About Me

Hi, Thanks a lot for coming to my site and spending a little time getting to know me.

My investment style, as I am finding most peoples does, has morphed and changed a lot as I learn more. Originally I was of the Ben Graham value school, but I quickly learn't that a more mixed/well rounded approach will yield far superior results. As Charlie Munger says something "I think should be avoided is extremely intense ideology because it cabbages up one's mind". While I didn't have an extremely intense ideology, by limiting my reading to only value style investing books and therefore being oblivious to all other styles, I in a sense did.

As an Engineer by trade, I try to brake down my mistakes and develop a more systematic evaluation process, whereby a business must jump a number of hurdles before I will buy in. Engineering techniques such as Just Culture and Lean manufacturing have been utilised to create a lean process whereby any failures will be investigated using a root cause analysis. By doing this, I am able to improve the process and by posting some of the failures on here, hopefully you can learn from my mistakes as well, as Eleanor Roosevelt said "Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself". 

My evaluation process is as follows:

1. I use an online screener, using a number of historically proven variables to increase the likely hood of success. For further reading, I recommend What Works on Wall Street by James O'Shaughnessy

2. I then double check the financials used in the screener (I use a free screener, so at times the numbers are not necessarily correct)

3. I then do a quick financial analysis with my excel spreadsheet, if it looks promising, I than check these numbers against a number of it's competitors

4. My next step is to use my checklist, currently at ~60 items, so whilst not extremely large by any measure, it will continue to enlarge as I gain more experience and make even more mistakes

5. From all of this, I create an investment thesis, some of them will be posted on here. The point of this step is to help fully develop my thoughts allowing me see anything that I may have missed.

And finally, if I have made a mistake in my analysis, which the market it quick to point out, I go back over my analysis to find what I missed and try and improve the 5 previous steps. When I am doing this, I always have in the back of my mind to keep it lean, there is no advantage to adding something that is already there, or can be slightly tweaked to incorporate new items. The Opportunity cost of time is very important to me, as Steve Jobs said "It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time".

Just as a side note, my recommend reads are (not in any order)

1. Influence: The psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini (I'm looking forward to reading his new book Pre-suasion)
2. Poor Charlie's Almanack by Charles T. Munger, Peter E. Kaufman
3. South: The Story of Shackleton's Last Expedition 1914-1917 by Ernest Shackleton, Peter King
4. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
5. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

I hope to evolve on here, which over time will hopefully not only increase my business evaluation skills, but improve me as a whole

Thanks again for stopping by

Just Culture Investor

Trav Mays