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This blog teaches you how to invest in stocks the way professional analysts do — using real methods, real math, and real reasoning. No tips, no guesswork, no jargon you have to look up somewhere else.

The material is organized into series. Each series covers one topic completely, from the ground up. You can start anywhere, but if you’re new to investing, the Intrinsic Value series is the right place to begin — it’s the foundation everything else builds on.

Start here: Introduction: Why This Blog Exists

The Rules — First Principles of Investing

Before strategy comes philosophy. These eight posts cover the principles that apply to every form of investing — the discipline, patience, and process that determine whether any approach succeeds or fails. Start here before anything else.

  1. Part 1: Buy and Hold — Why time in the market beats timing the market, the tax drag of frequent trading, and the cost of being wrong twice.
  2. Part 2: The Magic of Compounding — Why compounding is the most powerful force in investing, why time is the one input you cannot buy back, and what the numbers actually look like over 30 and 40 years.
  3. Part 3: Minimize Friction — Fees and taxes do not feel painful in any given year, but they compound against you just as surely as returns compound for you. How to keep more of what the market gives you.
  4. Part 4: Reinvest Your Dividends — Why taking dividend payments as cash is almost always the wrong choice during the accumulation phase — and how reinvesting them automatically builds a larger, faster-compounding portfolio over time.
  5. Part 5: Don’t Try to Time the Market — Why market timing fails even for professionals, and why dollar-cost averaging — investing a fixed amount on a fixed schedule regardless of price — is the discipline that makes buy-and-hold actually work.
  6. Part 6: Don’t Fall in Love With a Stock — Why attachment to a position is the most reliable way to turn a good investment into a bad one, and the two conditions that should drive any sell decision.
  7. Part 7: Being Wrong Less Often — Why knowing the rules is not enough — and how a written, pre-decided framework for entry and exit removes emotion from investment decisions and makes you wrong less often over time.
  8. Part 8: Know What You Own — Why understanding the business behind the stock is the foundation of every other rule, and what happens when investors skip this step.

Intrinsic Value

What is a stock actually worth — and how do you calculate it? This series walks through the complete process, step by step, using a method called a Discounted Cash Flow model (a way of estimating what a business is worth based on the cash it’s expected to generate in the future). Start here.

  1. Part 1: The Cash a Business Generates — The core idea: what free cash flow is, how it’s built, and the three things that determine what future cash flows are worth.
  2. Part 2: Why a Dollar Today Is Worth More Than a Dollar Tomorrow — The time value of money, present value, and how discounting works — the idea that makes all the calculations make sense.
  3. Part 3: Two Types of Free Cash Flow — FCFF vs. FCFE: which version applies to which companies, and why the distinction matters before any calculations begin.
  4. Part 4: Calculating Free Cash Flow to the Firm — The FCFF formula built line by line: EBIAT, CapEx, D&A, and working capital — where each number lives in the financial statements and how they fit together.
  5. Part 5: Where the Growth Rate Comes From — The fundamental growth rate derived from two things the business reports: how much it reinvests, and what it earns on those investments.
  6. Part 6: Risk and the Discount Rate — WACC built from scratch: cost of equity (CAPM), cost of debt (coverage ratio → synthetic rating → default spread), capital weights, and what the discount rate tells you about value creation.
  7. Part 7: Putting It All Together — The complete DCF model assembled: five years of projected FCFF, a terminal value, a WACC discount, net debt subtracted, and an intrinsic value per share compared to the market price.
  8. Part 8: Why Financial Firms Are Different — Why banks and insurers can’t be valued with FCFF, what makes them structurally different from other businesses, and why FCFE and the cost of equity replace WACC for financial firms.

Growth Investing

Not every great investment is a cheap stock. Some companies are worth paying a premium for because they’re growing so fast that today’s high price becomes tomorrow’s bargain. This series teaches you how to find those companies — and how to tell real growth from the kind that looks good but doesn’t hold up.

  1. Part 1: What Makes a Growth Stock — coming soon
  2. Part 2: The Six Gates — Screening for Quality Growth — coming soon
  3. Part 3: Reading the Scorecard — coming soon

The Peter Lynch Approach

Peter Lynch ran one of the most successful investment funds in history from 1977 to 1990. His method scores companies on the quality of their earnings growth, the safety of their finances, and how disciplined management has been with shareholders’ money. This series explains his framework and how to apply it.

  1. Part 1: How Lynch Thought About Stocks — coming soon
  2. Part 2: The Scoring System — coming soon
  3. Part 3: Applying the Lynch Score — coming soon

The Bogle Method

John Bogle founded Vanguard and invented the index fund — one of the most important financial innovations of the 20th century. His approach is simple, low-cost, and backed by decades of evidence. This series explains what he believed and which ETFs (Exchange-Traded Funds — baskets of stocks you can buy with a single purchase, like buying a small slice of the entire market at once) put his method into practice.

  1. Part 1: The Case for Index Investing — coming soon
  2. Part 2: The ETFs Bogle Would Approve Of — coming soon

Warren Buffett’s Advice for Ordinary Investors

The world’s most famous stock-picker has been remarkably consistent about what he tells everyday investors to do — and it might surprise you. This series covers his advice, the reasoning behind it, and the specific ETFs he recommends for people who don’t want to pick individual stocks.

  1. Part 1: What Buffett Actually Tells the Rest of Us — coming soon
  2. Part 2: The ETFs He Recommends — coming soon

Getting Started

The practical side: how to open a brokerage account, what index funds are and how they work, and how to think about building a first portfolio. If you’re brand new to investing, this series covers the basics you need before anything else.

  1. Part 1: Opening a Brokerage Account — coming soon
  2. Part 2: Your First Portfolio — coming soon

New posts are added regularly. Start with the Introduction if you haven’t already — it explains what this blog is, who it’s for, and where everything is headed.

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