Today, I am also be celebrating the fact that Fat Pitch Financials has served over 1 million page views, 1,054,491 pages to be exact at the time of this writing. This year alone, Fat Pitch Financials served 482,497 pages to 257,214 visitors. Supposedly, 68% of this years visitors were new to the site according to my stats counter.

If you are a recent reader of Fat Pitch Financials or even if you are a long time reader, there are probably many articles that you’ve never even seen at Fat Pitch Financials. I dug through my visitor logs and found the following stories were most read this past year:

Most Popular Stories

1. How to calculate your return on investment
2. Excel Financial Data Add-In
3. Exploring Greenblatt’s Magic Formula
4. Ultimate 2007 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting Guide
5. Phil Town’s Rule #1 Book
6. Biggest Losers of Today’s Stock Market Panic
7. Ultimate 2008 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting Guide
8. Using My Annualized Rate of Return Spreadsheet
9. 52-Week Low List Packed with Quality Names
10. Magic Formula Performance to Date

Are any of your favorite posts missing from this list? I’ve added several of these top posts to my new tabbed sidebar under the “Best Of” section. I’ll be updating that section routinely, so any suggestions would be helpful.

Since I recently redesigned the site, I thought it might also be interesting to look back at how Fat Pitch Financials has evolved over the past four years. Here are six screen shots that depict the evolution of this blog:

August 2004

May 2005

November 2005

July 2006

October 2007

August 2008

In addition to the evolution of Fat Pitch Financials, it’s hard to believe that my simple little blog has morphed into several spinoffs. Some were short lived, like Fat Pitch News. However, Fat Pitch News helped spark in October of 2006 the idea for Value Investing News, which is now even more popular than Fat Pitch Financials in under two years.

In early 2005, I created the going private transactions list, which in turn evolved into Fat Pitch Financials Contributor’s Corner. Contributor’s Corner now not only covers going private transactions, but also odd lot tender offers, spinoffs, split-offs, and other special situation opportunities. My goal is to continue developing Contributor’s Corner into a more application oriented service.

As I work towards my fifth year of Fat Pitch Financials, I look forward to discussing some meaningful portfolio numbers. As you might know, I track two portfolios here at Fat Pitch Financials. The first one is the Fat Pitch Financials Port and it is up over 30% since inception back in 2004. It is now sporting a 7% average annualized return. The second portfolio is the Special Situations Real Money Portfolio. It is a small portfolio that is a bit younger than the Fat Pitch Port. However, it has already produced a 60% return, which comes out to an impressive 20.75% average annualized rate of return. There are not many other blogs that track performance and very few have been doing it as long as I have. Since the beginning it has been my goal to maintain performance numbers as a way for my readers to understand my experience with investing and to learn from my actions. I look forward to being able to share five year performance numbers next year.

I can’t believe that Fat Pitch Financials served over a half a million pages to over 200 thousand visitors this year.  That’s especially amazing since Fat Pitch Financials has only served up 633,000 page view since inception. That means most of you have only just started reading Fat Pitch Financials this past year. Be sure to subscribe to Fat Pitch Financials if you haven’t already.  Over 1,400 of you already subscribe to the Fat Pitch Financials feed and a couple of hundred get our email alerts.

If you are a recent reader of Fat Pitch Financials or even if you a long time reader, there are probably many articles that you’ve never even seen at Fat Pitch Financials.  I dug through my visitor logs and found the following stories were most read this past year:

Most Popular Stories

1. How to Calculate Your Return on Investment
2. Ultimate 2007 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting Guide
3. Exploring Greenblatt’s Magic Formula
4. Excel Financial Data Add-In
5. Ultimate 2006 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting Guide
6. Phil Town’s Rule #1 Book
7. Magic Formula Performance to Date
8. Top 5 Hacks for Intelligent Investors
9. MFI – Rule 1 Big Five Combo Screen
10. Magic Formula Rankings Using Portfolio 123

I also want to thank everyone for helping to make Fat Pitch Financials so successful.  It has encouraged me to develop Fat Pitch Financials Contributor’s Corner and Value Investing News.  It’s really hard to believe that a little investment journal could lead to the development of an actual business.  It will be interesting to see where this goes next year.

Fat Pitch Financials was also mentioned in BusinessWeek earlier this week for my Ultimate 2007 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting Guide. I want to welcome all the new visitors that came from BusinessWeek yesterday and today. I hope you take some time to explore my archives to get a better understanding of what Fat Pitch Financials is all about and then consider subscribing to my feed.

Finally, I want to let you know about Stock GumShoe. Stock Gumshoe uncovers the actual stocks  behind the stock tip teasers touted by newsletters and advisers that end up in your mailbox. I recently challenged him to figure out the two tender offers I hinted about in my most recent Special Situations Real Money Port update. In less than a day, the Stock Gumshoe passed my test and figured out that I was talking about Premiere Global Services, Inc. (PGI) and Tribune Co. (TRB). The Stock Gumshoe’s sleuthing skills impressed me. I didn’t think he would figure out PGI, which by the way I sold last week for the tender price of $12.65. I’m going to be a bit more careful about the hints I leave in the future. Of course, you can always subscribe to Fat Pitch Financials Contributor’s Corner to find out the latest special situation opportunities I’m researching and investing in.

Full Disclosure: I currently own shares of Tribune (TRB) and McGraw-Hill, the parent company of BusinessWeek. I no longer own PGI.

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This Seeking Alpha certification fits in nicely with my 2007 goal of increasing the credibility of Fat Pitch Financials.  In addition to the Seeking Alpha certification, I also utilize the RapLeaf reputation system to allow my customers to provide feedback on doing business with me. I encourage you to click on the RapLeaf graphic on the left to review the excellent rating reviews Fat Pitch Financials has received.  While you are browsing my ratings, please show your support by providing feedback as a friend of the site or as a customer (if you have subscribed to Contributor’s Corner or sponsored an ad on the site). Thank you.

I thought you might be interested in my response to his questions.  I revealed why and how I started Fat Pitch Financials and my favorite financial books, just to name a few things.

I also let Jim try out Fat Pitch Financials Contributor’s Corner last month.  I think he found the current list of going private transactions to be useful, and he even invested in one of the opportunities himself.  I’m sure you’ll hear about his experience in the future on his site.

Any takers?

I guess this is why I avoid using relative valuations when analyzing stocks, and stick with strictly estimating value with a discounted cash flows (DCF) model. I don’t quite think Fat Pitch Financials is worth quite as much, based on DCF. Maybe someone will prove me wrong and make an offer. Ultimately, what the market is willing to pay is the real arbiter of price, not necessarily intrinsic value.

In the past, I struggled to take advantage of unexpected downturns in the stock market. In the emotional chaos that often hits after a market plunge, I often was unable to research enough companies fast enough to make a quality purchase decision while prices remained low.

My goal is to identify the highest quality companies now, so that I can swing hard and sure at the next fat pitch that comes over my plate. I am particularly looking for companies with sustainable competitive advantages and will keep them ahead of their competition for years to come. Warren Buffett refers to these companies as having wide moats.

What gives a company a wide moat that keeps the competition at bay? Some companies are very low cost producers, others have key patents on their products, and still others provide services that have high switching costs.

I’ll go into these characteristics in further detail in the examples I discuss in upcoming articles. Feel free to suggest your favorite wide moat companies and I’ll take a close look at them here.

I welcome your feedback and comments.