Value Invest

VID September 2019

September 17
12:54 2019

WELCOME TO THE 42ND EDITION OF VALUE INVESTOR DIGEST

In this edition we feature two articles from John Authers; the first is titled “Quality Stocks Are An Overcrowded Trade”, there’s also a Value Investor Insight interview with Mark Pearson, a new Warren Buffett interview which includes his comments on Berkshire’s investments in US banks, Jonathan Boyar’s open letter to James Dolan, Rajiv Jain of GQG Partners discusses portfolio management, Michael Burry’s views on a passive investing bubble, an article on discount supermarket chain Aldi, a Barron’s article which shows that “the top-10 stocks by market cap rarely stay there during the following 10 years”, Andrew Hollingworth’s open letter to Mike Ashley of Sports Direct, an informative visualisation of the world’s money and markets from The Money Project, John Hempton’s article on bank margins, a Citywire interview with Simon Gergel, a Robert Shiller’s “we’re in 2005 again”comments on the US housing market, a Deloitte piece on the decline and rise of London; plus Oaktree Capital’s primer on structured credit.

London Conference

The next London Value Investor Conference will take place on May 12th 2020

New York Conference

The speaker line-up for Value Invest New York on December 3rd 2019 has been announced

$700 VINY Discount

Use “VID-VINY-19” for $700 off a ticket to Value Invest New York (expires Sept 30th)

John Authers: Quality Stocks Are An Overcrowded Trade

“We need to be careful with definitions. Everyone would like to describe their stock as a quality investment. And even the quants who have broken down equity investing into a series of factors that drive returns are not sure how to define the quality factor. Broadly, it tends to refer to reliable profitability, and a strong balance sheet, in some combination.”

Value Investor Insight Interview With Mark Pearson of Arcus Investment

“Parts companies like Ahresty have followed the big Japanese automobile manufacturers overseas as they’ve successfully established global footprints. There was always sort of a bargain struck, that if the parts makers came along they would be allowed to sell to others, and Ahresty has built a good business selling to companies such as General Motors and Volkswagen as well. It supplies customers from its production bases in Japan, China, Thailand, India, Mexico and the U.S.”

The Big Short’s Michael Burry Sees a Bubble in Passive Investing

“The bubble in passive investing through ETFs and index funds as well as the trend to very large size among asset managers has orphaned smaller value-type securities globally…There is all this opportunity, but so few active managers are looking to take advantage.”

Warren Buffett on Berkshire’s Investments in US Banks

Buffett covered a lot in this new interview including comments on China, Costco, Elon Musk and more. Commenting on Berkshire’s investments in banks, he said: “They’re businesses I understand and I like the price at which they’re selling relative to their future prospects. I think 10 years from now that they will be worth more money and I feel there’s a very high probability that I’m right. I don’t think they will turn out to be the best investments at all, of the whole panoply of things you could do, but I’m pretty sure that they won’t disappoint me.” [Comments on banks at 53:40]

Jonathan Boyar in Forbes: Open Letter to James Dolan Outlining Ways to Unlock Shareholder Value

“Sometimes I think of you as the Rodney Dangerfield of investing—investors just don’t give you the respect you deserve. They’ve gone so far as to assign a ‘Dolan discount’ to entities you control—even though long-term shareholders of both Cablevision and Madison Square Garden (MSG) (my firm included) have been handsomely rewarded thanks to your shareholder-friendly actions. But your latest plan to build a concert/entertainment venue, the Sphere, in Las Vegas for $1.2 to $1.7 billion (and that’s just for the Las Vegas version) makes me wonder whether a ‘Dolan discount”’ is beginning to make sense.”

