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Learning that drives better investment decisions

Posts by Andrew Stotz

Make Indexing Your Investment Strategy

Book review of Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street: Investors who don’t try to profit by predicting market shifts will do better in the long run with tax-favored savings and investment plans with a diversified portfolio built up of index funds, over speculators who try their hand at short-term predictions.

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10 Ways Ethics Adds Value to YOU

Within the financial world, there are many areas of focus such as accounting, economics, valuation, or derivatives. And, of course, there is ethics. I want to teach you 10 ways that ethics can add value to you.

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Why We Stopped Performance Appraisals at CoffeeWORKS

Twenty years ago I co-founded a coffee roasting factory in Bangkok, Thailand while I was head of research at an investment bank in Bangkok. I learned more about investing and valuing businesses from that experience than I ever learned from all my studies of finance, including my CFA exams.

The most valuable thing I learned is that you get the most from employees when they love their jobs and respect their teammates and the people they work for.

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Profitable Growth is What Matters for Long-Term Value

World Class Benchmarking measures the financial performance of a company through Profitable Growth. Our database includes about 27,000 companies worldwide and each company is benchmarked versus all its global sector peers.

Learn more about it in this post, and why Profitable Growth is what matters to you as an investor.

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Business DNA: Face to Face with Armed Guards

Business DNA: Masthawin Charnvirakul joined one of his family’s companies, STP & I, and was quickly appointed to pilot it through its darkest time. Masthawin’s leadership emphasized changes that have brought the company to the financial success it is experiencing today.

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18 Questions for Pre-Revenue Valuation of a Startup

Oftentimes, I’m asked about the concept of pre-revenue valuation for a startup. Well, that’s a very difficult thing because you’ve got no revenue and certainly no profit. How do you value this? In my opinion, the first step in the valuation of a company is to ask these 18 questions. These 18 questions cover five areas. First is trust; second is the idea; third is execution; fourth is the exit; and the fifth is enthusiasm.

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Noodles in Exchange for Investing Advice

During my recent trip to China, I explored the topic of the Chinese stock market, which appears cheap at a 13x price-to-earnings (PE) ratio. However, this is distorted by a very low PE financial sector that is a third of overall stock market value. While visiting Hefei, Anhui province a friend took me to a noodle shop in. The owner of the shop had asked my friend if he knew anything about investing because he had lost a lot of money in the stock market.

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