If you're interested in joining up with like-minded beginner (mostly) value investors, send me an email at lporayko@gmail.com and I'll send you an invitation back. All of our discussions are kept on the VCIC website for future reference. There is a files section where I upload selected investing gems. When I have time, I throw together an informal newsletter with one or two stocks that I've been studying-- mostly for further discussion.
Most of us are not interested in "hot stocks" or buying the latest trend (gold?) so if that's your bent, you probably will find it frustrating. It's my experience that your brain is either wired to be a value investor or you are destined to follow the crowd as a momentum investor. This is why certain value gurus like Bruce Berkowitz, Warren Buffett and Seth Klarman (my 3 favourites, can you tell?) are so open about their analysis techniques and even concerning the stocks that they've bought recently.
From Klarman's "Margin of Safety":
"You may be wondering, as several of my friends have, why I would write a book that could encourage more people to become value investors. Don't I run the risk of encouraging increased competition, thereby reducing my own investment returns? Perhaps, but I do not believe this will happen. For one thing, value investing is not being discussed here for the first time. While I have tried to build the case for it somewhat differently from my predecessors and while my precise philosophy may vary from that of other value investors, a number of these
views have been expressed before, notably by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, who more than fifty years ago wrote Security Analysis, regarded by many as the bible of value investing.
That single work has illuminated the way for generations of value investors. More recently Graham wrote The Intelligent Investor, a less academic description of the value-investment process. Warren Buffett, the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc., and a student of Graham, is regarded as today's most successful
value investor. He has written countless articles and shareholder and partnership letters that together articulate his value-investment philosophy coherently and brilliantly. Investors who have failed to heed such wise counsel are unlikely to listen to me."
People can make money using either approach. I think that you make a mistake when you develop "style drift" away from what suits you best, but that's a different whole discussion. I also think that momentum investing is too difficult for me. I'm just not smart enough to figure out group psychology, particularly on that scale. I'll leave that to George Soros, who obviously can.
I plan to track the performance of all the stocks that we discuss in a spread sheet every 6 months. Clearly, the best way to learn is to get continuous feedback- on our objective performance as well as from level headed colleagues that you respect.
l
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