Learning from Wal-Mart's Sam Walton

"Walmart figured out ways to do things at lesser costs that people needed — where people spent money in big quantity." Warren Buffett

The Walton family is the richest family in America. And their wealth is the product of one man: the late Sam Walton. Walton's career tracks like many other greats of our time; starting from humble beginnings, soaking up knowledge and learning from others, and then developing an innovative concept of their own along the way.

Walton's first job out of college was as a management trainee at JC Penney. This was in 1940. In 1945, Walton borrowed $20,000 from his father-in-law to buy a Ben Franklin variety store in Newport, Arkansas; population 7,000, and within five years store sales had increased from $72,000 to $250,000 a year. Walton's landlord, noticing the success, wanted to give his son the store and refused to renew the lease, at any price. And Walton was devastated. Rather than drowning in self-pity though, Walton packed his bags for Bentonville, Arkansas, population just 3,000, where he bought a new store. It wasn't until 1962, when Sam Walton, aged 44, opened the first Wal-Mart. 

In 1991, and in poor health, Walton published the memoir 'Sam Walton : Made in America' chronicling history's greatest retailing success story. At the time, Wal-Mart's market capitalisation had escalated from just $135m fifteen years earlier to over $50b. Between 1977 and 1987, Wal-Mart delivered average annual returns of 46% pa. One hundred dollars invested in Walmart in 1972 would be worth $136,000 today, compared to $2,500 invested in the Dow Jones Index.

Wal-Mart vs Dow Jones Industrial Average - 1972-2018 [source: Bloomberg]

Walton's story contains many of the same themes that have characterised other great businesses we've covered such as Koch Industries, Nucor, Home Depot, Pixar and Panera Bread. These themes include reciprocation, win-win philosophy, constant innovation, humility, and culture; they all permeate through the book.

It's little wonder Buffett kicks himself when he didn't buy Wal-Mart in the early days. In fact, Buffett cites this miss as his biggest investing mistake. A 'Mistake of Ommission' that, by 2004, had cost Berkshire shareholders more than $10 billion dollars.

"Walmart — I cost us about — it’s up to 10 billion now.  I cost us about $10 billion. I set out to buy 100 million shares of Walmart, pre-split, at about 23. And Charlie said it didn’t sound like the worst idea ever came up with, which is — from him, I mean, it was just ungodly praise.   And then, you know, we bought a little and then it moved up a little bit. And I thought, “Well, you know, maybe it will come back” or what. Who knows what I thought? I mean, you know, only my psychiatrist can tell me. And that thumb sucking, reluctance to pay a little more — the current cost is in the area of 10 billion." Warren Buffett, Berkshire Meeting 2004

"We blew Walmart, too. When it was a total cinch, we were smart enough to figure that out and we didn’t." Charlie Munger 2017

Highlighted below are my favourite excerpts from Walton's book that explain the key drivers to Wal-Mart's success.

Education and Smarts

"I wasn't what you'd call a gifted student, but I worked really hard."

Learn from Others

"I learned a lesson which has stuck with me all through the years; you can learn from everybody. I didn't just learn from reading every retail publication I could get my hands on, I probably learned the most from studying what John Durnham was doing across the street."

Love

"I loved retail from the very beginning, and I still love it today."

"If you love your work, you'll be out there everyday trying to do it the best you possibly can, and pretty soon everybody around you will catch the passion from you - like a fever."

Focus on Customers and Staff

"The secret to successful retailing is to give your customers what they want."

"Our philosophy of putting the customer ahead of everything else."

"Everything we've done since we started Wal-Mart has been devoted to this idea that the customer is our boss."

"We exist to provide value to our customers, which means that in addition to quality and service, we have to save them money."

"The idea was simple, when customers thought of Wal-Mart, they should think of low prices and satisfaction guaranteed."

"Exceed your customers' expectations. If you do, they'll come back over and over. Give them what they want and a little more. Let them know you appreciate them."

"I'll tell you this; those companies out there who aren't thinking about the customer and focusing on the customers' interest are just going to get lost in the shuffle - if they haven't already."

"I read in some trade publication not long ago that of the strip of 100 discounters who were in business in 1976, 76 of them have disappeared. I started thinking about what really brought them down. It all boils down to not taking care of their customers, not minding their stores, not having folks in their stores with good attitudes, and that was because they never really even tried to take care of their own people. If you want people in the stores to take care of the customers, you have to make sure you're taking care of the people in the stores. That's the most important single ingredient of Wal-Mart."

"As much as we love to talk about all the elements of Wal-Mart's success - merchandising, distribution, technology, market saturation, real estate strategy - the truth is none of that is the real secret to our unbelievable prosperity. What has carried this company so far so fast is the relationship that we, the managers, have been able to enjoy with our associates. By 'associates' we mean those employees out in the stores and in the distribution centres and on the trucks who generally earn an hourly wage for all their hard work. Our relationship with the associates is a partnership in the truest sense. It's the only reason our company has been able to consistently outperform the competition - and even our own expectations."

"The more you share profits with your associates - whether it's in salaries or incentives or bonuses or stock discounts - the more profit will accrue to the company. Why? Because the way management treats the associates is exactly how associates will then treat the customers. And if the associates treat the customers well, the customers will return again and again, and that is where the real profit in this business lies, not in trying to drag strangers into your stores for one-time purchase based on splashy sales or expensive advertising. Satisfied, loyal, repeat customers are at the heart of Wal-Mart's spectacular profit margins, and those customers are loyal to us because our associates treat them better than salespeople in other stores do. So in the whole Wal-Mart scheme of things, the most important contact ever made is between the associate in the store and the customer."

"I didn't catch on to that idea for quite a while. In fact, the biggest single regret in my whole business career is that we didn't include our associates in the initial managers-only profit-sharing plan when we took the company public in 1970."

"Lip service won't make a real partnership - not even with profit sharing. These days, the real challenge for managers in a business like ours is to become what we call servant leaders. And when we do, the team - the manager and the associates - can accomplish anything."

"The decision .. to commit ourselves to giving the associates more equitable treatment in the company, was without a doubt the single smartest move we ever made at Wal-Mart."

"Today, more than 80% of our associates own Wal-Mart stock, either through profit sharing or on their own, and personally I figure most of the other 20% either haven't qualified for profit sharing, or haven't been with us long enough to catch on. Over the years, we've also had a variety of incentive and bonus plans to keep every associate involved in the business as partners."

"One simple thing puts it all together: Appreciation. All of us like praise. So what we try to practice in our company is to look for things to praise. look for things that are going right. We want to let our folks know when they are doing something outstanding, and let them know they are important to us."

"We want our associates to know and feel how much we, as managers and major shareholders, appreciate everything they are doing to make Wal-Mart the great company it is."

"As long as we're managing our company well, as long as we take care of our people and our customers, keep our eye on those fundamentals, we are going to be successful."

Experiment & Keep Innovating

"It didn't take me long to start experimenting - that's just the way I am and have always been."

"We paid absolutely no attention whatsoever to the way things were supposed to be done, you know, the way the rules of retail said it had to be done."

"I think my constant fiddling and meddling with the status quo may have been one off any biggest contributions to the later success of Wal-Mart."

"I've always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they've been."

"Most folks were pretty skeptical of the whole [Walmart] concept. Walmart was just another one of Sam's crazy ideas. It was totally unproven at the time, but it was really what we were doing all along; experimenting, trying to do something different, educating ourselves as to what was going on in the retail industry and trying to stay ahead of those trends."

"We were probably ten years ahead of most other retailers in scouting locations from the air, and we got a lot of great ones that way. From up in the air we could check out traffic flows, see which way cities and towns were growing, and evaluate the location of the competition - if there was any."

"Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find a niche by going in exactly the opposite direction."

Empower People

"My role has been to pick good people and give them the maximum authority and responsibility."

"You've got to give folks responsibility, you've got to trust them, and then you've got to check on them."

"We were among the first in our industry with the idea of empowering our associates by running the business as an open book."

"Sharing information and responsibility is a key to any partnership. It makes people feel responsible and involved, and as we've gotten bigger we've really had to accept sharing a lot of our numbers with the rest of the world as a consequence of sticking by our philosophy."

"At our size today, there's all sorts of pressure to regiment and standardise and operate as a centrally driven chain, where everything is decided on high and passed down to the stores. In a system like that, there's absolutely no room for creativity, no place for the maverick merchant that I was in the early days of the Ben Franklin [store], no place for the entrepreneur or the promoter."

"The bigger we get as a company, the more important it becomes for us to shift responsibility and authority toward the front lines, toward that department manager who's stocking the shelves and talking to the customer."

"Our buyers have much more responsibility for deciding what's carried in our stores than buyers at most other companies."

"We all worked together, but each of them [managers] had lots of freedom to try all kinds of crazy things themselves."

Be Optimistic & Accept Mistakes

"It's not just corny saying that you can make a positive out of most any negative if you work at it hard enough. I've always thought of problems as challenges."

"When somebody made a bad mistake - whether it was myself or anybody else - we talked about it, admitted it, tried to figure out how to correct it, and then moved on to the next day's work."

Imitate

"Most everything I've done I've copied from somebody else."

"I guess I've stolen - I actually prefer the word 'borrowed' - as many ideas from Sol Price as from anybody else in the business."

Listen, Remain Open Minded & Decisions at the Edge

"[Sam Walton] was always open to suggestions, and that's one reason he's been such a success." Claude Harris

"I don't like to go to the [management] meeting and hear about just the good things that are happening. I like to hear what our weakness are, where we aren't doing as well as we should and why. I like to see problems come up and hear suggestions as to how it can be corrected."

"We're always looking for new ways to encourage our associates out in the stores to push their ideas up through the system."

"Listen to everyone in your company. And figure out ways to get them talking. The folks on the front lines - the ones who actually talk to the customer - are the ones who really know what's going on out there. You'd better find out what they know. This really is what total quality is all about. To push responsibility down in your organisation, and to force good ideas to bubble up within it, you must listen to what your associates are trying to tell you."

"Great ideas come from everywhere if you just listen and look for them. You never know who is going to have great ideas."

Hard Work

Working weekends; it's just something you have to do if you want to be successful in the retail business."

"Four-thirty [am] wouldn't be all that unusual a time for me to get started down at the office."

Competition

"I was visiting stores all the time, and I still do today."

"I ran the country studying the discounting concept, visiting every store and company headquarters I could find."

"Some folks no doubt figured we were a little fly-by-night - you know, in the discount business today but out selling cars or swampland tomorrow. I think that misunderstanding worked to our advantage for a long time, and enabled Wal-Mart to fly under everybody's radar until we were too far along to catch."

"We would be putting in fifty stores a year, when most of our [competitive] group would be trying to start three, four, five or six a year. It always confounded them."

"[The competition] didn't really commit to discounting. They held on to their old variety concept stores too long. They were so accustomed to getting their 45% mark-up, they never let go. It was hard for them to take a blouse they'd been selling for $8.00, and sell it for $5.00, and only make 30%. With our low costs, our low expense structures, and our low prices, we were ending an era in the heartland. We shut the door on variety store thinking."

"I remember [Sam Walton] saying over and over again; go in and check our competition. Check everyone who is our competition. And don't look for the bad. Look for the good." Charlie Cate

"I like to keep everybody guessing. I don't want our competitors getting too comfortable with feeling they can predict what we're going to do next. And I don't want our own executives feeling that way either. It's part of my strong feeling for the need for constant change, for keeping people a little off balance."

"Competition is actually the reason I love retailing so much.. There is always a challenger coming along .. To stay ahead of those challengers, we have to keep changing and looking back over our shoulder and planning ahead."

"So far none of our competitors has yet been able to operate on the volume that we do as efficiently as we do. They haven't been able to get their expense structure as low as ours, and they haven't been able to get their associates to do all those extra things for their customers that our do routinely; greeting them, smiling at them, helping them, thanking them."

Touch the Business

"Because I have spent as much time as I could out where it counts, in the stores, seeing if we're doing the job we should be, it has put a very heavy load on all our executives, especially since I expect them to get out in the stores too."

"I always tried to maintain a sense of hands-on, personal supervision - usually flying around to take a look at our stores on a regular basis."

"A computer is not - and never will be - a substitute for getting out in your stores and learning what's going on. In other words, a computer can tell you down to the dime what you've sold. But it can never tell you how much you could have sold."

"At Wal-Mart we are absolute fanatics about our managers and buyers getting off their chairs in Bentonville and getting out into those stores."

"The really valuable intelligence that surfaces in these [management] sessions is what everybody has brought back from the stores."

