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Welcome to the latest edition of Value Investor Digest.
In this instalment we feature the London Value Investor Conference 2024 Overview Video, a Money Maze Podcast with Per Lekander, The Value Perspective live at the LVIC, a Howard Marks memo titled “The Folly of Certainty”, an FT article on the FTSE 100s “Magnificently Unglamorous Seven”, a Harvard Business Review article on how Starbucks devalued its brand, an eVestment report on Active Manager Outperformance in 2024, investor letters from Jonathan Ruffer and Andrew Hollingworth – plus a CFA Society Talk on what investors can learn from Evolutionary Biology.
The LVIC in May 2024 was the biggest and best conference yet and in this overview, we provide insights from the speakers at the event. Over the coming weeks and months the full interviews with the speakers will be released with more of their comments on the event and the content of their presentations. There are also short clips of the presentations on the LVIC video page.
“So Mercedes is recovering and now of course they have a super-strong balance sheet – close to 35 billion of net cash. So they are distributing 100% of net cashflow to us shareholders through a combination of dividends and buybacks…from tomorrow and until around January they are going to buy back about 7% of their daily trading volume day in and day out – on a stock that is trading at around 6.5x PE. I can guarantee you it is going to go up.”
“In this episode we catch up with eleven attendees, including some familiar guests from previous episodes of the Value Perspective. We discuss the current state of the market, the future of value investing, the stocks they pitch, their firms, and more. We feature chats with Cole Smead from Smead Capital, Alex Roepers from Atlantic Investment Management, Simon Gergel from Allianz Global Investors, Sarah Ketterer from Causeway Capital Management, Jacob Mitchell from Antipodes Partners, Sean Peche from Ranmore, Andrew Fargus from Vintage Asset Management, Simon Evan-Cook from Downing Fund Managers, Django Davidson from Hosking Partners, Andrew McDermott from Mission Value Partners, and finally, Richard Oldfield.”
“No statement that starts with ‘I don’t know but . . .’ or ‘I could be wrong but . . .’ ever got anyone into big trouble. If we admit to uncertainty, we’ll investigate before we invest, double-check our conclusions and proceed with caution. We may sub-optimize when times are good, but we’re unlikely to flame out or melt down. On the other hand, people who are sure may dispense with those things, and if they’re sure and wrong, as the Twain quote suggests, the outcome can be catastrophic…maybe Voltaire said it best 250 years ago: Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”
“On a long-term view, some of the FTSE 100’s less glamorous members, companies such as Compass, Intertek, Relx, Experian and Diploma as well as Bunzl and Howdens, have performed far better than the household names. Shares in those seven unglamorous companies are up by an average of around 1,000 per cent over the past 20 years. Even taking out Diploma, a supplier of industrial components which is the standout performer, the other six are up by an average of almost 600 per cent.”
“Recapturing the authenticity of the brand means doing away with the assembly-line feel of today’s Starbucks, letting employees once again be key actors in the experience. The liveliness that comes with baristas shouting orders and the human connections they make are precisely what gave these places a neighborhood coffee shop feel — even if that meant an occasional odd misspelling on your cup or an unwarranted extra pump of syrup. Such “mistakes” made the Starbucks experience authentically human.”
“Nasdaq eVestment’s annual Active Manager Outperformance report is a retrospective analysis of active equity and fixed income managers’ returns compared to their benchmarks over the past 10 years through 2023…Benchmark outperformance across active equities was hard to come by in 2023. At a high level, emerging markets and international equity strategies did best with 63.3% and 54.7% of managers beating their benchmarks last year. With U.S. equity market returns in 2023 driven by a handful of growth companies, we saw value equity managers beat their benchmarks more often than growth equity managers.”
“We have had a 40 year bull market, during which there have been only the briefest of conventional bear phases – 1990-1992, 2000-2002, 2008-2009, 2022 – all too short for ennui to set in. Instead there have been stock market crashes – crevasses which, in a jiffy, do immense damage to investment returns. Indeed, the identification of these has been the single biggest contributor to our track record. In each and every one, we were too early – in 2000, it was 14 months, in 2008, it was a full two years, in 2020, it was at least two years, and this time it is 18 months at a minimum. In each case, we had correctly identified the nature of the oncoming crisis, and were able to concentrate investments into the appropriate asset class.”
“We have now spent a good amount of time on TSMC. The more pages we turn, the more we like it. Numerous mental models come to mind as we study it. The first is one we heard Charlie describe when he was once discussing Google. He talked of ‘surfers and wallowers’ i.e. if a business is surfing in front of a wave (having found some form or advantage; scale, technological or otherwise), no competitor franticly paddling behind it is going to be able to catch up.”
“[And Charlie Munger said] …All kinds of things that work in business have been discovered by what I call ‘practice evolution’ and just as evolution has gradually developed the eyes and wings and claws and behaviour patterns that work so well to feed the animal, human enterprises have developed behaviour patterns winnowed by their successes and failures. A lot of what you see that works like crazy, they just blundered through a lot of things then repeated what worked and avoided what didn’t and – in time – the result was a very elaborate ‘practice evolution’.”
