Blog Archives

Have you seen the new website?

4/29/2018

Hey folks, the new StockCard.io is live!

We have made several improvements to make it easier for you to review the facts that matter, make long-term investment decisions based on Stock Card's automated and consistent information, and save time doing so. If you chose to join our newly released Stock Card Premium plan, you will have access to new investment ideas and can request new Stock Cards to validate your own. Regardless of the plan you chose, you can continue to track your true investment performance. We believe everyone in our community should be able to invest based on facts and generate wealth. That will never change!

If you haven't yet seen the new website, from all of us here at Stock Card HQ, this is your invitation to drop by and have a look. You will find tools to help you:

Discover new ides

Visit Investment Ideas page. We released five new portfolios. These portfolios are built using Stock Cards' insights to try out a few key investment strategies, ranging from a portfolio for starter investors to more advanced ones who have already progressed in their journey as stock market investors. You can have access to our CEO's complete investment portfolio. After all, we are all investors too.

Validate your ideas

There are hundreds of Stock Cards already published. As before, you can look for the companies you have on your radar using Stock Card Search page. We keep the existing ones up-to-date based on price changes and quarterly releases. Our Premium members have a chance to request up to three Stock Cards per month. Also, every week we publish a bunch of new Stock Cards. For example, here is a selected number of Stock Cards that we published this week:

Track your performance

One of the characteristics that separate successful investors from others is their focus on tracking their performance against the market. You are your own best teacher. By reviewing when and how you've made outperforming or underperforming investment decisions, you find your path to wealth. Stock Card's Track Your Investments page is designed to help you easily track such crucial information you need to stay ahead of the market.

Save time

You'll know what we mean if you click on any of the Stock Cards. We designed Stock Cards to help you invest without the time-consuming research, and still make decisions based on facts and logic.

Stock Card Premium members will receive their investment pick of the week, accompanied by detailed Stock Card team's research on Wednesday. Thanks, and stay tuned for the next week's edition of Stock Card weekly, as we go back to our regular weekly investment research.

Let's wrap it up with our latest Facebook video. Hope you'll like a bit of humor we sprinkled around ;). If you did, spread the joy by sharing it with friends and family.

Bye, Bye Beta!

4/22/2018

Yay, Stock Card is coming out of the beta phase. You might have noticed the "beta" icon on our website. We have been building stockcard.io and improving our tools based on our conversations with you and other members of our community. Thank you for being with us and sharing your thoughts, ideas, and questions all along! We still have a lot to do. But, the good news is that Stock Card's main data collection and automation system is working well and is ready to get out of the open beta phase!

What would this mean for you? Good question! Let me explain. Some things are not going to change at all, but some other will.

Things that stay the same:
The main reason we created Stock Card is to enable intelligent investors like you to do research, collect the facts that matter, and make long-term investment decisions based on consistent information. That will never change!

Access to all existing and new Stock Cards at no cost, ad-free, noise-free, and hassle-free,
Access to an improved My Portfolio page to build unlimited portfolios and try out different investment strategies,
Receive the weekly updates on every Sunday, as it has been customary since day one.

Things that will change:
We are introducing a premium version of Stock Card. The Stock Card Premium plan is for those of us who are looking to discover new investment ideas every week and validate our ideas using Stock Card's automated and consistent data collection system.

Access to the portfolios we create using Stock Card's insights focused on a few key investment strategies,
Access to our detailed analysis on each Stock Card to know how we use the information to pick new investments,
Receive one new investment idea per week,
Access to three Stock Card requests per month to validate your ideas without the need to do time-consuming research.

That's it, folks. We will release the new version of Stock Card in a few days and you will have access to the new and improved Stock Card. Happy investing to you all!

Let's wrap it up with a few of the newly published Stock Cards:

Checkout Bank of New York Mellon's Stock Card!

Checkout UnitedHealth Group's Stock Card!

Facebook is the new Coca-Cola!

4/15/2018

This week was the week of Facebook. Everywhere you turned, you saw Mark Zuckerberg's emotion-free, calm, focused, and some may say Android-like face answering the politicians' questions. While the questions covered a wide range of topics, I couldn't help but think about how Facebook has reached the Coca-Cola status! Who could have imagined Facebook to be so widely used that the U.S. government spends two full days understanding how it works, and what it does!

Like many others, you are most likely confused by my comparison of Facebook and Coca-Cola. The two companies are very different in many ways. If you ask some of the hard-core stock market investors, they laugh at the mere notion of comparing Facebook with Coca-Cola. How could these two be comparable? One is a "growth" stock, and the other is a stable, dividend-paying company. One makes money off people's data; the other quenches the world's thirst. What's the catch?

Where Facebook and Coca-Cola meet is their strength as a business and their inevitable status in the lives of billions around the world. Once a company reaches the inevitable status, it is hard to imagine it will lose its market leadership in years to come.

Here is what Warren Buffett wrote about Coca-Cola in 1996 as he was describing the company becoming an inevitable:

Now, replace Coca-Cola [and Gillete] with Facebook:

"Companies such as Facebook might well be labeled "The Inevitables." Forecasters may differ a bit in their predictions of exactly how much digital advertising business this company will be doing in ten or twenty years. Nor is our talk of inevitability meant to play down the vital work that the company must continue to carry out, in such areas as user satisfaction, data protection, regulatory compliance, and platform innovation. In the end, however, no sensible observer - not even the company' most vigorous competitors, assuming they are assessing the matter honestly - questions that Facebook will dominate its field worldwide for an investment lifetime. Indeed, its dominance will probably strengthen. The company has significantly expanded its already huge shares of the market during the past ten years, and all signs point to their repeating that performance in the next decade."

