New Investment Project

School is finishing for the summer next week. This semester has been interesting, I have learned a lot, but not as much as I thought I would. I have been busy, but don't have as much as I would like to show for it. However I do have a couple of great projects to work on over the summer.

As always, I am trying to learn more about business and investing. I feel like I really need to dig in deep on a lot of companies this summer. So here is my new project: I have seven different sectors that I want to learn a lot about this summer; banking, health care, insurance, software, consumer non-cyclicals, oil, and mining. I am going to try to at least take a cursory look at every company in as many of these as I can manage over the summer, and delve deeply into researching any that stand out as exceptional companies or that seem exceptionally cheap.

Since I have had some recent experience with health care, I decided to start there. I don't know a lot about health care, but it seems unique in that consumers often have no incentive to manage price. I have been to the doctor a few times recently and asked them how much they bill insurance for. It is amazing how many tests I have had that cost $500 plus, that I don't get bills for, and never thought about how much they cost. The really interesting thing is that sometimes the doctors and nurses have no idea how much this stuff costs either.

Healthcare costs are rising, it makes up a bigger portion of our economy every year, innovation seems to be abundant, and the population is aging, that seems like a pretty good picture to me.

However, health care as a sector has performed poorly over the past three years, up only 3.37% annually. Why? I really don't know, maybe nobody is really making a lot of money, maybe P/E ratios are compressing, maybe there isn't going to be any growth, I don't know but I will find out.

I will be looking at companies in the Dow Jones U.S. Healthcare Sector Index. If you know anything about health care, would like to learn, or would just like to help, I would love to hear from you. I would love to hear what other people think about this sector and these companies.

e-mail me at: timothyb@timothyburger.com

Timothy Burger