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TRR - TRC companies


kai99

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http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/which-5-investing-books-have-been-the-most-influential-to-you/

 

There are many great books mentioned in the thread above. Why don't you start educating yourself? Many stocks are cheap for a good reason - bad business, bad management, declining industry, etc. IMO, investing is mostly about avoiding mistakes and know the characteristics of great or at least improving companies. A very useful exercise for me is to back and study the operating trends of great companies - GOOG, VFC, WFC, GS, MKL, etc.

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What you need to look at is valuation relative to price.  Identifying great businesses is all right but you are not going to find as much misvaluation there as in other segments of the market.  If you have a small amount of capital (which is what most of us have), I think you can make better returns by buying the small mispriced merchandise (most of which have little or small moats) than focusing on the "moated" businesses.  If you have large amounts of capital "moats" make sense because of the size of "moated" companies is typically larger.  For your engineering company, I would look at comparable firms today and in the past to see if it is undervalued,

 

Packer

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no dividends, bvps went from 10 to 4 in 10 years, while share count doubled. roic and roe for the past 10 years are terrible.

 

they've destroyed a lot of value, so there should be some sort of catalyst or turn-around happening to make this a good investment. didn't dig that much into it, that's just from a quick look at the financials.

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http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/which-5-investing-books-have-been-the-most-influential-to-you/

 

There are many great books mentioned in the thread above. Why don't you start educating yourself? Many stocks are cheap for a good reason - bad business, bad management, declining industry, etc. IMO, investing is mostly about avoiding mistakes and know the characteristics of great or at least improving companies. A very useful exercise for me is to back and study the operating trends of great companies - GOOG, VFC, WFC, GS, MKL, etc.

 

Hi thx for your candid reply. I have read many of those books, perhaps in a very short span of time. Thus applying some principles such as  a 'boring business' as described by peter lynch. I am looking at new contracts as a possible turnaround for this such as the one with Kinder Morgan.

 

Do you mind sharing several characteristics and what to look out for in rapidly improving businesses or turnarounds. I have identified another one, $FSS but perhaps i might be late on this : http://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=fss&ty=c&ta=1&p=d

 

Thx in advance

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One thing to look out for in engineering companies is if they use percentage of completion for their revenues.

 

Percentage of completion allows you to book your profits over time along with your costs.

As long as costs are as expected, profits materialize as expected.  :)

Cost overruns result in sudden large losses and unhappy investors.  :'(

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When you are starting out, start small and diversified because you are likely to miss something. When you have more experience and a year or two of decent results, then you can be more aggressive and own a more concentrated portfolio. Google Buffett's partnership letters - set realistic expectations, "if you are in a hurry to get rich, you are more likely to lose it all." Also, reading books usually have much more meaning when you have a few years of experience and reading them for the second time.

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I would only invest like 10% of your  networth the first year or two really. What happens if you buy a lot of stocks when starting out, you stop looking and learning. And you get biased into thinking your portfolio is already pretty good, or better then it really is.

 

But if you still have 90% to invest, that is a very good motivator to keep looking and learning.

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