I was surprised to find that there wasn’t a value investing group on Mendeley.  I solved that little issue real by quickly setting up a group simply called Value Investing. I welcome fellow value investors to join this group and share their collections of papers.

I’m still looking for a collection of Benjamin Graham papers I have somewhere on my hard drive that I will add to the group as soon as I find them.  So far I have some classic Piotroski and Altman papers listed in the group. Please add your favorite value investing references to the list. I could see this group becoming a great resource for value investing students and researchers given the excellent collaboration features that Mendeley groups provide.

Inflation Adjuster calculates what the buying power of a dollar amount in a certain year is worth in another year. This inflation calculator uses the average annual Consumer Price Index (CPI-U) produced by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The CPI represents changes in prices of all goods and services purchased for consumption by urban households. This index value has been calculated every year since 1913. For the current year, the latest monthly index value is used. This past Wednesday the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.2 percent in May on a seasonally adjusted basis and over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 3.6 percent before seasonal adjustment.

In addition to estimating the buying power of a certain dollar amount, the Inflation Adjuster also reports on the total percent nominal price change and the annualized rate of inflation for the selected time period.

Start discovering the REAL value of prices with this simple handy Inflation Adjuster tool today! Please download this free app to your Android phones and provide some feedback. Be sure to provide the name of the device you used to try my App out on when providing feedback. I’m also planning to make additional apps for Android in the future, so I’m open to any suggestions for my next project.

I began browsing monitor options this morning. I started out thinking I’d buy a 21 inch LCD monitor to replace my old ViewSonic. However, I soon discovered that it looks like all the popular new monitors are high definition widescreen LCDs. What happened to all the regular 4:3 ratio monitors? Is widescreen the superior choice for online development and stock research?

If widescreen is the superior choice, I think I spotted a pretty good deal today. I’m thinking of going with the ASUS VH236H 23 Inch Widescreen LCD Monitor. If I actually get the $20 rebate, this highly rated monitor would only come to $179.10 and shipping would be free on Amazon. What are your thoughts on this monitor? Are there better alternatives out there? What are you currently using for your monitor?

ValueWiki  is a site dedicated to helping people make informed financial decisions from shared content. Valuewiki was formed in August 2006 and currently holds over 250,000 pages of comprehensive information about both large and small stock assets.  Wikia plans to expand these sites by embracing the existing community and attracting new contributors.

CEO of Wikia, Gil Penchina announced, “Valuewiki is a great addition to Wikia’s service and a great way to address the problems investors currently face as they are forced to wade through unnecessary chatter and frequent disputes regularly found on existing message board sites.” He also stated, ” Wikia supports Valuewiki with community building expertise to reach a broader audience, increase content and be recognized as a top destination for investors.”  It will be interesting to see if they will be able to create an active community on ValueWiki.  It might be worth keeping an eye on ValueWiki to see if it will develop into a tool that could be of value to serious investors.

The following is a paid review:

I’ve been check out Wall Street Survivor this past week. Wall Street Survivor is a free fantasy stock market game where you get to trade real stocks in real time using a fictional $100,000 account. Basically you can use the site as a “paper portfolio” to practice trading stocks. I highly recommend that beginners utilize these stock trading simulators for at least a few months before investing real money in individual stocks.

However, Wall Street Survivor.com is not just a mere stock market simulator. It is an active social community that provides a variety of learning tools and some attractive prize incentives to keep you motivated. Wall Street Survivor is giving out over $100,000 in prizes to their top players this year. The site is currently giving away 2 flights to Mexico for the top trader and the top investor of the month. I like the way investors with less than 15 trades have their own prize category. In addition to these top monthly prizes, there are Amazon gift certificates for the next nine runners-up in each category. There are also weekly prizes for the more active traders, starting at $200 for the top trader and down to a $25 gift certificate for the 5th place finisher. Finally, the site also gives out a random $25 gift certificate each day. If the prizes are not enough to motivate you, you also earn points for different activities and those points are redeemable for gift certificates.

Wall Street Survivor is also packed with educational content. This Survivor U includes basic, intermediate, and advanced trading lessons. There are also feature articles and regular columns. One column is even focused on dividend investing, so it is not all about trading. The goal of Survivor U is to eventually help members prepare for managing their own real-life stock portfolios.

The other main feature to prepare you for your own real portfolio is the real time streaming simulator. The trading area allows you to invest your $100,000 portfolio in stocks by making market orders, limit orders, stop orders, and shorting. The orders can be good for the day or good till canceled. It also appears they you will soon be able to also trade options. I look forward to that feature, since I’m trying to learn more about options trading. In the trading area, you get most of the standard brokerage account views including, open positions, order history, transactions, account balance, and watch list.

