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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Web 2.0 sites “…emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users.” Tim O’Reilly recently noted, “This is what I’ve elsewhere called ‘harnessing collective intelligence.’” 

Many Web 2.0 sites have the potential to harness the network effect that occurs when a service becomes more valuable to its users the more other users utilize it. In terms of business and investing, the network effect provides one of the most powerful and durable competitive advantages.

I have been trying to harness this network effect of Web 2.0 with my recent Value Investing News project. To better address my value investing community niche, I decided to research the top Investing 2.0 sites. I first spotted the “Investing 2.0″ phrase at TechCrunch. Over the past year, TechCrunch has reviewed three investing 2.0 sites, including Stockpickr, Motley Fool Caps, and Zecco. Based on those stories, the comments on those stories, and my own research, I pulled together the following list of top stock investing 2.0 sites.

Top Stock Investing 2.0 Sites

The Top Stock Investing 2.0 Sites list is sorted by Alexa Traffic Ranking. I know that the Alexa Ranking can be gamed and is only based on the web surfing habits of its toolbar users. Therefore, I’ve also included Google PageRank scores to also provide an indicator of how influential each site is on the web. Please let me know if I have missed any sites.  I may update the above table with additional metrics and revised statistics in the future.

The top Investing 2.0 site on the list is Motley Fool Caps. However, the Alexa Traffic Ranking for Motley Fool Caps, which is on subdomain caps.fool.com, includes all the traffic for the fool.com domain name as well.  Alexa captures all the traffic on a domain and does not break out subdomain statistics. Basically, this means that the new Stockpickr site could in fact be the king of the Investing 2.0 hill.

I am very happy that my niche social bookmarking site, Value Investing News, has come in tenth place.  The site has only been running for about four months, has no financial backing, no professional programming talent, and focuses on likely the smallest online investment community, value investors. Given all those handicaps, a top ten ranking between ValueWiki and Feed the Bull is great.

I feel that many of the stock picking sites will eventually run into trouble, even though right now many of them contain excellent discussions.  Herd mentality and stock pumping could really hurt members of those sites.  Social bookmarking sites that focus on news and commentary will likely have more longevity.  At least that is what I hope, since Value Investing News is primarily a social bookmarking site focused on linking to high quality investment analysis.

What are you favorite Investing 2.0 sites? I of course love Value Investing News (user name: George). You can also find me on Motley Fool Caps, Stockpickr, and Marketocracy. Feel free to share your user names and profiles on these sites with the rest of the Fat Pitch Financials community by leaving a comment below.

It appear this promotion is sponsored by Discovery (DISCA) (DISCB).  Maybe, this will be Dow Jones (DJ) future model for making revenue from the Wall Street Journal. Has it come down to this.

“Do you know of a quick formula to figure out a per annum interest rate when multiple deposits are made at different times?”

I sent Steven straight to a post a wrote a few weeks ago on how to calculate your return on investment.  I recommended that he check out the Microsoft Excel (MSFT) and Google (GOOG) Spreadsheet examples I included in that article.  I wasn’t to sure that my post was all that clear, but Steven figured it out and even posted a story about his experience.

Steven decided to use my Google Spreadsheet and he even figure out how to customize it for his own use.  I learned something new about Google Spreadsheets from his experience and I wanted to share his knowledge with you.  Steven wrote:

“Before you can customize it, in the Google spreadsheet you will need to click on file in the upper right, select copy spreadsheet, and rename it… What you want to do is change the notes to reflect your own needs… This is a nice little sheet that George has and I recommend it for the new investor looking for a quick way to track their progress.”

Thank you Steven for sharing your experience with my Annualized Rate of Return spreadsheet.

I personally just signed up to receive Global Finance and The Deal.  I figured I could use more exposure to international business news through Global Finance.  The Deal looks like it could be a good source of information on special situations and other arbitrage opportunities. The Financial Planning magazine also looks like it could be useful. You can find other financial publications in the Finance section of my free trade publications directory.

In terms of sector specific publications, Power looks like a good way to keep up with the energy sector.  I’ve been interested in several dental companies recently, so I was happy to find Dental Economics.  Finally, I was hoping to follow the biotechnology and pharmaceutical sector, but there are so many publication offerings for this sector that I haven’t been able to make up my mind on which ones I want to sign up for.  I’d love to hear your suggestions on which of these trade publications you feel are worth signing up for based on your experience.

* In addition to getting useful free trade publications from my magazine directory, you are also helping to support Fat Pitch Financials with each free magazine you sign up for.

Value Investing Search is available on Value Investing News sidebar. You can also try it out below.

Value Investing Search

If you would like to help refine Value Investing Search, consider contributing to this project. You can join this project by visiting the Value Investing Search page and clicking on to the contributors link.

WARNING: Micro cap stock investing involves serious risk. Often the financial numbers for micro cap stocks are not reliable in stock databases, so screening results can be misleading. Micro cap stocks are often thinly traded. This can expose investors to market manipulation and it can be difficult to exit larger positions. Finally, it is also less likely that micro cap stocks exhibit sustainable competitive advantages (i.e., wide moats). With those warnings in mind, have a look at the following list of micro cap stocks that pass my Big 5 Numbers screen:

The Big Five Numbers - Micro Caps

I hope you found these Rule #1 Big Five Numbers screen results to be helpful. The story doesn’t end here. There is a lot of work ahead needed to research each of these stocks. If you are a fan of Rule #1 investing, I’ll be talking soon about some tools that can help you continue your research of the stocks I’ve posted this week.

« Potential Small Cap Wide Moat Companies

Some of the small cap stocks generated by the screen serve unique niches while a few have the potential grow into mid cap stocks in the future. There are also fast growing companies that potentially have unsustainable competitive advantages. These pretenders are the most risky because they could blow up and cause you to loose serious capital. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the following stocks:

The Big Five Numbers – Small Caps

Tomorrow, I’ll list out the potential micro cap wide moat companies generated by the Big Five Numbers screen.

» Potential Micro Cap Wide Moat Companies

« Potential Mid Cap Wide Moat Companies