How much time do you put into each case before buying it?

[anders]

Oddballstocks:

 

Many thanks for great input, I salute you for bringing facts and thoughts to the table that changed my mind.

 

What you say makes sense and I feel that I need to refocus the assumptions. Rather than trying to estimate the effects of price fluctuations in all ingredients in a chewing gum and the paper that surrounds it; it's probably better to ask how commodity prices would effect how people chew gum.. 

 

Again, many thanks!

[Liberty]

Personal story: I worked at a startup a while back, we had a critical database fail that housed the company's data (literally the brain of the company), without it the company would have lost most customers.  When the database failed only one person could fix it, yet a team of us stayed there for 30+ hours sitting by just in case he needed our help in some way until everything was fixed.  The CTO stayed all night, CEO came in at some crazy hour.  People were motivated, we saw our jobs disappearing, especially the execs, they say their investment disappearing.  I think the CEO would have ran through fire if it would have helped the database.

 

 

I hope you guys learned the importance of having redundant backups  ;)

[oddballstocks]

Personal story: I worked at a startup a while back, we had a critical database fail that housed the company's data (literally the brain of the company), without it the company would have lost most customers.  When the database failed only one person could fix it, yet a team of us stayed there for 30+ hours sitting by just in case he needed our help in some way until everything was fixed.  The CTO stayed all night, CEO came in at some crazy hour.  People were motivated, we saw our jobs disappearing, especially the execs, they say their investment disappearing.  I think the CEO would have ran through fire if it would have helped the database.

 

 

I hope you guys learned the importance of having redundant backups  ;)

 

We had a backup that's part of what the DBA worked on, problem was it took something like 20 hours to restore.

 

After that incident they built out a database cluster to ensure there wasn't a single point of failure anymore.  Of course at a startup cash is tight, so the company didn't see a need to pay for and build a cluster until a failure happened.  Once the DB failed the checkbook came out.

[racemize]

Oddballstocks:

The idea with time value in research is brilliant and I have never thought about it in that way.. Many thanks! The inverting process and putting myself as complete owner of the business also helps me in deciding.. The best way would perhaps be to hire an analyst as your counterpart that get his/her compensation if s/he can convince you not to invest..

 

I think it is important to value your own time.  For example, since I bill by the hour, I could bring home 100 dollars/hour doing more work, so one could argue that I should value my time at 100 dollars an hour on my stock research.  However, when you are learning, there is a lot of future value built into the research.  Sure, I may have over-done my AIG research, but 1) it was enjoyable and 2) when there is a lot of capital later down the line, those initial hours and the incremental hours will be worth lots of money.  The time/money compounds! 

 

Accordingly, I have no issues at all working a lot of hours on any investment, regardless of how much it costs me in the short term.