Special Situation Investing Class Notes at Columbia University Business School
About this book
These are notes taken by a series of MBA students in Joel Greenblatt's Special Situation Investing classes at the Columbia Business School in New York. They can be found online (not an official document of Columbia Business School).I really enjoyed going through these notes - it took me a very long time! I feel as though I really took Joel's class though - his class happens to be a bit more stimulating than undergraduate business classes on how to network and what to put on my resume (context, action, result!)These notes really pound in what's going on in Joel's head, and what makes him different than everyone else.What I take away1 - It's not enough to just look where nobody else is looking. You want to set yourself up where the playing field isn't level already (spinoffs as a whole outperform, so looking through those and adding alpha can do you some real good)2 - Cheap and good, cheap and good, cheap and good3 - Wait and concentrate4 - Think simple5 - Use screeners to look for spinoffs, merger securities, terms like "maximize shareholder value" and "over-subscription privileges"6 - Your job is NOT to find earnings for the next 12 months, but to estimate normalized earnings 2-3 years out (I find this a particularly enlightening suggestion. Makes my analysis seem more reasonable).A lot of these notes are repetitive (I think taken over three years, a compilation of notes really). But I really enjoyed reading them