Welcome to the May 9, 2011 edition of the Festival of Stocks. The Festival of Stocks is a blog carnival dedicated to highlighting bloggers best posts on stock market related topics.Fat Pitch Financials is the actual birth place of this online weekly event, so it is always a special occasion when I get the chance to host this roving event.

If you aren’t already familiar with my blog, Fat Pitch Financials, it is a value investing blog with a focus on wide moat companies selling at substantial discounts and Benjamin Graham style workouts. I encourage you to subscribe for free to my blog feed to keep up with my latest postings.

You should also check my Fat Pitch Financials Contributor’s Corner while you are here. It is my premium members only community dedicated to unique arbitrage and special situation opportunities.

Now that you are familiar with Fat Pitch Financials, let’s take a look at this week’s Festival of Stock participants. Here are this week’s entries: Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the May 2, 2011 edition of the Festival of Stocks. The Festival of Stocks is a blog carnival dedicated to highlighting bloggers best posts on stock market related topics.Fat Pitch Financials is the actual birth place of this online weekly event, so it is always a special occasion when I get the chance to host this roving event.

If you aren’t already familiar with my blog, Fat Pitch Financials, it is a value investing blog with a focus on wide moat companies selling at substantial discounts and Benjamin Graham style workouts. I encourage you to subscribe for free to my blog feed to keep up with my latest postings.

You should also check my Fat Pitch Financials Contributor’s Corner while you are here. It is my premium members only community dedicated to unique arbitrage and special situation opportunities.

Now that you are familiar with Fat Pitch Financials, let’s take a look at this week’s Festival of Stock participants. Here are this week’s entries: Read the rest of this entry »

With the start of the 2011 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders Meeting, it is time for a new addition of the Ultimate Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting Guide. Throughout the meeting and for several weeks after this event, I will be sharing links to live feeds, meeting notes, and articles about this years event. The Ultimate 2011 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting Guide will be the next best thing to being at the event. Please send me your links to all things about the Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders Meeting. Be sure to bookmark this page and return often for the latest updates. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the April 25, 2011 edition of the Festival of Stocks. The Festival of Stocks is a blog carnival dedicated to highlighting bloggers best posts on stock market related topics.Fat Pitch Financials is the actual birth place of this online weekly event, so it is always a special occasion when I get the chance to host this roving event.

If you aren’t already familiar with my blog, Fat Pitch Financials, it is a value investing blog with a focus on wide moat companies selling at substantial discounts and Benjamin Graham style workouts. I encourage you to subscribe for free to my blog feed to keep up with my latest postings.

You should also check my Fat Pitch Financials Contributor’s Corner while you are here. It is my premium members only community dedicated to unique arbitrage and special situation opportunities.

Now that you are familiar with Fat Pitch Financials, let’s take a look at this week’s Festival of Stock participants. Here are this week’s entries: Read the rest of this entry »

Check out this list of top value investors on Twitter based on PeerIndex. PeerIndex is a proprietary measure of social capital based on measures of your authority, resonance, activity, and audience on Twitter and other social media platforms.

While this web authority metric is not perfect, it is fun to see how fellow value investors rank. It appears that I rank twelfth with @FatPitch and Value Investing News comes in at number 27. The average for the Value Investor PeerIndex Group is 29. I think you will find this list to be a good resource for finding new value investors to follow and you might even learn a bit about your own social media habits. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the April 18, 2011 edition of the Festival of Stocks. Today is Tax Day in the United States, so I hope you’ve all finished filing your taxes.  If not, don’t forget to file for an extension.

Read the rest of this entry »

Author and value investor, Joel Greenblatt answered questions live today on his new book, The Big Secret for the Small Investor. Greenblatt also answered questions regarding the Magic Formula discussed in The Little Book That Still Beats the Market. Sadly, not many of the questions touched on his best book, You Can Be a Stock Market Genius: Uncover the Secret Hiding Places of Stock Market Profits.

Welcome to the April 11, 2011 edition of the Festival of Stocks. The Festival of Stocks is a blog carnival dedicated to highlighting bloggers best posts on stock market related topics.Fat Pitch Financials is the actual birth place of this online weekly event, so it is always a special occasion when I get the chance to host this roving event.

If you aren’t already familiar with my blog, Fat Pitch Financials, it is a value investing blog with a focus on wide moat companies selling at substantial discounts and Benjamin Graham style workouts. I encourage you to subscribe for free to my blog feed to keep up with my latest postings.

You should also check my Fat Pitch Financials Contributor’s Corner while you are here. It is my premium members only community dedicated to unique arbitrage and special situation opportunities.

Now that you are familiar with Fat Pitch Financials, let’s take a look at this week’s Festival of Stock participants. Here are this week’s entries: Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the April 4, 2011 edition of the Festival of Stocks. The Festival of Stocks is a blog carnival dedicated to highlighting bloggers best posts on stock market related topics.Fat Pitch Financials is the actual birth place of this online weekly event, so it is always a special occasion when I get the chance to host this roving event.

If you aren’t already familiar with my blog, Fat Pitch Financials, it is a value investing blog with a focus on wide moat companies selling at substantial discounts and Benjamin Graham style workouts. I encourage you to subscribe for free to my blog feed to keep up with my latest postings.

You should also check my Fat Pitch Financials Contributor’s Corner while you are here. It is my premium members only community dedicated to unique arbitrage and special situation opportunities.

Now that you are familiar with Fat Pitch Financials, let’s take a look at this week’s Festival of Stock participants. Here are this week’s entries: Read the rest of this entry »

What are currently the cheapest stocks in the S&P 500? That’s a great question that I recently received. I decided to tackle this question using two simple and crude tools in the value investor toolbox, the price to book value ratio and the current ratio.

The price to book (P/B) ratio has been a favorite of value investors since the day’s of Benjamin Graham. However, often we find that stocks with low P/B ratios are cheap because those companies are financially distressed. What if we could control for financial distress and instead focus on companies that are cheap relative to their equity value? We can do this by using another of Ben Graham’s favorite ratios, the current ratio. The current ratio is simply a company’s current assets divided by current liabilities. Graham required at least a current ratio above 1.5.

Here are the results of a quick screen I ran for stocks on the S&P 500 that have a current ratio greater than 1.5 and then sorted by P/B from lowest to highest: Read the rest of this entry »