My Latest Efforts
A quick point of clarification to subscribers of my newsletter: Some of you have written specific questions to me asking what percentage of a portfolio should go into a specific recommendation, what...
View ArticleThe Foregone Riches of Blue-Chip Value Investing
There are some people who look at The NASDAQ Index taking fifteen years to pass its 2000 highs and conclude that is some proof that the stock market is “rigged” or a “casino.” After all, if buying the...
View ArticleStocks That Fund Themselves
In an old letter to clients, Tweedy Browne’s managers once stated that investors should be prepared to hold on to an undervalued stock for at least five years in expectation of the stock reaching fair...
View ArticleThe Conservative Investor Digest
I am excited. For the longest time, I have received encouragement from readers urging me to start some kind of subscription service with premium content. I’ve entered the occasional licensing...
View ArticleThe Secret GE Millionaires of Schenectady, New York
Jack Welch used to tell everyone to buy General Electric stock during his tenure as GE CEO, and many employees in Schenectady, New York were wise enough to follow the chief’s counsel when it came to...
View ArticleMaking The Big Bucks
It’s funny to me how the exact same actions can result in wildly disproportionate outcomes depending on the circumstances that surround it. One stock-market example of this is the price you pay to...
View ArticleThe Long, Long Term For Oil
It is hard not to sit up and take notice when you see that Royal Dutch Shell has delivered compounded returns for the buy-and-hold investor of 14% annually between 1911 and 2003. It’s been one of the...
View ArticleStarbucks Stock: Should You Buy Now?
I have only studied three companies in my life in which the following the following standard did not produce a good investment: Look for companies with high earnings per share growth that are...
View ArticlePeter Lynch Meets Dividend Growth
I have spent the past month reading critical editorials of my favorite investors. I wanted to see if there were any holes in my thinking that I could address by segregating the best philosophical...
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Top Ten Investment Books
#The Theory of Investment Value by John Burr Williams This book is still in print sixty years after it was written, despite never having been updated or revised. That testifies to its classic status,...
View ArticleTwo Categories of Successful Investments
It seems to me that there are two primary categories of successful investments that beat the S&P 500 over the long haul. Category 1 involves buying replenished known quantities. You can look at...
View ArticleWhy Big Dividend Growth Awaits Reynolds American
Reynolds American tobacco has officially acquired Lorillard and now owns Newport, one of the strongest brands in the tobacco sector that has industry leading profits in the menthol sector and has...
View ArticleHow To Avoid Getting Burned With Oil Stocks
A counter-intuitive investment principle is this: running to a sector of the economy after it blows up often proves, in hindsight, to be one of the safest things you can do. Take a look at something...
View ArticleBank of America Stock: The Dividend Increase Date Draws Nearer
Bank of America made a $4.6 billion profit between April 1, 2015 and June 30, 2015. Investors are finally getting a glimpse of what Bank of America’s profit engine looks like without lawyer fees,...
View ArticleThe Conservative Investor Digest
One of the underrated areas of the industrial economy where shareholders have made a lot of money over the years is used auto repair shops. It may not look like the sexiest business, but the returns...
View ArticleFive Year Vs. Twenty-Five Year Investing
Go dig up an old S&P Capital IQ from 2013 and look up the earnings expectations for Coca-Cola in 2018. You will see that analysts predicted the company would make $3.00 per share in 2018. At the...
View ArticleA Lesson On Market Timing
Sometime shortly after American Express lost its Costco exclusivity, I mentioned that American Express had gotten cheap. It was making $5.70 in profits and trading in the $70s, and things tend to work...
View ArticleBuilding Wealth, Going Nowhere
A sign of a high-quality business is not that adversity never occurs, but rather, that the core engine still remains strong even when adversity does strike. It is something that comes to mind when I...
View ArticleThe Abattoir of Large-Cap Value Fund Performance
In 1993, Joel Dickson and John Shoven came up with a breakthrough insight into the investment markets that they sought to publish in the 1993 National Bureau of Economic Research under the title...
View ArticleNot Your Daddy’s Conoco
For most of its history, Conoco (COP) had been resistant to the types profit streams that enabled Exxon and Chevron to have better reporting results during the low point in the business cycle. Exxon...
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