Short version: Moody’s Manuals were the investor’s Pokédex—one dense page per company with history, business description, people, capital structure, and multi-year financials. You flipped pages, circled oddities, then dug deeper. That workflow still works—just with better tools.
What was inside a Moody’s Manual page?
Typical entries included:
- Business + history: what the company did, when/where it was incorporated, key subsidiaries, geographies. www.libraries.rutgers.eduguides.library.oregonstate.edu
- People: officers/directors and sometimes control/ownership notes. (e.g., the 1972 National Indemnity page shows officers and that Berkshire owned 99.9%.) theoraclesclassroom.com
- Capital structure: classes of stock, shares outstanding, par value, preferreds, long-term debt, sometimes bond info/ratings. www.libraries.rutgers.eduwww.nypl.org
- Financials (multi-year): income statement snippets, balance-sheet line items, dividends, and industry-specific stats (e.g., premium written, loss ratio for insurers). theoraclesclassroom.com
- Coverage by type: separate volumes for Banks & Finance, Industrials, Utilities, Transportation, and OTC (unlisted/less-followed) companies. www.libraries.rutgers.eduonlinebooks.library.upenn.edu
How that turns into investment insight
Think like a treasure hunter—each field is a clue:
- Working capital vs. market cap → “net-net” alerts. From current assets and current liabilities you can compute NCAV; if price price, insider control, odd securities, or outlier margins/returns.
- Verify & value: Read the latest 10-K/10-Q; recompute NCAV, EV/EBIT, FCF yield; check capital allocation and risks; then decide if it’s truly cheap or just troubled. If you want, I can spin up a tiny Moody’s-style checklist you can apply to micro-caps today and we’ll go hunting like Buffett used to—page-turning, but with tabs instead of paper.