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Stock Research And Due Diligence: Faster And Better
If you are tired of wading through the 'data swamp' or 'information quagmire' of financial stuff out there, one enterprising investor has just come up with a way to cut through all the useless, time-consuming work with a new web site designed to speed up the process, make it more efficient, and provide even more information on the companies in which you might want to invest.
Ian Campbell was tired of wasting his time wrestling with the websites, blogs, newsletters, reports and other online information on how to research stocks.
It just wasn’t working. This troubled Campbell, who for thirty-five years has been viewed as a leading Canadian expert in the rendering of independent business valuation opinions in substantive Canadian public and private company shareholder disputes and company valuations. He literally wrote the books on this subject. They are used by professionals all over Canada.
For several years, with the assistance of three investment advisors, each of whom specialize in different industry groups, Ian has researched macro-economic concepts and investment ideas online. He consistently spent more time doing this than he believed should be necessary. At the same time he had to develop financial and market comparators that he could not readily find in one organized place.
Campbell then considered what he had learned in his years of helping clients determine the value of their companies and investments. He concluded that if the most pertinent data was consistently summarized across a focused group of companies, and focused due diligence techniques were applied to those companies in much the way a company acquirer might do, this should lead to considerable time efficiencies and importantly, to a more in-depth knowledge of the companies.
The result, after nearly one year of research and site-building, is a unique site, recently launched in December.
He was especially interested in the ‘due diligence’ aspect. This was used to get to the heart of the financial matters of these publicly-traded Canadian Junior Mining and Oil & Gas Industries. He created a proprietary patent-pending ‘due diligence’ questionnaire that includes more than 200 questions organized by three dozen topical headings.
The questionnaire searches company documents by keywords. The responses of each search are linked to company documents. This allows members to directly link to each specific response as it appears in the company’s documents. Later, a special search-report is available for the member’s review and follow-up.
Members have an opportunity to quickly and systematically learn a great deal about an individual company without having first to read voluminous corporate documents
Now here is where I think it really gets interesting. Members quickly learn what the company has not disclosed that may be important to their own work. All questions that do not yield a response to the special key words and phrases search are reproduced in an abbreviated ‘follow-up questionnaire’. Often the questions that weren’t answered are as ‘ if not more ‘ important as those that were.
It is now nearly one year since he began his quest to see if the market would respond favorably to a special member web site that could solve those problems and provide the speed, accuracy, efficiency and transparency the individual investor is believed to crave. So far, it looks like Campbell has hit the nail right...on the head.
©Copyright, Roy MacNaughton, 2007