The slow way, made survivable Chapter 3 of 23 Svenska

The map · Part One · The method · Chapter 3 of 23

This project's flavour

One person's version of the method, with four habits that make it unusual, and a tool built around those habits rather than around a market. About 6 minutes.

Value investing is a broad church. This is one person's version of it, and it was described by the owner, in the owner's own words, before any of it was built:

"a tool that we can read reports and follow the stocks we have catched with the screener and then evaluated and make a tool that gives me the ability to follow the companies and then make an educated 'guess' and buy it when i think it is undervalued and we can make some cash"

The owner, describing the project.

Read that carefully, because every part of it turned into a rule. Read reports: the figures come from the company's own filings, not from a data vendor's summary. Catched with the screener: a coarse mechanical pass over two thousand names finds the few worth reading. Follow the companies: a watchlist, checked nightly. An educated guess: the owner's own view of how the business will grow, written down as a view, not dressed up as a forecast. Buy it when I think it is undervalued: the owner decides. Not the tool.

Four habits that make this version distinctive

1. Figures come only from the company's own filings

A number in this system has to come from the report the company itself published: its quarterly or annual accounts, or a regulatory filing. Not a news article about the report. Not a vendor's cleaned-up version. Every figure carries where it came from, which period it covers, and the page it was read from. A figure without that is not a figure; it is a rumour with decimal places. Chapter 6 shows what this costs and why it is paid.

2. The owner's view is written before the market's number is seen

The method works out what growth the current price is assuming (chapter 7). Before that number is calculated, the owner writes down what growth he actually believes, with reasons, and the file is timestamped. If the market's number was seen first, the owner's view is void for that company in that round. Chapter 8 explains why this rule exists and what it borrows from clinical trials.

3. A failed test is final, and never widened to let a name through

When a company fails a test on something other than price, a lower price does not bring it back. Only a named new fact can: a new filing, a changed forecast from the company, a profit warning. And when a rule turns out to be badly designed, it is deleted or replaced by a dated ruling that says what the change cost. It is not quietly loosened because a particular name was almost through. Chapters 5 and 16.

4. Every refusal is tracked

Most of what the method looks at, it refuses. A system that only measures what it bought cannot tell whether its refusals were right. So every refusal is recorded with the price on the day and one line naming the reason, and measured against the market afterwards. Chapter 12.

What this is not

It is not a trading system. It does not predict prices, it has no view on next week, and it will never tell you to buy anything. It is a way of reading, deciding and recording, for a person who has accepted that most of the time the right answer is no, and who wants to be able to check afterwards whether the no was right.

Decided
The tool measures; the owner decides. No automated step may write a verdict, enter a company into the process, assign a confidence level or set a buy price.
Why
A person deciding alone cannot tell a careful reading from a motivated one. A machine that also decided would inherit the person's motivations and add its own errors. Keeping the decision with the person, and the measurement with the machine, makes each auditable.
Cost
The owner does all the judging, by hand, every time. Nothing is faster for it. The machine cannot rescue a bad decision; it can only make sure the decision was written down before the outcome was known.

Sources for this chapter

  1. The owner's description of the project, verbatim — read from this repository: the brief for this site
  2. What automated steps may and may not do — read from this repository: reference/FRAMEWORK-EDITS.md rulings E92, E93, E97; README.md

The slow way, made survivable. Built 2026-09-13 from the repository as it stood that day. NAME A and NAME B are fictional; no company, price or holding appears on this site. Not financial advice: one private investor's method, shared as it is.