I like the way trades are restricted in realistic ways. You can’t trade more than half the actual volume of the stock for the day. I tried to buy shares of a micro cap stock today, and the trade didn’t fill because of lack of volume. While this is annoying, it is also realistic. I did finally make one trade for the large-cap stock, Pfizer (PFE), and the order went through almost instantly as it would in the real world. Interestingly, the trading interface warned me that I could only buy up to a certain number of shares. I think it is a way to restrict members from purchasing more than 25% of their portfolio in one stock. I think this is a reasonable limit to keep the contest realistic and fair. Members are also restricted from trading pink sheet stocks, mutual funds, futures, or bonds. I’ve found many good opportunities in pink sheet stocks, so I was a bit disappointed in that restriction but it is probably not an area for beginners.

As a special situations and value investor, I also appreciate that most stock splits, dividends, and other corporate actions reported by the news wires will be accounted for in player’s account. According to the FAQ, these situations may cause account values to be misrepresented until the reconciliation occurs, but that also occurs in my brokerage account.

Finally, I’m just starting to explore the rich social networking capabilities of the site. These include buddy lists, profile pages, and forums. You can check out my fatpitch profile if you are looking for a buddy on the site.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

It is a combination of text messaging, micro-blogging, and instant messaging. The key to Twitter’s success has been its flexibility to be used on various platforms (web, desktop, cell phone) and the ease of its integration into third-party applications via its API. It is a great way to broadcast news, get feedback, and collaborate with groups. I’ve been doing just that with fellow value investors on Twitter. Here’s who I’ve found so far worth following on Twitter, starting with my own accounts:

Value Investing Tweeters

@FatPitch George
Location United States
Website Fat Pitch Financials
Bio Value investor
Stats 140 followers 422 updates
Recent tweet: $EMAG on the mend today, big time! Received tender offer for $1.82.

@ValueInvesting ValueInvestingNews.com
Website Value Investing News
Bio Investor powered stock market news
Stats 195 followers 450 updates
Recent tweet: Lead story: Magic Formula Stocks On The Move 2-22-09 | Contrarian Value Investing http://tinyurl.com/byhhgu

@marketfolly 
Location usa
Website market folly
Bio tracking hedge funds, investing, trading
Stats 684 followers 716 updates
Recent tweet: my long order for $MCD also got filled. just re-buying my hedges for my massive consumer short

@jaltucher James Altucher
Stats 503 followers 119 updates
Recent tweet: @JasonRaznick, interesting factoid about $cpb is that its the best performing stock after a hurricane. its always up after a hurricane

@ToddSullivan Todd Sullivan
Location Westborough, Massachusetts
Bio Investor
Website Value Plays
Stats 493 followers 3,415 updates
Recent tweet: great line …boone pickens… “i may have lost my shirt last year but i still got my pants”

@qovax Qovax
Location Agoura Hills, CA
Website Qovax
Bio Safe investing nut. Learn how to detect accounting fraud at http://blog.qovax.com.
Stats 381 followers 525 updates
Recent tweet: I guess ex-employees accusing Stanford of running a Ponzi scheme back in 2006 should’ve sent a real strong signal to investors too.

@stockmanmarc 
Location United States
Website Stockmanmarc
Bio Value Investor & Entrepreneur In search of Dollars & $ense
Stats 301 followers 669 updates
Recent tweet: @ToddSullivan thats a good one or “You make most of your money in a bear market, you just don’t realize it at the time”- Shelby Davis

@value_investing
Location Australia
Website The Intelligent Investor
Bio The Intelligent Investor provides Australian stock market research, fortnightly podcasts and ask the experts forums.
Stats 258 followers 124 updates
Recent tweet: James has begun reading the Watching Brief by barrister Julian Burnside, reflections on human rights, law and justice

@GuruInvestor Team Validea
Location West Hartford, CT
Website The Guru Investor
Bio Partners: Validea.com & Validea Capital; manage Omega funds; columnists RealMoney, Forbes.com, Israel’s Globes; & authors of The Guru Investor book
Stats 236 followers 310 updates
Recent tweet: … Buffett should double down from this point forward. The likelihood is the next 10 yr will be good for stocks coming out of this bear.

@EverydayFinance Everyday Finance
Website Everyday Finance
Bio Alternative Investment Strategies; High Yield, Hedging and More
Stats 223 followers 167 updates
Recent tweet: 421% in 1 month. What the heck’s up with this ETN that is not behaving rationally? Too Late to play? http://tinyurl.com/bqt3tq

@alexcrippen Alex Crippen
Location Englewood Cliffs, NJ
Website Warren Buffett Watch
Bio Tracking all things Warren Buffett for CNBC.com
Stats 191 followers 95 updates
Recent tweet: BRK shares drop for seventh straight day, down $1400 (1.8%) to $75,600 .. lowest close since October 7, 2003.

