Part I
THE ART AND SCIENCE OF
INVESTING IN STOCKS
The Art and Science of Investing in
Stocks
We start with a basic point: We’re enthusiastic advocates for
the individual investor. We live by the old adage: “Nobody
cares about your money more than you do.” The future for a
company—and its financial results—is driven by the
intangible factors like brand, market presence, management
excellence, market growth: all things that might be
interpreted from information found on the Internet but are
not handed down in nicely prepackaged chunks. A human
must make sense of it all, must interpret it, to decide
whether a company will excel down the road—which
becomes the basis for buying the company’s stock.
The 100 Best Stocks to Buy is an excellent resource for
investing ideas, a place to get investing ideas and get
started. Our goal is to help you not just keep up with the
markets but to exceed their performance—and to collect
some dividend income along the way. We want to help you
build a portfolio that you’re comfortable with, one that allows
you to sleep at night. We want to teach you the method for
investments that help you achieve your financial goals. In
this chapter, you’ll find our explanation of our investing
principles and methodology. We’ll tell you why we look at
numbers when valuing a company but also how we look at
intangibles not only of where a company is at right now but
where it’s going. We also generally describe our 2020 picks
and the thought process behind them—why we added 17 new
or returning stocks and what each of them brings to the
table.
Our Stock-Picking Philosophy
We use a value investing approach throughout the book.
What is value investing, you ask? Different folks define it
differently, but we think of it as seeking stocks whose price is
something less than their true, or intrinsic, value. That is, if
you buy shares of one of our picks at a favorable price, you