Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael Shearn founded Time Value of Money, LP, a private investment firm, in 1996, to devote his attention to selecting and researching stocks and private investments. He launched the Compound Money Fund, LP, a concentrated value fund, in 2007. Shearn serves on the Investment Committee of Southwestern University, which oversees the school's $250 million endowment. He is also a member of the Advisory Board for the University of Texas MBA Investment Fund. Shearn graduated magna cum laude from Southwestern University, a small liberal arts college in Georgetown, Texas, with a BA in business, with an emphasis in accounting and finance. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Austin, Texas.

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Praise for THE INVESTMENT CHECKLIST

"Every wise investor will keep The Investment Checklist next to their financial instrument panel and consult it whenever they make a decision to buy or sell a stock."
―Robert P. Miles, author, The Warren Buffett CEO

"Michael Shearn has written an indispensable book. It will raise the game of every investor who reads it. Fortunately, not all of them will."
―Judd Kahn, co-author, Competition Demystified and Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond

When you base your stock purchase decisions on isolated facts and don't take the time to thoroughly understand the businesses you're buying, costly investment mistakes are usually made. Instead, your investment purchases should be based on understanding the value of a business through in-depth research.

That's why Michael Shearn―founder of Time Value of Money, LP and the Compound Money Fund, LP―has created The Investment Checklist. In it, he shares the successful approach he's used over the past decade to generate and research investment ideas, assess the quality of a business and its management team, and ultimately improve his overall investment performance.

Along the way, you'll be introduced to specific "checklists" that will enhance your ability to understand the dynamics of the business you're interested in and the people operating it, value the potential investment, and make the most informed buy or sell decision possible. Each chapter also contains countless examples that show you exactly how the author's checklist has helped him make the right investment moves over the course of his successful professional career.

Whether you're just starting out and thinking about what you want to invest in, or already have a portfolio that you want to manage more effectively, The Investment Checklist has the tools and insights you need to improve your investment endeavors.

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All too often, investors buy stocks based on either recommendations from other investors, hunches, or isolated facts about a business they've heard or read about. In doing this, your decision-making process becomes dangerous because you haven't taken the time to thoroughly understand the businesses you are buying and you're relying on the information, or misinformation, being provided to you about a particular stock. Instead, your investment purchases should be based on understanding the value of a business through in-depth research. If you truly understand the value of a business, then you will be in a position to recognize investment opportunities and can more easily make the right buy or sell decisions.

The Investment Checklist has been designed to help you develop an in-depth research process, through a series of checklists, that will allow you to effectively generate and research investment ideas, assess the quality of a business and its management team, and ultimately improve the performance of your portfolio. In it, author Michael Shearn―founder of Time Value of Money, LP, and the Compound Money Fund, LP―outlines the systematic process he has used over the past decade to carefully think through potential investments and avoid common investment mistakes. Along the way, he puts this approach in perspective by addressing:

• A search strategy that will improve your odds of finding investment ideas worth researching further
• The importance of evaluating a business's strengths and weaknesses, measuring its operational and financial health, and understanding a business from the customers' perspective rather than your own
• Why assessing the quality of management― from how they handle daily operations and long-term strategy to the type of managers they are and how they rose to lead the business―are essential to achieving better investment results
• How to gauge the potential future growth opportunities of a business by looking at whether it's growing organically or through merger and acquisitions, and whether historical growth has been profitable
• And much more

Each chapter of The Investment Checklist also offers countless examples of companies the author has researched, considered investing in, and actually invested in or decided not to invest in. These examples show you exactly how his checklist helped him make investment decisions, and they'll show you how to do the same. In addition, each chapter ends with "Key Points to Keep in Mind," so you can zero in on the critical factors in each set of questions.

If you want to lower your investment risk you need to increase your knowledge of the businesses you buy stock in. The Investment Checklist will show you how to do this, and much more, by helping you follow a concise and easy-to-use framework that will guide your investment decisions.

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The Investment Checklist

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

There are many ways you can generate investment ideas, some qualitative, some quantitative. Quantitative methods include looking at specific financial or operating metrics, whereas qualitative methods rely on more subjective characteristics, such as management strength, corporate culture, or competitive advantages. Whether you are running a complicated stock screen or simply getting ideas from other investors, all methods have their own advantages, limitations, and risks. Ultimately, the best method of generating ideas for you is the one that gives you the largest number of opportunities.

This chapter explores why stocks become undervalued, how to generate investment ideas, how to filter these ideas, and how to keep track of them. These steps are critical to creating a pool of stock ideas.