@dsweet Dan Sweet
Location Mishawaka, IN
Website a finance guy
Bio 2nd Year Notre Dame MBA – a finance guy going to work for P&G
Stats 179 followers 394 updates
Recent tweet: liking the “narrow columns” option in Tweetdeck settings! who knew? 7 columns across-check it out!

@Jae_Jun Jae Jun
Location Seattle
Website Old School Value
Bio Value Enterprising Investor
Stats 67 followers 79 updates
Recent tweet: time to look into junk bonds.

@goodevalue
Location Saint Louis, USA
Bio Short seller, blogger
Stats 64 followers 489 updates
Recent tweet: $SPY p/b at 2.3, about where it was 16 years ago. That means good things for future returns. http://tinyurl.com/bkmfyn

@StockPursuit Mark Perkins
Location U.S.
Website Stock Pursuit
Bio exploiting emotion and inefficiencies in the stock market, “value” investing, “growth” investing, cigar butt
Stats 60 followers 7 updates
Recent tweet: SOAP in play less than cash 

@patvano Patrick VanO
Location Dallas, Texas
Bio Christian, newly married (June 2008), value investor
Stats 34 followers 382 updates
Recent tweet: Considering buying another b-share

@compoundinglife Kenneth Caruso
Location Seattle
Website Compounding Life
Stats 10 followers 3 updates
Recent tweet: Lot’s of potential blog posts in my drafts folder, need to do some editing

@yesandnotyes Doug Ott
Location Georgia
Website Yes and Not Yes
Stats 8 followers 8 updates
Recent tweet: Looks like Santelli caught the attention of Drudge.

NEW Additions

@thethirdpig Benjamin Taylor
Location New Jersey
Website The Third Pig
Bio The Third Pig: Building Wealth One Brick At A Time
Stats 18 followers 36 updates
Recent tweet: Read, Share, Digg, Comment, Post to FB, Subscribe to the latest from BPC: “Is Amy Holmes Straight Stupid?”: http://tinyurl.com/ahstupid

@SimoleonSense
Location Florida
Website Simoleon Sense
Bio Founder Of SimoleonSense.com
Stats 15 followers 4 updates
Recent tweet: Reading About Dubai & Abu Dhabi

@arminstuk
Location Rijeka, Croatia
Bio Stock Market Investing: Streaming news, analysis, research, thoughts, ideas updates
Stats 13 followers 156 updates
Recent tweet: Despite Obama ambitious agenda,no momentum for WS

@bazaar01
Location Katonah, NY
Stats 4 followers 22 updates
Recent tweet: anyone value investors on twitter look at small/microcaps…if so reach out..

Using Twitter

Using Twitter is rather easy. First, just sign up for a free account at Twitter. Be sure to include a picture, name, bio, web link, and location in your account profile. Then just sign in and tell the world what you are doing in 140 characters or less. That’s called a tweet in Twitter jargon.

There are a couple of basic commands on Twitter you will want to become familiar with. First, you can reply to other users on Twitter by simply starting your tweet with @username, replacing the username with that of the person you are responding to.

If you want to “tag” a tweet by giving it a subject keyword, you can include a #hashtag. Just replace the word hashtag with the keyword. For example, when I tweeted from the Value Investing Congress last year, I included #vic with all my tweets so my updates could be included in the online discussions happening at the conference. Consider using #vin in value investing news related tweets.

A similar tagging method has been developed for stock tickers by StockTwits.com. If you discuss a ticker, just start it with the $ symbol, such as $MSFT. You can also tag a general comment about the market by include $$ at the end of the tweet. StockTwits then organizes all the conversations by registered members that are tagged with $ or $$ into what Howard Lindzon dubs the “Human Ticker”. You can also short the conversations by ticker at the StockTicker.com site.

Finally, there is another tag you will see on Twitter called the ReTweet. A ReTweet is simply a tweet that starts with the letters, RT. You use it when you want to repost someone else’s tweet, so you can share it with your followers. Here’s an example:

RT @stockmanmarc For my afternoon followers:Mohnish Pabrai Files 13F-HR http://tinyurl.com/cr2bbd

This message starts with RT, since I’m reposting @stockmanmarc’s tweet about a 13F filing of interest to other value investors. Notice the link at the end of the message. This link was created using a url shortening service, TinyURL.com. There are several other url shortening services, including the up and coming bit.ly, which includes a few additional features. You’ll find these url shortening services handy to keep within the 140 character Twitter limit.

Twitter Tools

There are several applications you may want to consider using to facilitate your activity on Twitter. First, many users are finding the desktop application, TweetDeck, a great way to manage your converasations. I’m currently trying it out. There is also Twirl, which I’ve used in the past. On my BlackBerry, I use TwitterBerry to post tweets and browse the latest updates posted by users I’m following. What other tools are you using?

