“When investing, we view ourselves as business analysts—not as market analysts, not as macroeconomic analysts, and not even as security analysts.”
—Warren Buffett, Letter to Shareholders, 1987
The Buffett/Munger Investment Checklist: A Framework for Business Analysis and Valuation
How to go about when performing a business analysis, and what to look for in doing so, is nothing but the holy grail of investing. A business analysis could be carried out in a number of different ways. You just have to make sure that you have a way that works for you, a process for analyzing and evaluating businesses that is continually updated along the way as you learn about new facts and circumstances.
When building your own framework for business analysis, you should always remember to keep things simple, since it most likely will tend to get hard enough anyway in the end. Also, you don’t have to come up with your own stuff, you are perfectly free to use everything there is from great men that’s come before, as Charlie Munger noted when he said:
I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have figured out. I don’t believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody’s that smart.
To set the scene to sort of create an investing map to follow it’s worth considering what Warren Buffett once wrote:
In our view, though, investment students need only two well-taught courses—How to Value a Business, and How to Think About Market Prices.
To be able to value a business, you have to understand the business. And to be able to say that you understand a business you would likely want to know about its products/services and revenue sources, operating leverage, financial leverage, competitive position, industry characteristics, etc. These questions all belong to the first section of the Buffett/Munger Investment Checklist, i.e., understanding the business.
When you understand a business and its management, and have evaluated the long-term prospects as favorable, the next step is to value the business, i.e., come up with an estimate of intrinsic business value that is to be compared to the current market price of the business. If you manage to, and have the luck, to check each of the four main parts of the checklist, you most likely have an investment worth making.
In his 1977 letter to shareholders Warren Buffett explained his and Charlie’s process for analyzing and evaluating businesses.
We select our marketable equity securities in much the same way we would evaluate a business for acquisition in its entirety. We want the business to be (1) one that we can understand, (2) with favorable long-term prospects, (3) operated by honest and competent people, and (4) available at a very attractive price. We ordinarily make no attempt to buy equities for anticipated favorable stock price behavior in the short term. In fact, if their business experience continues to satisfy us, we welcome lower market prices of stocks we own as an opportunity to acquire even more of a good thing at a better price.
So, already back in 1977 Warren Buffett laid out the checklist that he and Charlie go through when evaluating a business. This will serve as a good starting foundation for anyone who wants to build their own investment checklist. Each checklist point could then be expanded to included a number of supporting sub-questions needed for coming up with a conclusion about the “main” checklist question being evaluated.
From the above quote and discussion, keep in mind the foundations of our Buffett/Munger Investment Checklist:
- Understand the business
- Favorable long-term prospects
- Operated by honest and competent management
- Very attractive price
To make it easier to remember the top four checklist points, memorize the acronym “UFOV.” That’s easy to remember, right? It’s just “UFO” plus a “V.”
As always, when talking about the subject of checklists, make sure to use them in an appropriate wat and also remember Warren Buffett’s words that “A checklist is no substitute for thinking.”
“Take a simple idea and take it seriously.”
—Charlie Munger
Hurricane Capital 
Mid cap growth has outperformed BRK-A over many time periods since 1996. MDY is systematically sorted for mid cap sized growth companies and is broadly diversified. No esoteric “human” decision process ( no buying of oversized positions compared to other asset holdings( such as KO in the 90’s), no shorting of the dollar ( early 2000’s ), no buying of oil stocks at a $120 oil price, no backroom “deals” involving bonds and preferreds during times of crisis. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Kv2UtpBp7OIK56ZzrkthnV1PDRUA9AmGS6hAmr3Tl6A/edit?usp=sharing
Buffet could profit from his own advice to the average investor ” just invest in the index “
Very nice write up. I like the the brevity and it makes a lot of sense.
The WB way…