There's a good compilation of questiosn to think of before investing.
The Quality Of Business Earnings - Checklist Of Questions
by Tannor Pilatzke
Here are quotes by WB from here :
“Investing is reporting. I told him to imagine an in-depth article about his own paper. He’d ask a lot of questions and dig up a lot of facts. He’d know The Washington Post. And that’s all there is to it.”
“You need a moat in business to protect you from the guy who is going to come along and offer it (your product) for a penny cheaper.”
“If (you go into a store and) they say ‘I don’t have a Hershey bar, but I have this unmarked chocolate bar that the owner of the place recommends,’ if you’ll walk across the street to buy a Hershey bar or if you’ll pay a nickel more for the (Hershey) bar than the unmarked bar or something like that, that’s franchise value.”
“How much more fruitful it is for us to think about whether the product is likely to sustain itself and its economics than to try to be questioning whether to jump in and out of the stock.”
“If I’m thinking about investing in a specific company, I try to size up their business and the people running it. And as I read annual reports, I’m trying to understand generally what’s going on in all kinds of businesses. If we own stock in one company and there are eight others in the industry, I want to be on the mailing list for the annual reports of the other eight because I can’t understand how my company is doing unless I understand what the other eight are doing. I want perspective on market share, margins, the trend in margins – all kinds of things...”
“It’s amazing how well you can do in investing with what I’d call “outside” information. I’m not sure how useful inside information is. But there’s all kinds of “outside” information around as to businesses. And you don’t have to understand all of them. You just have to understand the ones you’re thinking about investing in. And you can. But no one can do it for you.”
“In my view, you can’t read Wall Street reports and get anything out of them. You’ve got to get your arms around it yourself. I don’t think we’ve ever gotten an idea from a Wall Street report. However, we’ve gotten a lot of ideas from annual reports. Charlie?”
“PUCCI”: Pricing, Units, Costs, Competition and Insiders
“Investors should remember that their scorecard is not computed using Olympic-diving methods: Degree-of-difficulty doesn’t count. If you are right about a business whose value is largely dependent on a single key factor that is both easy to understand and enduring, the payoff is the same as if you had correctly analyzed an investment alternative characterized by many constantly shifting and complex variables.” -- Warren Buffett
