value and opportunity

Thanks to a good friend, I had the opportunity to test the screening tool from the guys of value-investing.eu.

Founder Tim du Toit (by the way: intersting interview with Tim here) and his colleague developed a screening tool which offers different screens based on a pretty large database of around 22k international stocks. The different strategies for which they offer a screen each is described here on their website.

In general, they are big fans of “quantitive value investing”, meaning that they don’t really dig too deep into companies and business models but try to build portfolio’s based on certain quantitative “formulas” based on well known fundamental ratios liek P/V, P/E etc.

The screener itself is relatively easy to use. I do not have a comparison to other available screeners for private individuals, but I think especially for the European stock market the tool is really competitve. They charge 299 EUR per year for the screener which seems to be a fair deal.

The only disadvantage was the fact that one cannot easily customize the queries. In theory, they could offer a little bit more user friendly flexibility to create customized queries, but maybe I was just to dumb to understand the customization possibilities.

I didn’t deeply check the data quality, but you can check the underlying data usually with a mouse click.

Additionally, they offer a monthly newsletter with 2 stock tips a month or so and reasearch, either for 209 EUR without the screener or 399 EUR a year as a bundle. If you only want to try out their offers for a shorter period, they offer cheaper 3 month packages as well (99 EUR for the screener).

I quickly scanned the newsletter, but I was not overly impressed. I compared for example their view on Creston Plc with my own analysis and found it a little bit “shallow”.

I think “quantitative value investing” works well in a portfolio with a larger number of shares, but it shouldn’t be overemphasized for stock picking.

However they issue really interesting additional research. Especially their current research from March, where they back test all their strategies plus some interesting “cross factor” models including pricing momentum is really interesting.

Summary: I think the screener seems to be really “good value” for people either interested in “quanitative value investing” or investors trying to identify interesting stock ideas. I am a little bit unsure to recommend the newsletter, at least for me it doesn’t really create value.

Disclosure: I do not use the screener and I do not get any money etc. by recommending it.