Hi Dannie,
What a great suggestion for an article...consider it done. You will see such a post on The Enterprising Investor in the next 4-8 weeks. I will give you credit for the suggestion, too.
As for the other questions...I am happy to answer for how I did my work. However, what I consider to be PARAMOUNT is to experiment with many different tools and news sources. Why? What matters is your mind. Different minds call on different memories, knowledge, mental models, and so forth. Therefore, the tools must exalt the individual's consciousness, as opposed to the consciousness exalting the tools. So I offer up my thoughts on this subject cautiously. This is the stuff I used...you WILL use different tools if you are aware of the ways that your mind works - and that (i.e. self-awareness) is much more important.
Here are the tools I used, mapped to your framework:
- excel, access, vba, computer programming? Excel, yes; I consider myself to be an Excel master. Want a tip? Learn the keyboard shortcuts as you can sextuple to septuple your productivity with Excel. Want another tip? Get an Excel Worksheet Function book and continually peruse it so you learn what is possible to do with Excel. Want another tip? Yes, take a computer programming class so that you understand how to use worksheet functions in a way that speaks the language of computers. VBA? A wee bit. My spreadsheets tended to be custom-made for each business I examined...but more on this in another blogpost. Access? No, I tried to learn it multiple times, but my process was not intensive enough to require a database's functionality. I used Excel as my clunky database. Want a final tip on this section of your question? You might want to learn Matlab, which many analysts, including my successor whom I hired, use. You also might want to learn a stat package like SPSS.
- news subscription (FT, WSJ) vs free source (bloomberg, reuters)? At the Davis Funds I had a WSJ subscription, but not an FT subscription. I read about 35-40 news sources per day. We had a Bloomberg terminal which was used sparingly, and FactSet, too. But one of my top secret weapons, and no longer available as it was absorbed into the vast AOL edifice, was Relegence. But for my model building I (and I CANNOT EMPHASIZE THIS ENOUGH) used ONLY primary data sources. I NEVER read sell-side or third party analysts research...we are talking maybe once every two years would I read an analyst's report. I only read reports if: I was looking at a complex business and wanted to see what factors seemed to be important, or, and more often, to understand what ignorance an analyst was peddling to the Street and that was negatively affecting my suite of businesses (i.e. my portfolio).
- computer (mac vs pc, laptop vs desktop, both)/doesn’t matter? I have owned both PC and Mac and I prefer PC, especially for finance. Why? Mac's version of Excel didn't used to support keyboard shortcuts so you had to laboriously use the mouse to execute commands. #pathetic. I once taught a young man in the secrets of my analytical methods and he used a Mac and it took him literally many hours longer to do what I was doing with keyboard shortcuts. By the way, I should give props to Javier Sanchez my fellow research analyst when I started at the Davis Funds for insisting I learn the shortcuts. Thank you Javier. I would argue that this allowed me to add a year of productivity on to my career. That kind of WOW is difficult to come by in the investment business.
- stock screeners? I never used a formal screener...meaning someone else's off-the-shelf package. Instead I used a simple PEG ratio once a quarter to sort the entirety of US stock listings. But this was just to get an idea list going. This maybe generated 2 ideas that were actually bought into the fund in the whole length of my career. In other words, screeners were not a big part of what I did. By the way, if I had it to do over again I would never use the PEG ratio. Why? Check out the article I wrote for the Journal of Private Equity about the Fallacy of the PEG Ratio...they are very, very unreliable.
I hope this helps!
Jason