Hi interested stock quickie patrons,

My name is Erin Johnson - spelled like a girl, but I'm all man :) - and I'm the guy behind the stock quickie. To be honest, I'm just a late twenty-something punk with a background in computer engineering, a day job as a software engineer, and a deep appreciation for the financial markets. About 8 years ago, when I was a college newbie, I started investing in equities in a very Graham/Buffetesque manner. My strategy was simple: 1) Find stocks that look historically cheap. 2) Perform fundamental analysis on them geared toward ROC, equity buildup, and cash throw off. 3) Buy those high quality stocks when Mr. Market throws a big sale.

That strategy was all well and good, but it was extremely time consuming to collect data and run the numbers; there just aren't very many stocks of extraordinary quality that are on sale at discount prices at any given time. My solution was to program my calculator to crunch the numbers and spit out a stock's true worth based on the data I gathered from quarterly and yearly reports. It was still a huge effort to gather and input the numbers, but with that kind of power I was able to find those needles in the market haystack and, with good portfolio and position management practices, I could walk all over the S&P500. Because I don't want to fall prey to the anecdotal "big fish" story of astronomical stock returns, I won't tell you what my exact returns were; I will admit that they were not out of this world, but they were, and continue to be, well above the indices and certainly worth my research and data collection efforts.

MrStockQuickie, the application, was born to the idea that I could save a lot of time, which is equivalent to money in my world, by leveraging my computer, my engineering prowess, and the internet with its endless supply of publicly disseminated company data. Not only could such an application defeat tedium, but it could dramatically increase accuracy and also introduce other facets of analysis by quickly incorporating the context of industries and even entire markets. With such an application, I could scan the entire equity population in just days and apply my proven valuation model directly to them! I could share it with the world! What choice did I have?... I created the application and it eventually came to be known as MrStockQuickie.

So what is so special about my valuation method that allows me to beat the averages? While my algorithms may be relatively complex, they are centered on a fundamentally simple process. First I determine if a particular stock represents a superior quality company based on its stewardship, financial health, and ability to "grow" over a 5-10 year period. If that checks out, then I not-so-simply calculate, programmatically, the intrinsic growth rate and discount rate of the underlying company over the next 5 years. I know what you're thinking... discounted cash flow. Nope, my model includes MANY more factors and even takes Wall Street into account - I ultimately value the stock, not just the equity in the underlying company to which it is proxied (though for comparison sake, I do include a DCF valuation which uses WACC as the discount rate in my free Value Investor tool). I guess if there is a secret ingredient baked into my model then it's the step-wise conservatism that it adheres to which ultimately renders very selective stock picks. I simply operate by selecting those high quality stocks which have an attractive MrStockQuickie value relative to the market price, and I build my position in increments.

Over the past 7 or 8 years I have refined, added to, and tweaked the algorithms that I now implement in the MrStockQuickie value investor tool, and I continue to do so today. In fact, I was recently prompted to add additional metrics to my valuation process after reading a deceptively simple and lightweight valuation book written for the masses, Rule #1 by Phil Town. Though my current focus is biased toward high risk/reward options strategies, I still spend many a late night value investing my retirement accounts and I still work my butt off to make certain that my valuation model is always evolving.