I hope this list will help you start finding like minded investors to start following. Am I missing any other value investors on Twitter? Let me know in the comments section below. I’ll update the list above as I get new information.

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Plus, you’ll get five additional free trades if I send you a referral. All I need from you is your name and email address. You can send that info to me using my contact form. In return, I’ll get $50 for referring you and you’ll get my thanks plus the referral email from Firstrade. This deal is running until March 31, 2009.

I’ve been using Firstrade since before Fat Pitch Financials even started and I’ve been pretty happy with their service. Their commissions are very low and they’ve done a great job handling all the weird special situation requests I send to them. They are also one of the few brokers that don’t charge annual fees for Coverdell Educational Savings Accounts or Roth IRAs and that is why I selected them for the Special Situations Real Money Portfolio (my son’s Coverdell ESA) when I started it in 2004. I think they are a good choice, especially for investors just starting out with small accounts.

You can compare the search volume of several terms against each other over time. I decided to compare “value investing” versus “growth investing” since 2004.

Search Volume: “value investing” vs. “growth investing” Worldwide, 2004 – present

The blue line in the above chart represents the term “value investing” and the red line is “growth investing”. According to the above chart it appears “value investing” is a much more popular term than “growth investing”. It also appears that the volume of searches for value investing spiked in the fall of both 2006 and 2007. However, since that 2007 peak, value investing seems to be going down in search popularity. I wonder if this bodes well for value investors, many of whom have been suffering poor performance recently.

Now let’s look at where these value investing searches are occurring.

Regional Searches for “value investing”

1. Singapore 100
2. Hong Kong 79
3. India 46
4. Malaysia 35
5. South Africa 34
6. United States 32
7. Canada 31
8. Australia 25
9. Switzerland 13
10. United Kingdom 9

I was surprised to see that the United States was only ranked sixth in the above list of countries ranked by an index of search volume for the term, value investing. The top four positions were dominated by Asian countries. It might be worth looking at what is going on with value investing in Singapore, Hong Kong, and India. There might be some good growth potential for Value Investing News by adding better coverage of news in those regions. 

As an investor, it might be more valuable to note where value investing search volume is low, such as South America, Middle East, and most of Africa, excluding South Africa. This could indicate that these markets are less competitive. Of course, the language in which searches are conducted is also likely a big factor in the regional distribution of the value investing searches.

U.S. Searches for “value investing”

Looking closer to home, it is also interesting to note where in the United States folks are searching for value investing. As to be expected, New York dominates the search volume, which is not surprising since it is the home of Wall Street. Connecticut, which is a popular location for hedge funds, comes in second. I was surprised to see California only made the seventh position, behind DC, especially given many members of Value Investing News appear to live in California.

So, what are all these value investors searching for. Below are lists of the top searches and fasting rising search terms for value investing since 2004.

Top searches for “value investing”

1. value investing graham 100
2. value investing congress 95
3. book value investing 95
4. growth value investing 90
5. value investor 70
6. value investing buffet 60
7. value investing stocks 55
8. columbia value investing 50
9. value investing funds 45
10. value investing buffett 45

Rising Searches for “value investing”

1. value investors
2. value investor
3. value investing stocks
4. value investing pdf
5. value investing news
6. value investing india
7. value investing graham
8. value investing funds
9. value investing congress
10. value investing conference

It appears investors are very interested in Graham, conferences, books, and value investors. Nothing surprising there. However, I am surprised to see “growth value investing” is the four highest search term. I wonder what those folks were looking for.

Looking a bit closer at the rising search terms, I’m happy to see “value investing news” is the fifth highest ranking term. (Could that have something to do with my relatively new site, Value Investing News?) What the rising search list also tell me is that there is a lot of growing demand for information on value investors. I’ll keep that in mind as I add new content to my sites.

Google Insights for Search will provide hours of fun for data hounds like myself. I can see this tool being quite helpful to examine the growth and the relative strengths of various brands. Have you tried Google Insights for Search? What interesting trends and patterns have you spotted?

Disclosure: I do not own shares of Google (GOOG).

The conference call was organized by Mark Story of the SEC Office of Investor Education. Opening comments were given by David Blaszkowsky, Director of the Office of Interactive Disclosure and Kristin Kaepplein, Director of the Office of Investor Education and Advocacy. The opening statements were very brief and left much room for questions. Thankfully, both David and Kristin responded to one question and follow-up question from each of the invited bloggers.

Bill Cara started off the questions with a passionate plea for data interoperability. He noted how expensive financial data can be for individual investors. Some have tried to use “bots” to gather data from financial sites only to find themselves “blacklisted”. Bill Cara’s question was whether the SEC would blacklist heavy users of XBRL data hosted on the SEC’s site. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t get a direct response, but it also doesn’t appear the SEC will restrict “bot” activity. I thought this was an excellent question, since I hope to build some sort of XBRL data viewer into Value Investing News without having to store a massive amount of financial data on my server.

