I just did a three day virtual workshop with Phil Town.

Over the weekend I did a three day virtual workshop with Phil Town and his dedicated teachers and coaches. These are my experiences from the workshop.

This is not a financial advice. I am not a financial advisor and I only do these post in order to do my own analysis and elaborate about my decisions, especially for my copiers and followers. If you consider investing in any of the ideas I present, you should do your own research or contact a professional financial advisor, as all investing comes with a risk of losing money.

First let me tell you that I am not affiliated with Phil Town or his website in any way. I did not get paid to write this and I do not get paid if anyone should sign up for his workshop based on this post. I paid for the workshop just like you will if you want to attend, meaning that this is my unbiased opinion of the workshop.

Before we get started let me match your expectations. I'm not going to reveal any specific tools we used, and will just go through the workshop in general and not dig deep into details. The reasons that I will not do so, is first and foremost because I have signed a document saying that I will not share these things in details with others, and even if I could I wouldn't as I think it is best to learn from the source directly. In case you are interested about what I write, Phil Town has several of free content out there and it would be easy for you to find a lot of it yourself.

The workshop started Friday and ended Sunday. I had great expectations when I started Friday, if you have been to this website before, you know that I regard Phil Town and his teachings very highly. Keep in mind that Phil Town, the teachers and the coaches are all located in the United States, hence the workshop kicked off at 6 pm Central European Time (CET). You get an e-mail the day before the workshop and you just click on a link which sends you directly into the group you are assigned to, and this is the group you will be with throughout the weekend. The coaches and the students present themselves and at 7pm CET Phil Town kicks off the workshop. The Friday it divided in teachings and exercises and you end up learning about the four M's, which is Meaning, Moat, Management and Margin of Safety, and gives you some tools to how you determine if the company you are analyzing are having these Four M's. In the end of the day, you should have found a company that you will work with the next day. At 3 am CET the workshop ends for the day, and if you had never worked with the four M's before, I guess you would be very tired.

Saturday starts 5 pm CET, and you continue to work with the Margin of Safety (this is how to valuate a company and determine a price), events (why the price drops) and inversions and rebuttals. Once you have gone through these teachings, you will be able to analyze the company you chose the day before. You will send this analysis to a coach, which will give you feedback later. Once you have handed it over, you will have a Q & A session with Phil Town. Obviously, he had a lot of questions and even though he never made it to mine, it was really educational to hear about his insights on various topics. The last thing you learn about that day is options and how you can trade those, which is a new world to many. The day ends at 3 am CET.

Sunday is the last day and starts at 5 pm CET, however before it even started you received feedback of the analysis you did the day before by e-mail. The coach that gives you feedback is not the one that has coached you all weekend but another one that you don't know. I think it is a nice as the person doesn't know you and will not be biased. It was really nice to see that the person had really looked into your analysis and crushed the numbers you had calculated. The topics Sunday are options and technical analysis, and follows the same path as the other days with teachings and exercises. The workshop ends with a list of 10 companies that Phil Town and his crew believe would be good companies to invest in over the next 10 years, if the price is right. The companies have been chosen among all the companies that the students have analyzed throughout the weekend. Our workshop was running a bit late and it ended 2.30 am CET.

I know this was a very shallow description of the workshop but it gives you an idea of the topics you work with and the format of the workshop.

I truly enjoyed the workshop. I might be a bit biased as I already use the four M's in my analyses, as I have read Phil Town's books prior to starting investing. Even though I have a quite good knowledge of the four M's, I really felt like I have learned a lot throughout the weekend. I always found it a little difficult to evaluate a management, as it could be hard to find information about the CEO or a management in general in a company. I feel like I got some great tools and suggestions to how to do so in the future, and I feel more certain about my decisions regarding determining a good management from now on. However, what I really really really enjoyed was getting new tools to calculate the Margin of safety, and it will change quite a bit for me in the future. I have done it right previously but I have only calculated it one way, there are actually three ways you should calculate it for a company you want to invest in, and all three ways can justify you investing in that company, meaning I will not be as limited as I have been so far when investing in a company. It really made me excited and my analyses will be much more extensive in the future. I think this will not only benefit me but also whoever that chooses to copy me.

I really loved the part about options. Options are something I never knew much about and I always found it a bit complicated. After this workshop I feel encouraged about options and once I have got some experience in trading options with paper money, it is certainly something I feel comfortable doing, due to what I learned in the workshop. I also enjoyed the part about technical analysis, even though it was a minor part of the workshop. I did already know about trendlines and Fibonacci retracements prior to the workshop but I never got any formal teachings in it. You also got to know some tools that might determine when it is a good idea to exit the market, which is certainly also something I will use from now on.

I really don't have much bad to say about the workshop but of course if you are not located in the United States, the time difference can make it hard. Personally I am an early riser and staying up until 3 am at night was a bit hard for me, however the teachers and coaches really made the whole workshop very interesting so time was flying by. Regarding the list we got in the end about some wonderful companies, I thought it was interesting but many of them are already in my portfolio. Nevertheless, it did open my eyes for some other companies I didn't know much about and will surely research them. I'm a bit torn about the list of companies as the whole idea of the workshop is to teach you how you find wonderful companies yourself through analysis, and it is stressed throughout the workshop that it has to be companies that has meaning to you as an individual. I believe that some might end up investing in those companies because they are on the list and not because they have done their own research. With that being said, it isn't a bad thing to get the list as you can always use it as inspiration when you research your own companies, I'm just a bit torn about it.

All in all I think the workshop was great. Not only did I learn new things but it also really sharpened the tools I already had. I have not the slightest doubt that this workshop will make me a much better investor going forward and I'm very exited to use what I learned. I also believe that I will earn back the expenses of the workshop very fast. I would recommend the workshop to everyone who wants to be a better investor. If you don't have the funds to attend now, you can earn these funds rather fast by doing extra work at Appen or Clickworker. If you do not want to dedicate the time, effort and money to attend the workshop, you can always copy me :)

You can read more about the workshop at Phil Town's website.