"Visiting the stores and listening to our folks was one of the most valuable uses of my time as an executive. Our best ideas usually do come from the folks in the stores. Period."

"For a long, long time Sam would show up regularly in the drivers' break room at 4am with a bunch of doughnuts and just sit there for a couple of hours talking to them. He grilled them. 'What are you seeing at the stores?' 'Have you been to that store lately?' 'Is it getting better?' It makes sense. The drivers see more stores every week than anybody else in this company. And I think what Sam likes about them is that they're not like a lot of managers. They don't care who you are. They'll tell you what they really think." Lee Scott

Scale

"The efficiencies and economies of scale we realise from our distribution system give us one of our greatest competitive advantages."

"When you own and manage your distribution and logistics channel, you have a great competitive advantage over companies that rely on third-party suppliers."

Culture

"A strong corporate culture with its own unique personality, on top of the profit-sharing partnership we've created, gives us a pretty sharp competitive edge."

"We've always tried to install in our folks the idea that we at Walmart have our own way of doing things. It may be different, and it may take some folks a while to adjust to it at first. But it's straight and honest and basically pretty simple to figure out if you want to. And whether or not the folks want to accomodate us, we pretty much stick to what we believe in because it's proven to be very, very successful."

"I enjoyed doing what I was doing so much and seeing the thing grow and develop, and seeing our associates and partners do so well, that I never could quit."

"If you're committed to the Walmart partnership and it's core values, the culture encourages you to think of all sorts of ideas that break the mood and fight monotony."

"We and the associates and the management like to do things together that contribute to the community and make them feel like a team, even if they don't directly relate to selling or promoting our merchandise."

"The bigger Wal-Mart gets, the more essential it is we think small. Because that's how we have become a huge corporation. - by not acting like one."

Tone at the Top

"A lot of people think it's crazy of me to fly coach whenever I go on a commercial flight, and maybe I do it a little bit. But I feel like it's up to me as a leader to set an example. It's not fair for me to ride one way and ask everybody else to ride another way. The minute you do that, you start building resentment, and your whole team idea begins to strain at the seams."

"We as a family have bent over backwards not to take advantage of Walmart, not to press our ownership unfairly, and everybody in the company knows it."

Drive Win-Win Relationships

"We're co-operating with our big vendors these days at the highest levels."

"We can get beyond a lot of our old adversarial relationships and establish win-win partnerships with our suppliers and our workers, which will leave us with more energy and talent to focus on the important thing, meeting the needs of our customers. "

"In the future, free enterprise is going to have to be done well - which means it benefits the workers, the stock holders, the communities, and of course, management, which must adopt a philosophy of servant leadership."

"You may have trouble believing it, but over time we've tested the old saying, it has paid off in spades: the more you give, the more you get."

Harness Technology

"We as a company have been ahead of most other retailers in investing in sophisticated equipments and technology."

"Without the computer, Sam Walton could not have done what he's done. He could not have built a retailing empire the size of what he's built, the way he built it. He's done a lot of other things right, too, but he could not have done it without the computer. It would have been impossible." Abe Marks

Accept and Adapt to Change

"To succeed in this world you have to change all the time."

"You can't keep doing what works one time, because everything around you is always changing. To succeed, you have to stay out in front of that change."

"I've made it my own personal mission to ensure that constant change is a vital part of Wal-Marts culture itself. I've forced change - sometimes for change's sake alone - at every turn in our company's development. In fact, I think one of the greatest strengths of Wal-Mart's ingrained culture is its ability to drop everything and turn on a dime."

"Just like everybody else, in order to survive, we need to keep changing the things we do."

"If American business is going to prevail, and be competitive, we're going to have to get accustomed to the idea that business conditions change, and that survivors have to adapt to this changing conditions. Business is a competitive endeavour, and job security lasts only as long as the customer is satisfied. Nobody owes anybody else a living."

"A whole lot has changed about the retailing business in the forty-seven years we've been in it - including some of my theories. We've changed our minds about some significant things along the way and adopted some new principles. But most of the values and the rules and the techniques we've relied on have stayed the same the whole way."

Humility

"If we ever get carried away with how important we are because we're a great big $50b chain - instead of one store in Blytheville, Arkansas, or McComb, Mississippi, or Oak Ridge, Tennessee - then you probably can close the book on us."

"A lot of bureaucracy is really the product of some empire builder's ego. Some folks have a tendency to build big staffs around them to emphasise their own importance, and we don't need any of that at Wal-Mart. If you're not seeing the customer, or supporting the folks who do, we don't need you."

Lollapalooza

"One thing you'll notice if you spend very much time talking with Sam about Wal-Mart's success. He's always saying things like ‘This was the key to the whole thing.' or That was our real secret.' He knows as well as anyone that there wasn't any magic formula. A lot of different things made it work, and in one day's time he may cite all of them as the key' or the 'secret.' What's amazing is that for almost fifty years he's managed to focus on all of them at once all the time. That's his real secret.” David Glass

Team Work

“If you want to build an enterprise of any size at all, it almost goes without saying that you absolutely must create a team of people who work together and give real meaning to that overused word ‘team-work.’ To me, that's more the goal of the whole thing, rather than some way to get there.”

Celebrate and Have Fun

“Celebrate your successes. Find some humor in your failures. Don't take yourself so seriously. Loosen up: and everybody around you will loosen up. Have fun. Show enthusiasm-always.”

Investors and the Long Term 

"I believe the folks who have done the best with Wal-Mart stock are those who studied the company, who have understood our strengths and our management approach, and who, like me, have just decided to invest with us for the long run."

“If I were a stockholder of Wal-Mart, or considering becoming one, I'd go into ten Wal-Mart stores and ask the folks working there, "How do you feel? How's the company treating you?" Their answers would tell me much of what I need to know."

"As companies get large, with a broader following of investors, it becomes awfully tempting to get into that jet and go up to Detroit or Chicago or New York and speak to bankers and the people who own your stock. But since we got our stock jump-started in the beginning, I feel like our time is better spent with people in the stores, rather than off selling the company to outsiders. I don't think any amount of public relations experts or speeches in New York or Boston means a darn thing to the value of the stock over the long haul. I think you get what you're worth."

"As business leaders, we absolutely cannot afford to get all caught up in trying to meet the goals that some retail analyst or financial institution in New York sets for us on a team-year plan spit out of a computer that somebody set to compound at such-and such rate. If we do that, we take our eye off the ball."

"If we fail to live up to somebody's hypothetical projection for what we should be doing, I don't care. It may knock our stock back a little, but we're in it for the long run. We couldn't care less about what is forecast or what the market says we ought to do. If we listened very seriously to that sort of stuff, we never would have gone into small-town discounting in the first place."

Postscript: Amazon

While Buffett initially missed Wal-Mart, he took a position in 2005. In 2017, Buffett exited the position. The Internet had changed shoppers' preferences and eroded the commanding influence Wal-Mart had over its suppliers. A new competitor also emerged.

Unencumbered by store costs and a conventional retailers mindset, Amazon.com harnessed technology to lower costs, increase selection and convenience and developed a pact with shareholders to accept limited profitability in return for a long term competitive advantage.  

“Walmart’s a fabulous company. What Sam Walton’s and his successors did is one of the great stories of American business. I think retailing is too tough for me – just generally. We bought a department store in 1966 and I got my head handed to me. I bought Tesco in the UK and I got my head handed to me. Retailing is very tough and I think the on-line thing is very hard to figure out. I think Amazon in particular is an entity that’s gonna have everyone in their sights, and they've got delighted customers and it's extraordinary what they’ve accomplished. That is a tough, tough competitive force. Now Walmart is pushing forward online themselves and have all kind of strengths but I thought I’d look for an easier game.”  Warren Buffett 2017

Walmart Share Price vs Amazon - 1972 Normalised Source: Bloomberg

Amazon Share Price vs Dow Jones vs Walmart - 1998 Normalised Source:Bloomberg

Summary

Sam Walton's incredible story illuminates the characteristics that combined to create a compounding machine. They have a relentless focus on the customer and a competitive edge derived from: distribution scale, embracing counter-parties, empowering employees, experimentation driving innovation, first mover advantages and corporate culture. And when combined with a large runway for sales, shareholder returns were phenomenal.

The history of Wal-Mart also highlights the brutality of capitalism. Change is inevitable. No business is forever. Trees don't grow to the sky. In 2015, after just two decades, Amazon’s value bypassed that of Wal-Mart. Ironically, Sam Walton ended his memoir contemplating whether there could be another Walmart.

"My answer is of course it could happen again. Somewhere out there right now there's someone - probably hundreds of thousands of someones - with good enough ideas to go all the way. It will be done again, over and over, providing that someone wants it badly enough to do what it takes to get there. It's all a matter of attitude and the capacity to constantly study and question the management of the business." Sam Walton

As Walton had copied others, Amazon's Jeff Bezos copied Walton. According to Brad Stone's book, 'The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon', Bezos studied the lessons of Walton and weaved them into the fabric of Amazon. 

Notwithstanding, Sam Walton's legacy of prioritising the customer, continuous innovation, technology embracement, and developing win-win relationships remains enduring. As Bezos became the Sam Walton of the 21st Century, the next Bezos maybe out there now.

Learn more with us on Twitter: @mastersinvest

TERMS OF USE: DISCLAIMER

Further Reading: 

MASTER CEO'S

Ray Kroc - McDonalds

Howard Schultz - Starbucks

Ken Iverson - Nucor

Bernie Marcus - Home Depot

Sol Price - The Price Club

Jim Sinegal - Costco

Sam Walton - Walmart

Jeff Bezos - Amazon

Karl Albrecht - Aldi

Arthur Blank - Home Depot

Yvon Chouinard - Patagonia

Bob Iger - Disney Corporation

Herb Kelleher - Southwest Airlines

Charles Koch - Koch Industries

Les Schwab - Les Schwab Tires

Charles Schwab - Charles Schwab Co

Ron Shaich - Panera Bread

Lynsi Snyder - IN-N-OUT Burger

Ed Catmull - Pixar

Leonard Lauder - Estée Lauder

Willis Johnson - Copart

Don Keough - Coca-Cola

Jamie Dimon - JP Morgan

Hunter Harrison - Railroader

Julian Richer - Richer Sounds

Bruce Halle Discount Tire

Dick Erickson - Sun Tires

Staying Curious

Are you a curious person? Do you always ask questions, determinedly seek out new information or continually want to know why? If there is one thing the Investment Masters seem to agree on, it's that you don't need a sky-high IQ or advanced mathematical skills to be a successful investor. What you do need is curiosity. And curiosity is an unbelievably powerful tool. Some of the most famous thinkers and innovators in human history (think DaVinci, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison and Einstein, to name but a few) have had one simple thing in common - curiosity. Einstein himself attributes curiosity to his success: 'I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious." 

Curiosity can be described as the drive that brings learners to knowledge. Curiosity is about being aware and open, checking things out, experimenting, and interacting within one's surroundings. Other physical manifestations include observing, reading, wondering, thinking and questioning.

Fostering curiosity can often provide an edge the market has overlooked. It can lead to new ideas and provide insights for further analysis. We know the Investment Masters are all voracious readers. What you may not know is they read widely; newspapers, annual reports, trade magazines, history books, business books, biographies; basically anything they can get their hands to accumulate large, mental databases of information.

"My policy [is] reading every annual report in sight that can further my knowledge about anything." Warren Buffett

"Be widely read and curious.” Ed Thorp

“You can’t have enough curiosity.” Todd Combs

“Being a successful investor you need to be hungry, intellectually curious, interested, read all the time.” Ted Weschler

“[Investing] requires endless curiosity, the relentless pursuit of additional information, the raising of questions, and the search for answers.” Seth Klarman

"Curiosity is the engine of civilization. If I were to elaborate it would be to say read, read, read, and don't forget to talk to people, really talk, listening with attention and having conversations, on whatever topic, that are an exchange of thoughts. Keep the reading broad, beyond just the professional. This helps to develop one's sense of perspective in all matters." Peter Cundill

“My whole life I’ve been a reader. I’m curious; I want to know how things work. Even more importantly I want to know what is going to happen. And what’s going to happen is often related to what has happened. I read history, I read psychology, I read finance and business. I read a lot of biographies. I’m drawn to anything that makes me a better person, makes me a better investor and makes me a better philanthropist or just makes me more knowledgeable about the world.” Seth Klarman

“I learn and I’m curious about all businesses. That’s why when opportunities come, within a few seconds you can smell it. How can you develop that smell? The only way to really do that is just reading page after page.” Li Lu

“I’m interested in millions of things. I’m on the verge of Curious George sometimes. I’m just curious about everything.” Pierre Lagrange

"I have an insatiable curiosity, and as a kid I thrived on wandering around my Chicago neighborhood on my own.” Sam Zell

Often they'll stumble on a snippet of information that provides inspiration for further analysis.

