How we decide.
July 23, 2008
So to give you all an idea, here is how we decide what to invest in:
At any given meeting we choose a sector we’ll be investing in the month after next and through the month we each (most of us) do some research, and suggest a company or two for that sector. Then through the second month I follow the suggested companies (loosely) and remove any that have become clearly no longer a good idea. There are some restraints/pressures on the risk level but so far we mostly ignore those.
Anyway when we finally meet we usually have a list of 4 – 6 companies we are considering. We discuss each of them, and I bring to the meeting a list of statistics comparing them, along with a little bit about their narrative. After at least briefly discussing them all we start narrowing the field usually until we pick one company. Sometimes we split and invest half into each.
It’s important to our group dynamic that most if not all decisions are made by consensus. We have clearly decided (even in writing) that we will vote to decide what to do if consensus cannot be reached, but I’m not sure that that has ever come up. We have voted multiple times, but we did it more as a tool to gauge people’s thoughts than to make a decision.