How Investment Opportunities Are Created

You can't manufacture investment opportunities. Instead, you need to be patient, and you have to be ready for the right opportunities. It is important to understand that good investment ideas are rare, and consistent success in the stock market is elusive. Those investors who believe that they can make money year after year in the stock market are setting themselves up for disappointment. Most investors are far too optimistic: They often think they've found great ideas when they haven't.

In contrast, investors with the best long-term track records have made most of their money with just a handful of investment ideas. For example, Warren Buffett states that his investment success is due to fewer than 20 ideas, such as the Washington Post newspaper, Coca-Cola, and GEICO. In short, you need to mentally prepare yourself in advance with the idea that you will not have many outstanding investments in your lifetime. Most investments you make will produce mediocre results, but a few can provide outstanding results.

The best investment opportunities usually come in big waves, such as when entire markets decline. There have been several recent examples: the Asian financial crisis of 1997 to 1998, the Internet bubble ending in 2000, and the recession starting in 2007. There were many buying opportunities in 2008 when the S&P 500 dropped 36 percent. This was caused by forced selling. The market sell-off was exacerbated by the indiscriminate selling of stocks by money managers who were forced to sell stocks to fund client redemptions. Even if these money managers knew these stocks were undervalued, they had no choice but to sell. This forced selling created artificially low prices—which created a rare opportunity for investors.

Other kinds of forced selling include situations when stocks are thrown out of an index because they no longer meet the minimum standards to remain in an index. Many investment managers who exclusively invest in stocks found in a particular index (such as the S&P 500) are forced to sell when the stock moves out of the index. Spin-offs (where a business divests a subsidiary) create a similar situation when the business that is spun off does not fit the investing criteria of an investment manager. Forced selling decreases prices—which creates opportunities.

Besides broad market sell-offs that create forced selling, the stock market has a way of magnifying different types of business and industry-wide risk that cause the stock prices of businesses to drop. To learn which area of the stock market is in greatest distress, look for those areas where capital is scarce. Scarcity of capital creates less competition for assets, which decreases prices. Ask yourself, what areas of the stock market are investors fleeing, and why?

You may want to begin by looking at the percentage change in prices of certain industries found in common indices such as the materials, energy, or financials subset of the S&P Composite 1500. For example, the price performance for components of the S&P Composite 1500 from April 23, 2010 to June 7, 2010 showed that:

• Materials were down 18 percent

• Energy was down 17 percent

• Utilities were down 9 percent

With that information, you might start researching the materials industry, looking for stocks that have significantly dropped in price. Ideally, you want to identify those stocks where the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater—and then rescue that baby!

Most stock price drops are due to some type of uncertainty about the business, and there are many possible reasons:

• Litigation fears

• Accounting irregularities

• Accusations of fraud

• Health concerns (such as swine flu)

• Execution problems due to a flawed strategy

• Management concerns

• Executive departures

• Government intervention or regulation

• Loss of a customer

• Technological changes

• Credit rating downgrades

• Competitor announcements

• Or a myriad of other reasons

In most of these cases, investors automatically assume the worst-case scenario and tend to sell stocks first and ask questions later. Once the reality starts to set in that the ultimate outcome will not be as bad as expected, then stock prices adjust and typically rise. Ideally, you want to identify those areas where the outlook is most pessimistic and identify whether the sources of pessimism are temporary or permanent. Let's look at an example.

Case Study: Investors' Pessimism about Heartland Payment Systems Proved Unfounded

In 2009, Heartland Payment Systems found itself in what appeared to be a disastrous scenario. Heartland helps small and mid-sized merchants with credit-card transactions, providing the physical card machine and payment-processing services that enable customers to use credit and debit cards in retail stores. In 2008, computer hackers installed spyware on Heartland's network and had gained access to the systems that process Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express transactions.

After discovering the problem, Heartland announced details concerning the breach, including the number of months the spyware might have gathered card numbers and the number of transactions that the company usually processed. Framing it as potentially the largest data breach in history, the New York Times noted that 600 million or more card accounts were vulnerable, and quoted a data security analyst who said that there could be as much as $500 million in losses and other expenses if you added it all up. Early estimates were that Heartland would have to pay $2 per card for MC/Visa to reissue each affected card. The result? Investors quickly sold the stock. The price plummeted from $18 per share before the breach was announced (on January 6, 2009) to as low as $3.78 per share on March 9, 2009.

However, other investors with a solid base of research on the company and industry knew several things that helped them take advantage of this situation:

• First, they focused on Heartland's transaction count of 100 million transactions per month, and they recognized that not all of those would be from unique accounts. People tend to go the same places more than once. Later, more conservative estimates of stolen cards emerged at...