All Investing Is Value Investing

Before you buy a stock, do you know what the business is actually worth? If not, how do you know whether you are paying too much, getting a bargain, or paying a fair price? It is a simple question, but one surprisingly few investors can answer. Most investors spend their time watching stock prices taking note of what is going up, what is going down, and what the market might do next. All Investing Is Value Investing starts with the fundamentals of the business which determine what the business is worth. For decades, Chuck Carnevale and Nathan Mauck have taught individual investors how to understand what a business is worth and whether the price being offered makes sense. As co-founder of FAST Graphs and the author of more than four hundred published articles on valuation, Chuck is known to a generation of self-directed investors simply as "Mr. Valuation." Nathan is a finance professor whose teaching and research focus on valuation, corporate finance, and investment decision-making. Together, Carnevale and Mauck distill decades of investing, teaching, and research into a practical guide to understanding businesses, prices, and value. Their argument is simple and, once seen, hard to unsee: growth investing, dividend investing, income investing, and quality investing are not competing philosophies. They are all value investing. Whatever your strategy, investment results ultimately depend on the relationship between the value of the business you own and the price you pay for it. That does not mean intrinsic value can be calculated with perfect precision. It cannot. But investors do not need a perfectly precise answer. They need a reasonable estimate of what a business is worth-one good enough to recognize when price and value have become disconnected. Using plain language and no math beyond simple arithmetic, Carnevale and Mauck take readers from first principles to a practical investment process. Along the way, they examine real companies with known outcomes, allowing readers to examine the evidence for themselves. Readers will learn to: ¿ Judge the quality of a business before considering its price ¿ See the long-run relationship between business earnings and stock prices ¿ Estimate what a business is worth using common sense valuation ¿ Recognize genuine bargains and avoid overpaying ¿ Know when to sell ¿ Recognize and avoid behavioral traps ¿ Build an investment process suited to your goals, needs, and temperament This is not a book of stock picks, trading strategies, or market predictions. It offers something more durable: a way to think about investing. Financial analysis is not the exclusive province of Wall Street professionals, and valuation does not require complicated mathematics. Any intelligent investor willing to understand the businesses they own can learn to make reasonable judgments about value. Because in the end, the question is not whether a stock is going up or down. The question is whether the business is worth the price you are being asked to pay.