The Intelligent Investor - The Definitive Book On Value Investing

gov, shows whether a firm’s senior executives and directors have been buying or selling shares. There can be legitimate reasons ...

Financial strength and capital structure.The most basic possible definition of a good business is this: It generates more cash t ...

owned not by its shareholders but by its bondholders, who can lay claim to Amazon’s assets if they have no other way of securing ...

CHAPTER 12 Things to Consider About Per-Share Earnings This chapter will begin with two pieces of advice to the investor that ca ...

those figures, might say to himself: “Not so bad. I knew that 1970 was a recession year in aluminum. But the fourth quarter show ...

reduce the apparent earnings by half, or more. We shall present examples of a really significant dilution factor below (page 411 ...

In dealing with ALCOA’s special charges, the first thing to establish is how they arose. The footnotes are specific enough. The ...

The reader should note two ingenious aspects of the ALCOA procedure we have been discussing. The first is that by anticipating f ...

produced some strange-looking footnotes to the annual reports. The reader may be amused by the following explanation given by a ...

future years—say, not more than five. This evidently they will not do either, since they have already conveniently disposed of t ...

An obvious remark here would be that investors should not pay any attention to these accounting variables if the amounts involve ...

cant. If the transaction goes through, and if the tax laws are not changed, this loss provided for in 1970 will permit Northwest ...

Use of Average Earnings In former times analysts and investors paid considerable atten- tion to the average earnings over a fair ...

for the long period 1958–1970. But how relevant is this figure, gen- erally considered central in common-stock valuations, to th ...

Let us apply at this point to ALCOA the suggestion we made in the previous chapter for a “two-part appraisal process.” * Such an ...

COMMENTARY ON CHAPTER You can get ripped off easier by a dude with a pen than you can by a dude with a gun. —Bo Diddley THE NUMB ...

But, as the Naughty 1990s advanced, companies just couldn’t leave well enough alone. Just look at these examples of pro forma fl ...

Abracadabra! That piddly-sounding “change in accounting principle” pumped up 1999 net income by $240 million after taxes—a fifth ...

cables, largely laid across the floor of the world’s oceans. After wiring the world, Global Crossing would sell other communicat ...

mal operating expenses into capital assets. As the Global Crossing case shows, the intelligent investor should be sure to unders ...