Let me print that comment, grab a cup of coffee by the fire, and get to reading. I did implement the next/back link (sorry you had to change the address 100 times!). I will get back to you on the rest.

I found this site on Friday and spent the weekend and the early part of this week reading every post and all the comments – from blog post #1 through #115. I’ve never found a site that has enticed me to do that before. Kudos to you, Joe, for creating such a rich content site that cuts through a lot of crap. Kudos also to many of the posters, who have created what seems to be a knowledgeable and incredibly polite group of folks (in all 100 posts, only a handful of posters I wouldn’t invite out for a beer – which maybe speaks to my proclivity for beer but…). Kudos to me, for (finally) asking the right question that brought me here. That question: “how much is a company worth”.

My two sentence sum up of my investing history follows, skip it if you’ve heard it all before (trust me, you’ve heard it all before – probably over a beer). Started making money in 2000, and investing because that’s what everybody did. Got stock tips from dad/uncle/best friend. Lost ~80% of invested money in 2001-2002. Put that 20% in mutual funds in 2002, because that was ’safe’. Still have that 20% of money, and not many pennies more. Realized there must be a better way, and realized that the way to invest is to figure out what a company is worth. Otherwise, you are just guessing, like Joe’s friend that was recently mentioned, who kept thinking company X was a great buy because it kept dropping from $100 to $96 to $whatever. Oh boy, do I remember that. I was lucky, I learned that lesson right away. For me, it was SUNW in 2001. $30 to $20 to $10 to $5… That drove home the investors adage “never try and catch a falling knife.” Afterwards it went something like: I get it, I get it, can I have my hand back now… Okay, I’ve exceeding the two sentences I had allotted myself.

So, how do you value a company.

I understand the model you’ve presented. I’ve worked some examples. I haven’t run Sanjay’s screen (very cool) because I want to really understand the model first (i.e., given any model is just a bunch of assumptions – I want to test them before using it blindly). That’s what I want to talk about here: model assumptions. The model is incredibly sensitive to growth rate of FCF. For example, someone in the comments mentioned Teva Pharm (TEVA), an Israeli drug maker, so lets use that as an example. The FCF growth is through the roof, with a median of 60%. 60% is pretty staggering and implies a doubling of the company’s FCF every 1.75 years. If we use that number, we’ll get a share price that’s as high as we want. But even if we cut that number in half, we get a very high share price. The only way to get the company to be realistically valued today (i.e., today’s stock prices are within spitting distance – still discounted – but close) is to use a growth rate of 20%, 1/3 of the median. So the model is sensitive to the rate, obviously, and so the key question is what rate do we use. You (Joe) actually discuss this with Google as an example (post #76 – the search feature is awesome, by the way*), and say that this ‘rapid growth’ problem can be dealt with by looking at – and using – median CROIC growth. The spreadsheet (for the JNJ example at least), however, uses median growth of FCF. So when to use which, or is it a judgement call. For my TEVA example, median CROIC is ~7%, giving us an overvalued share price at ~$50 (fairly valued at $36). That’s a big spread – from $36 to $several hundred, as the fair value of a piece of this rapidly growing, relatively solid company. The comments in that post (#76) actually get at this question, but I’d like to hear your take (i.e., how do you choose a growth rate, given the big spread for TEVA, or GOOG). Or, do you say (as you might), exercise the power of no and look for companies with high CROIC too (e.g., AEO has 18.5% median CROIC, so it’s a good deal no matter how you slice it, at least, according to this model…). Still, TEVA would have been a pretty smoking deal over the past 10 years, given that it has been returning 15% for that many years. You’d probably answer: ‘don’t worry, you’ll miss many smoking deals. You’ll also miss many that are smoking cause they crashed and burned…’

Oh, yes, one more question, and then I’ll wrap up. Over the past half year, you’ve produced a handful of graphs that show price following value. I’d like to see how you’re calculating that so I can try it for myself on companies. In each case, do you use the data that would have been available then (and how do you get that data?) or are you looking at today’s data.

By the way, Joe, congratulations on your baby. We’ve also recently had our second (in early December) and I’m impressed (amazed) that it hasn’t slowed down your posting much. All the best.

*It seems I arrived at a time of some reorganization. I like the clean aesthetics of the blog. I liked it better without the ads (on Friday when I found it) and would have been/would be psyched to contribute to the blog sans ads. That said, the ads are very understated. I will reveal my elitist snobby side and say that I think it will be increasingly complex to “scale up” a blog like this while maintaining the comments virtually troll free. My most favorite online communities have some membership requirement that is linked to real world friends and acquaintances.

Also: It would be extra awesome to have a button for “next blog post”, “previous blog post”, rather than changing numbers in the address bar as I did, some 115 times

I did enjoy the “old” design, but I think this is a lot more user friendly for new folks as well as regulars.

I, one the other hand, think the layout and changes look great.

Some people just don’t like change.

As the owner of a web business myself, it always makes me roll my eyes to see people criticize a free service, when they’ve been eating at the banquet without contributing a dish themselves.

[Sorry D, had to cut this last part out. -Joe]

hate the new layout, your site looks ugly and amateurish.

RSS is a nice touch tho, so i guess i wont even see your layout anymore LOL.

If you’re using Firefox and the ads bother you, you can install the Adblock(https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865) extension which will block the ads on this website and pretty much every other one.

Sorry Joe, I’d love to support the site, but I’m not likely to click on any of the ads anyway. I’m still waiting for the Favorite Books post

As for the guy measuring his belly (no, it’s not me), I cracked up when I saw it. I have to leave it, at least for now.