Rajiv Jain Discusses Portfolio Management

“I think the way to look at or to assess a portfolio manager or track record is [to ask] how do they do in different environments? So for example if you look at a ‘growth’  manager today, most of them look like geniuses. Most of them won’t have a good track record – if you go back to the 2000-2003 era – how many of them actually did well? So the whole ‘growth and value’ debate I personally feel is nonsensical in a way because why would you consciously overpay for anything?” [This discussion is at 31.30]

How a Cheap, Brutally Efficient Grocery Chain is Upending America’s Supermarkets

“When Walmart’s US CEO Greg Foran invokes words like ‘fierce’, ‘good’ and ‘clever’ in speaking almost admiringly about one of his competitors, he’s not referring to Amazon. He isn’t pointing to large chains like Kroger or Albertsons, dollar stores like Dollar General or online entrants like FreshDirect and Instacart. Foran is describing Aldi.”

Barron’s: History Says Apple and Amazon Probably Won’t Be the Next Decade’s Best Stocks

“Research from Gavekal’s Louis-Vincent Gave…looked at the top-10 stocks at the beginning of each decade since 1980. His findings demonstrated that the top-10 stocks by market cap rarely stay there during the following 10 years. Instead, prevalent investing patterns changed drastically, as the old winners were replaced with the new.”

HollAnd Advisors: Open Letter to Mike Ashley

In recent years, as you have sought to change the direction of Sports Direct (SPD) and invest for its future, many of the fair weather shareholders of 2011-15 have left you. They have been replaced by those that see value in your business and the skills you bring to it. To be a SPD shareholder in 2019 is to be someone who is backing Mike Ashley and taking the longer term view. As such most of your investors today are aligned with you. Please treat us accordingly.”

All of the World’s Money and Markets in One Visualization

This interesting visualisation from The Money Project compares the size of various asset classes, companies, people and other items. Each block in the visualisation represents $100bn.

John Authers: Bonds Meet the Four Criteria for Defining a Bubble

“There has been a tendency since the financial crisis to label any market that is rallying or deemed overvalued to be in a “bubble.” The word has become overused and debased. But if we treat it rigorously, the bubble concept is still vital in navigating financial markets. And the rigorous treatment reveals that bonds really are in a bubble.”

John Hempton: Thinking Aloud About Bank Margins – Part 2

Just over twenty one years ago The Economist wrote a glowing article about what was then a roll-up of British High Street banks. It was Lloyds TSB…And then it all went horribly wrong. The bank took only a decade to be nationalised. What went wrong was competition. At the time Lloyds revenue to risk weighted assets was 8 percent. This was the highest number I have ever seen on a major bank anywhere.”

Simon Gergel: Oil and Tobacco Aren’t Dead, Just Look at Their Profits

“I love the premise of that question [that oil and tobacco are sectors in decline], because oil actually isn’t in decline. The world is using more oil every year and has done since oil started being used and we still aren’t at peak oil. It may be another 10 or 15 years before we get to the peak and then I think you’ll probably see a gentle decline in oil. At the same time demand for gas is growing extremely fast. If you look at companies such as BP and particularly Royal Dutch Shell they produce huge amounts of gas. Gas demand is growing structurally and will do for decades so these aren’t necessarily businesses in decline.”

Robert Shiller on US Housing: ‘We’re in 2005 Again’

“I have seen this happen before. We’re back in 2005 again when the rate of increase in home prices was slowing down a lot but still going up. It would not take me be any surprise at all if in the next year or two we saw modest declines in home prices and if things play out right, there could be bigger declines. It has happened before on a number of occasions.”

Deloitte: The Decline and Rise of London

“The familiar story of London as the powerhouse of the British economy is relatively new. Within living memory London was a city in decline. Its population peaked in the late 1930s before going into a long decline. London’s population shrank by over a fifth between 1941 and 1992, losing two million people at a time of rapid growth in the UK’s wider population. Its economy also underperformed. The economic historian, Professor Nicholas Crafts, estimates that the premium of London GDP per head over the UK average shrunk from a peak of 65% in 1911 to 23% by 1971.”

Oaktree Insights: Structured Credit Primer

“Structured credit got a bad rap in association with the excesses in the subprime mortgage market preceding the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). It should be noted, though, that not every structured product played the same role or was affected the same during the last recession. Plus, the asset class has undergone significant reform since then. Today it offers materially improved investor protections while presenting potential for differentiated returns and a favorable relative-value proposition.”

