I work as an active value investor. I look for companies that the market is valuing at less than my own assessment of the company’s intrinsic value by a wide enough margin of safety. I look for businesses that I can understand (what are main forces that affect the business, how does it make money, what are main risks, etc.) and that are solid business (either profitable, or growing, or preferably both).
I wanted to include pointers to my favorite investing resources, but this is hard since so much depends on the audience. Here are some book lists compiled by others:
- Jason Zweig (an excellent columnist with the WSJ): a Short Shelf, and Five Books
- Shane Parrish (Farnam Street has an excellent newsletter and podcast): 12 Books
- Meb Faber (has an very good podcast): Learning to Invest
Investing links: There are tons and tons of investing sites. The hard part is finding signals that are relevant to you in all the noise. Here are a few sites that are useful for active investors doing their own analysis:
- Shawn Allen is a Canadian stock picker with a good sense of value
- Corner of Berkshire and Fairfax has an interesting forum
- Pretty well anything written by Warren Buffett
- The ideas in Chapters 8 & 20 of Graham’s “The Intelligent Investor” are still fundamental, and this is re-inforced by the fact that most people seem to ignore them in practice
- There is a great community of financial people on Twitter (so-called FinTwit).