Clariman wrote:Where do you currently post your Value Shares and Fundamental Analysis posts and what problems does that cause you or the site?
With regard to posts about fundamental analysis, Melanie (Mel and Matt) currently posts things like
"Price to Book value and Next (NXT) shares" on Share Ideas. If you read it, you'll see that it's primarily about P/BV and only basically uses Next as a not very prominent example. I.e. it's much more about P/BV as a fundamental analysis concept than about Next as a share idea. And I think the ensuing discussion very much followed that lead - e.g. the first reply started "
re. your request in the biscuit bar. First I won't comment about Next. I've never followed it and I avoid retail shares as they aren't within my circle of competence." And I suspect that most Share Ideas readers aren't really all that interested in discussing P/BV - they'll probably have made their minds up about its value or otherwise years ago!
I.e. I think that the post was very largely off-topic for Share Ideas, which means among other things that:
* Other future users with similar questions are likely to have trouble finding it.
* Future posters who want to quickly point someone with similar questions at an existing discussion about the ratio are similarly likely to have trouble finding it, unless it's something that they had thought "I'm likely to want to refer to that in future - better bookmark it" about when they originally saw it.
* Or indeed future posters might just want to point someone to a likely place to find previous posts about the subject and/or someone who can answer their question. E.g. if someone wanted to know what a cup-and-handle price pattern is, I know it's a technical analysis concept but basically nothing else about it. But that's enough to allow me to suggest the Technical Analysis board as the place to look/ask.
* Users who might well be happy to help a new investor with such things may well not find it (even if they do read Share Ideas, they might well think "Next - no, I don't know anything much about it beyond that it's not the type of company I'm interested in" and not read the thread at all).
* Users who are happy to help with them and do find them may nevertheless feel inhibited about replying, knowing that if the matter is reported as being off-topic, it may well be removed.
* If extensive
general discussions of fundamental ratios whenever a reader doesn't know what they are become the norm on Share Ideas, happening in threads that didn't start off as being about the ratio as well as those that did, they'll badly reduce the usefulness of the board to its normal readers.
Because of those, I would almost certainly report such threads as needing to be moved to a more suitable board - if I could see a more suitable board! But at present, I can't: they don't really suit Share Ideas, but I can't see a better one. For instance, I've considered How Do I Invest, but its subtitle "
Investment discussion for beginners. Why you should invest your money, get help getting started." and the threads it contains say to me that it's not very suitable at all: if a "for beginners" board showed them a list of stuff about weird combinations of letters that would only be useful to them if they decided to invest in individual shares and bonds, and that they probably wouldn't know was even that until they knew a bit more about investing, they would probably give up on the site on the spot! Basically, it's intermediate-level "how do I invest?" material, of interest to those who make
some decisions about how to invest, not beginner-level material.
Anyway, I'm more likely to reply to others' threads about fundamental analysis than to start them myself, but I would certainly be more comfortable about doing so somewhere where they were
clearly on-topic.
About Value
shares, I don't actually think there's a need for a board specifically named "Value Shares", because I think Share Ideas does the job of generally discussing individual shares perfectly well. I'm perfectly happy for boards to co-exist with it that discuss individual shares suitable for a class of strategies
specifically from that class's point of view: that allows a poster either to indicate that they're interested in the share from all perspectives by posting about it on Share Ideas, or to indicate that they are interested in it from a more specific point of view. But not for another board to exist besides Share Ideas that just discusses the shares generally, without any restriction on the strategies they're being considered for. (And as a board name, "Value Shares" doesn't IMHO provide a clear enough restriction on them: it's too easily misinterpretable.)
But I do think there's possibly a place for a board about Value
strategies, and I would certainly use such a board, though probably more as a lurker than a poster. That's because although I started many years ago on TMF as an active user of a Value strategy, my strategy has evolved away from being a Value strategy in two different directions. One half has become HYP (I started my Value strategy in late 1999, nearly a year before pyad wrote his original HYP articles), which differs from being a Value strategy in terms of being income-focussed rather than capital-gain-focussed, and also by generally holding shares for much longer. The other half has become a smallcaps strategy (mainly AIM shares, and not infrequently pretty small even for AIM), with substantial Value aspects but with quite a significant admixture of various other elements: looking at what the company is trying to do (and whether it's something I feel I can support), at the management (and whether I feel I can trust them!) and what I think the market in their shares is doing / heading all come into it to significant extents. Adherents of proper Value strategies would almost certainly turn away from it in horror at best, and the chances that
none of them would flame it are IMHO negligible...
So I don't think the home for any discussions of my smallcaps strategy would really be anything more specific than Investment Strategies, or possibly a Share Investment Strategies board if it existed. But I don't really want to discuss it anyway, basically because I think I have far more to lose than to gain by discussing it. In particular, a good number of the shares I buy for it are sufficiently small caps that my trades do quite significantly move the market in them, which means that I'm likely to move the market against myself if I discuss them before I trade and to be open to accusations of 'pumping and dumping' or other market manipulation if I discuss them after I trade... I really have no interest in doing either of those things, and so I won't be pressing for a Share Investment Strategies board or a more specific strategies board that would cover it!
Anyway, the point about all of that is that I'm interested in Value strategies both for the ideas behind them, some (but not all) of which are likely to be of interest in my own investing, and for any shares that get discussed specifically for them, as they will probably be a richer source of ideas for my strategies than Share Ideas. But that is dependent on there being other TLFers who use more clear-cut Value strategies than either of mine and want to initiate discussions about them...
What that does say is that I think the name of the proposed board should be "Value Strategies" rather than "Value Shares". The TMF board was called "Value Shares" and the OP of the
thread suggesting such a board specifically said it was about an equivalent board, so I've been taking "Value Shares" as a working name for such a board. But the subject matter of the TMF board was definitely Value strategies and shares that might be suitable for them, discussed from a Value strategy perspective. If one wanted e.g. to discuss it instead from a technical analysis perspective, it was
not a good idea to post on Value Shares: getting reported for being off-topic and having the post deleted (and its text returned to you for re-use elsewhere if you saw fit) was just about the friendliest likely response... (Having it gently pointed out that you were on the wrong board and being redirected to the right board would be friendlier, but about as likely as someone asking a meeting of a cricket club "I think your pitch would be ideal for conversion to a football ground - how about it?" being gently redirected to the football club down the road!)
But exact names, subtitles, guidance posts, etc, of a proposed board really need to be sorted out. Doing that properly requires a mixture of being keen on having the board, having the time and energy to sort it out, being willing to be constructive about it and essentially work on a "do the best job of designing it that we can,
then get a decision about whether it's wanted" basis, understanding what the proposed board is about and (just as important!) not about, having the ability to see potential misunderstandings of what's said (knowing what it is supposed to mean is
not enough), and having the ability to look at it from all of the perspectives of users who are interested in the subject, users who are not interested in it, moderators and the site owners. Any single TLFer probably won't manage all of that, and as Lootman says, getting it all done by one person risks ending up with that person's personal prejudices. But equally, the moderators and site admins have enough to do anyway, so I think the
bulk (not all) of the work should be done by someone who really wants the board and people they can recruit to the task - but have to understand that at the end of the process, what they come up with has to get the site owners' approval (obviously, it won't get anywhere without that!), the moderators' agreement that it is something they can moderate, and a sufficient number of users' real interest to make the board worth having.
Gengulphus