Hi guys,
I’ve been a longtime fool.com visitor but “only” discovered this board on early 2020 (thankfully!!). In that time i’ve only posted a few times but have read the knowledge base repeatedly as well as any post of the big dogs here to understand the process of analyzing and selecting a stock for investment.
Since I’m more of a quant guy and have worked with data and visualization for quite a while, i’ve tried to understand our companies from that perspective. When approaching any new data source i usually select a few metrics that can show the big picture and also serve as a dashboard to follow-up on the important numbers.
In the case of our stocks and Saul’s style (and after a few iterations) i’ve come up with these:
- Revenue Growth: for what i’ve gathered, is THE paramount metric. Everytime i’ve re-read the Knowledge base or a discussion about metrics comes up, this is the usual conclusion.
- Gross Margin: Saul exemplifies the importance of this metric several times and it’s multiplying effect over time when comparing a low margin vs. our high margin Saas companies.
- Revenue Growth trend: I’ve found that it’s the trend that’s important so i’ve devoted some time to get the “history” of growth on my dashboard.
- Valuation: This is probably going to be controversial since Saul and other here repeteadly mentioned that they do not care for valuation. But i’ve find these metrics (Market CAP, EV/s, OOmph) a good way to compare different horses. I’ve finally added these to the dashboard after struggling with the idea and became convinced after reading Bear “Market Cap Matters” post (https://discussion.fool.com/market-cap-matters-34887101.aspx?sor…)
Here’s a look into the current dashboard: https://imgur.com/cWhKrg6 I use it very often and whenever new data comes in to re-asses the big picture of my companies and compare with my allocation (also on the dash).
And now to my question regarding valuations or, to be exacto, OOmph (in case you’ve never hear of it: https://discussion.fool.com/current-oomph-factors-and-valuations…).
I’ve found in the OOmph a way to compare to a “normal” valuation (EV/S) and tried to adapt it to compare with the UPST, SE or other non-recurring rev. companies of ours, but withouth that component the numbers are quite different and not of many use for these cases. It seems to me that in those cases it’s more usefull to look at the EV/S. So that got me thinking if there’s a way to combine both or tweat the formula get to a apples-to-somewhat-apples comparison. Any ideas? Is this a lost cause you think?
Beside my question I’m extremely thankfull for what Saul, Bear, Paul, StockNovice and many other have taught us. As a way to give back, i wanted to share the tools i’ve developed hoping that it’ll help other make sense of all the information we all read and share here.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tTKhlZAcPV-i07STSfn9…
You can access the sheet through that link (read-only) and can copy it for yor use and experimentation.
I’ve organized the spreadsheet as follows:
- Dashboard: a birdseye view of the most important KPIs and allocation
- Stock-at-a-glance: a more in-depth detail inspired by StockNovice (https://imgur.com/4aNEd8B) where i can just change the symbol and get all the information in one place.
- SID Metrics: the data itself. Just used for input since it’s not very practical to look at it here, but from here i extract the info for the dash and in-depth screens.
I hope this is helful for some and please do not hesitate to ask or suggest any ideas that with might arise.
Thanks again to everyone on this board!
Martin