[jfoutz]

I wish I could remember the name of the book, but I remember a few stories. The author was a young broker, and had a truck driver client. The truck driver was pretty adamant about investing in this factory that kept growing every time their route took them out there. It was a tampon factory, and there was institutional bias about dumping millions into women's products. Truck driver ended up retiring early.

Another was Pep Boys, the name is stupid, hard to pitch to an institutional investor, but made tons of money when someone got over their embarrassment.

Aside from biases, He called out La Quinta, you experience doesn't have to be super deep. The guy recognized it was clean, inexpensive, not the Ritz but a solid deal for what you got.

The last strategy that I thought was sorta odd (but makes sense) is companies that own big chunks of other companies. Their example was AT&T being cheap, but owning big chunks of cell phone companies. We sorta saw the same thing play out with Yahoo and Ali-baba.

Peter Lynch! One up on Wall Street! Probably super dated now, but was a pretty interesting perspective on trying to see things other people didn't see.

[air7]

These are nice but I suspect these accounts suffer from survivorship bias.

[jfoutz]

Been a few years since I read the book, absolutely - these are the highlights. If I recall correctly there are failures as well. The book walks through how to read annual reports so hopefully the reader isn't picking totally fake companies.

I guess, the gist is, if all trades are just coin flips, it won't matter anyway. But if you're really committed to investing in a single stock (and you probably shouldn't), have yourself a reason to think you have an edge. maybe the whole sector is growing, pep boys, auto zone, o'rielly and you can't really go wrong.

If you're going to the casino anyway, play a game where you at least understand the rules.