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  • “We will only do with your money what we would do with our own.”
    Warren Buffett
  • “The trick of successful investors is to sell when they want to, not when they have to.”
    Seth Klarman
  • “Our job is to find a few intelligent things to do, not to keep up with every damn thing in the world.”
    Charlie Munger
  • “The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.”
    Phillip Fisher
  • “To thrive as a value investor you have to risk being called a dummy from time to time.”
    Christopher H. Browne
  • “The game of life is the game of everlasting learning. At least it is if you want to win.”
    Charlie Munger
  • “Value investing requires a great deal of hard work, unusually strict discipline, and a long-term investment horizon. Few are willing and able to devote sufficient time and effort to become value investors, and only a fraction of those have the proper mind-set to succeed.”
    Seth Klarman
  • “In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine.”
    Ben Graham
  • “Rule #1: Never Lose Money; Rule #2: Never forget Rule #1.”
    Warren Buffett
  • “Confronted with a challenge to distil the secret of sound investment into three words, we venture the motto, Margin of Safety.”
    Ben Graham
  • “All intelligent investing is value investing – acquiring more than you are paying for. You must value the business in order to value the stock.”
    Charlie Munger
  • “Practical investors usually learn their problem is finding enough outstanding investments, rather than choosing among too many.”
    Phillip Fisher
  • “In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.”
    Yogi Berra
  • “We really can say no in 10 seconds or so to 90%+ of all the things that come along simply because we have these filters.”
    Warren Buffett
  • “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to reform.”
    Mark Twain
  • “It’s not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid.”
    Charlie Munger
  • “As time goes on, I get more and more convinced that the right method in investment is to put fairly large sums into enterprises which one thinks one knows something about and in the management of which one thoroughly believes.”
    John Maynard Keynes
  • “Believe me, there’s nothing better than buying from someone who has to sell regardless of price during a crash. Many of the best buys we’ve ever made occurred for that reason.”
    Howard Marks
  • “Acquire Riches by Industry and Frugality.”
    Benjamin Franklin
  • “Cash combined with courage in a time of crisis is priceless.”
    Warren Buffett
  • “The Stock Market is designed to transfer money from the Active to the Patient.”
    Warren Buffett
  • “Great investors are not unemotional, but are inversely emotional – they get worried when the market is up and feel good when everyone is worried.”
    Bill Miller
  • “Contributing to . . . euphoria are two further factors little noted in our time or in past times. The first is the extreme brevity of the financial memory.”
    John Kenneth Galbraith
  • “In the world of investing, being correct about something isn’t at all synonymous with being proved correct right away.”
    Howard Marks
  • “The single greatest edge an investor can have is a long-term orientation.”
    Seth Klarman
  • “For some reason, people take their cues from price action rather than from values. What doesn’t work is when you start doing things that you don’t understand or because they worked last week for somebody else. The dumbest reason in the world to buy a stock is because it’s going up.”
    Warren Buffett
  • “Buy companies with strong histories of profitability and with a dominant business franchise.”
    Warren Buffett
  • “There’s little that’s as dangerous for investor health as insistence on extrapolating today’s events into the future.”
    Howard Marks
  • “Most people get interested in stocks when everyone else is. The time to get interested is when no one else is. You can’t buy what is popular and do well.”
    Warren Buffett
  • “Having great clients is the key to investment success.”
    Seth Klarman
  • “The focus of most investors differs from that of value investors. Most investors are primarily oriented toward return, how much they can make and pay little attention to risk, how much they can lose.”
    Seth Klarman
  • “If you want to have a better performance than the crowd, you must do things differently from the crowd.”
    John Templeton
  • “A margin of safety is necessary because valuation is an imprecise art, the future is unpredictable, and investors are human and do make mistakes. It is adherence to the concept of a margin of safety that best distinguishes value investors from all others, who are not as concerned about loss.”
    Seth Klarman
  • “As Buffett has often observed, value investing is not a concept that can be learned and gradually applied over time. It is either absorbed and adopted at once, or it is never truly learned.”
