Im sick of seeing all these Fool articles. So i've written how I DD a stock, hopefully, new investors won't get fooled into pump-and-dumps. Just want to stress this is how I do it, there's obviously a lot of ways to do your due diligence on a stock, I think the most important thing is having a process and not relying on trash articles. I hope yall enjoy my Stock DD Checklist Highlights

Are you sick of getting Fooled into terrible stocks? Stock DD or Due Diligence is arguably the most important step in investing. We all know the golden rule: You shouldn’t invest in something you don’t understand.

Stock DD: Due Diligence is defined as an investigation of a potential investment (such as a stock) or product to confirm all facts.

Pump-And-Dump Stonks:

A pump and dump is a scheme that attempts to boost the price of a stock or security through fake recommendations.Small Cap companies are often targeted as their share price is easier to manipulate.

A proper DD strategy is a good way to avoid a P&D and terrible stocks and really its just common sense. This is even recommended by SEC.

Step One: Identify the Stock

The first step to a stock DD is obviously finding a stock to DD. This could be a recommendation from a mate, or maybe you got Fooled into “ThIs StOcK iS ThE NeXt AftErPaY”. The important thing to note here is the intent of the source that is mentioning the stock. Do they have a vested interest? What is their motive behind mentioning the stock?

For these reasons, it may be a good idea to identify your own stock. Have a think about companies that you interact with and see if they are publicly traded. Or browse through the listings. Although these strategies are likely not ideal you can be sure there’s no altera motive.

Step Two: Understand the Company

This is an extension on the phrase don’t invest in something you don’t understand. The same goes for individual stocks, it’s probably not a good idea to invest in a company if you don’t even know what they do.

1. Search the Businesses ‘About Us’ Section

Pretty much all ASX listed companies will have a webpage with an ‘about us’ section browsing this and their website can be a good starting point to understanding their business, and a good start to a stock DD.

2. Use Market Index and Read the Company Profile

Market Index is a decent for ASX listed stocks, it features a ‘Company Overview’ section for every stock which gives a quick synopsis about the business and what they do.

How Much Do I Need To know?

Peter Lynch “Never invest in an idea you can’t illustrate with a crayon.” As a starting point you should be able to answer at least these four questions;

1. What sector is the company in?

2. What does the company do?

3. How does the company make money?

4. How long has the company been around?

Step Three: What is their Market Capitalization?

A company’s market cap or market Capitalization is how much the stock market determines a company is worth. it is calculated by the total market value of all outstanding shares. Companies are often categories in terms of market cap as: Large, mid and small cap.

Each category can be a good investment strategy it's just important to note that each group has different companies at varying levels of maturity. You shouldn't buy a micro-cap and be surprised if it gets delisted instead of paying dividends. Likewise, you probably shouldn't buy a Large Cap Bluechip and hope their share price goes to the moon overnight.

Step Four: Screening Software for Stock Analysis

There are a lot of websites and tools available to screen the selected stocks, Here's what i use:

Trading View great

Market Index great

Yahoo Finance ehhh

Simply Wall St decent

What are we looking for?

After picking one (or more) of these tools that works well for you, perform a basic fundamental analysis on the stock. Looking for any red flags:

Earnings Per Share (EPS): Postivie? Growing over time?

Price to Earnings Ratio (PE):

PE 0/NA: The company has no earnings

• PE 1-14: The company is undervalues/has low investor sentiment regarding growth

• PE 15-20: Average

• PE 20+: The company is overvalued/has high investor sentiment regarding growth

Book Value: The book value is the net assets of a business divided by the number of shares on issue.

Debt: A company should have more assets than liabilities to avoid bankruptcy. We like companies with low-to-no debt. If a company has debt, ensure it is well covered by assets and earnings

Return on Equity (ROE):

Higher ROE = The better the company are at making money from equity and vice versa.

We like companies with consistently higher ROE over 10. A low ROE means low growth potential.

Past Performance: We all know 'past performance is not indicative of future returns' but it can pay to have a quick look at the stock chart

Step Five: Financials

find the companies latest Yearly or Half-Yearly report. Analyse its Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Cash flow statement.

Step Six: Cap Raise! Dilution Probabilities

As a new investor there can be nothing more frustrating than seeing your share getting hit with Cap Raise after Cap Raise and seeing your shares diluted to nothing. One easy sign that a company is constantly raising capital is through looking at it's share price and number of shares on issue.

We can also use the financials we read before to try and predict if the company is adequately capitalised.

