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

To: Daniel Chisholm who wrote (6525)	4/1/1999 11:24:00 AM
From: Bob Rudd	Respond to of 78523

Dan: Closed my position in Loewen yesterday...with a modest profit due more to buying a dip and selling a rally than finding an incredible value. Despite their success in cutting a deal with bankers announced yesterday, and the possibility they will continue to do so, I can't ignore the fact that 4 bankruptcy prediction models show that as the probable result. Besides, following it all takes too much time for a modest position. Good luck on your bond play if you decide to do it. Bob Accounting: I beleive there's a shareware accounting tutorial available on zdnet and similar sites hotfiles.com search for accounting tutorial

To: Daniel Chisholm who wrote (6525)	4/1/1999 8:33:00 PM
From: Walter in HK	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78523

Daniel,..learning bookkeeping will be like learning quantum mechanics ? No, it is much easier. All you need by way of prior education, is adding, subtracting and percentage calculation !! I am an EE, you don't need Fourier Analysis and LaPlace transforms !! I learned it in 6 hours plus homework. The rest is learned by applying. Practising it by actually doing - your own books, somebody else's books for a month - and checking out Financial Statements, with a pencil and calculator. Once you learned it, you can think through why it works the way it does. Thereafter it will no longer appear counterintuitive, once you realize : The names Credit and Debit are a convention. Don't read meaning into it. Regarding your books, to have correct English Grammar is always good. It will be respected by those who learned it correctly. I should know, English is my second language. The rest of the books you mentioned, I would forget, at least for stock review. Statistics: Only helpful in esoteric applications. Most things in life are very simple. The key is to be able to recognize the essence of complicated circumstances. Then they are simple. To that end, what I found most useful were the books of Peter Drucker. He helps you get down to the essence. That is important whether you work as an employe, a manager and certainly, when you run your own business. Before Drucker, there was no business literature and just about all else is still poor imitation. Some Loudmouths that push fads. He is still alive, but getting very old. Just bought “On the Profession of Management”1998, for my wife, but only leafed through it, before buying. Drucker you can trust to help you. The rest are Fad people. Including the Harvard Business School. I once asked a famous HBS Emeritus professor, about 10 years ago, when we all stood in awe of the Japanese and American Manufacturing was low life: “Why should one not blame the Business Schools for that ?” I will never forget his wonderfully academically phrased answer: “ There were companies with good ideas (meaning the likes of General Electric which has been outstanding even before Jack Welch) and we systematized it to great disadvantage” In plain language, the great Harvard Business School taught fads. Imitating fads never works anyway. You have to arrive at whatever you do by thinking it through yourself. And for that, I found Peter Drucker helpful. Why, I thought of "Empowering" 40 years ago because I saw: Most people want to do a good job. Checking all the time demotivates. Demotivation costs more than the mistakes. You learn more.People have more fun. Now it's the latest fad. I hope you and others find these remarks helpful. I have a BS detector which rings alarms when encountering BS. I got there from reading Drucker. You have to do your own thinking, stockmarket, job, family, budget planning. I indulge in this philosophical excursion only because I think some of it is germane to Value Investing: Recognize the Essence of the business you invest in. Be able to analyse by understanding how accounting works. If you want to go further: Taxes.