"You have to understand accounting"
You have to understand accounting and you have to understand the nuances of accounting. It’s the language of business and it’s an imperfect language, but unless you are willing to put in the effort to learn accounting – how to read and interpret financial statements – you really shouldn’t select stocks yourself
As Warren Buffett said, accounting is a language. It’s not only for investment, but for modeling, benchmarking, and all things related to business. As you can’t communicate with people around the world without English, you can’t discuss business without accounting.
These slides show the basics of financial analysis including meaning of financial statements and perspectives of analysis. In particular, the quiz in this document offers a good opportunity to understand relationship between business and accounting. Give it a try!