“Who knows when some little fact stored in the back of your mind pops up and really does make a difference.” Warren Buffett

When Buffett reads annual reports he's seeking as much information as he can about the person running the business and how they think about what's really going on in the business. At the 1996 Berkshire meeting Buffett expanded on the idea:

"What I’m trying to do as I read [annual reports], I like to understand just generally what’s going on in all kinds of businesses. If we own stock in a company and in an industry, and there are eight other companies that are in the same industry, I want to own or be on the mailing list for the reports for the other eight, because I can’t understand how my company is doing unless I understand what the other eight are doing. I want to have the perspective of, in terms of market share, what’s going on in the business or their margins or the trend of margins, all kinds of things. If I’m thinking about investing in a specific company, I try to size up their business and the people that are running it. And over the years, I have found reading a lot of reports to be quite useful in terms of making business decisions at Berkshire."

"The way you learn about businesses is by absorbing information about them, thinking, deciding what counts and what doesn’t count, relating one thing to another. And, you know, that’s the job. And you can’t get that by looking at a bunch of little numbers on a chart bobbing up and down about a — or reading, you know, market commentary and periodicals or anything of the sort. That just won’t do it. You’ve got to understand the businesses. That’s where it all begins and ends." Warren Buffett

Buffett is curious; he's a learning machine. Alice Schroeder, Buffett's biographer, explains;

"[Warren] expends a lot of energy checking out details and ferreting out nuggets of information, way beyond the balance sheet. He would go back and look at the company's history in depth for decades. He used to pay people to attend shareholder meetings and ask questions for him. He checked out the personal lives of people who ran companies he invested in. He wanted to know about their financial status, their personal habits, what motivated them. He behaves like an investigative journalist. All this stuff about flipping through Moody's Manual's picking stocks, it was a screen for him, but he didn't stop there." Alice Schroeder

It's unlikely you'll find the information you need without asking questions. I'm often amazed when I attend company briefings that investment managers don't ask any questions. I always try to come from the angle that there are no stupid questions.

“There are no foolish questions and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions.” Charles Proteus Steinmetz

“Always ask questions and never be afraid to do so. The only dumb question is the one you do not ask.” Jim Rogers

"[It's important] not to be afraid to be ignorant and ask questions." Jim Leitner

“There is no poor question to ask, and we always want to know more.” John Britton

“The smart ones ask when they don’t know. And sometimes, when they do.” Malcolm Forbes

"I spend almost my entire day listening to other people, I ask questions, I probe, I raise possibilities." Sam Zell

Most companies presentations focus on what they think investors want to hear, the positives. Only by asking questions can you address areas of likely concern. Directed questions can facilitate learning and understanding and give you the confidence to do the right thing in times of uncertainty. Be attentive and ask questions.

"You have to be very careful to look hard at what’s really happening. You know, as Yogi said, 'You can observe a lot just by looking.'” Warren Buffett

"If you want to get smart, the question you’ve got to keep asking is: Why? Why? Why? Why?" Charlie Munger

"You just keep asking questions." Warren Buffett

If you find a business with characteristics that defy expectations, it is vitally important to determine how they have been achieved. And the answer to that question starts with a question.

“Well, I love [the] example of State Farm. I mean, the idea of picking some extreme example and asking my favorite question, which is 'what in hell is going on here?'; that is the way to wisdom in this world.” Charlie Munger

It's little wonder a hallmark of the Investment Masters is curiosity.

"We made some of our luck by being curious and seeking wisdom, and we certainly recommend that to anybody else." Charlie Munger

"You have to have a real curiosity about it. I mean, you — I don’t think you can do it because your mother’s telling you to do it, or something of the sort. I think you — it really has to turn you on." Warren Buffett

“There are many paths to investment success but deep curiosity is a prerequisite.” Jake Rosser

“A broad curiosity blended with some contrarianism and a sense of what makes you money is the right combination of traits.” Seth Klarman

"People who are curious are going to be better investors and better stewards of others’ money. If there’s no curiosity, you’re basically doing something that’s already been done by someone else." Henry Kravis

“Curiosity, hard work and more than a little luck goes a long way.” Chuck Akre

“I’m curious; I want to know how things work. Even more importantly I want to know what is going to happen.” Seth Klarman

“You’ve got to be extremely intellectually curious.” Clint Carlson

“It’s the best business in the world for those who are curious and emotionally resilient”. Yen Liow

“Imagination and curiosity are what’s hugely important. We’ve discovered things over the years purely by being curious and continuing to keep involved in the search process to find these exceptional businesses.” Chuck Akre

"If you have a passionate interest in knowing why things are happening, you always are trying to figure out the world in terms of why is this happening or why is this not happening, that cast of mind, kept over long periods, gradually improves your ability to cope with reality. And if you don’t have that cast of mind, I think you’re destined, probably, for failure, even if you’ve got a pretty high IQ." Charlie Munger

“Good ideas generally come from individual curiosity.” Michael McConnell

“I’m a curious guy.” Paul Singer

“The great thing about investing is you get to cultivate your curiosity about the world at large.” Jake Rosser

“I generally find the best investors are very open and have almost a child-like curiosity about how everything works. They don’t come to the table with preconceived notions.” Oliver Kratz

"You have to keep at it with a lot of curiosity for a long, long time." Charlie Munger

“You have to be naturally interested in interested and curious about everything – any kind of businesses, politics, science, technology, humanities, history, poetry, literature, everything really effects your business. It will help you. And then occasionally you will find a few insights out of those studies that will give you tremendous opportunities that other people couldn’t think of.” Li Lu

"We like people who are intellectually curious. I don't see how you can wise up over time if you aren't working at it." Charlie Munger

“[You] must have a true passion for investing, a genuine curiosity about businesses, and the ability to get the details right while still seeing the big picture.” Dan Davidowitz

“Most of our investment professionals begin their career on Baillie Gifford’s graduate training programme and few come from a traditional finance education. We value curious thinkers willing to contemplate an uncertain future.” Baillie Gifford

Even better, the results from asking questions, digging deeper, being attentive, observing anomalies and testing ideas are unlikely to be competed away by computer systems. It is the qualitative factors rather than quantitative factors that often explain extraordinary company results.

“There are a lot of things that involve thinking that artificial intelligence isn’t going to find.” Ed Thorp

"Curiosity is an inherent kind of arbitrage that no amount of computer technology can overcome." Alice Schroeder

“Computers will never, in my opinion, replace the judgement and intellect, and the ability to connect the dots, that people do.” Ken Griffin

In his latest letter, Oaktree's Howard Marks surmised a similar train of thought...

"Computers can do an unmatched job dealing with the things that can be counted: things that are quantitative and objective. But many other things – qualitative, subjective things – count for a great deal, and I doubt computers can do what the very best investors do:

• Can they sit down with a CEO and figure out whether he’s the next Steve Jobs?

• Can they listen to a bunch of venture capital pitches and know which is the next Amazon?

• Can they look at several new buildings and tell which one will attract the most tenants?

• Can they predict the outcome of a bankruptcy reorganization where the parties may have motivations other than economic maximization?

The greatest investors aren’t necessarily better than others at arithmetic, accounting or finance; their main advantage is that they see merit in qualitative attributes and/or in the long run that average investors miss.  And if computers miss them too, I doubt the best few percent of investors will be retired anytime soon." Howard Marks

It's little wonder Ray Dalio places curiosity at the top of the list of priorities he looks for when hiring someone to work at Bridgewater.

"[I look for the] five Cs—character, curiosity, creativity, common-sense, and consideration." Ray Dalio

Curiosity is a vital tool for investors. In fact it may be the most vital. We need information to make our investment decisions, and Munger's view that you have to keep asking 'why?' is one of the simplest ways to get there. I once read that the CEO of Toyota had a belief that to get to the heart or root of any problem, you had to ask 'why?' seven times. And that makes sense. If we are curious, and really want to know something, we should never stop seeking information and we should never stop asking that most simplest of questions. Just think what would have happened had Thomas Edison not been curious. Or Isaac Newton, or Henry Ford. Or Marie Curie or DaVinci for that matter.  Would we possess their incredible inventions or innovations today?

So never stop being curious. "Why?" I hear you say. Because quite simply it makes all the difference in the world.

Learn more with us on Twitter: @mastersinvest

TERMS OF USE: DISCLAIMER

Culture, Enculturation and the Cult of Home Depot

Have you heard the story about the two guys who were fired from their jobs running a US hardware chain, who then went on to build a hardware powerhouse that delivered investor returns that made the S&P500 and even Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway look pedestrian? That's right, I'm talking about Home Depot, which since inception has been an astounding compounding machine. 

Like Buffett himself, Home Depot's co-founders, Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank, have shared the secrets to their success in the 1999 book 'Built from Scratch - How a Couple of Regular Guys Grew the Home Depot from Nothing to $30b'. Home Depot turned the hardware industry upside down. They introduced big box stores which utilised high volume turnover and direct product sourcing to offer unbeatable prices, they encultured and empowered their staff to harvest customer relationships and they grew the market for do-it-yourselfers by teaching their customers the needed skills to save money. Fast forward to today and Home Depot's market capitalisation is an astonishing $229b!

The history of retailing is filled with once-great companies that disappeared off the face of the earth. It's one of the toughest industries to survive in, let alone prosper, given the minimal barriers to entry, changing customers demands and ruthless competition.

"Retailing is a tough, tough business, partly because your competitors are always attempting and very frequently successfully attempting to copy anything you do that's working. And so the world keeps moving. It's hard to establish a permanent moat that your competitor can't cross." Warren Buffett

In light of the above, it's should come as no surprise that the defining characteristic underpinning Home Depot's success is Culture. In recent posts we've learnt the importance of culture and you'll see how Marcus and Blank have leveraged it to phenomenal success. 

Buffett has long advised studying great businesses as case studies to improve one's investment skills.  'Built from Scratch' is one of the most enlightening business books I've had the pleasure to read. It tells the tale of what the two founders learned about customers, associates, competitors, growing a business, building a brand, and many other topics everyone in business needs to know. You won't find anything in the way of margin guidance, inventory turns, staffing ratios or comparable store sales; all that stuff that tends to fill analyst models. This is all qualitative stuff. 

Below you'll find some some of my favourite passages from the book, nuggets of wisdom that can help you frame the questions you ask and worthwhile observations in your own quest to find compounding machines. 

Push Boundaries

"We were always pushing boundaries beyond where our industry's conventional wisdom suggested we could go."

"No one believed we could do it, and very few people trusted our judgement."

Culture

"Ten years ago, The Home Depot advertised stores that were bigger than two and a half football fields. That was a point of difference. Today, who isn't bigger than two and a half football fields? We also said we carried more than 30,000 items. That was a point of difference. Well, who doesn't have more than 30,000 items today? And who doesn't have low-price guarantee? If all those things have become a commodity, why is The Home Depot still so successful? It is the culture of the people."

"The numbers are important as a measure of our success. But we've attained them because of a culture that is agile and flexible enough to change direction as quickly as events demand it."

"You can copy a Black & Decker drill and sell it for the same price that we do, but you can't copy The Home Depot culture. We think we're very difficult to emulate without believing in the same values that we do."

"Another important issue for us in considering an acquisition is culture. If ours is not akin to what we're acquiring, it represents a major problem. Is what they believe in similar to what we believe in? If not, we're going to have to work very hard to make it fit, and it may not be worth it. That's why we generally prefer to build from within."

Home Depot Share Price vs S&P500 and Berkshire Hathaway. Source: Bloomberg

Competitors

"The Home Depot is far ahead of Lowe's in every major measurement of success. We produce on average about 40 percent more volume out of our big boxes than they do at a 40 percent greater rate of profitability."

"When you only copy somebody and don't really understand why they're doing what they're doing, you're never going to be as good as the original. That's Lowe's problem vis-a-vis The Home Depot. They copy almost everything we do, from store design to marketing. But the reason they still only achieve about 60 percent of our volume is that they don't understand the essence of what we do: take care of the customers."

"The industry knew we were edging closer and closer to them but they never prepared for us. They all knew that we would eventually present a direct threat, but they couldn't think in terms other than the way they had for decades."

"The way we did business was hard for old-timers to understand. They couldn't understand sales volume and velocity as opposed to gross margin. Their key was selling less at a higher price; ours was selling more at a lower price. They couldn't understand our dynamics or the numbers."

