Investors should Stay with What They Know

KNOWING A COMPANY

Knowing a company involves research as well as personal experience and successful investors approach share investment the way that they would the purchase of a business.

They buy a business in an industry area that they know or that they have learned about, they investigate the financials, they look at how the business operated in the past, they weigh up future potential, and they then make a reasoned decision to buy at the price offered or not buy.

Just as the cobbler should stick to his last, investors should stay with what they know. They should not stray into areas beyond their expertise. As Warren Buffett said in 1992:

‘What counts for most people in investing is not how much they know, but rather how realistically they define what they don’t know.’

Robert Hagstrom has looked extensively at Warren Buffett’s investments over the years and agrees that Buffett has made it his business to understand the business of the companies where he puts the money of Berkshire Hathaway. According to Hagstrom, Buffett:

‘understands the revenues, expenses, cash flow, labor relations flexibility and capital-allocation needs of each of Berkshire’s holdings.’

Hagstrom argues that the prudent individual investor should do no less.

Identify the Right Company

How Conscious Investor Helps You Identify the Right Company
-- and What Price to Pay for It.

Conscious Investor® is a sophisticated, yet user-friendly, analysis tool that has been designed to allow all investors to follow a systematic, business-like approach to buying and selling stocks.

Until now, selecting outstanding companies and calculating what price to pay for them has been excessively challenging and time consuming, if not downright impossible.

Conscious Investor® completely changes the face of the selection process, and gives you an edge that has never before been available to ordinary investors. You will quickly gain immunity from all the conflicting opinions expressed daily by the talking heads, the gurus, the newsletters, and even your neighbors.

1. The first step is to scan individual sectors, or even the whole market, to find the small minority of stocks that meet our stringent “Buffett-style” criteria. This scanning combines crucial company information with proprietary tools to estimate future profitability of an investment in any of the companies.

These scanners alone will save you literally hours of time researching potentially wealth-eroding companies.

2. The second step is to perform more analyses on any of the companies that have been passed through the initial filters.

3. The third step is calculating the right price to pay. This is where the power of Conscious Investor really comes to the fore. It is not a question of whether a stock is undervalued or overvalued according to some theoretical model. Rather, what Conscious Investor does is calculate precisely what return you can expect under your own margin of safety.

http://www.conscious-investor.com/whatis/identify.asp



The next step is to use Conscious Investor to do further analysis on the companies that have lasted to this point. This is followed by the third step to determine if now is the time to buy stock in the remaining companies or to sell them if they are already in your portfolio.

If the current price is still too high to make a purchase (remember Warren Buffett says that you can pay too much for even the best of companies), then Conscious Investor will help you calculate a target price . This is the maximum price that you can pay to get your desired return under your margin of safety.

Similarly, if you are thinking of selling the stock, but the price is still too low, Conscious Investor will help you calculate a target price for selling.