Why This Blog Exists
A note from Jim Hess, before we get into anything else.
I want to be honest with you from the start.
Most investment content you’ll find online is either trying to sell you something, oversimplifying things to the point of being useless, or written in language that assumes you already know what you’re doing. This blog is none of those things.
This is a place where I’m going to show you exactly how I invest — the real methods, the actual math, the decisions I make and why I make them. No shortcuts, no hand-waving, no “just trust me.”
But before I get into any of that, I want to tell you why this exists at all.
It Started With a Question
For a long time, I’ve been interested in this one question: what is a business actually worth?
Not what the stock market says it’s worth today — the market changes its mind every day, driven by news, fear, and whatever investors happen to be excited about this week. I mean the real, underlying value. What would you pay for this business if you were buying the whole thing, and the stock market was closed for the next ten years?
That question turns out to be answerable. Not perfectly — investing is never about certainty — but rigorously. There are methods. There is math. There is a discipline called value investing — the idea that you can calculate what a business is worth, compare that number to what the market is charging for it, and make a rational decision about whether to buy it, hold it, or sell it.
The investor who made this approach famous is Warren Buffett. His teacher was Benjamin Graham, who wrote The Intelligent Investor in 1949 — still one of the most important books ever written about the subject. The academics who have done the most to put this approach on rigorous mathematical footing include Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at NYU whose work on valuation is referenced throughout this blog.
I’ve been building on their work for a long time. This blog is the result.
What You’ll Learn Here
This blog will teach you how to evaluate a stock the way a professional analyst would — step by step, from scratch.
That includes:
How to calculate what a stock is actually worth. We use a method called a Discounted Cash Flow model — a way of estimating the value of a business based on the cash it’s expected to generate in the future. We’ll cover this in detail, including all the inputs, all the math, and all the places where judgment comes in.
How to screen for growth stocks. 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. We’ll teach you how to identify those companies — and how to tell the difference between real growth and the kind that sounds good but doesn’t hold up.
How to use Peter Lynch’s approach. Lynch ran the Magellan Fund at Fidelity from 1977 to 1990 and produced returns that almost no one has matched since. His book One Up On Wall Street is one of the most readable investing books ever written. We use a quantitative version of his framework — a scoring system that measures the quality of a company’s growth, its financial safety, and how disciplined management has been with shareholders’ money.
How to think about a portfolio. Buying individual stocks is only part of the job. How many stocks should you own? How do you decide when to sell? What do you do with the proceeds? We’ll work through all of it.
An Honest Warning
I want to be clear about something: doing this well takes a lot of time and effort.
The methods described on this blog are not passive. They require you to read financial statements, understand a company’s business, track what’s happening in an industry, and revisit your analysis when new information comes in. If you follow this blog all the way through and apply what you learn, you’ll have a genuine edge — but only if you’re willing to put in the work.
For some people, that’s exactly the point. They want to understand what they own and why they own it. They find the work interesting. If that’s you, this blog was built for you.
For others, the right answer might be a low-cost index fund — a product that buys a little bit of every major stock in the market, charges almost nothing, and captures most of the market’s long-term returns without requiring any ongoing work. That’s a completely legitimate strategy, and we’ll cover it honestly here too. There is no shame in it. The best investment strategy is the one you’ll actually stick with.
What isn’t a good strategy is following tips, trading based on headlines, or buying something because someone on the internet said it was going to the moon. That’s not investing — that’s gambling with extra steps.
The Subscriber Portfolio
At some point in the not-too-distant future, this blog will offer a paid subscription tier.
Subscribers will get access to a real, actively maintained value portfolio, with the analysis behind each position. I’ll tell you when to buy, when to hold, and when to sell, along with the reasoning behind every decision.
The idea is simple: if you want to invest this way but don’t have the time to do the full analysis yourself, you can follow along with someone who does. You’ll still make your own decisions — I’m not a registered investment advisor and nothing here is personal financial advice — but you’ll have a detailed, transparent view into how a serious value investor thinks and acts.
More details on that when the time comes.
Lessons for Luca and Lili
There’s one more reason this blog exists, and it’s the most personal one.
I have two grandchildren — Luca and Lili. They’re young now, but I hope that someday they’ll want to understand how money works, how businesses create value, and how to build lasting financial security for themselves and their families. I hope they’ll find this work as interesting as I do.
Everything on this blog is written so that a smart, curious person — regardless of their background — can understand it without having to look anything up. If you’re in high school and you’re reading this, welcome. If you’re Luca or Lili and you’re reading this years from now — this is for you. Papa built all of it for you.
How This Blog Is Organized
Posts are grouped into series. Each series covers one topic from the ground up:
- Intrinsic Value — what a stock is worth and how to calculate it (start here)
- Growth Investing — how to identify companies growing fast enough to justify a premium price
- The Peter Lynch Approach — scoring companies on growth quality, financial safety, and discipline
- The Bogle Method — how John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, changed investing forever, and the specific ETFs (Exchange-Traded Funds — baskets of stocks you can buy with a single purchase, like buying a slice of the entire market at once) that put his approach into practice
- Warren Buffett’s Advice for Ordinary Investors — what the world’s most famous stock-picker actually tells everyday investors to do, and the ETFs he recommends
- Getting Started — opening a brokerage account, understanding index funds, building your first portfolio
You can read in any order, but the Intrinsic Value series is the foundation. Everything else builds on it.
Let’s get to work.
— Jim