oddballstocks

I'd say it depends on the company and location. Obvious (or not) the further from a big city the less dressed up a place is going to be. So if you're in a small town in Kansas for a small company a suit is overkill. Here is a random guide I made up but I think is appropriate: Manufacturing - Business casual, or dress pants + dress shirt, tie optional (suits are for bankers and lawyers at the meeting, they'll be readily identifiable.) A tech company - You'd probably be fine wearing jeans and a dress shirt. Insurance/Bank/Finance - Suit, unless this is a community bank annual meeting, and if it's in a small town maybe lose the coat. A major company - Are you also a major shareholder, then see below, otherwise; doesn't matter, they don't care about you or your input, maybe wear a body suit, at least they'd remember you. You're under 23 - Wear anything, you're young and people will underestimate you no matter what you wear. Really young and a suit, looks like you're ready to sell an annuity. You work for a bank - Are you allowed to wear anything but a suit? Better check with compliance You work for a small fund - Dress up, you want to impress this holding and hopefully work with them in the future. You work for a major fund - Wear whatever, you own enough shares that you've got the execs by the balls anyways, dress doesn't matter. You're a retiree and long time shareholder - Anything from a Hawaiian shirt and shorts to a dressy outfit works, the reverse of the 23 year old, no matter what you wear you'll be respected (unless you're wearing one of those goofy safari hats too.)

I think you'll find a lot more wealth created by people who started and owned businesses rather than people who invested their way to riches. Even the well known "hero" investors aren't rich because of their investments, they're rich because they're in the investment business. Their results have driven their success, but if they were sitting at home with their own capital they wouldn't have anywhere close to what they have now. I'd actually be curious for anyone on the board, any names of investors who are completely self made? I mean they started with a nominal savings, never managed any money and invested their way to multi-millionare status?

http://valueinvestingfrance.blogspot.com/ Two posts on Vivendi, he posted both in English this time due to the response. As a side note I really like that blog, on the ground view of some French small caps.

I have two recommended readings on how companies with moats utterly destroyed themselves and shareholder value along with it. Billion Dollar Lessons And the Wolf Finally Came Both great reads, nothing lasts forever!

I've found two decent French small caps and I was wondering if anyone here had experience with them. Both are Graham type stocks, and one is very slightly above NCAV. For anyone else with Europe experience, any details on Alternext you can give me? I guess the moral of the story is if you somehow qualify respond and I'll PM you. Thanks!

I guess the question I'd ask is why do you want to do this? Do you want to manage money because you love investing? Why not just manage your own money especially if the money you'd be managing is family money. I've found that family and money don't go well together. Everyone always seems to think their situation is different, but I have yet to see a relationship not changed when these two come together. I know this is unorthodox on this board, but when family asks me for investing advice I direct them to index funds. It's like the saying "no one ever got fired for buying IBM." Sure they're not going to beat the market, yet they won't do worse either, and it's no stress. Do you want to manage money because you're good at sales and you want to run a business? These are the skills you need, it's much easier to grow AUM by finding new clients rather than beating the market. When starting out with a few million it's a lot easier to find a few new clients and double your AUM vs having your portfolio gain 100%. Starting out you'd spend a lot more time marketing and meeting with new clients rather than bunkering down finding investments. When you manage money you are running a business. If you just want to do investments for fun with friends maybe an investment club is appropriate. Tim said it well, book keeping, legal, compliance costs. These things will take your time away from managing money but are all necessary. In the eyes of the law the compliance and legal are the most important things, if you don't get those right you're out of business or in jail. I think you really need to think long and hard about why you'd want to do this. I get asked every once in a while why I don't manage money and it's because I've sat down and thought it through. I don't think I could gather enough AUM quickly enough to support my family, and I'm not sure I want to run an investment business. So instead I do what I enjoy, researching and writing about investments and investing my own capital. There is a fantasy out there about turning passions into businesses. People think they'll get to do their passion 100% of the time and it's a slam dunk. What I've found is that usually the passion gets shrunk down to 50-60% at the most and the day to day running of the business, hiring, firing, accounting, sales takes over the rest. It seems the longer someone stays in business the smaller portion of their day is that actual passion they started for. If your passion is running a business there are thousands of companies that will compensate you very well for doing this without any of the startup risk. If you happen to have a passion for running a company, and a passion for some hobby that makes money (investing in your case) and they intersect you have the potential to be successful. I've seen a lot of entrepreneurs burn out because they become consumed with the stuff they hate and don't get to do the stuff they love and the reason they started their company.

