Mustard Seeds Investment Club

[NorthWesterner]

Here's a post I wrote in response to a series of questions on BIGB, but thought it might be of interest over here. I've encouraged Sara to come here with any further questions.

Lots of questions!

1. Do you have to be in a club to get the tools? Not at all. You can join the NAIC without being a
member of a club, and buy the paper forms, or (as I highly recommend) the software directly from
them. I did that -- was member of NAIC for several years before I found people to start a club with.
Or you can buy the Toolkit software directly from Investware at www.investware.com. Or you can
buy stuff from NAIC without even being a member, though you pay a bit more.

2. Do you work with a group? Yes, I do now. I find that the discussion and exchange of ideas is
extremely valuable. However, you don[t have to have a formal club to do that. We had a small group
that started out just studying together, no club, no formality, no dues. People dropped in and out.
After about a year we had a committed core group, and then we figured we knew enough to start the
club formally. But it's just fine to get a couple of people and just start studying. There's tons of stuff
on the NAIC site -- http://www.better-investing.org/. BTW, the NAIC manual, Starting and Running an
Investment Club, is misnamed -- a lot of it has to do with the investing philsophy and a clear
explanation of the tools -- the club stuff is only about a third of the book.

3. How do you measure cash flow per share? Easy. Just like PE, only using cash flow instead of
earnings. The ratio site Timh gave here a bit ago has the Price to Cash Flow and Price to Free Cash
Flow right there for you (URL below). Or you can calculate it yourself if you want to follow it for past
years. For myself, I just enter cash flow per share (which comes off of the S&P report and is
probably on ValueLine) in Toolkit instead of earnings, and it graphs it for me right there. But I don't try
to project cash flow -- I use it as an evaluative measure, not a predictive measure.
http://yahoo.marketguide.com/MGI/mg.asp?target=/stocks/companyinformation/ratio&Ticker=TGI

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Funny thing, but it seems that the harder I work, the luckier I get.