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Valuable Resources

Berkshire Hathaway:  Links to the Chairman’s Annual Letters to Shareholders, press releases, Charlie Munger’s Letters to Wesco Shareholders, the Berkshire Owner’s Manual, and much more.

Damodaran Online:  Professor Aswath Damodaran, Professor of Finance at NYU’s Stern School of Business, shares a wealth of educational material.  Here, you will find entire courses, books, spreadsheets, research papers, and more dealing with the topic of security valuation.

Graham and Doddsville Newsletter:  The Graham and Doddsville Newsletter is published three times annually by the students of Columbia Business School.  Feature stories include interviews with noted value investors, and coverage of Columbia Business School events including the Annual Graham and Dodd Breakfast, the Columbia Investment Management Association Conference and The Pershing Square Challenge.  (While the editor of this blog  is a  founding editor of this  newsletter, there is no affiliation between the two.)

Outstanding Investor Digest:  OID was once the place to learn from legendary SuperInvestors.  As I understand, the number of issues published has dwindled.  I read old issues whenever I can get my hands on them.  You can find some free excerpts and interviews here.

Shai Dardashti on Grahmarian Value:  While Shai has moved on to start both Dardashti Capital Management and a new blog, there is still nothing like the original.  Shai’s blog was one of my first windows into the world of value investing. (note:  Shai has recently taken down the blog.  I’m leaving the link in hopes that he decides to re-post the archives.)

The Ben Graham Center for Value Investing:  The mission of the Centre is to research, teach, apply and promote the style of investing developed by Benjamin Graham in the early 1930s, referred to as Value Investing.  The site contains a wealth of information about value investing, including video lectures with several value investing legends including Walter Schloss, Marty Whitman, Irving Kahn, and more.

Tilson Funds: Whitney Tilson has become known in the value world as co-editor of Value Investing Insight, organizer of the annual Value Investing Congress, and co-manager of T2 Funds.  His website contains links to many valuable VI resources.

Value Investor Insight:  This monthly publication, created by Whitney Tilson and John Heins, seems to pick up where the dwindling number of OID issues leaves off.  While VII requires a subscription, the interviews, insights and investment ideas from the world’s top value investors that are packed into each monthly issue make it well worth the price.

Wesco Financial Corp:  Links to Charlie Munger’s Annual Letters to Shareholders.

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Required Reading

The Superinvestors of Graham and Doddsville by Warren Buffett

Buffett Partnership Letters(1959 – 1969) by Warren Buffett

Berkshire Hathway Unpublished Letters (1969 – 1976) by Warren Buffett

Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholder Letters (1977 – present) by Warren Buffett

Graham Newman Partnership Letters by Benjamin Graham

Value Investing and Behavioral Finance by Christopher Browne

What has Worked in Investing, Studies of Investment Approaches and Characteristics Associated with Exceptional Returns by Tweedy, Brown

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Explaining Value Investing

Benjamin Graham once quipped that if someone doesn’t understand value investing within 5 minutes, they never will.  Below are several articles/sites that I believe do a great job at explaining value investing.

CAP@Columbia:  This is a site maintained by two Columbia Business School Faculty members and SuperInvestors Michael Mauboussin and Paul Johnson.  The site is an excellent resource on topics such as value investing, behavioral finance, return on invested capital, and more.

Poor Man’s Mosaic:  Before Mohnish Pabrai wrote The Dhandho Investor in 2007, he wrote a book called “Mosaic: Perspectives on Investing.”  The book, which is now out of print, and sells for over $200, was a compilation of essays written by Mr. Pabrai and published over time on different websites.  Value Investing News has recreated the book by posting links to almost all of the original essays.

“What We Value” by Whitney Tilson (via Kiplinger.com)

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Hunting Grounds

Dataroma:  This is one of the better sites that track the 13F filings of SuperInvestors.

Finding Moats: A site by Morningstar Director of Research Tom Dorsey related to his book:  “The Little Book that Builds Wealth.”

Gurufocus.com:  Gurufocus follows the 13F filings of a select list of SuperInvestors.  It is a great resource for ideas as well as articles about value investing.

Hedge Fund Letters Blog:  This site looks like it is just getting underway.  There are links to some great resources on some great funds, although the actual fund letters are sparse.  It looks like this is a site to keep an eye on.

J3 Information Services Group:  A free site (with registration) that provides a large amount of useful information in insider/institutional transactions. (alternative:  OwnershipAnalyzer.com or MFFAIS)

Magic Formula Investing:  Based on Joel Greenblatt’s The Little Book that Beats the Market, the Magic Formula site will produce a list of stocks that pass the magic formula, given a set of parameters you can define.

Manual of Ideas:  This relatively new resource from John Mihaljevic, CFA is excellent.  John offers several newsletters that include screens, investment ideas, interviews, and portfolio reviews of some of the world’s top value investors.  This resources requires a fee, which varies by publication, but the ideas that result will likely pay for the cost.

MergerInvesting.com: A current list of publicly announced mergers along with any arbitrage profit potential.  (Arbitrageview.com is another alternative.)

