Extracting Value: Value Investing Resource

Value Investing isn’t a new concept in the world of investing. I’m guessing people have always been look for value when they buy something. But what I’m talking about, analyzing securities, stocks, ownership in a business, in a way that looks to see if that security is undervalued, is something that two very famous investors started to truly consider back in the early 30’s.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m talking about Benjamin Graham and David Dodd. These two are what some might call the fathers of value investing as we know it today. Their book in 1934 titled, Securities Analysis, is the book that brought the value investing approach to investments into the forefront and sparked careers for people like Warren Buffet. Warren learned directly from Ben Graham.

Benjamin Graham and David Dodd made terms like “intrinsic value” and “margin of safety” fun. These two terms ensure a value investor that he or she will be buying an undervalued security. Their methods, unlike trading, teach investors to buy stocks that for one reason or another are undervalued. They taught that even though a company may be getting pounded by the investment world, it can still be a good buy, just based on the intrinsic value of the company.

Benjamin Graham went on to write another book that provides value investors with one of the best resources on the subject ever written in The Intelligent Investor. A book that gives investors easy to follow rules for finding value in the stock market.

These two investors helped pave the way for value investing and in a market where day trading, options trading, buying and selling on any old blog or news article is the norm, their theories still hold water in any conversation. After the blog storm has settled, everyone will always look to what the actual value of the stock is.

To kick off the reporting of Value Investing and providing readers with a great resource I thought it be a good idea to start with a resource to research stocks. I was checking in on my portfolio and financial news today over at Google Finance and found a new NEW tool from them.

By the way I like Google Finance because they allow you to access all sorts of sites data, although they could put more ratios and info outside the balance sheets on the quote pages.

But the new Google Stock Screener is a great tool. I’ve only just begun to play with it but the javascript enabled Google interactivity and user friendliness of the tool is just what I’ve been looking for. You can add as many or as few screeners, or criteria as they call them, as you wish.

Now, they don’t have everything you’ve ever wanted in terms of ratios but they have some key ones that value investors should look for like book value per share, cash per share, and EPS growth rates. These are all stats that I’d like to see on the main page of each quote in Google Finance but glad that they finally opened up their site to new functionality.

If you like Google products and you like to research stocks then you’ve finally got a good place to visit in the new Google Stock Screener.