Investing 101
Picking & holding stocks
Only worth reading once you have decided to do the extra work. What a business is worth, what protects it, and what should make you change your mind.
16 guides · Beginner friendly
What a P/E Ratio Is, and the Comparison That Makes It Useless
The most quoted number in stock picking, and the one most often misused. What it actually measures, and why comparing it across two industries produces a confident wrong answer.
Based on a clip by @seekingwisdominvesting — YouTube
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"If You Can't Answer This, Don't Buy the Stock" — Buffett's Test in One Question
One answer at a university Q&A, and the cleanest statement of what a share is. Intrinsic value is all the cash a business will hand you, discounted — which makes valuation three questions, and makes "I can't answer that" a complete decision rather than a gap to be filled with optimism.
Based on a clip by @YAPSS — YouTube
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Three Statements, Three Questions
A company's accounts look impenetrable until you know that each of the three statements exists to answer exactly one question. Learn the three questions and the layout stops mattering.
Based on a clip by @BrianFeroldiYT — YouTube
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How to Tell Whether a Stock Is Cheap — Three Methods, and Why You Need More Than One
Cheap has nothing to do with the share price. Three ways to estimate what a business is worth, what each one assumes, and why the honest answer is to run more than one and look for agreement rather than precision.
Based on a clip by @TheSwedishInvestor — YouTube
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The Four-Number Stock Checklist — Which Parts Survive
Four numbers, one score, ten minutes a stock. The structure is genuinely useful for a beginner — but one of the four rewards you for buying what has already gone up.
Based on a clip by @joyeeyang — YouTube
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Two Numbers: Cheap, and Good
Greenblatt reduced stock selection to two rankings added together. The interesting part is not the formula — it is his explanation of why it cannot be arbitraged away.
Based on The Little Book That Beats the Market — Joel Greenblatt
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Economic Moats: The Four Things That Actually Keep Competitors Out
A great product is not a moat. Neither is great management. There are four structural advantages that keep high returns from being competed away, and they are checkable.
Based on The Little Book That Builds Wealth — Pat Dorsey
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What a CEO Does With a Dollar Decides Everything
Thorndike studied eight CEOs who massively outperformed their peers. None was a visionary operator. What they shared was a discipline about where the company's cash went.
Based on The Outsiders — William N. Thorndike
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Warren Buffett's Six Rules of Investing — Which Ones Transfer to a Small Account
Six principles, in Buffett's own words, cut from interviews. The words are real and mostly excellent. The numbering is the editor's, and it hides the fact that rule five only works if rules three and four are already true.
Based on a clip by @TheBetterMenProject — YouTube
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"Invest in What You Know" — What Peter Lynch Actually Said, and the Half Everyone Drops
A compilation of Peter Lynch talking to a room of investors. Four ideas run through it — know what you own, stop predicting, declines are scheduled, and you are in no rush — and the famous one about investing in what you know is the one that has been flattened the most in the retelling.
Based on a clip by @thecooperacademy — YouTube
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Peter Lynch's Six Categories: Sort the Company Before You Value It
Lynch's first move was never valuation. It was sorting the company into one of six buckets — because what you should expect, and when you should sell, is decided by the bucket.
Based on One Up on Wall Street — Peter Lynch
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Scuttlebutt: How to Research a Company Without an Analyst's Access
The most useful information about a business is held by the people who compete with it, buy from it, and used to work there. None of it is in the annual report, and all of it is reachable.
Based on Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits — Philip A. Fisher
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CANSLIM Explained — Seven Filters, and the Two That Do Most of the Rejecting
A seven-letter checklist that is unusually specific about its thresholds, and unusually demanding about when you are allowed to trade at all. Worth understanding as a screen — and worth being careful with the return figures attached to it.
Based on a clip by @RichardMoglen — YouTube
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Buying at the 52-Week High: The Research Behind the Ugliest-Feeling Entry
The research the video leans on found that nearness to the 52-week high predicted future returns better than past returns did — because traders anchor on the high and under-react to good news. It is a portfolio-level tendency, not a promise about any single breakout.
Based on a clip by @lookingatthemarkets — YouTube
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When Not to Sell a Stock — Buffett Gave Two Opposite Answers, and Both Were Right
A student asks how he decides to abandon a position. The answer is four minutes long, contains two contradictory rules, and the contradiction is the lesson: what you should do about selling depends on whether you are short of ideas or short of cash.
Based on a clip by @YAPSS — YouTube
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Buffett's Biggest Mistakes — The Expensive Ones Never Showed Up in the Accounts
A list of admitted errors that ends somewhere unexpected: the trades that lost money were not the expensive ones. The mistakes that cost most were the good ideas he understood and did not act on — and nothing in any accounting system records those.
Based on a clip by @YAPSS — YouTube
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Learning paths that use these guides
Research and value a company from scratch
The extra work, in the order it is actually done: read the accounts, sort the company, judge the business, then — last — argue about the price. Eleven guides, and the price question is deliberately not first.
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Hold through a cycle: crowds, crashes and when to sell
Buying is the short part. This path is about the years afterwards — what a crowd looks like from inside it, what a 30% drawdown does to your reasoning, and the two conditions that should actually make you sell.
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Build a momentum stock system: buy strength that keeps proving itself
The style that feels wrong on purpose: buying what already went up. Eight guides from the evidence that strength persists, through the research on 52-week highs, to a repeatable loop — screen for leaders, confirm with volume, enter on the pullback, and handle the winners that pay for every small failure.
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Reading about a system is not having one.
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