Summary: <br> Welcome to investing for beginners podcast I’m David Ahern, and Andrew Sather is here with us tonight. We’re going to talk about investing checklists; we’re going to talk a little bit about when to use checklists and how they can help you when you make buying stock decisions as well as selling stock decisions.<br> <br> * Checklists can help control your emotions<br> * They are great at helping you avoid mistakes<br> * They can be as short as four questions or as long as hundreds<br> * Stock checklists are perfect for buying and selling decisions<br> <br> I’m going to start us off and talk a little bit about my friend Mohnish Pabrai. I’ve talked about him in the past, he’s an investor that’s originated from India, and he’s a value investor cut right out of the Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett ilk.<br> He’s very conservative, and he’s been very very successful with his investments I believe he’s in the high40% range in returns over the last ten years or so so he is one of those gentlemen who has a very concentrated portfolio.<br> I believe he only has six or seven stocks in his portfolio right now and<br> the majority of them is in actually one or two companies. He’s written a book called the Dhando Investor, and if you have not read this book, it is fantastic. It’s effortless to read, and he lays out a lot of his investing principles in the book.<br> He’s very very well-read, and he’s a great writer I’ve talked about this before, and I enjoy his writing, and he’s just he’s one of those people that’s so smart that he’s good at explaining things.<br> It makes it sound easy and Andrew, and I have talked a lot about this. These are simple ideas that we talk about, but they’re not easy to do. So with some of the checklists that he speaks about in his book, I’m going to kind of outline those a little bit. These are some of the things that I use when I’ve created my checklist, and one of the things that I wanted to kind of say well as we talked about checklist tonight these are personal decisions that you make.<br> Andrew and I are going to give you some ideas of some things that we use and our checklist. But I agree on withMohnish Pabrai. He has never revealed his complete checklist, as well as Charlie Munger, has not and Warren Buffett because these are personal ideas.<br> These are things that you have to experiment with on your own. You can use some of the things that Andrew and I talked about today as guidelines, but you know as you get more experience with your investing.<br> I would highly encourage you to create your checklist kind of go from there.<br> some of the things that I kind of use is a guideline for me.<br> <br> * focus on buying an existing business<br> * buying simple businesses and industry with a superslow rate of change<br> * buy distressed businesses and distressed industries<br> * buy businesses with a moat that is a big one<br> * bet heavily with the odds are overwhelmingly in your favor<br> * buy businesses at big discounts to their underlying intrinsic valuing-ding-ding that’s huge for us<br> * we’re low-risk high uncertainty businesses,<br> <br> This is a great place to start as a framework for a checklist, and I’m going to cheat a little bit about each of these a little bit, review so you can throw your two cents worth as well.<br> Focus on buying existing businesses for me this is all about looking for companies that are already out there. We’ve talked a lot about IPOs in the past and IPOs are can be a very dangerous thing to get into. So looking for a company that’s already in businesses already doing what they’re doing for several reasons. One you’re gonna know where the sales are coming from where the profits are coming from where the earnings are coming from whet...
