Capital Flow Watch » Security Analysis

Five reasons why Google Finance is a winner - Google Finance

John Schroy — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 18:10:58 +0000

Google Finances is a top-rated tool for investment research of US stocks. It features a smart, well-designed interface for fundamental or technical analysis. For both long-term investors and short-term traders, ease of use puts this tool ahead of Yahoo Finance in the US market. For further articles on Google Finance, sign up for the free RSS feed in the sidebar.

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Why false bull markets are likely - The long road to recovery

John Schroy — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 02:03:37 +0000

Over the years, I've read quite a number of books on investment. Not all are worth the effort. Among those that I consider valuable, I would cite Graham & Dodd's "Security Analysis", "Fooled by Randomness" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Wu and Zakon's "Elements of Investments", and "The Great Depression: A Diary" by Benjamin Roth. The latter brings a message that is especially relevant in these trying times — a warning that early optimists regarding recovery are often as badly burnt as those who failed to foresee the original crisis.

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Is security analysis a science? - Post Modern Security Analysis

John Schroy — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:57:54 +0000

A pretense of scientific basis has weakened the usefulness of security analysis in the modern era. Fancy mathematics serve to cloud the minds of investors.The collapse of Long Term Capital Management and the Crash of 2008 were assisted by the injection of 'junk science' into investment decisions.Can (or should) security analysis be considered 'scientific'?

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A securities analyst’s greatest challenge - The investment profession:

John Schroy — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 21:45:13 +0000

The Crash of 2008 raised questions as to the competence of many who work in the profession of security analysis. There are dozens of schools providing professionals with training and certification in this field. However, know-how is not enough.Commonsense and hard work can be more important than theoretical training and the ability to use the terminology.This article discusses an endemic problem: Laziness.

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Fundamental analysis and the data tsunami - Information technology

John Schroy — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:44:39 +0000

Whereas, in the days of Benjamin Graham, an analyst could count on Standard Statistics to provide the essential facts, three-quarters of a century later, this is no longer true in the case of its successor, Standard & Poor's.The tsunami of free financial information and increasingly complex markets, have driven up the cost of traditional security analysis. The less expensive route, technical analysis, is now favored by many. We must move beyond Graham & Dodd if fact-based analysis is to remain relevant.

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Crowdsourcing opinion is not factual research - Post Modern Security Analysis

John Schroy — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:55:25 +0000

Post Modern Security Analysis calls for facts, not opinions. Collaborative research, not the crowdsourcing of opinion, is required.A tsunami of raw, unanalyzed open source information now overwhelms the market, calling for new tools and new ways to motivate researchers.To this end, Capital Market Wiki has tweaked the Wikipedia model, added a semantic structure and built-in incentives, and has created a system for collaborative investment research.

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The heroic, solitary analyst is long gone - Post Modern Security Analysis

John Schroy — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:38:10 +0000

The old-fashioned, heroic security analyst, working alone in a dark room with a stack of annual reports, in a snow-bound house in Omaha, far from Wall Street, is less likely to solve investment riddles today, than fifty years ago.The analyst of the 21st century must be ready to engage in collaborative research. The future lies in modern knowledge handling technology, including OSINT techniques, crowdsourcing, wiki software, and capital market taxonomy.

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Crowd sourcing investment research - Post Modern Security Analysis

John Schroy — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 17:54:46 +0000

Free, easily available investment information is largely unexploited. This is because there is too much of it.Information, to be useful, must be processed. This processing has a time cost.This article describes how new technology allows securities research to evolve beyond the industrial techniques of the 20th century.Crowd sourcing and collaborative research, semantic wikis, and Capital Market Taxonomy are discussed in this article.

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An encyclopedia of world capital markets - Post Modern Security Analysis

John Schroy — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 17:06:09 +0000

Today, Capital Market Wiki has "gone public", after thirty months of development effort. This is a free encyclopedia of world financial markets that anyone can edit, based on semantic wiki technology and Capital Market Taxonomy.This non-profit project is sponsored by the Center for Capital Flow Analysis and addresses informational shortcomings in increasingly complex capital markets.

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How much are US equities over-valued? - Securities Analysis

John Schroy — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 17:21:20 +0000

Commonsense analysis shows that US equities are at least 40% overvalued, a conclusion supported by many academics and John Burr Williams's formula.This suggests that many retirement plans, based on equity investments, may be in trouble, if (or better, when) stocks fall to reasonable values.This article, using John Burr Williams' famous formula, shows how the market may be valued.

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