"The fact we were able to design our company on a clean sheet of paper and weren't hampered by years of tradition and years of people being committed to a certain sort of business form played to our advantage with both customers and the industry."

The Customer

"Whatever it takes, serve the customer."

"Nobody could compete with us on price."

"Never, ever take the customer for granted."

"The key is not to make the sale. The key is to cultivate the customer."

"We believe in doing more than customer service. We call it customer cultivation. If you cultivate it will bear more fruit."

"Every business is there to please the customer."

"One of our values: caring for the customer. Care for them today and they'll be back tomorrow."

"We don't just develop an intellectual relationship with our customers and associates. There also needs to be a tight emotional bond. At the end of the day, we're in the people business. And people need bonds with each other."

"The reason we have our business is because customers trust us."

"We did not for one minute take the customers coming own our store for granted. We really wanted them back, and our entire service culture developed from that. It wasn't some lofty idea written by out-of-town consultants in a policy book nobody read. It was necessary."

"The job of the people working in the stores [is] to do whatever it takes to make customers happy."

"We are in the business not to destroy a competitor but to serve the customer. If, as a result of that, we end up hurting a competitor, that is fine, but it can't be our focus. Our focus has to be on the customer. The truth of the matter is, we have to win the customer. We don't have to beat the competitor, we have to win the customer."

"The way to win the hearts and minds of customers is with merchandise, price comparisons, and sufficient stock. But that is the mechanical part of the business. We win their hearts and their minds with our people."

"If I ever saw an associate point a customer toward what he or she needed three aisles over, I would threaten to bite that associate's finger. You won't even see aisle numbers in our stores. There is not a retailer on the face of the globe with 1,000,000 square foot stores other than Home Depot without some aisle numbers. Why? Well, if we had aisle numbers, when a customer asks, "Do you know where I can find this widget?" it would be very easy for our associates to point and say, "aisle eight." If there are no aisle numbers, the employee has to say, "Let's take a walk and we'll find it together.""

"Our people were already instructing weekend warriors in an informal way. Putting on How-To-Clinics became a way of formalising the teaching and making it available to all of our customers and further cultivating their interest in do-it-yourself home improvement. We saw people who were all thumbs before they came into The Home Depot go on to do room additions or build their own homes. That's a big part of how we created demand that never existed before."

"We gave customers the knowledge to do it themselves at the right price. Today, you could install a Mills Pride kitchen yourself for $3,000 that would have cost you $25,000 and the services of a pro twenty years ago."

"Home Depot is and always will be evolving to find new and better or additional ways to serve our customers."

People

"Why have I been successful my whole life? Because I've always surrounded myself with people who are better than I am."

"The company didn't blossom from miracles. It came from our instincts, knowing whom to do business with and whom to avoid."

"The single most important reason for the Home Depot's success is our effort to take care of associates."

"You can teach anyone about a drill, but you can't teach people how to smile and be kind to other people."

"We learned that love and compassion do a hell of a lot more than just buying people."

"Hire the best people. Payroll is not an expense to us; it's an investment." 

"The people at the stores are the most important - after customers - because they interface with the customer, and since Bernie and I really couldn't begin to tell you how to wire a house, we are the least important when it comes to satisfying a customer."

"Everyone who works at the Home Depot is an associate of Bernie and me."

"[Sales Associates] are the heroes of the company, the ones who create a cult among our customers. We're trying to make our customers bleed orange."

"We value what the salesperson on the store floor says just as much - sometimes more - than what a district manager says, if they're right. That's because the salesperson touches the customer more."

"We also put a larger percentage of our overall sales back into store payroll, putting more people on the sales floor than anyone else."

"We're only as good as our people - especially the men and women working in our stores. If the front line isn't absolutely committed to the cause we can't win."

"Setting the stores gives our people ownership. We don't own these stores; they do."

"We pay people what they are worth. That is the cornerstone of the culture of the company."

"When it comes to people, you must look past the numbers, past the resumes, and look at their heart and soul. And you must treat people as you would want to be treated."

"One of our values is caring for our people. If we expect them to take care of our customers, we've got to take care of our associates." 

"Our theory has always been that if we were going to get rich, we wanted our associates to get rich with us. If we were going to benefit, they were going to benefit as well. That has always been a part of our philosophy."

"Everyone has a stake in the company that goes beyond earning a day's wage. Associates have a real vested interest in cultivating customers and building lifelong relationships with them."

"Our associate turnover is very low for the home improvement industry."

"Our competitive advantage is having knowledgeable salespeople."

"As good as we are on price, that is never the most important decision. More important is product and project knowledge."

"Our Atlanta Training Center teaches new and existing store managers and district managers how and why our culture, philosophy and leadership approach works."

"What makes us so different from anyone else in our industry is that we take the inverted management structure so seriously."

"Bernie and I believe it's all about trust. With the right value system and the right knowledge to do their job, people can be trusted to make the right decisions. If you can operate with that kind of trust, you don't have to micromanage. And people will do more good for the company than anyone could ever dictate."

"There is a cultural adjustment that must take place for anyone to be valuable to this company."

Head Office

"The sign at the front entrance of our main offices in Atlanta says "Store Support Center" Not "World Headquarters." It is not a corporate ivory tower. It is truly the store support center. We want everybody in this building to know that we are here to support the stores." 

"Everyone's career depends on how the associates in the stores function. If the people in the Store Support Centre or divisional offices don't feel like they are selling a product to customers in the stores, then they are part of a bureaucracy, and they will stymie the stories, not help them."

"We don't care what your job is. What have you done to sell a product to our customers? What have you done to bring a customer into our stores? What have you done to make a manufacturer want to sell to our company? You have a role, and if you don't think you do, you don't belong here. If you don't know what that role is, you need to find out."

Decentralisation and Empowerment

"Our store managers and their assistant managers have more operating and decision-making leeway than in any other retail chains in America. We want them to roam and test parameters to see how far they can move out on the fringe of the property."

"One of our big advantages that we have over most of our competitors is being decentralised. It allows us to be close to the customers and access the best knowledge in the field. That way we can do not only what is right for the stores, but also respond to the marketplace and support the associates in the stores."

"We insist, we demand that our people take risks, and then take responsibility for those risks. "It is your business, your division, your market, your store, your aisle, and your customer. It is not a Home Depot customer, it is your customer.""

"Don't wait for some Home Depot bureaucrat to give you an answer or fix your problem. And don't blame somebody else. If you have something that needs to be fixed, fix it."

"We expect the associates to run their store like it is their own business, tailoring a great deal of the product selection to local needs and buying local products."

"Our people are shopkeepers. As long as they run their business well or reasonable well, we don't bother them."

"Our culture is about making sure people understand that they are empowered to do what is right. We worry about the other stuff; just do what is right now."

Values

"Our values are the magic of Home Depot. By consistently and emphatically teaching and enculturating them through the ranks of managers and on to the people working in the stores, we know that each and every one of these 160,000 folks will take care of the customer and each other. The rest takes care of itself."

"If a company's values are nothing more than words hanging in the lobby of a corporate headquarters for visitors to see, they're a fantasy, dead on arrival."

"A sure way to grow the company is to clearly state our values and install them in our associates. Values are beliefs they do not change over time; they guide our decisions and actions. They are the principles, beliefs, and standards own our company. We call this process of enculturation 'bleeding orange.'"

"Our values empower our people to be their best. If we can implant a value system that lets them apply their basic goodness and ingenuity to the Home Depot and its customers, that's all we need to succeed."

"These values are our company. They are out belief system, and we believe in them as much today as when the first Home Depot stores opened in June 1979. Without them, we're no different than our competition. Our competitors could copy them just as they've copied our stores, products, and merchandising ideas. But they would have to believe in the ideas underlying these values to make them effective, and that's a tough step to take."

"We believe there is no perfect, ongoing formula, as long as your values remain constant."

Transparency

"Managers can ask any kind of question no matter how blunt, invasive, or even offensive it might be. These meetings are intended to be naked, honest exchanges of information and opinions. Bernie insists on it - no pussyfooting around."

A Vision

"A great company goes beyond making money. A great company has a mission, a vision, a dream."

"You must stick to a vision and turn people into believers."

Setting examples

"If an associate picked something up off the floor, it was because we did it first. We set the example. Few people ever felt that they were working for somebody."

"Let me go back to the essence of what the company is: Role-modelling. Every manager and every district manager in this company is a trainer and a teacher."

Change

"The world changes, the environment changes, competition changes, people change, everything changes. Retailers can't ever stay the same. If you don't change you are a dead duck. You must wake up every morning and wonder, "Who will destroy me today if I don't keep my eyes open?" You must constantly think about ways to out-manoeuvre the competition and be the number one horse."

"Responding to change is one of the reasons for the success of the Home Depot."

Innovation

"Much of our success through the years has resulted from a love of discovering and inspiring new products, putting a new sales spin on reliable classics, and our passion for seeing them move through the cash registers."

"We are always looking over our shoulders. The essence of keeping our company great is its non-stop reinvention, because if you are in constant motion, nobody can catch you. You must maintain that motion, whether it be physical layout of the store, merchandising, advertising, or a thousand other factors. It is no different than changing your clothes everyday. If your spouse wore the same clothes everyday, after a while, you'd stop looking at him or her."

"No matter what your business, you cannot stay still for any length of time, or our competitors will scratch and crawl over you."

"[We do] workouts. This involves getting all the people closely tied to any given business problem and to lock themselves in a room together - for as long as two days - and work out potential solutions. Even if it's something we're doing well, how can we do it better?"

Flexibility

"Our flexibility and our enhanced ability to adapt, is not only to positive developments but to negative ones, too. That was a very, very important issue that goes back to finding out what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong."

Planning Ahead

"One of the key strategies of this company has always been to do things before we needed to do them. That might sound obvious, but lots of companies get painted into a corner, then have to react instead of pre-act."

Humility & Studying Failure

"You can't ever, ever take it for granted that you own the business. Because everybody who does eventually disappears of the face of the earth. We learned that by studying people who failed and understanding why they failed. Failures - especially our own - are great teaching tools. If someone fell on his face prior, why would you do the same thing again?"

"Bernie and I relearn our business firsthand from people on the floor of the stores. The associates know more about the products and what the customers are looking for than we do. It is a changing, teaching experience."

"We are not more important that the customer."

"Even our investors find it hard to believe the founders of the company still participate in training managers, expounding the The Home Depot explicit values, as if that were beneath us."

Store Walks

"Store walks are such an important and valuable tool to this company, that they're required not just of our executives, but of our board of directors, too."

"It flattens the management pyramid by creating communication from the very top to the very bottom of the company."

"Some managers manage by walking fast and looking worried. We would rather them take their time, focus, see what the customer is seeing, talk to the customer, and interact, because that is where you get all your answers."

"Bernie and I probably spend 25 to 30 percent of our time in the stores. The balance is spent training managers in our culture and teaching merchandising."

Common Sense & Bureaucracy

"Common sense was an overriding factor in everything we did. Nothing but our values, ethics, and morality were set in concrete."

"Bureaucracy is giving in to stupidity and ignoring common sense. When you know something is wrong and you don't challenge it, you have become bureaucratic. The root cause of creating a bureaucratic environment is when people are afraid to make mistakes. We want our people to be unafraid of making mistakes."

"The culture of this company intentionally beats down our associates' fear of bureaucracy, opening up very honest face-to-face interaction. Smart associates are not afraid of us."

"If anything ever kills the personality of this company, it will be creeping bureaucracy."

Summary

Payroll is not an expense, its an investment. Place customers at the forefront and encourage staff to interact with them. Learn from your mistakes and the mistakes of others. Have Management and Board Members walk the store floors. Empower your people. Share the winnings. Set the example. Innovate and drive constant change. Remove bureaucracy. Support your staff.

But why do all of this? Because great Culture is a competitive advantage that is hard to compete against. And its hard to argue against when you look at Home Depot's returns since inception. $100 invested in 1981 would have earned you $2,377 on the S&P, $9,719 within Berkshire Hathaway, and an astonishing $569,000 in Home Depot.

And you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see that in the end it's very easy maths indeed. Great Culture = Great Business.

Follow us on Twitter: @mastersinvest

TERMS OF USE: DISCLAIMER

Further Reading: 
Investment Masters Class: Learning from Arthur Blank
The Home Depot: Built from Scratch

Widening Moats + Culture

If you've been keeping abreast of my posts in the last twelve months, you will no doubt have noticed the common trend of the Investment Masters to want to buy Great Businesses. These of course are companies with healthy rates of returns, strong future earnings potential and usually come with a significant competitive advantage. And when the Investment Masters look for competitive advantages, one of the most important a company can possess is a strong corporate culture. 

