From the Vault: Stock Picking for Dummies

Today’s episode is from the archive, Andrew and I hope you enjoyed your holiday weekend and everyone is safe. Please enjoy this episode redux concerning stock picking and some of the pitfalls to avoid. Don’t worry, we will be back next week with a new episode. Announcer (00:00): You’re tuned in to the Investing for Beginners podcast. Finally, step by step premium investment guidance for beginners led by Andrew Sather and Dave Ahern. To decode industry jargon, silence crippling confusion, and help you overcome emotions by looking at the numbers, your path to financial freedom starts now. Dave (00:38): Welcome to the Investing for Beginners Podcast. This is Episode 100 Tonight, Andrew and I are going to talk about stock picking for dummies. So we have some stories we’d like to pass along to you guys, and we have some ideas that might help you along the way with picking out some stocks. So, Andrew, would you like to talk first, or would you like me to talk first? Andrew (00:58): I think your story is the better one. So maybe it’s such a perfect illustration of how, when you’re picking stocks, it’s really easy to get caught up in the numbers or get caught up in a narrative or get caught up in your biases, tore the stock. And sometimes depending on what price you’re paying with for the stock, it’s creating these expectations that you don’t realize might be unreasonable. So tell your story first. Dave (01:30): Okay. All right. We’ll do so. A lot of you know that I have been watching the videos that Professor Aswath Damodaran does on YouTube. Dave (01:41): And I’ve been studying valuation with his MBA classes as well as his undergrad classes. And it’s very interesting and very enlightening. And he was telling a story on one of his lectures the other day that I thought was kind of fascinating. And I shared it with Andrew a while ago, and we thought this would be a perfect illustration of what we’re going to talk about tonight. So what the professor related to all of us was that he had a student that part of their project is to do a valuation of a company at the end of the semester. And so one of his students presented his findings at the end of the semester, and everything was really good except for one small detail. So he called the student in and had him come in and talk to him about his, his work and everything. Dave (02:29): And the professor went over everything and said, there was a lot of great stuff in there. And he asked him why he chose the company, and the company he chose was Tesla.