My questions were along the same lines of thought as Bill Cara’s. I wanted to know if the recent addition of XML feeds on EDGAR would also include information about XBRL data. Apparently, the EDGAR feeds were done independently of the XBRL feeds. You can see this lack of coordination by noting that the EDGAR feeds are Atom feeds while the XBRL feeds are RSS feeds. The least they could have done was pick one standard for web feeds at the SEC website. I really shouldn’t complain, since I love the new EDGAR feeds regardless of what format they are in. I was hoping the new EDGAR feeds would include the XBRL data because the EDGAR feeds are relatively easy to retrieve by ticker.

For my second question, I wanted to know if the SEC would provide an API or some standardized url format so that one could bring up an annual income statement of say Microsoft for 2007 without having to do a search at the SEC website. This is critical for making it easy to add XBRL data to mashups and widgets. I didn’t get a response to my question but I believe Ms. Kaepplein thought this was a good idea. Let’s hope this gets worked into the final XBRL storage and retrievel system at the SEC if it isn’t already part of it.

Doug McIntyre of 24/7 Wall St. asked how many companies are reporting in XBRL now. I didn’t quite catch the exact number but I believe it was about fifty participating in the SEC pilot program. In addition, many other companies are already using XBRL interally.

Christian Gross of InvestorGeeks asked a trader oriented question regarding the impact of XBRL on news scalping, which is a technique for being the first to trade on news. The concern would be that for popular stock releases that not everyone would be able to access the XBRL data when it is first released. The SEC representatives thought the data would be available in XBRL within a few minutes of filing. My thought is that XBRL will give individual investors a better chance of getting financial news as it breaks as long as the SEC servers are capable of handling the traffic.

Ray Pellechia of the NYSE/Euronext blog asked about the level of interest so far with XBRL. Apparently, there are various levels of interest in XBRL. Some companies are waiting, getting ready for it, and seeing what will happen. The SEC sadly reports that there is hardly any level of interest from the retail investor side. As a retail investor myself, I sure am interested in seeing XBRL expanded to cover all company financial filings. It would substantially lower my investment research costs.

Thinking about what other filings might be covered by XBRL, Dominic Jones of IRWebReport.com asked the SEC whether we might see footnotes, insider trades, etc. reported using XBRL. He didn’t really get a direct answer to his question, but we might learn more at the next SEC Open Meeting on May 14th. Dominic just wrote up his own observations from the conference call that you might also want to read.

A few other bloggers asked questions about how the data will be stored, the potential for increased corporate liability associated with potentially miss tagged financial data, and even the potential that XBRL could lead to real time reporting.

The end of the conference call concluded with some statements by SEC Chairman Chris Cox. He mentioned that he was at a luncheon where folks were talking about accessing XBRL data from thousands of companies at a time. I sure hope that will be a real possibility in the future.

I am very excited by the fusion of information technology and financial data that XBRL will allow in the future. I encourage the SEC to promote free accessibility, ease of use, open standards, and the creation of third party apps (widgets, mashups, etc.). If you have any questions or comments about the SEC XBRL initiative, please feel free to share them with me and I’ll pass them along to my contact at the SEC.

At first I thought those little orange XML graphics linked to RSS feeds, but they are actually Atom feeds. They open properly in Internet Explorer 7, but IE6 requests that you save the feed. I recommend using Google Reader to keep track of the SEC EDGAR feeds that you are interested in tracking.

In addition to the feeds appearing for company searches, it also looks like they are also available for the Latest Filings. That means you can also get them by filing type, such as this latest 10-K query. Sadly, the feeds are not available for full text searches or historical EDGAR archives searches yet.

I’m guessing a couple of commercial EDGAR providers are going to be losing some business as a result of this, since many were paying to get these type of feeds. I feel sorry for Joe Ponzio since he recently spent money on a programmer to create the SEC feed feature on his site. There is no more need for that feature now.

This new feature kind of caught me be surprise. I can’t even find an official announcement of this feature on the SEC site. Let us know if you find out any more information about this new XML feeds feature.

If you need an RSS feed reader, I highly recommend Google’s Reader. I use it to keep track of all sorts of sites and even a few data sources. Now you can use it to keep track of the lastest filings by your companies. I hope F Wall Street will be able to keep up with all the demand for this great service that appears to be ad free.

