3 Items to look for in a Stock

This is an excerpt from an article on Motley Fool regarding Google stock but the 3 items in the list below are valid and can be used when looking for very strong companies.  I have not worked out a stock screen yet to see if I can incorporate these 3 items into a screen but will be looking to do so.  I especially need to look at item 3 below to better understand what that means.

The Motley Fool | 2016-08-13T18:04:00Z

No book has had a more profound impact on my investing than Nassim Taleb's Anti fragile. It argues that the entire world can be broken into three categories:

• The Fragile: things that break as soon as stress is applied -- like a glass falling off of a table.
• The Robust: things that stay absolutely the same under stress -- a rubber ball falling from the same table.
• The Anti fragile:things that become more powerful when stressors are introduced -- think of how your bone heals back stronger than before after it's broken.

We want our portfolios to be as anti fragile as possible. But we often fail at this. That's largely because we are suckers for the narrative bias: We tell ourselves a story about a company: how its sales will grow and its products will revolutionize the world, and we invest accordingly.
I created a compelling narrative for the first stock I ever wrote about for The Fool six years ago. Since then, that stock has trailed the market by a whopping 172 percentage points!
By viewing the investing world through an "anti fragile" lens, I eliminate the narrative bias by focusing on three attributes:

1. Lots of cash and lots of customers: cash gives companies options during downturns -- outspending rivals, buying back stock, or acquisitions. Debt does the opposite. And by having lots of customers, a company doesn't run the risk of losing an outsized portion of business if a client walks away.
2. Management with skin in the game: When the people running the company have their own skin in the game -- via shares of the company's stock -- their long-term interests are aligned with ours. That benefit compounds when founders are running the company, as they often view it as a literal extension of themselves.
3. A barbell approach:This means having two sides to your strategy -- on one hand you have a business segment that has a wide moat. On the other hand, you take lots of low-probability, low-risk, high-reward bets -- a trait otherwise known as "optionality".