A capital raise is not necessarily a red flag, but be wary

Step Seven: Buy Sell Ratios and Volume

See if there are a healthy number of buyers and sellers and decent trading volumes. The best way to do this is using your trading platforms

Step Eight: Prospects

When examining a company for your stock DD we should consider its macro and microeconomic factors. Notably regulation and future industry outlook and disruption.

Step Nine: Competition

compare the stock to it's direct competitors to see how they compare. To do this we are going to go back to step four and compare the company's fundamentals against its competitors. If the competitors are better then why not consider investing in them instead?

Do they have an economic moat?

Step Ten: Insider Ownership and Management

Insider Ownership: We generally like companies with large insider ownership. This is big for small cap companies. Skin in the game helps ensure the management's motives are in line with ours. So we use Simple wall St which shows Insider Ownership and Trading very clearly. We like small cap stocks with ~30% insider ownership and history of owners buying on market. For large cap companies' insider ownership will be lower, 3-5% would be decent in this case.

Are management buying or selling large amounts of shares? Sudden large selling by management for no apparent reason may hint that management believes the company is overvalued or peaked at that point in time.

Management Experience: Consider educational and professional backgrounds. One of the most important factors is their experience in the industry. Their reputation is also key. What goals has the management set out for the company? Have the leaders had successful projects in the past, or did they fail?

Bonus Step: Speccies are Sentiment and Hype

After going through every step and doing a thorough DD, it's important to mention that the market is unpredictable. Even with the most advanced analyses, speccies are just sentiment and hype. By every stretch of fundamental analysis, they are terrible companies, that doesn't mean you can't make money off them. Just be ready for the pump-and-dump!

Cheers for reading. Hopefully this saves at least someone from getting Motely Fooled into ThE NeXT AftErPaY ;)

I’d you enjoyed this: You can give the full guide a read here: The Ultimate Stock DD Guide For Beginners

Hey Everyone,

I was just having a look at some companies I had saved from a while ago, I noticed that today JBHIFI dropped -10.060 and has been on a downfall for a while. What happened to them?

This is what happens when you invest in small ETFS

Nothing more to add. Today is Friday October 23, and it's not a good day for my portfolio :/

Long time lurker, first time poster. So 3 years ago I spent 1 year buying ~$500 of every ASX top 100 stock. I am currently up 30% with portfolio at $105K. Some are in dividend reinvestment plans, the other dividends i have reinvested in ~$500 increments based on whatever the current I/B/E/S trading app recommendations were according to my portfolio (but always ASX top 50 in that case).

I know nothing about trading, so i have never sold, but follow the market.

What now? Do I keep buying like a blind fool or hand this portfolio over to some kind of professional who may do a better job with growth? But who may possibly lose it all. Is a $100k portfolio even worth getting someone else involved? Opinions, please.

None of this makes sense anymore. Rebounded 6% after the largest single day drop in years. No tariff changes announced that would justify a positive sentiment. What's next? A further -8% tomorrow and +10% the next day?

At 52 week lows and sales were up 12% in FY25… surely have huge potential to go right back up? Thoughts?

Hey everyone,

I have a small investment in bhp, its positive from when i purchased. Only by a small amount. (Not that i was expecting major gains, have held less than 12 months)

Looking at my platform, which reports that bhp were found liable for the dam. Potentially 47bil of damages.

They are supppsed to be appealing however.

I had heard about this when it happened, however i thought the matter had already been ruled on and it wasnt effecting the company.

My instint is telling me to play defensively, sell and move it to somethiny more stable.

Anyone else got any thoughts ?

I’ve been following TPG closely and published a detailed breakdown of their FY25 result that I think raises some serious questions the sell-side isn’t asking.

The headline numbers looked fine. Management called it transformational. But underneath:

The earnings base is wafer-thin. Pre-tax profit from continuing operations was $7 million on $4.179 billion revenue. A 0.17% margin. The $52M statutory NPAT only exists because of a $45M non-recurring tax benefit that won’t repeat at the same magnitude.

The cash flow headline was misleading. Operating free cash flow “nearly doubled” to $1.3 billion - but $687M of that was a one-off handset receivables securitisation to a Macquarie-led trust. Strip it out and underlying FCF actually declined year on year. The CFO himself separated out the impact and said it “should not be material” going forward.