If you are a value investor, I am sure you spend many hours a day reading.  I find myself reading all the time.  The Kindle caught my attention because I spend two hours a day on the subway and I try to use much of that time reading.  I find it particularly difficult to read newspapers when I’m standing in a crowded train. I thought an electronic device that could receive daily newspaper updates would be ideal.  I’m currently using a Dell Axim PocketPC for some of my reading, but the screen is small, suffers from glare, and I often forget or down have time to upload new content on it for my morning commute.  The included wireless connectivity of the Kindle looked like a smart solution to this problem, especially since it can store book and subscription content locally when you are in an area that lacks wireless connectivity (like in the subway).

Some of the other key features of the Kindle include:

• The ability to subscribe to The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post.
• It’s larger screen and very light weight.
• Access to a dictionary and Wikipedia.
• Ability to email the device documents (for a fee) or transfer content with a USB cable.
• Ability to access webpages anywhere, though only in black and white and I’m guessing without may page layout features.
• Ability to play audio books and other mp3 files.
• No monthly wireless access fees.

The major drawback right now for a cheap value investor like myself is the $399 price tag.  I’d also like to be able to try one of these devices out before considering investing in one. Most of all, I’d like to see how it would handle the SEC EDGAR site and whether the wireless Kindle can handle large 10-K webpages.  My current PocketPC often chokes on the large 10-K text pages I try to read on EDGAR unless I first convert the files to PDF.

I’ve put the Kindle on my wish list for now, but I’ll likely be waiting until either the price drops or someone sends me one.  Have any of you had the opportunity to get your hands on a Kindle yet?  Do you think the Kindle could potentially be an essential tool for bleary eyed value investors?

I wonder if today’s free access has anything to do with the debut of the Fox Business Network yesterday. Nah, I’m sure it is just a coincidence. ;-)

If you like what you see today at WSJ.com, consider signing up for an online or home delivery subscription by clicking here.

There is just one catch.  You need a private invitation to poat messages on the Fool Discussion Boards.  I can provide 20 of these invitations to readers of Fat Pitch Financials.  Just leave a comment below indicating your interest and be sure to provide your email address when filling out the comment form.

I’m pretty excited to check out some of my old favorite boards.  These include:

• Berkshire Hathaway
• Foolish Collective
• Zen & the art of risk arbitrage
• Real Estate Inv. Trusts: REITs

I hope to find some time this week to explore these discussion boards.  Of course, you’ll also find me hanging out on my own forum at Value Investing News.  No invitations are required for the VIN forum and registration is free.

The main feature of ZacksElite is their Zacks Rank, which is based on consensus earnings per share (EPS) estimates from brokers. I’m not a big fan of these so called Sell-Side analyst estimates, so I am coming into my review of ZacksElite with a bias. The Zacks Rank is calculated from four primary inputs: agreement, magnitude, upside, and surprise. This means that much of the rank is based on relative changes in brokerage analysts EPS estimates, which might make this metric a bit more robust. However, humans and especially professionals tend to seek consensus based on the herd mentality of most mammals. Therefore, you tend to find estimates all cluster around each other regardless if they are all wrong.

Leaving the Zacks Rank aside, I did notice that there is also Zacks Recommendation based on both a qualitative model to predict prices and analyst recommendations from the Zacks Equity Research division. I believe that Zacks Recommendation is used to develop the Zacks Focus list, which is a diverse portfolio of stocks from different industries and market caps expected to outperform the market over the next 12 months.  This list is then broken down further each week into Targeted Recommendations. Tuesdays, ZacksElite issues targeted recommendations for “Value Stocks”.

I thought you might be interested in looking at this week’s Value Stocks Targeted Recommendations list. I’m having a lot of trouble finding value opportunities, so I was interested to see what ZackElite has come up with. This week they targeted U.S. Steel (X) and Wellpoint (WLP). I’m not particularly interested in commodity companies like U.S. Steel but Wellpoint is a health insurer that could be promising. It was even featured in this past weekend’s Barron’s. Listed below are all the other stocks within the Focus List with the cheapest valuations:

Zacks Featured Target: Value Stocks

What are your thoughts on these stocks? Please share your thoughts below on this Focus List and on the ZacksElite service in general.

Full Disclosure: I do not own any of the stock mentioned in this post. I am receiving a free trial to ZacksElite and Research Wizard, but I am not receiving an compensation for this review.

