If I were thinking about starting a small business from nothing or I were actively operating a small family company, there are eight questions that I would immediately ask myself about any entrepreneurial idea I had. These eight questions are: How do we make money? (What product or service do we provide at a profit? What…
Mental Model: Information Asymmetry For the past month or two, there has been a running joke at the office that I’ve been giving Aaron a hard time about, providing me countless hours of entertainment. It is a good illustration of a mental model from economics called information asymmetry and I thought I’d take five minutes…
After writing about the 20 year performance of Colgate-Palmolive stock, my Aunt Donna asked me about Dawn dish soap, which is owned by Procter & Gamble. I broke out the historical dividend charts and went to work to create a comparison of how an investor would have fared had they parked money in P&G twenty…
I’m still running several weeks behind but one of the things I’ve been working on is a response to a few of the questions submitted by FratMan, whom you’ve seen in some of the mail bag sections I believe. He’s mentioned a few times, such as in the comments sections here and here, that he likes…
A Look At How the Father of Value Investing Calculated the Intrinsic Value of an Ordinary Share of Common Stock Benjamin Graham, the rich investor, professor, and mentor to Warren Buffett, once proposed a quick back-of-the-envelope intrinsic value formula for investors to determine if their stocks were at least somewhat rationally priced. He encouraged investors…
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who…
I’m a big reader. Huge. My library consists of thousands of titles, mostly all of which are non-fiction (biographies, finance, business, economics, psychology, history, ethics, etc.) If I were to reproduce it, the cost would be somewhere between $12,000 and $30,000 depending on how difficult it was to get your hands on many of the…
Using Wal-Mart Stores as an Example of Earnings Yields vs. Treasury Bond Yields I was up until 5 a.m. this morning reading through the past few years’ of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. annual reports, filings with the SEC, analyst reports, transcripts, and other documents. It is about time to have the businesses make another contribution to…
Very early in life, I had three important insights that helped me achieve the things I desired within a year or two after graduating college. These three insights were based upon my observation of the world and years of sitting in a reading chair by the fireplace pouring over history, accounting, economics, philosophy, psychology, ethics,…
Though I very rarely talk about my personal life on the blog due to privacy concerns, I will say that for years, I have attended a flexibly-scheduled weekly family dinner that rotates among the members’ households with the host cooking for the guests. This is an extension of the tradition that began during my childhood…