I work from home in my pajamas, and I'm not Monish :) For some people it works, for some not. I would not have it any other way, personally. I work from home as well, and my family's at home during the day. There's work that needs to get done so I just do it. There is a 'fantasy' to it for the first week or so, all the around the house distractions. Those go away and then it's just the normal routine.

I use Fidelity, just got an annual report in the mail today incidentally. Any reason you're with MerrillEdge? From what I've seen they cost more and have less features than other brokers. Just curious.

I know with my broker there's a place in their online system where you can set your preference. I get all my confirms electronically but everything else on paper. I agree about reading annual reports on paper, much easier. I have some stranger stocks as well so I like to have a library of hard to get annual reports, paper copy is the best for those.

Also don't discount the role genes play in longevity. Almost everyone in my mom's family has lived deep into their 90s which I'd consider a nice long life. What I find fascinating is none of them exercised, they didn't eat any sort of special diet outside of buttery, fatty ethnic food, especially baked goods. It is almost like whatever they did to try to kill themselves early didn't work, they just kept living. On the other hand the other side of my family was all very athletic and would be considered very healthy, doing the right things. That side of my family is plagued with health issues and there's no longevity at all. I look at the things I do, exercise, eating healthy etc not as something that will prolong my life but rather something so that I can enjoy life more now. I gain more in the present by being in shape than I will in the future depending on which side my genes come from. I feel better from eating better. A key is moderation. An overweight person or obese person is a prisoner to their appetite. A health nut is a prisoner to a dogma about nutrition. I don't want to be a prisoner to either, I want to enjoy life. You can do all the right things and die in a car crash or of cancer at age 45. Or you can do all the wrong things and live into your 90s. Life can be cruel like that, if you're putting yourself through a crazy routine now so that you can gain a few years in your 80s and 90s remember that nothing is guaranteed.

Agreed, you need to be able to read an annual report and quarterlies cover to cover buy this doesn't mean you need to be able to read through AIG's 10-K. Not sure where you're located, I've found non-US reports to be much more readable than US reports. SEC filings contain a ton of boilerplate text. There's a lot of paragraphs you need to read three times to understand. Most non-US reports are a lot shorter as well although once you get into the mega-cap realm they start to become similar sized. I guess the bottom line from this thread is if you don't enjoy reading value investing probably isn't your thing. There are plenty of traders and quants who've done quite well for themselves without ever opening a 10k!

Are you wondering if investing will be a good career fit or if value investing in and of itself is a good fit? As for right/left brain I am by far a more right brained person. In all those psychological fit tests I'm always a big picture thinker, hates details which is actually mostly true. I seem to do alright investing, I'm mindful of the details but I don't get stuck in them. When I was in college I debated on majors between music, psychology, sociology and systems analysis. I talked to some professors in the sociology and psychology departments and they said take the degree that makes money, so I majored in systems analysis with a minor in sociology. I'd say I use a lot more of what I learned in sociology day to day, the degree made me think differently about things which is very useful. I think in the end you need to find an investment style that fits you. Sounds like you enjoy event driven investments, dig deep into those and see how things turn out. I'm with you, I'd go crazy reading some of the bigger 10-Ks. There's a thread about some BAC warrants that requires digging through some crazy prospectus. Good luck to those investors I hope they are rewarded but I'll take a pass on that one. I'd start out, read 10-15 pages, start to daydream and miss some important detail. I know I have this flaw so I can work with it. I've also created an investment process for myself that compensates for this and reduces the amount of time I spend reading through annual reports for companies I never end up purchasing. I like small caps, they're easy to understand, easy to read the reports, and easy to think about the business aspects of them. I'll really buy anything that's attractive and relatively simple. Maybe someday I'll be forced to invest in complex things, but so far the simple investments have worked out well. I try to buy companies with a margin of safety and positive cash flow. Of course this is all my opinion and what do I know, I'm just some dude who writes about investing on the internet. If you're looking for career advice on Wall Street I have none. I'd say find a job that is somewhat enjoyable (afterall it's a job, not fun) and will provide for your family and doesn't require 100% of your waking hours. If you're thinking about a career a lot of people can tell you what to expect on this board.