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend a speech by Kurt Winrich about just that subject: 'Corporate Culture'. Winrich and his partner Paul Black run WCM Investment Management, and together manage a $26b global equities portfolio out of Laguna Beach, California. 

A good corporate culture is key to business performance. It is clear that Companies with good cultures outperform those with poor ones. In the recent Robert Cialdini post we talked about a 'cultural flywheel' driven by the powerful trait of human nature, reciprocation. If Corporates treat their staff well, the staff reciprocate by working harder, customers benefit and reciprocate, and the company prospers. In a recent CNBC interview, Paul Tudor-Jones discussed research showing companies that look after their staff and customers and produce quality products, typically earn an average 7% higher ROIC and heavily outperform those that don't. Basically, companies that prioritise staff and customers above shareholders and management perform better.

Culture can be a competitive advantage that's almost impossible to replicate. Winrich and Black's WCM spend 95% of their time looking for companies whose moats are growing and who have corporate cultures that are aligned with those competitive advantages.

And they're not alone in recognising that an expanding moat is a key trait to success. Buffett himself has said that widening the moat is more important in any given year than a company's profit.

"If you are evaluating a business year-to-year, you want to — the number one question you want to ask yourself is whether the — could the competitive advantage have been made stronger and more durable before — and that’s more important than the P&L for a given year." Warren Buffett

“Widening the moat.. that is essential if we are to have the kind of business we want a decade or two from now. We always, of course, hope to earn more money in the short-term. But when short-term and long-term conflict, widening the moat must take precedence." Warren Buffett

"We think in terms of that moat and the ability to keep its width and its impossibility of being crossed as the primary criterion of a great business. And we tell our managers we want the moat widened every year. That doesn’t necessarily mean the profit will be more this year than it was last year because it won’t be sometimes. However, if the moat is widened every year, the business will do very well." Warren Buffett

It's WCM's recognition of culture as a key input into a company's competitive positioning that makes their investment process somewhat unique. And with outperformance of 500bps pa over the last 10 years, they were clearly something worth digging into. In my quest to learn more about WCM's partners, I found some great interviews and podcasts. One of my favourites was Ted Seides, Capital Allocator's podcast interview with Paul Black. Below you'll find insights from that interview and a few others with links below.

Learning From Failure

"We got here from a lot of hard work, a lot of good fortune and learning from past mistakes and making almost every one you could possibly make, but using that as a source of strength to get better and better. Anyone who doesn't believe that most of life is learning from your failures just doesn't quite get it or they're too young to get it." Paul Black

Focus on Great Companies

"A growth stock investor has a different perspective on the world. You have to be optimistic about the future. I like it because I tend to see the world more positively. It's consistent with where I am psychologically. To me optimists rule the world. I think optimists are the ones who ultimately get it right. Buffett says it all the time, 'Never bet against America'. I'd say never bet against great growth companies with superior cultures that are highly competitively advantaged." Paul Black

People Matter

“A lot of people think it is all in the numbers, we think it’s all in the people” Kurt Winrich

"If you read Phil Fisher's book Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, I think he has a 25 point checklist on how to analyse a company and interestingly of the twenty-five, probably fifteen are qualitative elements. Which is just the reverse of what most people on Wall Street do." Paul Black

“My favourite example in the US is Costco vs Sam’s club (Walmart division). Those businesses look the same but Costco sales per square foot are more than double, revenue per employee stronger, employee turnover much lower (Sam’s club 44%). Costco pays employee more. Employees are the starting point of customer satisfaction. When people are really happy they give more. A lot of people think company should treat shareholders best. Costco thinks key is to treat employees best.” Kurt Winrich

Focus on the Direction of the Competitive Advantage

"95% of our work is around identifying businesses with growing competitive advantages." Paul Black

"A couple of things define a great growth company. [What we do] is very different from what most people do. We've found if you're just looking for high quality, wide-moat businesses selling cheaply, today you are going to find yourself in a lot of value traps. We've made the mistakes in the past buying high quality, wide-moat businesses cheaply. What we learned because of our mistakes of significantly under-performing the market, is that you have got to stay focused on the direction of the competitive advantage. Everybody's businesses is either getting strong versus your competitors or you're getting weaker. You want to be able to make the case, through pattern recognition and other tools around 'moat-typologies' as we classify it, that the company you're looking to invest in has a strong likelihood of growing its competitive advantage over the next five, ten and fifteen years. If you get that right, any valuation work you do is going to look ludicrously cheap five and ten years out. That's a huge part of what we do that's different." Paul Black

"A lot of people think you just want the biggest moat. Our contention is you need to pay attention to a moat that is growing. A moat that is shrinking can be dangerous. If we find a growing moat how do we have any confidence it will keep growing. We found the number one way that convinces us of that is the culture is aligned to the moat. We want to see behaviours that enhance the competitive position.” Paul Black

"What's more important than just a big competitive advantage is buying a business where the competitive advantage is actually getting stronger. Where you can make the case over the next 5, 10, 15 years the competitive advantage is going to be stronger. If you get that part of the equation rights your going to go a long way to having a successful investment." Paul Black

Place a Premium on Culture

“Culture is a huge differentiator between successful organisations and unsuccessful organisations.” Kurt Winrich

"The second thing we do that's really significant and very different is that we put a huge premium on corporation's culture. That doesn't mean we just want shareholder friendly management team. We want to understand the DNA of the business. We want to know what the core values of the business are, and how those core values relate to the competitive advantage. Because if you can buy a company where the core values of the organisation are aligned with its competitive advantage." Paul Black

"To us the distinguishing characteristic in any investment has got to be determining what the core values are, what animates that culture and making sure there is an alignment." Paul Black

Ensure Culture aligns with Competitive Advantage

"We worked with a guy named James Heskett, a Harvard Business Professor, and wrote a book called the Culture Cycle. It's one of the more interesting books on culture. He's really the person who helped us understand that when you're assessing a culture, the strongest companies are going to be where the cultures and value are aligned with he competitive advantage." Paul Black

"What are the core values of great retailers? It's about taking care of your people. We take the example of Costco versus Sam's Club. Those are two companies in the same industries where the stores look the same. But you look at the financial metrics of Costco, they're twice Sam's Club on every metric. Same store sales 4-5% at Costco versus 1-2% at Costco, Sales per Sqft $1,000 versus $500, Employee Turnover 12% versus 50% at Sam's Club. ROIC 12% versus 4%.  What account for that? To us it has to come down to the culture and the values in the business. In Costco they truly care about their people, they want happy employees. In retail you want happy employees, because when people get a great experience they are going to come back and spend more. The whole value side comes directly from the top. The founder of the company, Jim Sinegal owned a lot of shares but never made more than $300k a year. How different is that from other companies where the CEO is making $20m, $30m, $40m or gets fired and gets a $200m golden parachute. That doesn't usually bode well for the long term cultural success of the firm." Paul Black

"Sam Walton really embraced the notion that you have to bring people along, you have to get people excited, you have to make people happy. You have to pay people well and tie them into the bottom line. He built this culture where people just loved coming to work and they had a lot of fun doing it. As a result they took on these old stale bureaucratic centralised organisations. That works for a retailer. But do you really need happy employees to run a railroad? Probably not. You want people that are highly accountable, that probably think in certain way, more linear, because it's all about delivering an on-time product in an efficient cost effective manner. There is a high cost of failure. Different stresses. Very difficult corporate culture is needed for that than for a retailer. We found there are different cultures you for different businesses that are effective." Paul Black

Assessing Culture and a Widening Moat

"When you are trying to assess a culture one of the best things to do is not just talk to the CEO or CFO but it would be to talk to people who have left on good terms. Of course you to talk to suppliers, vendors and competitors to find who do they/don't they respect. If you talk to people who used to work there and left on good terms you usually get a pretty good picture. What you are doing is building a mosaic when you're going after culture. A lot of people don't do it because you can't quantify it, you can't put it in a box and score it, or scale and number ranking. You really have to build a mosaic." Paul Black

"You can't just walk into a business and say tell me about the culture. If someone goes on for 30 minutes on culture it's important to them." Kurt Winrich

"One question [we ask on culture] is 'what would you tell a friend on how to be successful in your company? What are the three things to tell them to be successful? What's really hard for new hires to really get used to? What are some difficult scenarios? Tell me about your failures, where have you made mistakes. Most people don't want to talk about their mistakes. They move on as if their career was just filled with success." Paul Black

“How do you measure if a moat is getting stronger? It’s pretty easy ex-post. It’s probably best seen in ROIC. Think about it from a competition perspective.  If you have a very profitable business and you have protection then your profits can continue to grow. If your competitors can attack you and copy you, your profits disappear. A rising ROIC is a great ex post measure of growing competitive advantage. Only one problem is that it’s practically useless because the good news is already in the stock price long before its shows up in the financials. You need to find a reliable ex ante measure. We settled on a simple form of pattern recognition. It comes from studying great examples of growing competitive advantages and their life cycle in the past. We’ve studied the great businesses of the past in a case study way and we’re trying to identify and catalogue the markers that tell us in a contemporaneous way whether the moat is growing or shrinking. We can learn something from these things. The ideas are that if the markers are present we feel confident, when they disappear we lose our confidence.” Kurt Winrich

“When you have a culture that isn’t empowering or doesn’t encourage engagement, you’re already hamstrung. A great incentive for engagement and empowerment is ownership - not just from the CEO but other employees.” Kurt Winrich

“To really know which businesses have an edge you’ve got to do the in-the trenches-research, it’s not getting more numbers, it’s just talking to people who know the business. That’s why we us a large network to talk to current employees, former employees, customers, vendors, competitors. Ask questions about competitive advantage and culture. Phil Fisher called it scuttlebutt research. That’s critical.” Kurt Winrich

Rising ROIC Correlates with Returns

"Most managers screen for a hurdle on ROIC over the last 5 years. What we've found more valuable than just the level of the ROIC is the direction. There is a 1: 1 correlation between the direction of the ROIC over a 5 year period of time and stock performance. If you break the market down into five quintiles from the top quintile where they have the most rapidly rising ROIC to the bottom where they have declining ROICs, there is a 1:1 relationship between the best performing stocks on the top quintile and the poorest performing stocks on the bottom." Paul Black

"We'd prefer a company that maybe five years ago had a 4% ROIC  growing to five , six, seven, eight. That's a much better investment than a company that's at a 12% ROIC that might be stagnant over that period of time." Paul Black

Models Won't Give You The Answers

"Most people spend 95% of their time crunching numbers, running DCF models, which by the way has zero competitive advantage because you have thousands upon thousands of people doing the same work. Where we can get a massive competitive advantage is by doing the things that other people are not." Paul Black

Long Term Horizon

"There aren't that many great cultures with alignment to their competitive advantage, but when you find them, you hold them for a long time, ten years."  Paul Black

"In investing, time is your friend. The people who make a lot of money in investing are those that buy great businesses, in our case with expanding moats, and they give them time to work for them over 5, 10 and 15 year pulls. All the people that have created a lot of wealth for themselves didn't do it in a week, or 3 months or 6 months. They did it over a generation." Paul Black

A Tailwind

"You certainly want to have tailwinds. It's just an acknowledgement that is how life works. Anyone that doesn't acknowledge that is just not being honest. I think having tailwinds is essential to success. I think a big advantage we have is we tend to own businesses in the growthier sectors like tech, healthcare and consumer. If you think about the emerging middle class around the globe, as people get wealthier in Brazil, Indonesia, India and China, they're going to buy products from the companies we own. They sell products as these people get richer - that's a beautiful tailwind that not going away for fifteen or twenty years, it's something you can really take advantage of." Paul Black

Manage the Downside

"Everything we do in this portfolio is to manage on the downside. One way is being more times than right on direction of competitive advantage. Because in difficult times if you can own the company that isn't constrained by the financial markets and can allocate capital in to the space their weaker competitors cannot. what you find is that those companies hold up really well. Of course we do the basic portfolio construction and diversifying among sectors and industries and making sure we never have more than 4-5% in anyone name. At the end of the day, everything we manage is to to do well in tough markets. Where we really expect to do well is tough markets. Very counter intuitive. But to me it goes to the heart of what we are doing differently" Paul Black

Ignore the Pessimists

“Our advice is ignore the pessimists. I think humans are naturally wired to look at everything that can go wrong and we tend to miss what is good which dominates most of the time. You watch the news are all you see is crises. Yet when you look back over the 20th century and into the 21st  you find out things end up working really well.” Kurt Winrich

Out of Town

"It's a massive competitive advantage for us [being in Laguna Beach]. There's so much noise in New York and San Francisco and Chicago. The beauty of being in Laguna Beach is that you're not subject to the constant chatter that goes on, which really forces you to be short term in your orientation - to make decisions in 3 and 6 months periods of times versus five and seven year periods of times. We are able to be more thoughtful." Paul Black

Summary

I really like Winrich's comment that you can't just walk into a business and say, "tell me about the culture." Those without good cultures will lack substance in their reply. It clearly is not something they rate. If, as Kurt says someone goes on about culture for thirty minutes, however, then its obviously important to them.