To complement uncle Warren's description above, here are a few facts to feel the real power of Facebook as an economic engine in comparison with the good old Coca-Cola. This is not meant to bash Coca-Cola, but to showcase the power of Facebook:

The two companies almost spend the same amount of money on operating expenses. (~ $15 Billion)
But, Facebook makes $40 Billion in revenue, whereas Coca-Cola makes $35 (So, Facebook is $5 billion more efficient)

It's not over yet!

While Facebook has no debt, Coca-Cola has $48 Billion in debt!
And, both companies have about the same amount of cash at hand.
Last, but not the least, even though introducing a bit healthier drink shows the extent of Coca Cola's innovation, take a look at how Facebook and it's Facebook Spaces' product is innovating the realm of communications with the use of new technologies such as Virtual Reality in the ways that once was only imaginable in Sci-Fi movies.

With that in mind, this week's featured stock is Facebook which by the way has entered into an undervalued price range as the result of the recent data breach controversies.

That's it, folks, for this week's edition of Stock Card Weekly! If you've made it so far and read through the whole newsletter, I want to let you in on an exciting Stock Card news. We are getting out of Open Beta very soon. Several improvements and automations have been in the works, and in the next week or so, you will get to experience those changes first hand. Many of you have already sent me your thoughts and ideas as to how we can make Stock Card better. You can still do so by either sending me an email or joining our Intelligent Investing Facebook group. Hope to hear your suggestions and ideas about how Stock Card can be a better investment tool specifically for you!

Is it worth investing in an IPO?

4/8/2018

What about Spotify?

This is the question I almost certainly get asked when I see my friends and family. Not to forget long threads of discussions on our intelligent investing Facebook Group and other investing communities. Whenever a silicon valley darling gets public, it inevitably becomes the center of attention for a day if not months.

I usually stay away! For us the intelligent investors, the IPO is either a playground of the day traders who hope to profit from the first few days of fluctuations or a chance for the private investors, the company itself and the investment bankers (well, assuming that they are hired!) to boost the price as high as possible. There is no need to rush into investing whatsoever.

If the company is a well-operated and benefits from a growing market, there would be enough opportunities to invest after the dust of the IPO settles down and a few quarters of operational data becomes available. It is always good to remind ourselves that all the great public companies we have come to know and invest in were once IPOs. Even if we don't invest during the IPO time, we still get enough opportunities to invest in them post IPO and we still get the chance to generate a significant return. Therefore, it is to the benefit of the public market investors to stand aside and let the dust of the IPO settle.In any case, today even for the fun of it, let's take a look at SPOT's Stock Card. You'll see how the lack of the availability of several data points makes investing in a recent IPO a not-so-intelligent investing decision.

As always, don't forget to visit All Stock Cards tab. We published 20 new Stock Cards this week, thanks to several Stock Card request from our community and users. I personally picked up a few stocks this week and added them to my Small & Nifty and League of 10Xers portfolios:

That's it for this week's Stock Card weekly. It would be great to hear from you and your views about how you decide to take risks. Join us on our Facebook group and let's have an intelligent investing conversation. More than 2000 intelligent investors have already joined us and we have fun discussing new investment ideas every day! Intelligent investing never stops!

That's it for this week's Stock Card Weekly. If you had fun reading today's newsletter, celebrate by forwarding it to a friend or two.

When does it make sense to take risks?

4/1/2018

This week we got the news that Salesforce.com has acquired MuleSoft for $5.6 Billion, and the company's shareholders pocketed a nice return. The acquisition news brought back the memory of when I published MuleSoft's Stock Card (not available anymore due to the acqusition). It all started when one of our users sent a request. Once the data was pulled into the Stock Card, and I had a chance to look at it, I was faced with a dilemma. What would you do when half of the data points you need to make a good investment decision are unavailable?

Because MuleSoft has been public only for a few years, there was limited data about the company's historical investment return. Similarly, there was just not enough data available to be able to estimate the company's fair share price range. Out of the four big questions we answer on Stock Cards, two were grayed out. I looked at the other two dimensions; market opportunity and operational strength, and the company was dazzling green. Then and there, I had an aha moment.

The market opportunity was big, and the company was well-managed. I was willing to take the risk of not having the full information!

Risk is being defined in many different ways. For us at Stock Card, the risk is equal to missing data points. With each missing data point, we have one reason to doubt if the company will pull it off and earn a spot in our portfolio. If you measure risk as to the number of missing data points, it is a lot easier to figure out how much risk you will have to take. For us, when a company gets a perfect market opportunity and operational strength scores, we are willing to bear the risk and make a bet. In the case of MuleSoft, it paid off. Here are a few other stocks that are MuleSoft look-alikes and are worthy of a spot in our portfolio:

Checkout Applied Genetic Tech's Stock Card!

Have you had a chance to play around with Stock Card's advanced filters? For me, personally, it is one of the best ways to find new investment opportunities. Here is how I used the filters to find MuleSoft's look-alikes:

This week thanks to several of our community members we published 22 new Stock Cards. Make sure to submit your Stock Card request as you explore new investment opportunities! As always, you know that sharing this email with a friend or two makes the gods of investing smile! :)

Have you seen the new website?

Bye, Bye Beta!

Facebook is the new Coca-Cola!

Is it worth investing in an IPO?

When does it make sense to take risks?

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