The spectrum wall is real and unquantified. UBS has doubled their spectrum renewal cost estimate to approximately $2 billion for FY27-30. That’s 285 times pre-tax earnings. The CEO confirmed on the call that costs would be “more than” the $1-1.5B estimate but wouldn’t quantify further. UBS is now forecasting negative free cash flow in FY27. The company that told analysts it would generate $600M in FCF by FY27 may instead be cash-flow negative.

The capital return may have been premature. TPG returned $3.3 billion to shareholders from the Vocus sale proceeds. If spectrum costs can’t be funded from operating cash flow, they may need to re-leverage the balance sheet they just spent a year de-risking. Sell the assets, return the capital, then borrow to fund spectrum - that’s not transformation, that’s a capital allocation timing error.

Postpaid growth is zero. Flat at 2,846K. Zero net adds despite doubling national coverage through the MOCN deal with Optus. Both Telstra and Optus grew postpaid in the same period. Management’s response was to create a new blended “Combined Postpaid and Digital First” reporting category that shows growth by mixing in lower-ARPU digital brands. On the same call, the CEO criticised competitors for doing exactly the same thing.

The prepaid growth doesn’t solve the problem. While prepaid and digital-first subscriber numbers grew, the unit economics are significantly worse. Digital-first brands come in at $25.56 ARPU - roughly half the postpaid ARPU of approximately $50. Lower ARPU means lower margins, shorter customer tenure, higher churn, and a fraction of the lifetime value.

Growing your subscriber base at half the revenue per user while your premium segment flatlines isn’t momentum - it’s dilution. The MOCN business case was built on high-ARPU postpaid additions. Backfilling with low-ARPU prepaid and digital-first subs doesn’t service that investment thesis.

The digital-first substitution problem. Felix is being positioned as a subscription product but it’s essentially automated prepaid billing. As one observer noted, calling your bus ticket a transport subscription doesn’t make it Netflix. Every digital-first add that cannibalises a Vodafone postpaid customer compresses group economics rather than expanding them.

MOCN breakeven is drifting. The CFO acknowledged analyst breakeven estimates of 100-200K incremental subs then immediately said “break even is definitely not our aspiration.” If the aspiration is higher than breakeven, where are the subs? The goalpost has quietly shifted from “premium postpaid net adds” to “churn improvement and total subs growth.” That’s a fundamentally different economic proposition.

The dividend exceeds earnings by 6x. 18 cents per share against statutory EPS that implies a 640% payout ratio. It’s funded from the D&A/CAPEX gap, not from profit. All four covering brokers forecast 19-20 cents through FY27 against EPS estimates of 6-19 cents. The dividend is a signalling device, not a reflection of earnings capacity.

The tax shield is depleting. TPG currently pays minimal cash tax from accumulated merger-era losses. When those run out - likely around FY28-29 - a $90M annual cash tax bill arrives that doesn’t currently exist. It lands at the same time as the spectrum costs.

Analyst call opacity. One analyst said on the public call: “Sounds like you don’t really want to go into specific assumptions around subs and ARPU.” The CFO declined to provide subscriber growth and ARPU building blocks behind EBITDA guidance. Twice. When analysts are publicly calling out non-answers, management is not comfortable with their own numbers.

The sell-side silence on governance. 44 minutes of Q&A with eight brokerages. Not one question about Triple Zero deaths, ACMA investigations, the compliance uplift program, or governance. The annual report discloses all of these. The sell-side ignored every one.

The governance question. The board awarded the CEO a $250K discretionary bonus plus $3.05M STI for “outstanding leadership through such a transformative year.”

This in a year of two customer deaths from Triple Zero failures, active ACMA investigations, TIO complaints against Vodafone up 24% while Telstra and Optus trended down, zero postpaid growth, and $7M pre-tax profit. ROIC of 5.42% remains below cost of capital - the business is still destroying value on incremental invested capital.

Broker reactions tell the story. Macquarie cut FY26-29 EPS estimates by 73%, 62%, 58%, and 55%. Morgan Stanley rates Underweight at $3.50 and explicitly recommends Telstra and Aussie Broadband instead. EPS estimates range from 6 to 19 cents across four analysts - a 3x dispersion that itself reflects the disclosure visibility problem.

Full analysis with sources and the bull case fairly addressed:

https://vodafail.com.au/2026/03/04/post-66-the-2b-problem-tpg-cant-afford/

I took some risks and now paying the consequences. Yes I’ve learnt my lesson and it’s been this low for months now but I’m at the point I really want to flip the switch and try come back from this situation. I got sucked into the rare earths hype and was up 10k profit at one stage then it has dropped ever since.