It's clear that companies who build effective Corporate Cultures are better performers. They have a competitive advantage that sets them apart from the rest of the market, giving them a wide moat. And moats are hard to cross. Those businesses that can continually widen their moat each year will likely also continue to grow earnings for long periods of time because they become harder and harder to compete against. Its a no-brainer. Even Buffett says so. 

Follow us on Twitter: @mastersinvest

TERMS OF USE: DISCLAIMER

Sources:

Gratitude, Fun and Growth Stocks - Capital Allocators
Global Investing Webinar with Paul Black
The Rules of Investing: Is value dead? - Livewire

Note: This post is for educational purposes only. I have no relationship with WCM IM.

Learning from Robert Cialdini - Part II

If you read Part 1 in this series on Robert Cialdini's wonderful book 'Influence', or even the book itself, I hope you've started to notice some of the six key principles of influence all around you. In investment circles, you will witness these mental shortcuts being practiced every day by peers, clients or fellow investors. All of these groups are human beings and because of this, unless we are aware of these things we will practice them ourselves without thinking.

In the last post we discussed the principles of Commitment & Consistency and Reciprocation and how each is relevant to business and investing. We also looked at some methods to ensure they don't detract from investment performance. In this post we'll touch on two of the remaining four principles. You'll notice, like the first two, these principles strike at the heart of investing. They are Social Proof and Authority. Let's consider each and look at some investment analogies.

Social Proof

We are all social animals and we conduct ourselves in a manner that fits in with others. As a general rule, in everyday life we make fewer mistakes by acting in accord with social evidence than contrary to it. I'm sure you've witnessed a situation where someone is looking up at the sky. Not long after, a crowd gathers, doing the same thing. As Charlie Munger has observed "Monkey See, Monkey Do."

"The otherwise complex behaviour of man is much simplified when he thinks and does what he observes to be thought and done around him." Charlie Munger

Cialdini tells the powerful true story of a North American doomsday cult which was infiltrated by a few journalists. The cult leader informed his members that their town was to be flooded, however, they as the chosen ones were going to be saved by aliens arriving by spaceship on a forthcoming date. 

On the 'specific' date at the ‘specified time’, not surprisingly, no spaceship turned up. The group seemed near dissolution. As cracks emerged in the believers’ confidence, the researchers witnessed a pair of remarkable incidents. The cult leader told the members she had received an urgent message from the Guardians stating, “the little group had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction." Having previously shunned publicity, the cult leader then at once called the newspaper, to spread the urgent message. The other members followed suit placing calls to media outlets. 

So massive was the commitment to the cult that no other truth was tolerable. The member's previous beliefs should have been destroyed from the physical reality that no spaceship had landed, no spacemen had arrived and no flood had come. In fact, nothing had happened as prophesized. 

There was but one way out of the corner for the group. They had to establish another type of proof for the validity of their beliefs: social proof. The fact the leader was still believing let other members also believe.

Social proof is most powerful when we are uncertain. Cialdini notes "when people are uncertain, they are more likely to use other's actions to decide how they themselves' should act." And the principle of social proof is most powerful when we are observing the behaviour of people just like us. Furthermore, the more people that are doing the same thing, the more we're inclined to believe they must know something we don't.

In ambiguous situations, there is a tendency for everyone to be looking to see what everyone else is doing. This can lead to a phenomenon called 'pluralistic ignorance'; something happens and no one acts; each person decides that since nobody is concerned, nothing is wrong. The inaction of others can be as powerful a guide to action as action itself. 

"Especially when we are uncertain, we are willing to place an enormous amount of trust in the collective knowledge of the crowd. Second, quite frequently the crowd is mistaken because they are not acting on the basis of any superior information but are reacting, themselves, to the principle of social proof." Robert Cialdini

When it comes to investing, Social Proof is one of the most common, powerful and dangerous influences. Perfect information is unattainable in investing and because of it, uncertainty reigns.

"No matter how much research is performed, some information always remains elusive: investors have to live with less than complete information." Seth Karman

It's easy to see why investors are often swayed by the crowd. When prices are rising we look to others behaviour and buy. Conversely when a sell-off ensues, we panic and sell. The tech boom, nifty-fifty mania, and bitcoin are all good examples. More recently, long dated sovereign bond yields went negative around the world. This smacks of 'pluralistic ignorance.'

"When speculation gets rampant, and when you’re getting what I guess Charlie would call 'social proof' — that it’s worked recently — people can get very excited about speculating in markets." Warren Buffett

“The crowd madnesses recur so frequently in human history that they must reflect some deeply rooted trait in human nature. A bull market, for example, will be sweeping along and then something will happen – trivial or important – and first one man will sell and then others will sell and the continuity of thought toward higher prices is broken.” Bernard Baruch

We can overcome the pitfalls of social proof by relying only on the facts and taking the time to think. It is important to recognise that share prices are often a function of the crowd, and crowds are often wrong. In addition, just because a share price hasn't reacted to some news doesn't imply it shouldn't have. 

"We focus on the facts of an investment case and ignore the crowd." Bruce Berkowitz

"You can’t look around for people to agree with you. You can’t look around for people to even know what you’re talking about. You know, you have to think for yourself." Warren Buffett

“It is always easiest to run with the herd; at times, it can take a deep reservoir of courage and conviction to stand apart from it.  Yet distancing yourself from the crowd is an essential component of long-term investment success.” Seth Klarman

"You have to think for yourself. It always amazes me how high-IQ people mindlessly imitate. I never get good ideas talking to other people." Warren Buffett

“You will not be right simply because a large number of people momentarily agree with you... You will be right over the course of many transactions, if your hypothesis are correct, your facts are correct, and your reasoning is correct.” Warren Buffett

"A basic ingredient of outstanding common stock management is the ability neither to accept blindly whatever may be the dominant opinion of the financial community at the moment nor to reject the prevailing view just to be contrary for the sake of being contrary. Rather, it is to have more knowledge and to apply better judgement, in thorough evaluation of specific situations, and the moral courage to act 'in opposition to the crowd' when your judgement tells you you are right." Phil Fisher

"Learn how to ignore the examples of others when they are wrong; because few skills are more worth having." Charlie Munger

While acting in concert with the crowd can be disastrous, taking advantage of the crowd can be highly profitable. It's the social-proof aspect of the public markets that creates mis-pricing opportunities for those who have done the work and can think independently. These opportunities don't arise in private markets where business or property owners tend to be less emotional and choose the optimal time to sell their asset.

"Auction driven markets have a great quality that tends to undershoot and overshoot underlying value quite significantly. So for example, if I took a dart and threw it at any stock in the New York Stock exchange and look at the 52 week range on it, there will be something like 70 to 130. If I look at a business that’s for sale and I asked the owner of the business what the selling price is, it’s hardly going to move over the year. Maybe +/- 15% at most. So auction driven markets create opportunity to buy when they are cheap and sometimes to sell when they are overpriced." Mohnish Pabrai

Public market opportunities have a tendency to be contrarian and therefore can make us feel uncomfortable and lonely.

"The ultimately most profitable investment actions are by definition contrarian; you're buying when everyone else is selling (and the price is thus low) or you're selling when everyone else is buying (and the price is high). These actions are lonely and, uncomfortable." Howard Marks

“You have to be willing to have the courage to stand by your convictions and that can be a very lonely place to be at times." Chris Mittleman

Corporate leaders, Wall Street analysts and Investment Committees are not immune from social proof tendencies. In the former, aggressive corporate takeovers, bidding wars, buybacks at market highs, and mis-aligned incentive structures are often implemented because of what others are doing.

"In the highest reaches of business, it is not all uncommon to find leaders who display fellowship akin to that of teenagers. If one oil company foolishly buys a mine, other oil companies often quickly join in buying mines." Charlie Munger

"The herd-like behavior of companies and their managements never loses its power to astound. All to often one company decides that buybacks are the thing to do, then its competitors will play the game too. By the same token, capital raising often appears at the same time among multiple companies in the same industry" Marathon Asset Management

"The behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated." Warren Buffett

Wall Street analysts are just as guilty; better to maintain a view consistent with the other analysts than step out on a limb and make a bold contrarian call. When the whole market loves or hates a stock, it's hard to think so many smart people are wrong. Better to raise your price target to where the stock is currently trading.

"Man is extremely uncomfortable with uncertainty. To deal with his discomfort, man tends to create a false sense of security by substituting certainty for uncertainty. It becomes the herd instinct. The irony is that the greater the uncertainty, the greater the similarity of predictions, as the experts 'shout together in the dark'." Bennett Goodspeed

"Too many sell-side analysts whisper in each other's ears, and few want to stick his or her neck out too far." John Neff

“Specialist analysts operate in a cocoon, in which they are overexposed to company management and peer analysts and underexposed to what is going on in the rest of the world. Herding instincts may tend to reinforce similar opinions among peer analysts.” Marathon Asset Management

Authority

You might be surprised to know that we have been trained from birth to acknowledge that obedience to proper authority is right and disobedience is wrong.

"The essential message [of obedience] fills the parental lessons, the school-house rhymes, stories, and songs of our childhood and is carried forward in the legal, military, and political systems we encounter as adults. Notions of submission and loyalty to legitimate rule are accorded much value in each." Robert Cialdini

Our obedience takes place is an automatic fashion with little or no deliberation.

Cialdini provides colourful examples where people make irrational decisions and/or unthinkable mistakes because of some authoritative directive. Authority can come in many forms, it could be clothes [a uniform or even a business suit], a title [ie an 'expert', a 'rated analyst,' a PhD, CFA?], or personal trappings of authority [a nice Wall Street Office with an electronic LED ticker behind?]

I can't tell you the number of times I've seen investors make irrational decisions based on some authority figure's viewpoint. You'll always find some Wall Street expert predicting the market will crash, the USD/Euro/Yen is going to rally/collapse, gold is going to $3,000 etc .. take your pick. Wall Street analysts are paid to act and sound confident in their forecasts. Its worth noting that the Investment Masters are highly skeptical of forecasts.

"I'd advise you to approach the entire subject of forecasts and forecasters with extreme mistrust." Howard Marks

Testing a forecasters' track record from a few years ago can be both enlightening and entertaining.

"Old forecasts are like old news - soon forgotten - and pundits are almost never asked to reconcile what they said with what actually happened." Philip Tetlock

"One of my greatest complaints about forecasters is that they seem to ignore their own records. The amazing thing to me is that these people will go on making predictions with a straight face, and the media will continue to carry them." Howard Marks

“I was recently involved in a situation where projections were a part of the presentation. And I asked that the record of the people who made the projections, their past projections also be presented at the same time. It was a very rude act. Believe me, it proved the point. I mean, it was a joke. So, we’ll leave it at that.” Warren Buffett

And never forget, there is always someone who picked the last few winners. The problem is, next time it's likely to be a different person.

"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

"Consumers of forecasting will stop being gulled by pundits with good stories and start asking pundits how their past predictions fared - and reject answers that consist of nothing but anecdotes and credentials." Philip Tetlock

“Organizations that take the word of overconfident experts can expect costly consequences … however, optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers.” Daniel Kahneman

“People are also attracted to the titles and degrees of academics because finance is not a credential-sanctioned field like, say, medicine is. So the appearance of a Ph.D. stands out. And that creates an intense appeal to academia when making arguments and justifying beliefs – “According to this Harvard study …” or “As Nobel Prize winner so and so showed …” It carries so much weight when other people cite, “Some guy on CNBC from an eponymous firm with a tie and a smile.” A hard reality is that what often matters most in finance will never win a Nobel Prize: Humility and room for error.” Morgan Housel

It's important to get the facts and make up your own mind. Remember, even the world's best investors are rarely right more than 6 out of 10 times. Analysts and Wall Street experts are likely inferior. Don't follow them blindly.

