Folks – as you can imagine, I have been busy ripping through annual reports and financial statements like crazy. Hence the irregularity to my posting. Back in October of last year, I had a lot of time on my hands – the effects of a high market and few opportunities.…
Phil Fisher laid out fifteen points to look for in a common stock; three of them are directly related to profit margins. Calculated as net income divided by revenue, the profit margin is a quick way to determine which companies in an industry are most efficient (i) relative to the…
You’ve heard the clichés: He could sell ice to an Eskimo. She could sell a ketchup popsicle to a woman in white gloves. The sales force is the lifeblood of an organization. After all, the best product in the world is worthless if nobody knows about it. And so, we…
Today’s research and development (R&D) is tomorrow’s new product or process. The other day we (or more specifically, Phil Fisher) asked, “Does the management have a determination to continue to develop products or processes that will still further increase total sales potentials when the growth potentials of currently attractive product…
Businesses generally expand in three ways – increased sales of existing products, sales (and increased sales) of new products, and acquisitions to expand product lines. We looked at “increased sales of existing products” in Can They Increase Sales For Several Years? Fisher then went on to talk about “sales (and…
Back in April, Lawrence Cunningham, editor of The Essays of Warren Buffett, emailed me to tell me about the (then) upcoming release of the second edition of the book. (We all know what a nightmare April and May were for me. Sorry, Larry, for the delay.) In this new edition,…
In Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, Phil Fisher outlined fifteen points to look for when analyzing a company for purchase. When valuing a business, our job is to try and predict the future with a degree of accuracy and confidence. If it were as easy as plugging the financials into…
When you buy stock in a company, how long do you plan on holding it? Forever. Ideally, yes. But we live in the real world – a world of wildly fluctuating stock prices that often turns otherwise sane investors into panicky, self-doubting lemmings. As stock prices drop…lower…lower…people tend to second-guess…
On October 15, 2007, I took a look at Nutrisystem (NTRI) about two weeks after a 25% drop. Running a fairly conservative analysis (in my opinion), I pegged the company as a $38 or so company. Add in a little uncertainty and a 50% margin of safety, and I said…
Building on a theme started back in March (How Bad Will This Get), I think it is safe to say that the US economy is weakening. We can choose to ignore the fact that millions of homeowners have zero equity and super-high mortgage payments they can’t afford; we can pretend…