Sounds like we have similar interests, I love backpacking and I agree it's hard to eat enough while hiking. I've done Wyoming and then a TON of stuff in PA and WV. It's a lot easier to get away local with a family. I'm up in the air on weight loss, I lost a bunch of weight last year by doing the two classic things, exercise more, and eat less. I didn't watch what I ate I just ate less. I will say I have a good starting point, my wife cooks everything from scratch, and she makes healthy meals. That said even a lot of healthy food and sitting all day can add up to weight gain. It didn't happen fast but over probably 7 or 8 years I added a lot more weight than I wanted. I ran in high school and biked on and off out of college. I started to run again and increased both the frequency and intensity. I started biking a lot more as well. The exercise plus less calories consumed and the weight melted away, literally. There's a lot of science on this thread, but I think the basic facts can't be denied, if you consume less than you burn you will lose weight. Exercise helps in burning more calories by building up muscle. I realize there are all sorts of crazy things you can do to fine tune your diet, coconut oil in tea, certain types of cooking oil etc. I'm sure at some point that makes a difference but for the vast majority of Americans they just need to eat less, and a lot less and get out and walk some. One thing I always keep in mind as well, for all the fine tuning health stuff sometimes it doesn't matter. A friend's dad just died, he was in his late 50s, just collapsed while running. He was the epitome of healthy, fit, worked out, no known health issues etc. At some point the body is just going to give out, and all the eating right in the world or exercise can't prevent it. I try to be healthy, but I also want to enjoy life. I'll have an ice cream cone or a beer and I don't feel guilty about it.

I read his 2002 edition probably back in 2006, it really opened my eyes to what could be done with accounting. I don't think I ever looked at a company the same afterwards. I think there's a newer edition out, not sure if the examples are updated or not. The interview was good, he really hit on some current issues, I liked the examples. I think a lot of investor's returns would be helped if they approached companies with a much more skeptical outlook especially with regards to the accounting.

From what I've read and understand doing this is illegal, copyright infringement. A company's annual report and quarterly reports are copyrighted material. The figures inside are not, but the actual presentation and format are. So this means if you took the figures in the annual report, transposed them and wrote up your own summary of the company it's fine. If you just posted what the company published it's not. This is how books can publish this information, it's the figures, and summary level info.

Yes, in theory this is just fetching data and putting it in a nice readable format. The problem is where does the data come from? I would say probably 85% of the companies in Walkers are truly unlisted by that I mean the only way to get financials is to buy a share and call the CFO/COO and ask for them to mail you the most current annual report. To complicate this a lot of the shares trade infrequently, so you will have all these bids sitting out there for months just trying to get information. Another issue is some shares aren't cheap, like $1,000/sh and up. There's the Indianapolis minor league team listed, their shares are $40,000/sh. So you need to plunk down $40k, and hope your bid fills just to get the latest numbers. What happens when you finally get your share and realize they're on death's door? The amount of work to compile a volume isn't cheap. There are some other threads on this board that discuss this, just search Walkers Manual. I've tossed around the idea, and still plan on starting up a small site where like minded unlisted investors can share relevant data for companies they're aware of. Even something simple like a P/E or last year's dividend or cash flow is really helpful in narrowing down companies to research further. I think this is a really good market if you want to get your feet wet with real research, and I mean thinking outside the box research. For example I was able to find out about one company's land value by researching a bond offering by the local fire department. The bond offering had the largest tax payers in the city and the company and their assessed value was listed. I try to write up really interesting companies that I find in Walkers on my blog (linked under my username). I've ended up emailing with a group of investors who all invest in this same realm, I've traded some annual reports which is nice. The funny thing is for the 400 companies in Walkers it seems that the cream rises to the top, I'd say most of the people I've talked to who invest in true unlisted stocks are all aware of the same 20-30 companies or so and are investors in different numbers of them. As for your question about the Walkers data being old. Yes it's old but it's useful. So my theory was overcapitalized companies in 2003 would be overcapitalized now, that was right. Companies that were quality then are still running at mostly the same level. These are family businesses, the types of companies you'd see in a small industrial park in the Midwest. I've got a small library of annual reports, I have had fills on three companies recently and since it's annual report season I'm just waiting for those to be mailed. Am I insane? Maybe, I've got $290 tied up in companies that I know nothing about (1 share orders). $290 is a lot to pay, so would I pay someone $100 to put this in a book, yes. I don't think there are enough actual investors out there who are willing to do it though.