    Seth Klarman
  • “To buy when others are despondently selling and to sell when others are euphorically buying takes the greatest courage, but provides the greatest profit.”
    John Templeton
  • “Wall Street research is strongly oriented toward buy rather than sell recommendations. There is more business to be done by issuing an optimistic research report than by writing a pessimistic one.”
    Seth Klarman
  • ‘If you don’t feel comfortable owning something for 10 years, then don’t own it for 10 minutes.’
    Warren Buffett
  • “It is easier to rationalize than it is to be rational.”
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  • “Investors have been so oversold on diversification that fear of having too many eggs in one basket has caused them to put far too little into companies they thoroughly know and far too much in others which they know nothing about.”
    Phillip Fisher
  • “Value investing is the discipline of buying shares at a significant discount from their current underlying values and holding them until more of their value is realised. The element of a bargain is the key to the process.”
    Seth Klarman
  • “Once you adopt a value-investment strategy, any other investment behaviour starts to seem like gambling.”
    Seth Klarman
  • “What the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end.”
    Howard Marks
  • “You need to have a passionate interest in why things are happening. That cast of mind, kept over long periods, gradually improves your ability to focus on reality. If you don’t have that cast of mind, you’re destined for failure even if you have a high I.Q.”
    Charlie Munger
  • “Establishing and maintaining an unconventional investment profile requires acceptance of uncomfortably idiosyncratic portfolios, which frequently appear downright imprudent in the eyes of conventional wisdom.”
    David Swensen
  • “Conservative investors sleep well.”
    Phillip Fisher
  • “Acquire worldly wisdom and adjust your behavior accordingly. If your new behavior gives you a little temporary unpopularity with your peer group… then to hell with them.”
    Charlie Munger
  • “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”
    Warren Buffett
  • “Sometimes a value investor will review in depth a great many potential investments without finding a single one that is sufficiently attractive. Such persistence is necessary, however, since value is often well hidden.”
    Seth Klarman
  • “In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time – none, zero… You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads – at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”
    Charlie Munger
  • “Usually a very long list of securities is not a sign of the brilliant investor, but of one who is unsure of himself.”
    Phillip Fisher
  • “Warren and I insist on a lot of time being available almost every day to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. We read and think. So Warren and I do more reading and thinking and less doing than most people in business.”
    Charlie Munger
  • “there are two essential ingredients for profit in a declining market: you have to have a view on intrinsic value, and you have to hold that view strongly enough to be able to hang in and buy even as price declines suggest that you’re wrong. Oh yes, there’s a third; you have to be right.”
    Howard Marks
  • “When everyone believes something is risky, their unwillingness to buy usually reduces it’s price to the point where it’s not risky at all. Broadly negative opinion can make it the least risky thing since all optimism has been driven out of it’s price.”
    Howard Marks
  • “We have two classes of forecasters: Those who don’t know – and those who don’t know they don’t know.”
    John Kenneth Galbraith
  • “Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up.”
    Charlie Munger
  • “At one extreme of the pendulum – the darkest of times – it takes analytical ability, objectivity, resolve, even imagination, to think things will ever get better. The few people who possess those qualities can make unusual profits with low risk…”
    Howard Marks
  • “The harder you work, the more confidence you get. But you may be working hard on something that is false.”
    Charlie Munger
  • “…at the other extreme, when everyone assumes and prices in the impossible – improvement forever – the stage is set for painful losses.”
    Howard Marks
  • “You shouldn’t own common stocks if a 50 per cent decrease in their value in a short period of time would cause you acute distress.”
    Warren Buffett
  • “Many investors insist on affixing exact values to their investments, seeking precision in an imprecise world, but business value cannot be precisely determined.”
    Seth Klarman
  • “Greater risk does not guarantee greater return. To the contrary, risk erodes return by causing losses. By itself risk does not create incremental return, only price can accomplish that.”
    Seth Klarman
