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Author: Roy MacNaughton

Researching Stocks: Better and Faster

Ian Campbell felt he had been wasting a lot of time for years. He liked managing his own portfolio; but was tired of wading through the quagmire of data that confronts anyone trying to work their way through the maze of blogs, newsletters, sites, and various information regarding stocks and equities.

It just wasn't working. This troubled Campbell, who for thirty-five years has been viewed as a leading Canadian expert in the rendering of independent business valuation opinions in substantive Canadian public and private company shareholder disputes and company valuations. He wrote the definitive Canadian books that are broadly used by Canadian professionals and others.

For some years now, with the assistance of three investment advisors who each specialize in different industry groups, he has researched macro-economic concepts and investment ideas on the Internet. He consistently spent more time doing this than he believed should be necessary. At the same time he had to develop financial and market comparators that he could not readily find in one organized place.

Campbell then considered what he had learned in his years of helping clients determine the value of their companies and investments. He concluded that if the most pertinent data was consistently summarized across a focused group of companies, and focused due diligence techniques were applied to those companies in much the way a company acquirer might do, this should lead to considerable time efficiencies and importantly, to a more in-depth knowledge of the companies.

The result, after nearly one year of research and site-building, is a unique site, recently launched in December.

Campbell was particularly interested in the due diligence aspect of getting to the heart of the financial matters of these publicly-traded Canadian Junior Mining and Oil & Gas Industries. He created a proprietary patent-pending 'due diligence' questionnaire that includes more than 200 questions organized by three dozen topical headings.

The questionnaire searches company documents by keywords. Search responses are linked to company documents enabling site members to link directly to that response as it appears in the company document. Later, a special search-report is available for the member's review and follow-up.

Members have an opportunity to quickly and systematically learn a great deal about an individual company without having first to read voluminous corporate documents

Now here is where I think it really gets interesting. Members quickly learn what the company has not disclosed that may be important to their own work. All questions that do not yield a response to the special key words and phrases search are reproduced in an abbreviated 'follow-up questionnaire'. Often the questions that weren't answered are as ' if not more ' important as those that were.

It is now nearly one year since he began his quest to see if the market would respond favorably to a special member web site that could solve those problems and provide the speed, accuracy, efficiency and transparency the individual investor is believed to crave. So far, it looks like Campbell has hit the nail right...on the head.

©Copyright, Roy MacNaughton, 2007

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