10 Vital Things To Check Before Investing In Any Business Or Stock
Here’s a practical checklist to level up your stock selection process-
1) Past Revenue Growth
Check revenue growth over the last 3–5 years. Double-digit CAGR is preferred.
For cyclical companies — study how they perform in upcycles and downcycles. Studying old cycles can give you a clue about how future ones might play out.
2) Competitive Intensity
How many players are there in the industry? The lesser the better. If there are a lot of players, check if everyone makes money or not? Competitive intensity matters a lot. Also check if the business you are studying has something unique like — cost advantage, brand, distribution, etc.
3) Consistency Of Margins
Are the margins volatile or consistent? Check the margins of the last 10 years. If current margins are unusually high, don’t overpay. Margins eventually revert. Buy when they’re expanding — not peaking.
4) Operating Leverage
Look for companies where fixed costs are done & sales are now scaling. Capex cycles and management commentary will help you to spot this. Getting this right can lead to powerful re-ratings.
5) Check The Cash Flows
Is the company able to convert its EBITDA into cash flows? Some companies have epic income statements and profits. However, when you look at their cash flows, everything is stuck in the working capital. This is an important question to ask when looking at stocks.
6) Market Penetration
How much headroom is left to grow? If a product has >90% market penetration, growth might be limited. But companies creating new categories can grow exponentially.
7) Focus On Volume Growth
Revenue = Price × Volume
The best quality of growth is when the number of units sold or volumes sold keeps going up. Double digit volume growth over an extended period of time can lead to big winners in the stock market.
8) B2C > B2B > B2G
Generally B2C valuations are > B2B Valuations > B2G Valuations. Thus, if you see consumption businesses growing at double digits, do not ignore them!
9) Margin Of Safety
Have a Margin Of Safety or be cautious of the valuations you are paying for a stock. You can be right on all the things but one can forget that sometimes accidents happen. At high prices, small mistakes might lead to derating of PE Ratio. A great business bought at the wrong price may prove to be a bad investment.
10) Learn Stage Analysis
Learning Stage Analysis is a blessing for fundamental investors who are good at valuing companies. It will help you to understand where the stock is in its cycle.
Few books which can help you to understand the cycle of a stock from fundamental and technical perspective- 1) Understanding Michael Porter by Joan Magretta, 2) Capital Returns by Edward Chancellor and 3) Secrets For Profiting In Bull and Bear Markets from Stan Weinstein.
Hope this post gave you a rough checklist to evaluate stocks better!
I am going to complete 11 years in market and I will tell you what is the worst that happens, when a bear market starts, investors and famous influencers get so excited that this is discount just jump, invest everything, and then starts wait and hope, this is so tiring that retail investor completely losses hope due loss and sluggish market that he is left with no patience and energy by the end of bear market.
I can guarantee you that most of the retail investors will sell their entire portfolio at the bottom of market because they have been waiting from last 1 to 1.5 years which is a very long period and from next day, next week or next month of their selling bull markets will start. The worst that anyone can do to them is to give them hopes right from beginning of bear markets. This is the reason I didn’t wanted to give any hopes so that you are prepared for the worst full of energy and coz most of your free cash is invested slowly in market you don’t have that frustration and lack of energy being somewhere prepared for this, if you did a mistake this time than at-least take a learning on how to deal with bear markets, returns are not important, survival is more important. Preserving your energy is most important, coz any bad day will make you take an emotional decision.
Simple framework
20-30 Pe or
Below 1.5 times Peg
Top 3 in the market it operates in
Clean cash flows
Triggers for growth
Stage analysis + EPS & RS rating
That’s it..
You buy a 15PE stock with few problems and issues which you expect will get resolved in next 2 years and thats how your 15PE stock becomes a 45PE stock, where you make 3x returns only on PE rerating, and if earnings doubles in that 2 years than you make a 6X returns.
But after a bear market, investors starts doubting each and everything, and they want everything clean, that cleanliness you will get in a 100PE stock, and that cleanliness is also not permanent, things might change in next 2 years.
This is why they say bear markets are an opportunity. But only for visionary investors.