1. Hack EDGAR
   Regulatory filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) provide investors with critical information disclosing the financials of corporations, corporate governance, news disclosures, mergers, acquisitions, insider trading, and more. This massive amount of information is overwhelming. You can narrow down this information using one of the basic EDGAR search features like company search. However, you’ll likely still have to narrow your search down.Use Historical Archive Search and take advantage of the header fields of filings to narrow your search. You can even find SEC comment letters by searching for (form-type=upload or form-type=corresp) and company-name=”Microsoft” to find for example letters concerning Microsoft. If you need to go beyond the header information, you can even search the full text of the filings using the new Full-Text Search EDGAR feature. I almost always click the “Advanced Search” link on that page to restrict the date range, form type, and company name.  For example, I can find the latest odd-lot tender offer opportunities, by searching for the term “odd lots”, restricting the form type to SC TO-I, and the date range from 04/22/2007 to 05/07/2007. I recommend that you print out the description of SEC form types PDF for quick reference. Now get searching!
2. Steal Investment Ideas
   Are you having trouble finding your next great stock investment? Wondering what the pros are doing? You can discover their latest investments and it does not involve anything illegal. There are a couple of tools for spying on the pros.
   1. NASDAQ Holdings/Insiders: Just type in the name of an individual (last name, space first name) or company name.  Then just click on the result and sort by “% change” to see the latest changes.  Check out Berkshire Hathaway’s portfolio to see how Warren Buffett is investing his company’s funds. Alternatively, you can type in the symbol of a stock to see who owns it. Here are the current institutional investors of SBH for example.
   2. GuruFocus: Another option is to look though the latest trades of the select list of top investors at GuruFocus. This site tracks the latest stock picks reported by some of the best known investors.
   3. Stockpickr: See the latest pro portfolios tracked by Stockpickr. The portfolios are rated by the members of the site.
3. Consume Custom Feeds
   In my opinion, one of the most powerful new internet technologies is RSS feeds. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. I prefer to use the powerful Google Reader to subscribe to RSS feeds. I not only subscribe to standard website feeds like the ones you typically find on blogs. I use specialized financial news feeds and even customize them so they are laser focused.One of the best sources for financial news is Yahoo! Finance and it is a favorite of mine. You can create very specific feeds of the news you often find on Yahoo! Finance by using the Advanced News Search feature of Yahoo! News. Be sure to check off “Business” in the Categories section of the advanced search page to cut down on noise. Then run the search. On the resulting page, you can get an RSS feed by looking on the right side of the page for an orange rectangle with the letters RSS.An alternative source of new is Google News, which has a similar advanced search feature.  However, it lacks a way to filter only business news. To get a less mainstream perspective, you can run a Google Blogsearch to develop a custom feed of the latest skuttlebutt.You can even track the latest regulatory filings using RSS feeds. I actually built an RSS feed for the latest annual report filings to the SEC. You can build more sophisticated RSS feeds for SEC filings using the free services of SECFilings.com. However, the resulting feeds from SECFilings.com don’t point directly to the SEC EDGAR files. You have to waste time logging in to see the filing and then if you want to see any filing attachments, you have to still go to the SEC EDGAR database.The web contains lots of valuable data for investors, but it is spread out over thousands of different sites making it almost impossible to keep up with changes. Much of that data is not in RSS feeds. A way around this is to screen scrape data from various site and have it delivered to you directly. Screen scraping has a bad reputation since it is usually associated with spammers and splogs. However, some new more user friendly web services can be used legitimately to gather data from around the web. You can build custom RSS feeds of scraped web data using simple link gathering services such as FeedYes.com, slightly more sophisticated Page2RSS, advanced conditional scanning of Feed43, or super slick Dapper.

   Finally, you might want to further filter your RSS feeds or even combine some of your feeds.  Yahoo Pipes provides a very sophisticated way to do this.  For example, I just created a filtered feed of only value investing news items from the general Fool.com headlines feed so I can quickly scan only the articles I might be interested in reading.

4. Automated Spreadsheets
   If you focus on fundamental stock analysis like I do, you probably spend considerable calculating ratios, making projections, discounting and compounding various dollar amounts, and running other statistics. Spreadsheets can help you organize and automate these calculations.  Microsoft Excel is old favorite tool of mine to do this. If you don’t have access to Excel, you can do many of the same things with Google Spreadsheets.You can turbo charge you stock financial spreadsheets using an excellent and free Excel Stock Market Functions Add-in. You can download this great tool that lets you add data from MSN, Yahoo, Google, Reuters, ADVFN, Morningstar, and more directly into your Excel spreadsheet cells by joining the smf_addin group. You can try out my Fat Pitch Finder spreadsheet that utilizes the SMF Add-In to see how it works.
5. Screen Stocks
   Finally, I also think you can save a lot of time by using sophisticated stock screeners. My favorite is Reuter’s screener. The MSN Deluxe Screener is also a pretty good alternative. Finally, you can access the professionally developed and backtested Magic Formula screen developed by Joel Greenblatt as a starting point or even as the sole source of your stock research.

These are my favorite time saving stock research hacks. I’ve been working many of these into my custom Value Investing News toolbar. What are some of your favorite time saving stock investing tricks?

