Value Investing: Jump Start in Singapore

Hi,

If we want to master value investing, what is the best and fastest starting point here in Singapore?

Self-study?

Courses?

I have attended demos (selling pitch seminars) on a few different companies selling training on Value Investing.

And yes they are all expensive. I therefore must choose carefully as I do not have the luxury of spending 3000$ on each of them, just to peek on if what they teach is what will help me in Value Investing.

One of them actually (bigfatpurse.com) is not based on Buffett's strategy but more on Walter Schloss' strategy. Both Schloss and Buffett are students or followers of Benjamin Graham, if I am not wrong. Schloss' strategy is slower but profitable as well. This course offerer has an automated way of finding stocks that fit Schloss' filters. If it works, then it is great as it is automated. You dont need to read company reports etc. You may not have hours and hours studying every company.

One of them is at mindkinesis.com. They seem to offer another strategy on online options trading, in addition to Value Investing. I am not sure though if they have an automated way of identifying the stocks that pass Value Investing filters just like the above one I mentioned that follows Schloss.

There is another one but I already forgot what they offer (wealthmastery.sg/valueinvesting).

I am about to attend another demo this week - valueinvestingcollege.com.

You guys have any things to share?

How did you reach your acceptable level in Value Investing?

All ideas will be great.

For myself, I reached my current level of knowledge in value investing mainly through intensive readings (lots of books), real-life investing, reviewing and cataloging mistakes (on my blog) and also learning from others who I deem smarter and sharper than myself.

Books provide a good basis for starting out and one must read about valuations, corporate strategies, accounting and also psychology, among others. It really pays to be not only interested, but well-read. Munger himself said that we need a latticework of mental models to be able to invest successfully, and this is why consistent results and returns in value investing is NOT easy.

As for courses, I haven't attended any of them so I cannot comment directly. But these are the ones out there which I am currently aware of:-

1) Big Fat Purse - Alvin Chow offers a CNAV strategy to pick stocks based on formulae, screens and filters which essentially automates the stock picking process. His method looks to be based more on Graham/Schloss than Buffett/Munger/Fisher/Lynch.

2) Millionaire Investor Program (8 Investment - listed on ASX) - CEO is Ken Chee and the program has been around since 2010. From what I understand, they are aggressive in marketing and hold many free seminars, as well as advertise at events such as Invest Fair and Invest Carnival. They usually dish out a free ideas at such events and invite people to sign up for the one-day seminar (small sum of $), which then leads on to the 3-day intensive course ($X,XXX).

3) Value Investing College - Headed by Sean Seah and he has a stable of trainers. I haven't really seen them advertising, nor attended the free preview so I cannot comment much.

4) Value Investing Academy - Headed by Cayden Chang. I don't know much about them either though they claim their program is "endorsed by Mary Buffett". Could improve on their English though. Looks more "salesy" than most of the others, going by their website.

5) Adam Khoo Learning - I've heard that AK organizes a value investing type course too but have limited information on it. But I understand AK provides training for a variety of skills (including trading by Conrad Alvin), so value investing may not be his forte.

Would like to hear others' comments too. Thanks.

I always recommend two books to people who are looking to start. The Intelligent Investor and Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist.

I always felt reading Buffett's biography offers a really good road map, as it illustrates his own difficulties, and more importantly gives you confidence that value investing does work. There are plenty of great case studies and examples to provide ample room for learning.

Also I love that you literally see Buffett get richer chapter by chapter by applying simple investing principles. You will be dying to read The Intelligent Investor by the time you're done

I wouldn't start with The Intelligent Investor first as its a bit dry (to be fair, it was written in the 1940s). There are plenty of great videos online introducing you to the basics (Ackman comes to mine). I will dig them up when I have time.

I haven't been to any of the local courses so I can't comment. It really depends on how much time you're willing to spend.

Hi JohnCruz,

Nice seeing more people getting interested in value investing. For me the best teacher has still been the stock market. Like what Musicwhiz said, I find it really helps to keep a log of your investments, i.e. what is your personal investment rationale for a particular stock, was your rationale proved or disproved over time, any lessons learnt, etc.

I have learnt to avoid buying on other people's recommendations, as i) you blame others and not yourself when the particular stock doesnt perform ii) you don't learn anything out of the process. Use other people's posts for fact gathering, but form your own opinion of a stock. The best investors never care about what other people think or who is investing alongside them.

If you want a less expensive starting point, you could check out "Buffettology: The Previously Unexplained Techniques That Have Made Warren Buffett the World's Most Famous Investor" It was the first book that got me interested in investing. Im 100% sure there are other much better technical books out there, but if it was good enough for a 18 year old me who had never heard of a balance sheet or cash flow statement before, it should be good enough for anyone looking to enter the value investing world. Just sharing from personal experience

Thank you guys.

Today, I attended the valueinvestingcollege.com intro seminar (selling pitch seminar). The main seminar is also around 3000$.

There is also an 'option' strategy in the course.

It is nice that there is an installment option of about 100$ for 36 months.

Talking with some of the attendees, another value investing resource came out. It is investmentquadrant.com for less than 300$ only. I believe that it only includes online resources, like videos.

