.
There was a lot more information to digest, some of it clearly exposing how out-of-date my technological knowledge is, and some embarrassing, if not slightly humorous demos of AI tracking people and jackhammers. The biggest thing that hit me, but also at the same time nearly passed me by, was that one of Microsoft's Cognitive Services, the Speech Recognition Technology, was now beating humans - according to the Switchboard speech recognition benchmark test. This has to be seen as an incredible achievement, I personally didn't think we would get to this level of speech recognition for a good number years into the future. Transhumanists often talk about the point of singularity, there has been a lot of talk about what happens when machines become better than humans. A lot of this talk is quite general and not talk about a particular niche. Tim Urban wrote a wonderful, and very long, post on his Wait But Why blog about this, and explored how it could have an impact on humans. Clearly this kind of AI currently needs to be kept alive by humans and technology companies. As soon as we ignore it, abandon it, shut down the servers or delete the code, the technology could become redundant and forgotten. I do not believe that AI is keeping this AI technology alive, ....yet! It did not really occur to me that the point of singularity would come to me in many stages, for example this, followed by something else, then some other thing, until the point where AI is better than us in every cognitive sense. But I guess this is how it's going to happen. These are like mini singularity moments, I like to call them Solo Singularity Events, Many Solo Singularity Events will lead to the Point of Singularity. But for now, one thing looks a certainty, from this day on, computers will always be better than humans at recognizing and transcribing speech. On Friday evening, I attended the Context Driven Testing Meetup in Zürich, a MeetUp group that's organized by Ilari Henrik Aegerter, a co-founder of the International Society for Software Testing. This was the 4th MeetUp by the group, the previous 3 I unfortunately missed. The group currently has 59 members (or Testers) and promotes Context Driven Testing over traditional testing models that we already know about. Ilari has worked with Swiss Re in the past. In 2013, Testing Service had half a day with him examining context driven testing techniques and how it's not always a good idea to follow traditional testing methodologies or attempt to blanket automate everything. The evening was held in the Appway offices on Lessingstrasse in Zürich and about 15 people attended. Ilari walked through his presentation on Observation. He started with one of the most commonly known optical illusions, a double-ended arrow along side another double-ended arrow with the arrow ends pointing inward. Of course, the center lines in the images are always the same length, and professional testers like us are not going to be fooled by silly well known optical illusions. We were all in agreement. We were challenged a little bit "are we sure they're the same length", "what would we do as testers?", "we would measure it!" was our resounding response, smiling smug faces all around. As this was been done with an overhead projector and the image was quite large on the wall, one of the group started to doubt the common belief and thought there might be something fishy going on, so he got up out of his chair, took my umbrella as a measuring device, and lo and behold, the lines were a different length, like in the example above I might add! Here were a few other examples, like what can we see from the two images below. Of course we can see a lot of black and white patches, but the human brain works in such a way, that we eventually spot the real images.
There is a point to this and a message to testers. Just from the 3 different images above, I can draw the following conclusions.
There were many other aspects to the evening that were of interest and I can strongly recommend the MeetUp group for those of you in Zürich, developers also attended. Happy testing! This is my first post of what will eventually become andyorange.com. I've created andyorange.com mainly for me but I'm happy to have my views out there in the wild.
On the website you'll find content that's relevant to things I'm interested in, I'll try to make it varied and interesting and I'll using as many weebly controls as possible. Sometimes I have crazy or terribly boring ideas. I get frustrated when I forget about them or don't write them down so I've finally decide to create something to store my ideas - it just do happens that they will be public as well. :-) For those of you that know me from the past, you know that I used to write about snooker at greenbaize.blogspot.com. I shared greenbaize with the fantastic cue sportsman, Jonni Fulcher. But after a while I got tired of only writing about snooker and found that I wanted to share my views on many other things. Here you will not find views on any one particular subject. I still have thoughts on snooker and the state of the game, but I have other passions like consumer technology, formula 1, investing and other stuff. I will leave comments open, I will generally allow trolling but will probably ignore it. Positive comments will be very welcome and I'm happy to have open discussions, even heated ones, but at the end of the day, it's only a blog, and anything can be changed, edited or deleted. |
AuthorHere you will see my own views only. I've been told to write this. I don't always do what people tell me to do. Archives
February 2019
Categories
All
|