StockScan: V-Mart Retail Ltd.

“Writing is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent elimination.” ~ Louise Brooks

This is an idea about brevity, so let me be brief.

StockScan is Safal Niveshak’s latest initiative where I will write and share to-the-point, one-page reports on listed Indian companies on a regular basis.

If you have been a reader of Safal Niveshak for long, you must remember how my idea of writing stock analyses has bombed quite a few times. So, I launched StockTalk 1.0, then 2.0, and then 3.0…but none could make it beyond a few weeks or days. If you think that’s due to my incompetence in analyzing stocks, you are right, and I am fine with that thought because you won’t expect much from this new initiative too. 😉

One big reason I never carried on far with my earlier such initiatives was that my business analyses were often construed as stock recommendations, and I found a lot of people acting on the same (and, of course, losing money). In fact, some curse me even now for a few old reports, despite my several warnings that what I wrote was purely entertaining business analysis and not serious stock recommendations.

Anyways, as I have also realized in hindsight, another reason I could not continue with these initiatives for long was that I often found the idea of writing long reports as cumbersome, after having done that for a few years in my job.

So, here comes StockScan, which is inspired by this report that Warren Buffett wrote in 1951 – The Security I Like Best. It was brief, to the point, and thus powerful and interesting.

Only that, through StockScan, I will NOT be writing about businesses I like best but ones that I have been reading about. And in case I write about the ones I like best, I will ensure that you don’t come to find that out. 😉

So, here’s the first StockScan report on V-Mart Retail, a business that I had first written about in the March 2016 special report for subscribers of our Value Investing Almanack newsletter.

Click here, if you cannot read or download the report above.

In all, this one-pager contains my thoughts on these most important points one needs to understand while analyzing any business –

• Business and industry overview
• Key drivers for sales growth and profitability
• Capital allocation track record and balance sheet strength
• Competitive advantages a business may possess
• Management quality
• Key risks the business faces
• Valuation

My experience suggests that trying to find out a lot of extra information about a business beyond what is mentioned above has the risk of leading you to just one thing – illusion of control, because you think you know a lot.

So, this is my effort to get myself over that illusion by eliminating the extras and focusing on just the most important things.

And as always, please don’t believe what I say or write here. You may regret later.

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Statutory Warning: This is NOT an investment advice to buy or sell shares. Make your own decision. I do not own the stock, but my analysis may be biased, and wrong. I, Vishal Khandelwal, am a registered Research Analyst as per SEBI (Research Analyst) Regulations, 2014 (Registration No. INH000000578).