I used to spend half of my Saturdays and Sundays at the library going through the pages trying to find the stocks to buy

haven't looked at a VL in about 10 years and don't even know if libraries carry it any longer

I created a spreadsheet program to take info off VL and run a bunch of calculations and tests to rule stuff in or out

I don’t know.

I was a subscriber for many years. I used to take the internet delivery. I think it was about $1,000 a year, something like that. I found a number of anomalies in their data and had a number of ongoing dialogues with their analysts about what their categories really meant. There was a lengthy dialogue about bank stock data, how it was entered, which I can’t now recall the details of.

After I was diagnosed and had to shut down my investment management operations, I no longer subscribed. The last time I ventured into the local library here, Value Line was there in dead tree form.

The one page summaries were pretty useful. I didn't rely on their rankings, at least not expressly. You can look at many year results, and get a feel for how the company is doing, run the ratios, and decide whether it is within limits or not. Then if so, look into it more.

Investment analysis can be very complex, but need not be. You want to be vaguely right, and not precisely wrong.

Whether it is worth it or not, of course, depends on the use you can make of it.

quote:

You want to be vaguely right, and not precisely wrong.

I like that spec a LOT.

I didn't specifically follow their ratings, but the one page summary of historical data was pretty useful

essentially what I did was look at the previous 5 years or 10 years worth of revenue and earnings data and plotted it out looking for a positive increase year over year

also looked at dividend data and looked for gaps or missing payments.

I did some quick calculations on PE's to get a feel if they were way out of line

not really overly scientific but it was a good way to toss out an overpriced stock or one that had a disparity between the slopes of the curves for revenue and earnings

I only every used the dead tree version at the library

I should swing by the local library and see if they still get it

thanks for the response

quote:

Originally posted by nhtagmember:
I didn't specifically follow their ratings, but the one page summary of historical data was pretty useful

essentially what I did was look at the previous 5 years or 10 years worth of revenue and earnings data and plotted it out looking for a positive increase year over year

also looked at dividend data and looked for gaps or missing payments.

I did some quick calculations on PE's to get a feel if they were way out of line

not really overly scientific but it was a good way to toss out an overpriced stock or one that had a disparity between the slopes of the curves for revenue and earnings

I only every used the dead tree version at the library

I should swing by the local library and see if they still get it

thanks for the response

We used it as a filter. If a company passed the crude tests, I would get my CPA son to get his eyes on several years of annual reports. He had been an auditor at PriceWaterhouse and had a lot of expensive training in putting those things together, and I was constantly astonished at what he could tell just by looking. It wasn't always investment critical, but every now and then it would reveal something that wasn’t easy to detect on a cursory look.

One time we had an outfit that seemed really cheap, consistent earnings, decent financials, so I had him take a look. After about an hour, he came in and said, “they are factoring their receivables.” Nowhere did it say that, but he had analysed it somehow. Was that good? Not so good? Sign of impending doom? There is usually a reason something is really cheap, and it pays to try to figure what it may be.