Online Investor Stock Buyback:  A resource of companies that have announced stock buybacks.

Spinoff Tracker:  You can track various spinoff opportunities in the US as they develop.  The list includes spinoffs that are structured as both new share offerings or as shareholder distributions.

StockScreen123:  I just found this site tonight, and I am already hooked.  If it pans out to be what I think it is, and if it is kept updated, this could be the best free screener I have ever found.  Happy Hunting!

Streetinsider.com:  This blog tracks the 13D filings of well-known activist investors.

The 52-Week Low List

The Value Guys (podcast):  The value guys are two anonymous research analysts who record a weekly podcast reviewing their favorite stocks from Value Line.

Value Line:  If you ever wondered how Walter Schloss achieved returns that stunned Buffett, visit Value Line.  As I have heard first-hand, Schloss, who didn’t want to spend the money for his own subscription, used to grab copies from his office mate – Tweedy Browne.

Value Investors Club:  VIC is a members-only site where participants share their top value ideas.  Non-members can access parts of the site on a 45 or 90 day delay.

Value Investor Watch:  A very plain site that tracks what many value-oriented mutual and hedge funds are buying and selling.

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The Research Process

FundingUniverse.com:  A site for angel investors that also has the company history for thousands of companies.  A great place to begin the process.

Morningstar Stocks:  Morningstar is traditionally known for their mutual fund analysis.  In fact, Morningstar also has a team dedicated to equity research.  I find this site helpful for both looking at financial data and getting a good background on a business.  The actual analyst reports require a paid subscription.  They claim to use a value-oriented philosophy.  While better than most sellside/independent research, I still find them to be a bit too short-term oriented.  You can also find excellent interviews with fund managers, as well as the holdings of almost any mutual fund.

SEC – EDGAR: is the official SEC database for all public company filings.

SEC Filingings.com:  is an absolutely fantastic alternative to EDGAR.  SECFilings.com provides neatly formatted filings in both Word and PDF formats.  The site also allows you to create alerts for specific filings, or for all filings for a certain company.  Best of all, the site is absolutely free with registration!

Seeking Alpha Transcripts Center: It was not that long ago that investors needed a paid subscription in order to access company conference call transcripts.  Now, thanks to Seeking Alpha, a tremendous amount of call transcripts are available for free!  Seeking Alpha is primarily an aggregator of some of the best financial blog posts on the internet, but I think that it is the transcription service that makes this site invaluable.

CrocTail: Diggs deep to extract information about corporations and their subsidiaries.

ZoomInfo:  is a fantastic site for scuttlebutt research.  You can look people up by name, industry, or company and get their contact information.  I have cold called many ex-employees of companies I am researching.  While the site has a free component, more detailed information requires a subscription.

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Worthwhile Blogs

10Q Detective
Above Average Odds Investing
Accounting Observer Public Blog
A Ship in the Harbor is Safe…
Buffettucation
Cheap Stocks
Compounding Machines
Contrarian Value Investing
Controlled Greed
CoryJ.com
The Curious Investor
David Hiu Lau’s Blog
Distressed Debt Investor
Fat Pitch Financials
Focus on Value Investing
Footnoted.org
Greenbackd
In Search of Value
Joe Ponzio’s FWall Street
Jonathan Goldberg on Value Investing
Magic Diligence
Market Folly
Mike Rivers’ Blog
Mr. Market Blog
Old School Value
Street Capitalist:  Event Driven Value Investments
Sham Gad on Value Investing
Shai Dardashti’s Reflections on Value Investing
Shadow Stock:  Deep Value Micro-Cap Stocks
Stable-Boy.Selectoins
Street Capitalist
The Inoculated Investor
The Warren Buffett Blog
Thoughts on Value Investing and Related Matters
Todd Sullivan’s Value Plays
Understanding and Applying Value Investing
V. Katsnelson’s Contrarian Edge
Value Blog Review
Value Investing Congress Blog
VInvesting.com
Wide Moat Investing

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Other Interesting Value Sites

Corner of Berkshire and Fairfax:  This message board is the new location of the MSN Berkshire Shareholders Board.

Futile Finance: Lots of Warren Buffett / Charlie Munger links and resources.

Jelly Roll Capital Equity Research

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General /Random Market Sites

Education:

Investopedia:  Investopedia is still the first place I go when I am reading a K/Q and come across something that makes me scratch my head.

The Motley Fool

Performance Tracking:

Covestor:  I have abandoned the use of Stockalicious and moved over to Covestor.  I was hesitant to give Covestor the username and password to my brokerage account, but decided to give it a try and am very happy so far.  My only issue, counting cash as an active allocation, was addressed at the end of April.  As of now (5/11/09), I think Covestor is the best way to keep and audited trail of performance for a real money portfolio.  (You can follow my performance here.)

Stockalicious:  A new site I found that helps to calculate portfolio returns.  It looks pretty new, but so far, I love it.  (update:  I think this site had excellent prospects, but it seems like it has stopped being maintained.)

Investment Returns:  A great site that provides various Excel templates to calculate returns.