I am currently reading Patriot, a posthumous memoir authored by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, a truly inspiring man and one who will be greatly missed, but not forgotten. 🫶
Alexei makes many interesting points in the book and one in particular has inspired me to make this comment on what makes a good investor, by adapting one of his sayings…
‘A good investor is not one who knows everything but someone who knows what they need to read and where to find it.’ Double Bubbler 2025, with thanks to Alexei Navalny for the inspiration!
And this is what I consider before buying a stock…
I build up a shortlist of companies that catch my eye over time from broad general reading, and I then look at each one in more detail when I am ready for my next investment. I follow as many lines of enquiry as my time allows to get a broad understanding of a potential investment before often ruling it out. Only a fraction of the companies I look at are selected for investment.
I consider various aspects including the company’s sales opportunity and ability to protect any advantages over competition (e.g. patents, complexity, cost to market etc.), financial aspects (e.g. sales and profit growth as well as forecast potential and contracts), management expertise and connections, industry competition, relative value of the company (e.g. compared to industry average PE, PS etcetera), geopolitics, and the economy amongst other aspects. I use freely available information such as news sources, company websites, SEC submissions, search engines, Reddit, as well as paid for content such as from Simply Wall St and The Times.
Investing in individual stocks is not for everyone and one is unlikely to ever have a perfect investment track record, but if you make far more good decisions than bad, you should do very well in my opinion.