Yup.. Walkers Manual for Unlisted stocks. The latest edition is from 2003 and as far as I can tell they're sold out online. Your best bet is probably going to a local library, I searched the Pennsylvania libraries and there's a copy at a library a few towns away. Also check university libraries. Just a note probably 40% of the companies or more in there are no longer listed, so the biggest time sink is entering the ticker into otcbb.com just to see if the company even trades still. The last 100 pages of the book are community banks, a lot of those banks have been swallowed up, and the metrics aren't really comparable to now.

I'm actually surprised at the low amount of NY,NY responses. I figured most people would be from money centers, Toronto, New York, London. The responses are actually that most people aren't from those places which is really refreshing to see.

Opportunities arise when lots of holders sell en masse, which is an act of capitulation. Owners feel it after giving up on all reasons to hold. I try to invert this process, and think about purchases in terms of capitulation: what am I compelled to buy, after giving up on all reasons for not holding? This dramatically shrinks the universe of worthwhile purchase opportunities, which it seems to me, is the way it ought to be. I've gone this route, I can't find any possible reason to not invest, I can't kill the idea. Even if there is a queasy factor (usually good) then I throw some money at it. I've done the worst it seems when I've felt the best about an idea, I'm usually over confident. If I feel queasy about something but I know I've done my research that's usually a good sign. I remember hearing a quote saying something to the effect that a value investment that doesn't make you question your sanity might not be a real value investment. I've purchased a few of those situations, they've turned out really well. My slam dunks...uh, well let's forget about those.

I have very loosely followed Best Buy over the past year, mostly through investors who trumpet some stats and say they're too cheap to ignore. I saw this article this morning: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/best-buy-shutter-50-big-120457157.html Here's a different article saying they'll be selling phones: http://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2012/03/29/death-of-best-buys-big-box-store-company-will-shift-to-new-model-close-50-existing-stores/?partner=yahootix Looks like revenue is dropping and BBY is trying to re-tool their strategy to be mobile stores. This sounds really similar to what Radio Shack did, they abandoned their core business and went mobile. Granted this seemed to work out fine, no one's buying CB radios anymore and cell phones are big. I guess my question is what do people think of this, is BBY a value trap, or is this a sustainable strategy?

Montreal, nice.. J'habite a Pittsburgh, PA

I second MrB's recommendation, nothing works like the good old informational interview. People LOVE to talk about themselves and give advice. I would meet with people, ask them about their experiences, what they think is important in the industry and how they'd go about getting a job if they were in your shoes. I'd also think about bringing a sample of some of your ideas in case someone asks.

I think this is in the cards as well, but my view is that this won't be some sort of cataclysmic meltdown a lot of people seem to be hoping expecting. Let's say the Yen drops 40% that would put it at 112 Yen/USD. This would put the Yen right back where it was at the end of 2007 beginning of 2008. This is also the same level it was for most of the last decade when the Japanese market sustained quite a rally. Just trying to keep things in perspective. My own perspective is this will be good for equities and a hedged foreign investor. Any easy hedging ideas for a retail investor? Right now I purchased a call on the short yen ETF as a short term stop gap until I can figure out something a bit longer term.

It's just the manic-depressive nature of the markets. You are just watching it in action. ECRI and Hussman are probably correct in their assessment, but missed the timing. The problem with forecasting is that you will be correct eventually...be it in a week or 70 years...the problem is the little gap in between! That's why investors should ignore the markets and focus on individual stocks only. After significant runs, start looking at obscure investments. We are back to hunting for unloved, small, distressed businesses...not companies you would find in the broader market. There were people screaming on here that a few of us were wrong, that the S&P500 was at historical highs on profit margins, that macroeconomic events were ominous, that the Fed was running a ponzi scheme...you name it. My argument was always I'm buying individual securities, not the market, so I don't give a rat's ass! But I always get more cautious when everyone else starts joining me...thus as the margin of safety diminishes relative to intrinsic value, I start pulling back. Cheers! Agreed 100%. I also like buying family businesses, ones that have been around for years. These are the sorts of companies that can pump out a steady return regardless of the market. Management has seen everything, they know their market, they know their clients they just keep executing. A lot of investors are scared of family held companies worried that the family will cut and run with the money. I figure if they haven't cut and ran in the last 20 years what makes today any different? Small obscure stocks are my bread and butter, lots of family held companies in there as well.