Whopper Investments

The heart and soul of this blog is deep value investing at the micro-cap level. It’s turning over rocks that no one else looks at to find stocks w/ high potential for appreciation w/ tons of downside protection. Why?

Quite simply: to beat the pants off the market in the long run. To generate significant amounts of alpha. If I’m not doing that, what’s the point of spending all this time researching stocks and writing this blog (trust me, it’s not for the google advertising fees. They don’t even cover the cost of hosting!)? And if you don’t think I can help you beat the market, why waste the time reading this blog???  Continue reading »

First of all, happy new years!!! I hope the new year brings all of you plenty of ten-baggers!

Along with drinking too much and kissing a stranger, probably the most well known new year’s tradition is making resolutions. Some people resolve to quit smoking, some resolve to lose weight, some resolve to cut back on coffee (man, would I like to do that one!).

The resolutions may all be different, but the basics of the new year’s resolution are always the same- identify a weakness in yourself and resolve to improve it.

In a similar sense, part of the path to becoming a great investor is awareness of both your strengths and limitations. Buffett calls this understanding your circle of competence. Once you understand your circle of competence, you can identify your weaknesses and resolve to improve upon them. In that way, you can improve and develop as an investor. Ideas that were previously off limits to you will be right in your wheelhouse!

With that in mind, here are my five resolutions for the new year. Feel free to “borrow” them, or comment below and add your own. Continue reading »

I recently wrote my “10 keys to beating the market as a small investor” (see part 1 and part 2). But I purposefully left out one principal / key because I feel it’s so critical to investing on all levels that I wanted to single it out for focus. It’s actually a pretty simple point, but it’s an easy one to forget. And actually, it’s probably more applicable to when you invest in large cap companies than when you invest in small cap companies, because investing in small cap companies almost automatically incorporates a bit of this key. Continue reading »

One of my favorite series to follow is Greg Speicher’s 100 ways to beat the market. The series is basically focused on being a better value investor- thinking longer term than the market, doing the math to make sure your investments have better mathematical expectations than the market as a whole, etc. But the author is very clearly focused on large / mega-cap value investing, while I’m focused almost exclusively on micro-cap and small cap investing. And while the principals of large cap vs small cap investing are the same (buy with a margin of safety, at a discount to excess value, do your own work, etc.), I think there are some key principles to micro-cap value investing that are unique to the field. With that in mind, I present to you the second part of my “10 keys to beating the market as a small / micro-cap investor”. You can find part 1 here. Continue reading »

One of my favorite series to follow is Greg Speicher’s 100 ways to beat the market. The series is basically focused on being a better value investor- thinking longer term than the market, doing the math to make sure your investments have better mathematical expectations than the market as a whole, etc. But the author is very clearly focused on large / mega-cap value investing, while I’m focused almost exclusively on micro-cap and small cap investing. And while the principals of large cap vs small cap investing are the same (buy with a margin of safety, at a discount to excess value, do your own work, etc.), I think there are some key principles to micro-cap value investing that are unique to the field. With that in mind, I present to you my “10 keys to beating the market as a small / micro-cap investor”. Today, I’ll post the first 5 keys, and you can find part II here. Continue reading »