"You will not be right simply because important people agree with you." Warren Buffett

“In every great stock market disaster or fraud, there is always one or two great investors invested in the thing all the way down. Enron, dot-com, banks, always ‘smart guys’ involved all the way down.” Jim Chanos

Authority + Social Proof

Oftentimes the interaction of Authority and Social Proof amplify outcomes. Asset bubbles are a good example.

"Avoid the Pied Piper. Just because someone has been right seven times in a row is no guarantee that number eight will work. When he is finally wrong, the size of the herd will be at its maximum - just as it plunges over the cliff and into the sea. As investors walk in lockstep with the guru over the cliff, a new guru who pointed the way correctly (though only a few listened) is thrust to the forefront. When he too falls, investors will again frantically search for a new guru so as to perpetuate the guru loser's game." Bennett Goodspeed

“Groupthink” frequently causes an individual to capitulate to crowd thinking simply because he or she finds it difficult to believe that such a large group of people could be wrong particularly when an authoritative figure lends his or her stature to the proposition.  The spread of epidemics and information cascades – where a faulty thesis proliferates by word of mouth like a forest fire leaping from tree to tree, without the validity of the original thesis again being contested – further explains the suppression of the constraints of rational and independent thought.” Frank Martin

As is Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme .. 

"Bernard Madoff showed, thirteen thousand investors and their advisers didn't do elementary due diligence because they thought the other investors must have done it." Ed Thorp

And corporate management disasters... 

"In the ambit of social proof, the outside directors on a corporate board usually display the near ultimate form of inaction. They fail to object to anything much short of an axe murder until some public embarrassment of the board finally causes their intervention." Charlie Munger

"Pressure to meet those numbers any way possible is something all employees feel despite their manager's denials. The non-verbal signals, the phraseology, the tone, the authority figure syndrome, and the implications of what is said count more than good intentions and assumed ethical parameters." Marianne Jennings

"Confrontation at a meeting where one side has authority and the other needs the job can breed strange and unintended responses." Marianne Jennings

It takes courage to think independently, and it takes a lot more of the same to be able to act that way. The concept of Social Proof occurs around us every single day, and being able to run against the tide is something that we know can make us feel uncomfortable and very, very alone. And if you add Cialdini's concept of Authority to the mix, it only makes us feel worse to work against the herd. If someone with a title and a large sense of self-importance with little in the way of track record is offering conviction on an opinion, it is almost impossible for most of us to go the other way. But this is a key difference between the Investment Masters and the rest of us. Courage to take a different path, humility to know when they're wrong and a healthy wariness to forecasters and their crystal balls. 

It's a conscious choice; to blindly follow the loudest voices or the biggest crowds, or to actively choose to go on your own, independent path.

Further Reading:
The Munger Series - ‘Learning From Robert Cialdini - Part I’
The Munger Series - ‘Learnings from Robert Cialdini - Part III’ 

Follow us on Twitter: @mastersinvest

TERMS OF USE: DISCLAIMER

Your Investment Style

Everybody is different. Each and every one of us. We all have unique personalities which we apply to our everyday actions and beliefs, which in turn denote our individual style. Authors have different styles, as do coaches, business people and even musicians. And naturally, because of this, every investors' style is also different. 

While all of the Investment Masters have great track records of long term success, they naturally all have their own styles. Whether it's running highly concentrated portfolios, focusing on a select type of asset or having a different time horizon, each has had their own path to success. As Buffett likes to say, there's more than one way to get to investment heaven. 

"I’ve said in investing, in the past, there’s more than one way to get to heaven." Warren Buffett

"There are many, many different ways to make money in the investment business and the one I describe as ours, its not necessarily the only right one but it's the one we like." Howard Marks

"Looking at the careers of the great investors, it is clear that there are many different, often contradictory, ways to succeed. Each has been highly successful in his own way" Roy Neuberger

Buffett, for example, often says his style is a combination of Ben Graham and Phil Fisher. He's taken elements from both and combined them.

“I think I’d rather think of myself as being a sort of a hundred percent Ben Graham and a hundred percent Phil Fisher in the points where they don’t — and they really don’t — contradict each other. It’s just that they had a vastly different emphasis.” Warren Buffett

As a student of Graham, Buffett started out with a focus on buying companies whose underlying asset values exceeded their share prices. As his asset base grew, he leaned more towards Fisher, seeking wonderful businesses. But Buffett never forgot the three key tenets of Graham's approach. 

"The three basic ideas that underlie successful investing — look at stocks as businesses; have the proper attitude toward the market [use it to serve you and not to instruct you], and to operate with a margin of safety." Warren Buffett

And while all of the Investment Masters have their own unique style, those three ideas underpin the majority of their investment philosophies; Karman, Greenblatt, Akre, Pabrai and many more.

"With those three sort of philosophical benchmarks, the exact — the evaluation technique you use is not really that important. Because you’re not going to go way off the track, whether you use Walter’s approach — Walter Schloss’s — or mine, or whatever. Phil Carret has a slightly different approach. But it’s got those three cornerstones to it, I will guarantee. And believe me, he’s done very well." Warren Buffett

And while we should learn from the Masters, we must also recognise we aren't them. Each of us have different knowledge bases and different skill sets; we all have a unique circle of competence.

More importantly, each us are wired differently. It is because of our different psychological make-up that we must find a style that suits us.

"My advice is to learn from the great investors - not follow them. You can benefit from mistakes and successes, and you can adapt what fits your temperament and circumstances. Your resources and your needs are bound to be different from anyone you may want to emulate." Roy Neuberger

Buffett touched on this in 1994 when he was asked about Peter Lynch:

"There’s certainly a fair amount of overlap. There’s some difference. Peter [Lynch], obviously, likes to diversify a lot more than I do. He owns more stocks than the names of companies I can remember. I mean, but that’s Peter.  And, you know, I’ve said in investing, in the past, that there’s more than one way to get to heaven. And there isn’t a true religion in this, but there’s some very useful religions. And Peter’s got one, and I think we’ve got one that’s useful, too. And there is a lot of overlap. But I would not do as well if I tried to do it the way Peter does it, and he probably wouldn’t do as well if he tried to do it exactly the way I’d do it." Warren Buffett

From my own observations, I'd say Charlie and Warren's tolerance for volatility is higher than most investors. Share price volatility doesn't scare them. Munger has often said that if you can't stomach a 50% fall in a stock price, the markets are no place for you. 

"If you're not willing to react with equanimity to a market price decline of 50% two or three times a century you're not fit to be a common shareholder, and you deserve the mediocre result you're going to get compared to the people who do have the temperament, who can be more philosophical about these market fluctuations." Charlie Munger

Many shareholders can't stomach such returns.

"Large losses, though initially only on paper, often derail an otherwise rational investor. An illogical fear of loss insidiously exerts an undue influence on portfolio decision making. (Rationally, the lower prices go, ceteris paribus, the less the likelihood of further loss—a truism that falls on deaf ears when fear has the upper hand.)" Frank Martin

For the last decade or more I've run 'alpha funds' for some of the world's largest hedge funds and long-only investors. Each of these funds have different requirements and risk tolerances; some of these clients want you to manage only long positions, others let you choose your long/short and net/gross exposure, while some want a market-neutral portfolio and others beta-hedge all positions. One commonality is they all want limited losses or drawdowns [usually sub 5%]. This happens to suit my style; a low tolerance for loss, even if it is just quotational [i.e. not permanent loss of capital].

While my tolerance for loss hasn't changed over the years, my style has evolved. I've extended my time horizon, looking out three to five years, to try and establish what a company might be earning. I've shifted from advocating stocks on undemanding multiples to preferring high quality companies with competitive advantages that are getting stronger. I now structure the portfolios I run around companies that meet these criteria. I'll build smaller positions in other opportunities like mis-pricings, takeovers etc, around the core positions.

Once a big advocate for short selling and maintaining a short book, I've found it far less fruitful over the years than spending time finding quality mis-priced companies to buy. (I sometimes wonder if that's a sign we are late in the market cycle). While I focus on individual stocks I spend a lot of time constructing a portfolio which is likely to perform under alternative scenarios. Come what may, I've got a pretty good idea how the portfolio will perform under different scenarios.

While Buffett's core positions since the 1970's have been 'franchise businesses,' he's also invested in silver, oil, takeovers, distressed bonds and preferred stock. Before Berkshire, the Buffett Partnership operated like a multi-strategy hedge fund. Buffett has since evolved.

For example, we know Buffett's always had an aversion to technology stocks. At the Berkshire 2012 meeting Buffett said he wouldn't buy Apple. In years gone by Buffett swore himself off airlines and jokingly enrolled himself in AA ['Airlines Anonymous']. More recently, he's taken large  positions in both. 

"I would not be at all surprised to see them [Apple and Google] be worth a lot more money ten years from now, but I wouldn’t want to buy either one of them. I do not get to the level of conviction that would cause me to buy them. But I sure as hell wouldn’t short them, either." Warren Buffett 2012

And that's a key lesson: Markets change and you need to adapt. A set and forget approach does not work when investing. 

"An investor cannot obtain superior profits from stocks by simply committing to a specific investment category or style.  He can earn them only by carefully evaluating facts and continuously exercising discipline.” Warren Buffett

“Investors who adhere to one particular style are likely to end up in trouble, sooner or later.” Marathon Asset Management

"It is dangerous to rely on a single strategy in a doctrinaire fashion. Strategies and disciplines ought always to be tempered by intelligence and intuition." Peter Cundill

"An investment approach may work for a while, but eventually the actions it calls for will change the environment, meaning a new approach is needed." Howard Marks

"Never adopt permanently any type of asset or any selection method. Try to stay flexible, open-minded, and skeptical." Sir John Templeton

So find an investment style that suits your personality. One that matches your temperament and lets you sleep at night.

“If you fit your nature with your investment style and it makes economic sense, you’ll probably do pretty well.” Shad Rowe

“You have to invest the way that’s comfortable for you.” Walter Schloss

“You need a method that suits your personality.” Colm O’Shea

“Every investor has to gear their strategy according to their own talents and their own psyche. George Soros has been successful for a long time in dealing with extremely large, unbalanced risks. But I’m a completely different type of investor and trader.” Paul Singer

“You have to adapt your strategy to your own nature and your own talents. I don’t think there’s a one-size fits all investment strategy that I can give you.”  Charlie Munger

“If you are going to be a great investor, you have to fit the style to who you are. At one point I recognized that Warren Buffett, though he had every advantage in learning from Ben Graham, did not copy Ben Graham, but rather set out on his own path, and ran money his way, by his own rules.”  Michael Burry

“Part of the game of investing is to come into your own. You must find some way that perfectly fits your personality.” Li Lu

“You have to adapt what you learn to what fits your own personality. A lot of times people try to mimic blindly somebody else. That will not work.” Rajiv Jain

“Everyone has to understand what type of investor they are. I know that I am not George Soros. I don’t have a temperament to be constantly flitting in and out of positions in order to gain a short-term edge or best position the portfolio for macro events.” Jake Rosser

“There is no single correct way to be successful in capital markets. There a multiplicity of approaches and each and every one of them offers the prospect of success. The most likely requirement of success is finding the investment approach that is most emotionally satisfying for you.” Nick Train

“There are lots of ways to make money, but it is really important to find one that fits well with the way that you are built emotionally. You have to discover it as early as you can.” Yen Liow

“My father had this saying, he said, ‘Investing is like painting, there are all different styles’. It’s one thing to imitate someone’s style when you are learning, just like a painter would go to a museum and copy great works, but at some point, they find what resonates with them.” Chris Davis

"If you are pursuing a style that doesn't fit your temperament, you won't be happy. Show me an unhappy investor and I'll show you an unsuccessful investor." Ralph Wanger

And if you're managing money for others, make sure those investors are aligned with your style. If not, you risk having to liquidate the portfolio at exactly the wrong time.

“We care less about volatility than others and try to find limited partners who are like-minded.” David Abrams

“[It’s critical to] correctly align the interests and time horizons of the manager with those of their end clients.” James Anderson

"To perform the task of money management properly, there must be a true partnership and understanding between investors and their managers. The partnership does not mean that investors are sitting in the kitchen watching the sausage being made. Rather, it means that investors should have rational expectations based on past performance and current market conditions, and should give managers a strong leeway for the inevitable range of their (the manager's) brilliant and not-so-brilliant decisions within the overall boundaries of trust and confidence." Paul Singer

“People say, “Do you want individual owners? You want institutional owners?” What we want are informed owners who are in sync with our objectives, our measurements, our time horizons, all of that sort of thing.” Warren Buffett

“People ask for advice and I say, ‘The first and most important thing is make sure that you choose your clients carefully.’ Most people either look at me like I had three heads, like ‘You’ve got to be kidding me’, like ‘That’s quaint.’” Seth Klarman

“It’s important how you choose your clients. I threw every fund of fund out of Duquesne in 1993. It was the smartest thing I ever did. It’s very important that you educate your clients to whatever your investment philosophy is.” Stanley Druckenmiller

You can see that all investor's styles differ. Warren Buffett is not Peter Lynch. Neither is he Ben Graham or Phil Fisher. And nor are they he. But Buffett has elements of his style which are common to all three. And you'll find that while no two of the Masters investment styles are the same, there are common threads that run through all of them; if you've read any of the Investment Masters tutorials you will have noticed as much. You'll do well to learn from the Masters and adopt some of their approaches, but in the end you must find both a style and investor clients that you're comfortable with, that ultimately suit your personality. 

