• Understand Warren Buffett’s unparallel investment success. (Buffett outperformed most fund managers by 280,000+ percent over his investment career). Click here to read a Letter from Warren Buffett to the shareholders of Bershire Hathaway. Report.
• Learn why most fund managers admire Buffett but fail to emulate his results.
• Why trying to guess which way the market may move – or whether it is currently at a high or low – is a waste of time.
• Why a successful investment strategy starts by focusing on individual businesses, rather than the “market” overall.
• Learn the dangers of trying to “time the market”.
• Learn the questions that you must be able to answer before investing in any company.
• The importance of establishing a “margin of safety” between the economic value of the business being purchased and the price being paid for it.

• How to identify businesses that you can easily understand (within your own “circle of competence”).
• How to identify businesses with a strong economic moat (protection against their competitors).
• How to determine whether a company is “investment grade” (i.e. with a proven track record of sales and earnings growth, capable and honest management, low or no debt, high returns on owners equity etc).
• Should I diversify or concentrate my portfolio?
• This knowledge can be demonstrated using current stock examples from either the Australian or USA stock markets (click here to see examples).
• Learn how to value these quality companies accurately, to determine a single profitability figure for each company.

• Learn the single most common stock strategy used by most investors and find out why it will always under perform the overall market.
• Learn the questions that you must be able to answer before investing in any company.
• Learn how you can quickly and accurately assess the quality of companies that you’re hearing about in the news.
• Learn where you can get free unbiased stock market information.
• Learn the difference between stock market investing and speculating.
• Learn how you can become your own stock market “expert”.

It is a basic principle of success to learn from the most successful. Without a doubt, Warren Buffett, the Chairman and CEO of the USA company Berkshire Hathaway, is the world’s greatest investor.

This genius of long-term investing has a track record that stands alone. Suppose you invested $10 000 in one of his original partnerships back in 1956 and rolled it over into Berkshire Hathaway when they terminated in 1969. Today that investment is worth over $280 million — after all taxes, fees and expenses.

Click here for the five main keys to Buffett’s methods of investing.

How do Mr. and Mrs. Average Investor choose their stocks? Careful analysis of reports from stockbrokers? No time. Interviewing members of the board and senior management of the company? It is unlikely their calls would be returned. Then how about by looking at price and volume changes? Now you are getting closer.

Recent research by Brad and Terrence Odean of the University of California shows that individual investors tend to purchase stocks on the days that there is some sort of attention-grabbing activity. Specifically, they tend to purchase stocks on the days when there is high trading volume, when there are extreme movements in the price whether up or down, and when the stocks are in the news.

Further material:

• Discussion of the above results
• Extra difficulty associated with buying compared to selling

Refer also to research by Daniel Kahneman, the 2002 Nobel Prize winner in economic sciences: we evaluate past incidents by extreme highs and lows and by the most recent memory.

Currently there is great concern about the reliability of the earnings figures put out by companies. As each company recalculates its figures the sense of gloom increases.

Examples of companies: Enron and Worldcom in the USA and HIH, One-Tel in Australia provide perfect examples.

But are things really worse now than they used to be? Back in 1934, Benjamin Graham warned readers of Security Analysis, that “earnings per share, on which the whole edifice has come to be built, are … subject in extraordinary degree to arbitrary determination and manipulation”.

The things we worry about have their fashion: inflation, unemployment, current deficit. Currently it is accounting shenanigans. Refer to Peter Lynch.

After all said and done, it is not the job of management to educate the public. Or even their shareholders. Their job is run the most profitable business they can within the laws of corporate business.

Click here for more.

Sorry Mr. Shakespeare. There is just NO question about this one.

Investing long term in quality assets is the key to the financial independence that we each deserve.