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As a child, did you ever read about – and then make your own – pinhole cameras? (I'm pretty sure there were directions in "The American Boy's Handy Book," along with do-it-yourself taxidermy and rabbit traps.)
It's simple to do, and as a kid, it feels a lot like magic…
All you have to do is go into a very dark room on a very bright day, and then introduce light into the room through one tiny pinhole in a curtain.
There, reflected on the opposite wall, you'll see the outside world reflected in living color – but upside down!
This, of course, is because of the behavior of light rays – when they're pushed through this kind of tiny hole onto a flat surface, they cross and reform as an inverted image.
People have been experimenting with the pinhole camera, or camera obscura, since at least the 5th century B.C., and probably before (there's a theory that the distorted animals seen in cave paintings were inspired by pinhole reflections in caves). The Chinese philosopher Mo-Ti first recorded the phenomenon in 5 B.C., calling the darkened room the "locked treasure room." And Leonardo da Vinci studied and wrote about it – in backwards writing, of course! It was used as an artist's aid in the 17th and 18th centuries, too.
Eventually, the dark room became a box… the flat surface became photographic paper… and the camera obscura developed into the camera we know today…
But what's perhaps most amazing is that the pinhole camera almost perfectly mimics the function of the human eye.
Light comes in through the iris – the pupil contracts to create a tiny pinhole…
Passes through the lens, and reflects perfectly on the flat wall, or retina. (Our marvelous brain then corrects the upside-down image.)
If you can understand a pinhole camera, you can understand the beautifully complex human eyeball.
And that brings me to our topic today…
Rather than sift through endless numbers and financial statements to understand the health of a company, there's one tiny, simple number I look at that lets me know if it's a good idea to make a trade.
If you can understand a pinhole, you can understand this – and it will likely change the way you look at stock picking forever.
Skip All the Confusing Numbers and Go Straight to Operating Cash Flow
There are many parts of fundamental analysis – or the understanding the value of a company and hence today's stock price. There are qualitative ideas like the caliber of the management team. There are forward-looking components like what new products or services a company might introduce in the near or distant future. And then there are the purely quantitative "hard numbers" that we find in a company's financial statement.
Of the "big three" parts of a financial statement – income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow – cash flow is really the most important and tells you the most about the financial health of a company.
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Operating cash flow (or cash flow from operations) is by far my favorite fundamental indicator. You can "bend" a lot of numbers in a financial report, but it's tough to mess with cash flow! Operating cash flow lets us see the stream of revenues and expenses before things like investment, interest, and capital expenditures are calculated. Looking at the trends for operating cash flow gives us a great tool for looking at the quality of a business over time – and finding the best stocks.
When you look up a company's cash flow statement (more on that below), you'll see three different areas of cash flow: operating, investing, and financing. Investing includes the money the company invests in itself, that is, spends to make itself better – often, on things like facilities and staffing – as well as any investments it makes in other companies. Financing includes the things the company does to raise more money for itself – usually by issuing debt (bonds) or equity (stock). These statements can be a little complicated to parse and often don't tell you as straightforward a story as you'd like. (For instance, it's sometimes expected and fine to see a negative number at the bottom of the investing section – since spending that money helps the company long term.)
However, operating cash flow is blessedly simple – and it also tells you the most straightforward story about how well the company is doing…
About the Author
D.R. Barton, Jr., Technical Trading Specialist for Money Map Press, is a world-renowned authority on technical trading with 25 years of experience. He spent the first part of his career as a chemical engineer with DuPont. During this time, he researched and developed the trading secrets that led to his first successful research service. Thanks to the wealth he was able to create for himself and his followers, D.R. retired early to pursue his passion for investing and showing fellow investors how to build toward financial freedom.
Thanks for the article.