Cuban makes a lot of good points in this series, but fundamentals do exist. Compare his philosophy to Warren Buffet. Sure, Buffett does often get better deals not available to retail investors, such as the recent Goldman deal, but Buffett also buys plenty of common stock as well. (There is plenty of overlap in the philosophies as well...looking over his 2008 letter, seems like he favors dividend paying stocks, but don't hold me to that).
It's kinda ridiculous to try and extract personal investing lessons from Buffett. He cultivates this image of some grandpa who is just good at picking stocks, but it's baloney. He has always operated with an edge. Information advantages or super cheap capital from insurance companies.
Personally, I take the approach advocated by Benjamin Graham. I have separate accounts for investing, and speculation/trading.
I just view them as fundamentally different activities, with different risk profiles, and different sorts of analysis required prior to taking or selling any given position.
I read the 'snowball' book about Buffet, and it seemed to me like the advantage Graham had was that they went over information in a way that would only take a few minutes with a computer, but that wasn't done so systematically at the time, by most people. So, 'fundamentals', yes, but fundamentals driven by data. In this day and age, when everyone can comb out the same stocks in a matter of minutes, does that approach work?