This feed is available at the Value Investing News Annual Reports aggregator. The annual reports page includes 10-K, 10KSB, and 20-F filings. 10-K filings are the standard annual report filing. The 10KSB is filed by small businesses and 20-F filings are for foreign private companies. In addition to including a direct link to the filing in the enhanced annual report feed, there are also the following features:

•  A link to the all the company’s recent filings by clicking on the company name. 
• A link to a current stock quote via Google Finance. 
• A handy link to quickly submit the annual report to Value Investing News so you can:
  • Bookmark it for future reference
  • Write down and share your comments
  • Discuss the annual report with other members of Value Investing News
• Advanced RSS feed services provided by FeedBurner to insure ease of use, maximum compatibility, and reliability.

Best of all, you can subscribe to this free enhanced annual reports feed directly using the following RSS feed link:

http://www.valueinvestingnews.com/annual-reports.xml

If you are unfamiliar with RSS feed technology, I recommend that you watch the RSS in Plain English video. Once you are familiar with RSS feeds, you might want to consider using Google Reader for subscribing to feeds. It’s my favorite. Besides using a feed reader, there are a lot of other ways you can use feeds, such as adding them to your homepage, desktop widget or even syndicating them on your own blog’s sidebar (just be sure to cite Value Investing News as the source).

This RSS technology combined with the annual reports feed provided by Value Investing News will save you time and maybe even help you make better informed investment decisions. By the way, you can also subscribe to the Fat Pitch Financials feed as well to keep up with my latest posts here.

Never the less, I plan on going through all the video class sessions over the next few months.  Would anyone be interested in join me? Maybe we could start a study group here for members of Fat Pitch Financials.  Let me know in the comments section if you are interested.

Professor Damodaran’s course covers the following topics:

• Approaches to Valuation
• Discounted Cashflow Valuation: Equity versus Firm
• Reconciling firm and equity valuation
• The Riskfree Rate
• Historical Risk Premiums
• Country Risk Premiums
• Company Exposure to Country Risk
• Implications for multinationals
• Implied Equity Risk Premium
• Introduction to Betas
• Bottom up Betas
• Cost of Debt
• Weights for Cost of Capital
• Dealing with hybrids
• Getting earnings right
• Reinvestment needs – Cap ex and working capital
• Debt cashflows and Cash flow to Equity
• Historical Growth Rates
• Analyst Estimate of Growth
• Fundamental Growth in EPS
• Fundamental Growth in Equity Earnings
• Fundamental Growth in Operating Income
• Revenues and Margins: High Growth Firms
• The Terminal Value Computation
• Terminal Value Dynamics
• Loose Ends in Valuation
• Dividend Discount Model and Implied Growth Rates
• Valuing the Entire Market
• FCFE Models and Emerging Market Risk
• Circular Reasoning in DCF Models
• The value of corporate governance
• Valuing distresssed companies
• Valuing Young Companies
• PE Ratios
• More on PEG Ratios
• EV Multiples (FCFF, EBIT and EBITDA)
• Book Value Multiples
• Revenue Multiples
• Relative Valuation versus DCF Valuation
• Valuing Private Companies

Along with the webcasts, there is also a three part course packet that includes the overhead slides for the lectures. The packet is divided into the following three parts:

• Discounted Cashflow Valuation (pdf)
• Relative Valuation and Private Company Valuation (pdf)
• Real Options, Acquisition Valuation and Value Enhancement (pdf)

I look forward to working through this course since Damadoran wrote the book on stock valuation. I’ll share highlights of what I discover with you here.

This new version of the Fat Pitch Finder Spreadsheet has been updated to address a problem with my net cash calculations that I discovered as a result of a comment I received on my analysis of the intrinsic value of Microsoft. I wasn’t including restricted cash when determining net cash on hand, so I was undervaluing some companies. In addition, I also added the following new features:

• Increased documentation using cell comments 
• New Free Cash Flow trend chart
• Added trailing twelve-month free cash flows to the trend analysis
• Cash and equivalents and debts are now broken out before net cash is calculated

To use this spreadsheet, you need to have Microsoft Excel, and I recommend that it is at least the Excel 2003 version. In addition, you need to install an “Add-In” to make the Fat Pitch Finder spreadsheet work.  The add-in you need is RCH_Stock_Market_Functions.xla at the smf_addin group files.  Be sure to install the add-in in the directory  C:\Program Files\SMF Add-In  in order for the spreadsheet to work. Finally, download the spreadsheet below and uncompress it before opening it.

If you find any problems with the Fat Pitch Finder spreadsheet or have any ideas on how to improve it, please share your thoughts below.

Download: Fat Pitch Finder 0.2

The coolest feature is an international equity map that graphically displays the relative performance of different national stock indexes. You can adjust the map to display either daily, weekly, monthly, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, or 5 years time periods. As a result of monitoring this map, I’ve started looking for value opportunities in Brazil and possibly Argentina.

I’m sure there many other great research tools and resources that can be added to this international stock investing page. Please suggest additions to this new page in the comments section below.