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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Michael Burry who wrote (8794)	10/28/1999 6:39:00 PM
From: jeffbas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78478

Mike, I noticed your restriction of debt to equity of less than 50%. I suggest including those as well, perhaps on a separate list. Some of the ones on your list may have D/E of over 50% if you take out good will on acquisitions overpaid for -- as CHB would be if it made your list.

To: Michael Burry who wrote (8794)	10/28/1999 9:35:00 PM
From: Bob Rudd	Respond to of 78478

Mike: Interesting list - Thanks for doing the legwork. You might want to take a closer look at GISH. A bunch of value guys have been buying it....Marty Whitman even had or has a small position. I tripped across it while looking at Craig theaters, but it's way outside my area of understanding so I passed. OTOH, you should be familiar with this stuff and maybe could give us some insight into whether these value guys are on to something or just suffering from 'tired blood'. moneycentral.msn.com bob

To: Michael Burry who wrote (8794)	10/28/1999 10:47:00 PM
From: James Clarke	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78478

Mike, that screen is incredible. Everyone on the thread is going to hate me for saying this, but FIND A WAY TO CHARGE FOR IT. YOU HAVE A UNIQUE PRODUCT. NOBODY ELSE DOES THIS. Or are you holding out for the IPO of DrMike.com. In that case, just get me 1000 shares at the offering price, ok pal. I'll wash your car. I'll walk your dog...there are some things I won't do, even for money. You talk about the internet destroying opportunities. I start with the same raw list you do, and then do the same weeding you do (but I don't have to publish it, so its a lot less labor intensive - I cut out 2/3 of the list by sight - i.e. is there any way I would ever invest in this company no matter what the numbers - but I know the list you're starting with). The only way I know of that this list could have been generated before Mike found this free thing was with a VERY expensive product called Factset. Factset is a publicly traded company you can short. Game over for those guys in the long run if free screening is getting to this level. It also tells you something else. The Pensobscots aren't going to be there any more. This is market efficiency rearing its ugly head somewhere where it hurts me - in $10 million net-nets. You may be happy about this development, but this is not a good thing. All credit to Mike, though. He has truly broken new ground here. Once again, CHARGE FOR IT! A LOT. (I figure if you charge about $10,000 for your screen, I might still be able to buy my Pensbcots at 6. You make money, I make money. Win-win, right?) Or maybe the correct way to make money off this screen is to make me pay for you NOT to post it publicly. In all seriousness, this thread is going to go to new levels with that kind of raw material for everybody to work with. I look forward to seeing the posts in the next few weeks. And yes, the mystery net-net is on your list. JJC

To: Michael Burry who wrote (8794)	10/29/1999 12:12:00 AM
From: Q.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 78478

Mike, re. your net-net screen using StockQuest, I tried to duplicate your results using StockQuest data I downloaded today, but I ended up with nearly 3X the stocks as you. You said you found 47 under 66.67%. I came up with 157 stocks under 66.67% with the mechanical screen, and this dropped only to 133 when I added your extra criterion debt/equity < 0.5. I noticed that none of your stocks had a market cap under $2.5 M, whereas 47 of mine did. Eliminating those 47 super-tiny stocks reduced my list down to only 86 stocks, which is still nearly twice as many as yours. I wonder if we did it differently? I hadn't used StockQuest in a long time, so maybe I did something wrong. Would you be kind enough to take a look at the following, and tell me if you did it differently? Here is the criterion I used: {MktCap}<0.66667({workingcap}-{LTDebt}) where the last two quantities are user-created variables that I defined as follows: {workingcap} = {CURASTQ}-{CURLIABQ} {LTDebt} = {DBTLT2EQQ}{MKTCAP}/{PR2BOOKQ} note: all quantities that are not ratios are expressed by MarketGuide in millions.