A pipeline. Six frameworks. One verdict. Below is exactly what happens in the ninety seconds between your ticker entry and the letter that lands on your desk.
Each step is independent. Each step is auditable. The brain leaves a trace of what it read and how it reasoned.
Each investor reads the same business and asks a different question. We do not average their answers — we present them. Where they agree, conviction is genuine. Where they disagree, the texture of the investment becomes visible.
"Time is the friend of the wonderful business, the enemy of the mediocre."
— 1989 Letter to Shareholders
"Invert. Always invert. Tell me where I'm going to die, so I never go there."
— On Mental Models
"We invest in simple, predictable, free-cash-flow-generative businesses with deep moats."
— Pershing Square Holdings, Annual Letter
"The most important question is: how high are the barriers to entry, and how durable are they?"
— TCI Investor Letter
"You really only need a few good ideas in your lifetime, but you have to be able to recognize them."
— Columbia Business School Lecture
"In investing, you are correct or incorrect — but the market does not have to agree on your timeline."
— Margin of Safety
Reported earnings can be massaged. Free cash flow ignores reinvestment requirements. Owner earnings is the figure Buffett actually uses to value a business — and the figure AMORDAD computes on every analysis.
"The figure for the cash a business throws off — that the owner could remove without harming the business's competitive position."
Klarman wrote a book on it. Graham named it. The principle is simple: never buy a business at its intrinsic value. Buy it at a discount large enough that being wrong about the future does not become a permanent loss.
AMORDAD will not flag a stock as BUY unless it trades at or below seventy-five percent of estimated intrinsic value. The buffer absorbs error in the model — and there is always error in the model.
Every analysis scores the business across five orthogonal axes. A wonderful business with bad management is not the same as a mediocre business with great management. We do not blend them.
Every analysis ends in a letter. The letter is signed by the AMORDAD Capital Investment Office. It is written in the spirit of Buffett's sixty years of shareholder letters — but it is independent. It will tell you when a famous stock is overpriced. It will tell you when the business has changed for the worse.
The letter does not exist to confirm what you already think. Roughly one in three letters declines a famous stock. We would rather lose a subscriber than tell them what they want to hear.
No advertising relationships. No paid placements. No undisclosed positions. The investment office holds no stocks personally and accepts no compensation from any company analyzed.
Plain prose. Numbered paragraphs. Owner-mindset framing. A signature. The form is taken seriously because the form carries meaning — the way Berkshire's letters do.
The cash a business generates after the reinvestment required to maintain its competitive position. The number Buffett uses to value Berkshire's businesses.
A valuation that projects future cash flows and discounts them to present value. Useful as a discipline. Dangerous when treated as truth.
Return on invested capital. The single best measure of capital efficiency. A business compounding at 20% ROIC will, over time, swallow a business at 8%.
The discount between intrinsic value and price. Graham's central idea. If your model is off by 20%, the buffer absorbs the error.