Unconventional Investment Research
Monday, October 19th, 2009As I mentioned in my earlier post I recently read One Up On Wall Street : How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money In The Market
Lynch’s investment style varies quite a bit from the traditional super value investors. Lynch seems more likely to invest in public offerings or companies that have little operating history if he feels they have potential for serious growth. Lynch is willing to take a little risk on situations where there is some uncertainty so some people might call him a “growth” investor. That being said I try to ignore categorizing investors into buckets like “growth” and “value”. Instead I categorize them into two buckets “good” and “not so good”. Looking at his record Lynch falls in the “good” bucket. I can’t imagine how much work it must be to manage a fund with billions of dollars in assets, over 1000 positions and on top of it providing returns that outperform the market.
One point that Lynch makes again and again is that you should always use whatever edge you have over Wall Street. If you work in in a particular industry and have a finger on its heart beat, you have an edge over people sitting in front of a Bloomberg terminal all day who may invest or trade in that sector. In the book Lynch mentions examples of great companies that he identified before Wall Street simply by being a typical consumer. Lynch also mentions some of his follies, such as the sandwich shop he ate lunch at that made a public offering. He bought in because he felt he had an edge on predicting the success of their business. They found out the hard way that their sandwich shop format did not go over well in other cities as the expense of the shareholders who bought the stock offering.
I walked away from Lynch’s book thinking primarily about one thing. What unconventional research tools are available to investors? When I say unconventional I mean anything that gives you information a typical investor or money manager might not get from the annual reports or SEC filings. Here are a few examples of some unconventional and some more conventional but under utilized tools that might help give you an edge.
The Phone
This is not really unconventional, but I think underutilized. I personally have not exercised this option as much as I would like to but I think after reading Lynch’s book I probably will.
Same the idea here. There was a risk arbitrage situation I was interested in and I was trying to get a little more information about when the company expected to complete the transaction. I emailed investor relations at the company supposedly making the purchase and my email to their investor relations address bounced because the person who answered that address was no longer with the company. While this doesn’t give me any information about the merger it could be an indication of how much or little effort they put into informing shareholders. On the flip side I have emailed investor relations at other companies and gotten immediate responses from an actual human being, sometimes with decent answers to my questions! That is always a good sign.
Web stats
In my previous post about IGOI I mentioned that I went to a local retailer to see what their in store marketing and placement looked like. Another bit of research I did was related to their online store. In their conference call from last quarter the CEO mentioned that they are engaging in a more direct to customer marketing campaign. They launched a new online store where customers can buy product directly from the company cutting out the middle man and resulting in higher margins for IGO. When I heard that I decided to go to Alexa and see what they said about traffic going to the IGO website.
Here is what they had to say:
The one thing this tells me is that traffic to their online store is not growing. For a company attempting to reach customers directly I don’t find this encouraging. Another thing I looked at is their online advertising. If I do a google search for IGO, I see an sponsored link for IGO’s website. They are paying to show advertisements for people who search for “igo” even though their site is the first organic (non advertisement) search result. Now if I do a search for “universal laptop power supply” I don’t see an ad for IGO. I refresh a couple of times, still no IGO ad. This makes me wonder if they have a handle on their online advertising campaign. Next I do a search for “netbook power supply” and first time I don’t see an IGO ad, I refresh and I start seeing their ads. At least they are going after netbook customers, but I still get the feeling that if they are really trying to reach more customers directly their online advertising strategy might need some refinement. Any one of these things on their own don’t provide a ton of data, but as you start to add them up you can start to draw a picture of how well the company is aligned with their mission. It is possible that they are just gearing up their online business, in which case now that I have this information I can monitor it accordingly and this can give me an edge on how the company is doing. We already know that they are loosing their biggest customer (Targus) and they need to make revenue up some where. If their Alexa stats start growing this might be an indication that they are on the right track.
Street View
In some cases Google Street View can be a good tool for checking out the company headquarters of smaller companies. Is it a fancy building? Is it a dump? Does it even exist? Unfortunately street view only works in major US cities and this information in a lot of cases could be of minimal use, but you never know what you may find.
Here is the Vaxgen (VXGN) office (I liquidation situation I had a position in):
Here is a Berkshire Hathaway in Omaha, Nebraska:
LinkedIn is a professional social network. Facebook for corporate America. One of the ideas I had for LinkedIn was using it as a tool research company management. If a CEO or other executive is on LinkedIn there is a good chance his or her employment history is on their profile. Are their previous companies still around or did they run them into the ground? This could be a good starting point for finding out more about executives in small companies.
Obviously these tools on their own will not tell you what stocks to buy or sell. However they can potentially provide some value when used in conjunction with your normal investment research.