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Scan thousands of stocks looking for screaming bargains



ONLY A HANDFUL of outsiders have been permitted to enter the inner sanctum of the Berkshire Hathaway offices in Kiewit Plaza, Omaha. When Chris Stavrou, the founder of the New York asset management firm, Stavrou Partners, visited the offices he reported seeing hundreds of file drawers full of reports on thousands of companies.
Two things stand out. Firstly, Buffett said that the reports were mainly annual and quarterly reports. In other words, material that is available to everyone. Secondly, he declares that he does not use a computer. Not even a calculator.
He is able to do without these standard aids since, as many people have attested, he has a prodigious memory. There are numerous examples of him being able to recall obscure facts about the companies that he has investigated, and their competitors, many years later. It seems that he has read, and memorized, a huge amount of the material in the filing cabinets.This means that, when he is looking for quality investments satisfying his stringent criteria, he can scan through his own memory and couple the results with current prices. In the end, he is not looking for investments that are, with a little luck, likely to be slightly better than average. He wants them to be great investments by a large margin. “If (the investment) doesn’t scream at you,” he once said, “it’s too close.”
Summarizing this, we arrive at Secret #3: Scan thousands of stocks looking for screaming bargains.”
Few people have a memory to match Buffett’s. Even fewer have the resources to collect and index tens of thousands of documents on thousands of companies. This is one of the main reasons why I developed Conscious Investor—to overcome these problems.
Implementation using Conscious Investor
Conscious Investor has built into it a range of key criteria used by Warren Buffett to make his selections. Either looking at the market as a whole, or sector by sector, you can instantly scan through ten years of corporate data on every Australian stock, around 6,000 USA stocks and 3,000 Canadian stocks to locate companies that satisfy these criteria at different levels. In seconds you can filter thousands of stocks down to a handful that have the hallmarks of profitable “Buffett” investments.