Re: First good idea
Wiseheart:
You certainly can invest without visiting a company (in fact that is the significant majority of my portfolio). Visiting a company gives a number of benefits in practice -- depending on the situation it may yield any of the following (not in any order):
1) Better relationship with management going forward - quicker returns of phone calls and deeper disclosure (can be subtle) on sensitive issues
2) Proverbial "looking management in the eye". I have taken courses by former CIA spooks in detecting deception and half of what you are looking for is physical in nature. I can detect deception (very important in the stock business) significantly more effectively in person.
3) Visiting the main operations of a company can give you some feel for how tightly its run, whether people are there late on a Friday, how new or old the plant and equipment is, etc. Some people hate to invest in company's where the CEO has built himself a shrine of an HQ for instance.
4) You get a deeper exposure to management...whereas on a phone call with management I feel its rude to go significantly past an hour, you can get mutliple meetings that last longer than this (CFO, CEO, IR, head of sales) depending on the situation.
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