About

Value Investing, and a Few Cigar Butts

Author History

My name is Mike Price, I am currently 17 years-old, and am going to high school in Pleasant Grove, Utah. I will start going to Westminster College in the fall of 2008.

When I was 13, eighth grade, I was homeschooled, for a variety of reasons, because of this I had a chance to go to a Get Motivated seminar. My mom found a coupon to get two tickets for the price of one and Joe Montana was speaking so I was eager to go.

At the seminar Phil Town was promoting an Investools package. The ability to make a lot of money got me very interested.

We went to one Investools class and learned about stochastics, other TA and how to trade short-term using options. The whole class was basically how to use Investools' proprietary (and very expensive) software. Though there may have been more, but the only fundamental analysis I remember was checking the last two months news to make sure there weren't any scandals, obviously far different from my current investing style.

After the class we went to the library to find books on investing, I found three or four trading books, a gold book and The Motley Fool Investment Guide for Teens.

I don't think I use a lot of the book with my current philosophy, but it was the first time I read anything about a long-term focus and saving, it also turned me unto the Motley Fool Boards where I have posted almost 1,200 times most of those falling between 2004-6.

Soon after I started posting often, I wrote a post about ten investing mistakes, and won $1,000 in a teen writing contest.

Most of the stuff I know came from reading the boards and the books recommended by the posters there. I owe a lot of my knowledge to those boards.

Around the end of the summer of 2005 I started trying to find ways to make money from my articles (after The Motley Fool turned me down as an author three times because I wasn't 18).

The result was Value Investing, and a Few Cigar Butts

Blog History

The first post was How I Invest, which was a post on my investing philosophy, the post described which investments I liked and what percent of my portfolio I felt should be invested in them.

I named the blog Value Investing (which is the type of investing I prefer, buying good companies at a margin of safety), and a few Cigar Butts (special situations, or how Buffett could have made 50% per year, which about which I have become partially obsessive in my research and reading, and ended up writing five posts on them).

As I got annoyed by the overwhelmingly un investing related posts on The Motley Fool boards I started to post more often, posting 31 times in the lats few months of 2005 then 68 times in 2006.

During this period I basically experimented with risky speculations made to look like value stocks in my mind.

I even recognized this and repeatedly wrote about how I would change, in this period I lost 15% over three years and consider this the first chapter of my investing life.

In 2007 I got sick of my poor returns and poor hits results, and only posted 11 times, mostly because of school work and my job at KFC.

More recently I've started to post more often, reaching my 2007 post level by the end of March.
At the start of 2008 I'd made about $900 total since I started the blog, including all ad sales (google, blogads, adbrite), Amazon Associate links and a Blast Invest affiliate link.

This seems like a lot of money, but it's over two-and-a-half years, on over 65,000 page views and well over 300 pages of writing.

In an effort to monetize the blog and make it beneficial to write often, in March of 2008 I started posting almost every day and started using better ad placement. I also have plans to make a pdf (also a print edition) of the 'first chapter' of my investment evolution encompassing all of my posts up until 2008, including new commentary and updates on the progress of researched stocks. Plans to sell copies of my advanced security analysis spreadhseet have also been explored, there will be more info in the future about these potential products.

Portfolio Holdings

After I started the 'second chapter' I decided to follow my portfolio in more detail. I do a monthly post detailing each investment and any changes and also have added, on the sidebar, a list of my current portfolio holdings and the percent allocations in each holding. Underneath the holdings is a list of the investments I sold after the start of the 'second chapter' it does not include any investments (good or bad) that I have made in the past.

Book Store

I also started a Right Price Book store, that is in the progress of showing all my recommended books, from investing to business to economics to fiction.

Political Blog

In March of 2008, I created a political blog with my Uncle. The blog is The New Sons of Liberty and the articles detail our libertarians leanings and the benefits of small government and the Free Market.

Readers should visit the site at their own risk and I hope they will not hold any political disagreements against my investment writings.

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