  • “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
    John Maynard Keynes
  • “…active management strategies demand uninstitutional behaviour from institutions, creating a paradox that few can unravel.”
    David Swensen
  • “Investing is the intersection of economics and psychology.”
    Seth Klarman
  • ‘Risk can be greatly reduced by concentrating on only a few holdings.’
    Warren Buffett
  • “The number of things that can go wrong (in business) greatly exceeds the number that can go right.”
    Seth Klarman
  • “Great investment opportunities come around when excellent companies are surrounded by unusual circumstances that cause the stock to be misappraised.”
    Warren Buffett
  • “How do value investors deal with the analytical necessity to predict the unpredictable? The only answer is conservatism.”
    Seth Klarman
  • “We look for a horse with one chance in two of winning and which pays you three to one.”
    Charlie Munger
  • “I never buy anything unless I can fill out on a piece of paper my reasons. I may be wrong, but I would know the answer to that. “I’m paying $32 billion today for the Coca Cola Company because. If you can’t answer that question, you shouldn’t buy it. If you can answer that question, and you do it a few times, you’ll make a lot of money.”
    Warren Buffett
  • “Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy; profit from folly rather than participate in it.”
    Warren Buffett
  • “It is better to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.”
    John Maynard Keynes
  • “You do things when the opportunities come along. I’ve had periods in my life when I’ve had a bundle of ideas come along, and I’ve had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I’ll do something. If not, I won’t do a damn thing.”
    Warren Buffett
  • “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
    Benjamin Franklin
  • “Know what you own, and know why you own it”
    Peter Lynch
  • “In both economic forecasting and investment management, it’s worth noting that there’s usually someone who gets it exactly right… but it’s rarely the same person twice.”
    Howard Marks
  • “The four most dangerous words in investing are: ‘this time it’s different.’ ”
    Sir John Templeton
  • “I do not like debt and do not like to invest in companies that have too much debt, particularly long-term debt. With long-term debt, increases in interest rates can drastically affect company profits and make future cash flows less predictable.”
    Warren Buffett
  • “Skepticism and pessimism aren’t synonymous. Skepticism calls for pessimism when optimism is excessive. But it also calls for optimism when pessimism is excessive.”
    Howard Marks
  • “In investing, what is comfortable is rarely profitable.”
    Robert Arnott
  • “You can’t predict. You can prepare.”
    Howard Marks
  • “No wise pilot, no matter how great his talent and experience, fails to use his checklist.”
    Charlie Munger
  • “Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.”
    Warren Buffett
  • “A hugely profitable investment that doesn’t begin with discomfort is usually an oxymoron.”
    Howard Marks
  • “There are worse situations than drowning in cash and sitting, sitting, sitting. I remember when I wasn’t awash in cash — and I don’t want to go back.”
    Charlie Munger
  • “The wise investor can profit if he can think independently of the crowd and reach the rich answer when the majority of financial opinion is leaning the other way.”
    Phillip Fisher
  • “Analysis should be penetrating not prophetic.”
    Ben Graham
  • “…it never ceases to amaze me to see how much territory can be grasped if one merely masters and consistently uses all the obvious and easily learned principles.”
    Charlie Munger
  • “This matter of training oneself not to go with the crowd but to be able to zig when the crowd zags, in my opinion, is one of the most important fundamentals of investment success.”
    Phillip Fisher
  • “Without numerical fluency, in the part of life most of us inhibit, you are like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.”
    Charlie Munger
  • “All Investors should devote themselves to understanding the nature of the business and its intrinsic worth, rather than wasting their time trying to guess the unknowable future.”
    James Montier
  • “There is a complicating factor that makes the handling of investment mistakes more difficult. This is the ego in each of us.”
    Phillip Fisher
  • “The disciplined pursuit of bargains makes value investing very much a risk-averse approach.”
    Seth Klarman
  • “The successful investor is usually an individual who is inherently interested in business problems.”
    Phillip Fisher
  • “In a commodity business, it’s very hard to be smarter than your dumbest competitor.”
    Warren Buffett
  • “Because investing is as much an art as a science, investors need a margin of safety.”
    Seth Klarman
  • “Chains of habits are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”
    Warren Buffett