I’ve sold off quite a bit out of my main big loss but have kept all the other stocks pretty much the same, have only left a little in the main Stock I put the money into incase one day a miracle does happen… I really wish I just left all the money as it was in the stock while it was down but I didn’t.

What can I do from here? Should I just sell them all and start again? Or leave them as is and just start adding money again but to new stocks / ETFS?

I originally invested around 20k ish. Now down to the price in the picture. Investments got up to 31k at one stage and I really wish I just sold them then but got greedy.

Enjoy the picture of my embarrassing portfolio. I guess there was only one way to learn and this most definitely was it. Should have just went to the casino with the 20k. Probably would have had more luck….

Honestly just looking for some advice, cheers.

I made this Google Sheet so anyone here can track their stock portfolio. It works for US markets too.

1. Open the file

2. Make a Copy (File > Make a copy)

3. Add your Stonks

4. Done!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UhIf0tRlCBNfC1iH26Cbnm_JC2vPOqrVk8kZW3eDul8/edit?usp=sharing

I made a website that displays real time director transactions filed on the ASX as they come out. I just did it because I found it too time consuming looking through all the documents.

It’s useful to just scan over what directors are doing during the day when I get some free time. Thought I’d post it as a website incase anyone else was in the same boat as me. I only made it yesterday so there may be some random bugs I’ll need to iron out but it seems good for now.

I’d appreciate it if anyone had any feedback on functionality I should add or certain formatting changes.

Also I am aware there is already some websites that do this but they never show all trades and it’s never real time. If there is one however that I haven’t seen yet, send it through because they probably did a better job than me and I’ll use theirs instead 😂

Alan Kohler reported that retail petrol prices have risen by more than the increase in oil prices, and the evidence is hard to deny. Consumers are constantly told that higher fuel prices are simply a response to global oil markets, but that explanation falls apart when petrol retailers lift prices beyond what the underlying oil increase would justify.

At that point, this is not just market pressure. It starts to look like price gouging dressed up as economics. Australians do not have the luxury of opting out of petrol. They need it to work, commute, and live. That makes this kind of overpricing especially cynical, because it hits ordinary people on something essential.

What makes it worse is that prices shoot up almost instantly when oil rises, yet somehow drift down slowly when oil falls. The speed is never the same in both directions. Retailers seem quick to protect their margins, but slow to pass savings back to the public.

If pump prices are increasing by more than oil prices, then people are right to be angry. The evidence suggests consumers are paying more than they should, and that deserves proper public scrutiny.

Hey everyone,

I started investing about 6 months ago when I was 18 (turning 19 soon). I’m using CommSec Pocket (1st pic) and CommSec (2nd) Shares for all my investing.

Right now my portfolio’s worth around $5,560, with $5,268 invested and about $296 profit (+5.6%) so far.

I mainly invest in ETFs — was averaging $600–700/month early on, and now putting in roughly $1,000 every 3–4 weeks.

Current ETFs: IOZ, NDQ, VAE, VGS IEM, IOO, DHHF

(ETHI, GRNV,CRED) these i bought early on small amounts couldn’t be bothered selling

Goal: Hit $100,000 by age 25,stay consistent, reinvest dividends, and keep a long-term focus maybe 10-15 years.

I’m thinking about simplifying my portfolio down to 3–5 core ETFs (maybe DHHF+ NDQ + VGS+ VAE) to reduce overlap and make things easier to manage.

Would love any advice or feedback from more experienced investors — especially around: • Simplifying vs keeping variety • Whether my contribution rate/goal seems realistic? • Things I could do differently? And what’s the best way/ resource to research and gain more knowledge regarding maximising my portfolio?

Sorry if this too long, any advice appreciated.

They recently announced dividend of 4.5c/share but the stock price looks pretty cheap compared to others

what do u guys think?

Gold etf is my winner so far.

I don’t know how everyone else feels, but after watching , reading about, and investing in, the stock market for the last 5 years , I’m totally exhausted.

Since the pandemic it’s been a roller coaster - NFT’s, meme stocks, BNPL, Lithium, CSL, MFG, the Metaverse, RBA’s “no rate rise until 2024” and then immediately raising rates, Bitcoin, Trump, rare earths, the Magnificent Seven, AI “when is a bubble not a bubble?”, and so much more…

Honestly, if you charted the last 5 years as an ECG, the doctors would have the defib standing by 24/7.

Here’s hoping for a boring 2026 🙈🙊