I feel that some of these courses will indeed help a beginner jumpstart his value investing. Why?
#1. some involve [simplified] theoretical training
#2. some involve applied training (useless without this, I think)
#3. some have post-training support/consultation e.g. 3 months
#4. some have a (forever) member-only community for open sharing and discussion. (helps in continuous learning, getting ideas which company we can dig in deeper at that moment, and just keeping up to date with the network)

Value investing, is simple in concept, but complex in execution. To have a good kick-start, probably a good book will do the job. What is needed after that, is the practical session with stock market.

(sharing a view, which might already shared by others)

7 Best Materials to Value Investing: Not The Typical To-Read Intelligent Investor Post.

1. What has work in investing by Tweedy Browne.

This is the most important piece of paper that every value investors must read, it shows you all the researches and back-tests that have done by academia on value investing in a single easy-to-read paper. It answers questions such as : Is low P/E good? how about low P/B? Then which is more important? How do stocks under those categories performed during economic downturn. How about Div Yield as an indicator of performance?

Read the below as well if you have more time:

10 ways to beat an Index
The High Dividend Yield Return Advantage.

2. Eric Kong scientific approach to value investing.

About an hour video explaining the concept of investing in a portfolio of undervalued stocks can achieve a satisfactory return. So how much return is he talking about? Well is 13-15%! So how hard is it? does one required to do intensive analytic works to make it works? Somehow no, one just need to invest a portfolio of 30-50 stocks that have the lowest P/E ratio. And magic happened. Any investment made based on economic prediction is just hocus-pocus.

3. Show Me The Money: Sound Principles To Grow Your Wealth

I can’t stress how much great stuff Teh Hooi Ling has in this book. It contains years of valuable research and write-up on value-investing, general finance and personal finance. Structured in an article by article format, which contains simple graph and table of data. Most importantly is – You Can Understand and is in Singapore Context!

I’m not sure is it just me, I got inspired by her quite a lot and understand the importance of carrying out further research than simply listening to the hearsay. I like the part where she shared how she carries out research whenever she heard something interesting or general statement made by the public.

Recommend articles:

Time the market based on valuations, not news flows
Who’s Afraid of Equities?

4. Peter Lynch Lecture Video

Great video by legendary investor Peter Lynch, clearly a must-watch for any serious learners of value investing. The reason why I do not recommend his book rather than this video is because I don’t really find his books very helpful in most cases. The approach involve too much of a personal judgement, and it is certain that average retail investors following his approach will likely make more mistake than not. Nonetheless both of his books One Up On Wall Street & Beat The Market are good read.

5. Greenbackd.com

Greenbackd.com

Recommend articles:

How to beat The Little Book That Beats The Market: An analysis of the Magic Formula
Benjamin Graham’s “Foolproof Method of Systematic Investment”
EP25: Deep Value Investing – with Tobias Carlisle

A Must-Follow blog for any serious learner, Tobias Carlisle has produced some of the most amazing back-test finding on value investing. Some of the data might not by that easy to understand but nonetheless his conclusion and explanation is enough to make average investors to understand his points.

I wanted to mention about Deep Value as well, but since this post is about what I have benefited the most and I’ve yet finish the book so I will hold my comment until I’ve finished reading it.

At this point I recommend readers to do some read up on EV/PBIT over here or at your own Google’s findings.

6. Tobias Carlisle on Google Talk

Tobias Carlise over here introduces some of the most interesting phenomenal known as mean-reversion. And also talks about how behavioral error is a big thing that affects our investing decision without us realizing it. I most like the part where he shared about simple proven model outperforms human’s judgement with the same model.

7. The Manual of Ideas

This book touches all the concepts of value investing that you have watched or read from the above with additional findings and view points. It introduces the concept of Sum-Of-All-Parts something which I’ve no real experience applying it, and I think is very easily overvalued a stock with SOAP. Anyway I’m not the best person to comment on this.

One good thing I like about this book is that it talks about the downside of value investing that most of the above do not, for example how things can still go wrong despite you are buying a company with great asset and trading below its intrinsic value.

(05-06-2015, 01:10 AM)JohnCruz Wrote: Talking with some of the attendees, another value investing resource came out. It is investmentquadrant.com for less than 300$ only. I believe that it only includes online resources, like videos.

Do you have the link?

Tried keying it yield server error. Did a yahoo search also resulted in error. Or they no longer exist already?

(07-06-2015, 10:32 AM)hh488 Wrote:

(05-06-2015, 01:10 AM)JohnCruz Wrote: Talking with some of the attendees, another value investing resource came out. It is investmentquadrant.com for less than 300$ only. I believe that it only includes online resources, like videos.

Do you have the link?

Tried keying it yield server error. Did a yahoo search also resulted in error. Or they no longer exist already?

I tried 'investmentquadrant.com' now on a google chrome and it is okay. The parent company is at http://fifthperson.com/.

Some browsers might require you to put 'http://investmentquadrant.com/', i.e., including the http colon slash slash.

Anyone interested in this topic can also read the thread below which is similar.

http://www.valuebuddies.com/thread-6213.html