Investorial

Earnings is the number that keeps CFOs awake at night. Nightmares of backlashing shareholders dance in their heads, in fear of a time when that number should ever prove dissappointing.

I’ll preface by saying that I’m not an accountant, and would welcome any comments by people commanding such expertise. Numbers can’t lie, but the game’s stakeholders may use them as tools to mislead and distract from the real issues. Here’s an example of a company creatively presenting earnings figures. (more…)

First, I want to thank the InvestorGeeks co-founders Chris, Jason and Frank for bringing me into the fold. InvestorGeeks was founded in October 2005 (around the same time as Investorial) and is

“focused on building a community of investors and acting as a launch pad to discover new resources [..] creating real dialogue, sharing ideas, and encouraging criticism.”

Those ideals were very similar to my own and so I approached Chris early this month about the possibility of expanding that community. The result was an open call to investor geeks out there, and I’m happy to be among the first group of new writers. (more…)

You can’t really blame MarketWatch for trying to integrate Digg on their articles and pages, but you can certainly question their blind-blanketing treatment for the site. If you have been surfing around the MarketWatch, you may see a section at the bottom of articles to entice people to submit them to community web-sharing sites such as Digg, del.icio.us. And why not? Digg has become of one of the web’s most visited site boasting very high traffic. Here’s a screenshot of the link area as captured from one of its pages.

The page from where I captured this was actually (more…)

Sometimes it’s hard to get a true value investor to not talk about the facts and come with some emotion, just ask Jim Chuong! Does this mean that value investing fund managers don’t ever hard sell? There are always exceptions and Joel Greenblatt of Magic Formula Investing is one of them.

Though the site sounds more like it belongs to Ripley’s Believe It or Not, Joel considers himself a value investor and is the author of the book, The Little Book That Beats The Market (you can read excerpts on Amazon.com). I recently read an April 2006 interview that Joel did with MoneySense. The interview angle depicted Joel as if he was a sideshow salesman who’s found the magic formula to generate great investment returns. Joel talks candidly about (more…)

If you are a regular Investorial reader, you may already have notice the new layout design. I spent the whole day creating this design on my PC and finally felt it was ready to be ported to the site.

I was acutely aware that visitors using Internet Explorer 6 were having difficulties with the stylesheet I was using in the last design (shown in picture). I hope this version will remedy those issues. I really do like this design better. A little house cleaning was needed to throw away some unnecessary components. I will still be working on a few little tweaks over the next few days on the site. Please bear with any site issues while I finish the live re-design. (more…)

Billionaire Mark Cuban is no stranger to sharing his personal views about the stock market and its players. While he is busily waiting in anticipation for a Dallas Maverick NBA World Championship, he is still working on other ventures in the background.

One such venture is ShareSleuth.com, a new journalism venture by business reporter Christopher Carey that will start to go live July 2006. Mark Cuban’s involvement in the venture was revealed in the internal announcement of Carey leaving the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to work on Sharesleuth. (more…)

google-spreadsheet.thumbnail.jpg"/>Much thanks to JLP from AllFinancialMatters, for sending me an invite to try out Google Spreadsheets. I was interested to evaluate the web tool because many financial bloggers like to use, design and share spreadsheets. Google spreadsheets could be a great way to share such information! I looked around, tried a few features and even uploaded one of my own spreadsheets. After playing around for about 30 minutes, I decided to send Google a feedback. I thought I would share what I wrote: (more…)

This post will definitely be one of those memorable moments in Investorial’s history. Aside from being my first podcast, it is also my first interview with a fund manager, Jim Chuong! Jim will be the first to humbly tell you that being compared to the Oracle of Omaha is a bit much. But there certainly exist similarities. Jim founded the Chuong Investment Management (formerly The Toronto Investment Club). Chuong Investment Management (CIM) is an investment partnership that followed closely Warren Buffett’s own partnership structure when he first started. As well, Jim has managed CIM to an annual return of 22.9% since 1998 (without buying tech stocks) by following the tenets of value investing.

We had lunch at a local Tim Hortons before Jim went for his regular workout. I tried cleaning up the audio, but I want to apologize for the background noise and the occasional baby’s cry. Jim was a really nice guy who spoke very intelligently and candidly on every subject that came up during our 43 minutes. We chatted about a wide variety of subjects from MERs, to value investing, to comic books, tennis, saving for yourself and many other subjects. I learnt a lot from this experience and I know you will too! Download it, put it in your iPod and listen on your way to work. You’ll be glad you did!

Jim Chuong Podcast Interview (10 MB, 43 minutes)

I definitely believe that Jim is one of the good people you will find in (more…)