Geoff Gannon

“Are we in a bubble?”

Right now: This is the most common question I get. For a long time, my answer to this question has been: “yes, stocks are overvalued but that does not mean the stock market has to drop.” […]

Someone emailed me this question:

“…how do you consider negative shareholder equity? Is this good, bad or other?”

Before I give my answer, I apologize to the roughly 60% of my audience that I know is made […]

A blog I read did a post on goodwill. The discussion there was about economic goodwill. I’d like to talk today about accounting goodwill – that is, intangibles. Technically: accounting goodwill applies only to i […]

A blog reader sent me this email:

“Do you ever pay attention to insider transactions when analyzing a company?”

I do read through lists of insider buys from time-to-time. I follow a blog that covers the […]

There is a discrepancy between two posts I wrote. One is this post at Focused Compounding. Another is yesterday’s post here on this blog. A reader pointed this out:

In your post on NACCO from 15 Dece […]

I’ve done a couple posts recently that have too many “rules” type statements in them. As investors: it’s less important what we tell ourselves we’re doing and more important what we’re actually – habituall […]

I’ve noticed that in a lot of the emails I’ve been getting recently, the emailer says something along the lines of “of course a U.S. corporate tax cut in 2018 is probably already priced into stocks […]

A blog reader emailed me this question about why I appraise stocks using a pure enterprise value approach – as if debt and equity had the same “cost of capital” – instead of using a Weighted Average Cost of Capi […]

The always interesting Japanese stock blog (it’s written in English), Kenkyo Investing, has a post on a negative enterprise value stock called Hokuyaku Takeyama. The reason this stock is cheap is because it tra […]

Someone emailed me this question about tracking portfolio performance:

“All investors are comparing their portfolio performance with the S&P 500 or DAX (depends were they live). I have asked a value investor w […]

Someone emailed me this question about NACCO (NC):

“If you don’t mind me asking, why do you so strongly recommend other people not buy the stock given your obvious high conviction? It seems like a classic va […]

When writing about a stock, it’s always easier to use a more conventional estimate so you don’t have to argue with people about your “model”. This is one way in which writing about investing – showing your work p […]

John Huber, who writes the Base Hit Investing blog and also runs the excellent BHI Member site, did an interview over at Forbes.com. In that interview, Huber says:

“(My) strategy is very simply to make mean […]

In response to an email a reader sent about some of my recent posts on the difference between investment and speculation, I entered lecture mode…

I am especially worried about the tendency among readers to […]

Someone emailed me asking what sources they needed to study to get better at valuing stocks.

My answer was that the ability to come up with accurate valuations for public companies is overrated.

Why? […]

I got an email in response to my earlier post about the line between investment and speculation. It’s a good email, so I want to quote it in full:

“Really interesting post today, but I was wondering how y […]

In a recent post, Richard Beddard mentions Ben Graham’s speech “The New Speculation in Common Stocks” and particularly how it ends with a quote from the Roman poet Ovid:
“You will go safest in the middle cou […]

Someone on Twitter mentioned it’s been 32 days since I put 50% of my portfolio into a new stock and said: “I’ll reveal the name of this new position on the blog sometime within the next 30 days”. Since, I promised […]

“It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.”

–          Warren Buffett

Richard Beddard has an excellent post worrying about whether the sto […]

Under Armour (UA) stock dropped a lot in the last 24 hours. So, some value investors may be looking at it. If you do look at it, make sure you consider buying only the class “C” shares trading under the ticker “UA […]