If you want to look at an extremely successful stock picks strategy, you would be remiss to overlook the Warren Buffett strategy. The philosophy he uses is known as value investment and this comes from the school of Benjamin Graham. When he invested in Berkshire Hathaway in 1965 it cost him $10,000. This investment is worth $30 million today. Had he invested this money in the S & P 500, it would be worth the considerable sum of $500,000, however half a million is nothing compared to thirty million!

Looking at numbers like this is it not surprising that the Warren Buffett legend has also grown to mythical proportions. But how did he do it? By value investing, he like many other bargain hunters, looks for product that are undervalued, finds them and invest in their stocks. The majority of other buyers don’t see the investment value in these products, but Warren Buffett does.

Value investors are able to identify securities with unjustifiably low intrinsic worth. This intrinsic worth is predicted by analyzing the fundamentals of a company and this is not seen by the majority of buyers. Warren Buffett essentially trusts that the market will eventually favor the stock he invests in.

He is not concerned with facts such as supply and demand. This is normally what controls markets, but Warren Buffett is not looking for short term gains, he is looking for long term, return on investment. The quote that best describes the way he thinks is: “In the short term the market is a popularity contest; in the long term it is a weighing machine”.

He looks at stocks in terms of the company’s overall potential to make money. Because he seeks long term investment value, capital gain is of no consequence, and this is what makes value investing so different to other methods of investing.

There are a number of questions he asks himself when evaluating the relationship between the price and the level of excellence of a stock. These include but are not limited to the return on equity in terms of performance, whether the business avoids excess debt, if the profit margins are high and are they increasing, how long it has been a public company and whether the company relies on a commodity for its products.

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