Follow us on Twitter: @mastersinvest

TERMS OF USE: DISCLAIMER

The Munger Series - Learning from Robert Cialdini

We all know how important an understanding of psychology is to sound investment practices. And when Charlie Munger espouses the virtues of someone he considers a leader in the Psychology field, its well worth taking note of his opinion. 

Robert Cialdini is the author of an incredibly insightful book, 'Influence'. Dr. Cialdini has spent his entire career researching the science of Influence, earning him an international reputation as an expert in the fields of persuasion, compliance, and negotiation. He currently holds the position of Professor Emeritus of Psychology & Marketing at Arizona State University.

Upon reading Cialdini's book, Munger was so appreciative of the collected wisdom in Cialdini's work that he sent him a share of Berkshire Hathaway A-stock to thank him.

“I was in my office and went to the mail box and got a big envelope that came from Berkshire Hathaway. Of course I had heard of Berkshire Hathaway, everyone had by that time about 15 years ago. When I opened it, it was a share of Berkshire stock. The letter from Charlie saying ‘this is by way of thanks, Warren and I have read your books, we’ve made hundreds of millions of dollars. This is our way of saying thanks.’” Robert Cialdini

"You couldn’t start with a better book than Cialdini’s 'Influence'” Charlie Munger

"Academic psychology has some very important merits alongside its defects. I learnt this eventually, in the course of general reading, from a book, 'Influence', aimed at a popular audience, by a distinguished psychology professor, Robert Cialdini… I immediately sent copies of Cialdini's book to all my children. I also gave a share of Berkshire stock [A share] to thank him for what he had done for me and the public." Charlie Munger

"Fairly late in life I stumbled into this book, Influence, by a psychologist named Bob Cialdini.. Well, it’s an academic book aimed at a popular audience that filled in a lot of holes in my crude system. In those holes it filled in, I thought I had a system that was a good-working tool." Charlie Munger

Charlie Munger has been Buffett's business partner for the best part of 50 years. Together they're the world's undisputed Investment Masters. And while it's Buffett who basks in the spotlight, it's Munger who directed Berkshire away from buying companies cheaply to instead focus on buying high quality businesses at reasonable prices.

Munger's forte is mental models, and over the years he has drawn on these to sculpt investment theses that have generated billions of dollars in profits for shareholders. And when it comes to mental models, some of the most powerful are psychological. It is in psychology that Munger credits Dr. Robert Cialdini with filling in a lot of the gaps in his understanding.

Over the years, reading about the businesses that have attracted Buffett and Munger, I've seen the insights of Cialdini permeate through their thought processes. I've often drawn on the lessons in Cialdani's book myself to help understand a company's competitive advantage, why share prices may be acting in a particular way, why a board has engaged in a certain manner or why shareholders or analysts have taken a certain stand.

I was fortunate enough to meet Robert Cialdini in Omaha at the recent Berkshire meeting.

In his best-selling book 'Influence', Cialdini addresses six psychological principles of influencing - Consistency and Commitment, Reciprocation, Social proof, Authority, Liking, and Scarcity. Each principle tends to have a basis as a useful mental short cut which has evolved with human development and aided society's functioning. The book is an easy and enjoyable read, as Cialdini provides vivid and entertaining anecdotes on each.

When it comes to investing, understanding each of these fundamental principles can provide invaluable insights. In this post I'll cover off on the first two principles, 'consistency & commitment' and 'reciprocation', and provide some relevant investment analogies.  The other principles will be covered in a later post. 

Consistency and Commitment

Humans have evolved to value and desire consistency. Cialdini explains "It is, quite simply, our nearly obsessive desire to be (and to appear) consistent with what we have already done." Inconsistency is commonly thought to be an undesirable personality trait, yet a high degree of consistency is normally associated with personal and intellectual strength.

"It allows us a convenient, relatively effortless, and efficient method for dealing with complex daily environments that make severe demands on our mental energies and capacities. It is not hard to understand, then, why automatic consistency is a difficult reaction to curb. It offers us a way to evade the rigors of continuing thought. And as Sir Joshua Reynolds noted, 'There is no expedient to which a man will resort to avoid the real labour of thinking'." Robert Cialdini

The associated bias is commitment. When we make a commitment to something, we like to remain consistent. As humans, we don't like changing our mind.

"Whenever one takes a stand that is visible to others, there arises a drive to maintain that stand in order to look like a consistent person." Robert Cialdini

The dangerous side-effect for investors of commitment and consistency tendencies lies in situations that are changing or when there is contrary information to our initial assumptions. 

"The humankind works a lot like the human egg. When one sperm gets into a human egg, there's an automatic shut-off device that bars any other sperm getting in. The human mind tends strongly toward the same sort of result. And so, people tend to accumulate large mental holdings of fixed conclusions and attitudes that are not often re-examined or changed, even though there is plenty of good evidence that they are wrong." Charlie Munger

Investors often don't change their minds when contradictory evidence makes it obvious they should. As a relevant example, I remember a hedge fund manager who cleaned up in the Financial Crisis. Following this, he made a name for himself as an able short seller and inflows naturally  followed. Unfortunately he'd become committed to shorting stocks; never able to take-off the so-called 'bear suit'. As a result he gave back a good portion of his earlier profits.

"Oscar Wilde said that 'consistency' is the last refuge of the unimaginative." Peter Cundill

Even today, I can think of one reasonably well known manager, a true 'perma-bear' in every sense of the word, whose monthly missives have been a cacophony of doom and gloom since 2009. Here's a very small sample ...  'Strenuously Overbought' (2009), 'Don't Take the Bait' (2010), 'Betting on a Bubble, Bracing for a Fall' (2010), 'Reduce Risk' (2011), 'Hard-Negative' (2011),  'Warning: A New Who's Who of Awful Times to Invest' (2012), 'Dancing at the Edge of a Cliff ' (2012), 'The Endgame is Forced Liquidation' (2013), 'A Textbook Pre-Crash Bubble' (2013), 'Market Peaks are a Process' (2014), 'Ingredients of a Market Crash' (2014), 'Fair Value on the S&P 500 Has Three Digits' (2015), 'Warning with a Capital "W"' (2016). While he's maintained his commitment, his fund has delivered -8%pa return over the last 5 years and -6%pa over 10 years. Like a broken clock, you can expect that his bearish thesis will be right one day, but in the meantime he's lost his investors a lot of money.

The Investment Masters recognize the risk of commitment bias. When facts change, you must change. There are numerous techniques to combat this bias. Being a generalist allows you take a wider view of the investment landscape rather than committing to a certain type of investment. By refraining from publicly disclosing an investment idea there is less risk of becoming committed to it. Consider the following from Buffett's lieutenants:

"I never liked talking to my limited partners about ideas I had, because you become somewhat wedded to it, it's harder to change your mind over time, you become pre-committed to your positions and so forth. That's always been my stance." Todd Combs

"If you speak up and put it [investment idea] on record, you end up getting too wedded to your thesis and that's dangerous because everything your'e invested in is a function of the facts and circumstances on a given day, it changes." Ted Weschler

Getting others to continually test your ideas, or appointing a devil's advocate, can help force you to consider alternative theses and help avoid investment mistakes. Writing an investment thesis prior to investing and then regularly re-checking your reasons can help you maintain an unbiased and rational view should developments evolve contrary to your original expectations. Simply asking yourself if you'd buy the stock today if you didn't own it is another good self-check. 

"You've made an enormous commitment to something. You've poured effort and money in. And the more you put in, the more that the whole consistency principle makes you think, 'Now it has to work. If I put in just a little more, then it will 'all work'. People go broke that way, because they can't stop, rethink, and say, "I can afford to write this one off and live to fight again. I don't have to pursue this thing as an obsession in a way that will break me."  Charlie Munger

Remaining flexible, keeping an open-mind and maintaining a sense of humility is essential. Recognize there are things you can't know. Recognize that you will make mistakes. And when you enter an investment, acknowledge you may be wrong and you'll be far better placed to adjust your thesis if and when required. Remember stocks are just 'three letters' - don't fall in love with ideas.

It's not only investors that get caught in the commitment bias. When a company's management commits to earning guidance or an acquisition policy, they may be inclined to take actions which aren't in the interest of shareholders. The Investment Masters tend to be leery of companies with aggressive growth targets and/or acquisition strategies.

"Over the years, Charlie and I have observed many instances in which CEOs engaged in uneconomic operating manoeuvres so that they could meet earnings targets they had announced. Worse still, after exhausting all that operating acrobatics would do, they sometimes played a wide variety of accounting games to 'make the numbers'.” Warren Buffett

“Organisations expected to grow rapidly, usually because of pressure from investors, often turn to acquisitions to meet expectations. This may dilute an organizations strategy, by tempting it to extend its reach beyond its area of expertise. At least one research study has called this practice ‘premature core abandonment,’ citing it as one of the primary reasons that an organization’s growth stalls.” James Heskett, 'The Culture Cycle'

"Number's pressure impairs judgement and robs dignity.. [It] makes good, smart people do ethically dumb things and takes them closer toward ethical collapse." Marianne Jennings, 'The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse'

Reciprocation

As humans we have benefited from placing a high value on reciprocation. Our ancestors learned to share their food and their skills in an honored network of obligations. We feel an obligation to give, an obligation to receive and an obligation to repay. This is particularly relevant for things like gifts and favors. And then there are what are known as 'reciprocal concessions'; someone makes a concession to us and we feel obliged to respond in kind.

In business, the implications can be positive. A good example lies in the intangible qualities of culture. They're hard to replicate. When a company looks after it's staff, when it pays them well, values them, trusts them and empowers them, it can provide a significant competitive advantage. A cultural 'flywheel' develops.

"Corporate culture becomes self-reinforcing after a point." Warren Buffett

"Cultures seem to perpetuate themselves, good and bad." Shad Rowe

The company rewards the staff, the staff go the extra mile for customers, the customers reciprocate.

“You long forget about the price, but you never forget whether you had a good experience or a poor experience with the purchase experience. You’ll have a hard time finding a person who has a wonderful, delighted experience buying anything who isn’t going to come back. Similarly if the memory is of rudeness, indifference, they’re never going to come back. As a small business owner grows you have to not only project that interest yourself but you have to do it through other people. You won’t be able to do it through people who themselves do not feel are being fairly treated, that their views aren’t being appropriately considered, so you really do have to learn to multiply yourself through other people." Warren Buffett

“What I consider a great company. These are companies that delight and bring value to their customers, suppliers and shareholders, and provide a culture of fulfillment to their employees." Shad Rowe

"Generally, if you take care of your customer, the customer takes care of you." Warren Buffett

"Customer reciprocation is a super-factor in business performance.” Nicholas Sleep

Home Depot is a good example, they support their staff and they also support their communities, particularly in times of need.

"Traditionally, we hire the best people in the industry, so they make more money than their counterparts do at our competition. That breeds initial loyalty when they are hired; receiving company stock further deepens that loyalty; and then they fall in love with the way they are treated .. Every associate at Home Depot has an opportunity to be an owner of the company. Everyone has a stake in the company that goes beyond a day's wages. Associates have a real vested interest in cultivating customers and building lifelong relationships with them." Bernie Marcus, Founder - Home Depot

One of the best predictors of a company's performance is when staff work together, which starts with reciprocation. Adam Grant, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania explains:

"Evidence from studies led by Indiana University’s Philip Podsakoff demonstrates that the frequency with which employees help one another predicts sales revenues in pharmaceutical units and retail stores; profits, costs, and customer service in banks; creativity in consulting and engineering firms; productivity in paper mills; and revenues, operating efficiency, customer satisfaction, and performance quality in restaurants." 

Across these diverse contexts, organizations benefit when employees freely contribute their knowledge and skills to others. 

While reciprocation tendencies can be positive, they can often lead to sub-optimal investment outcomes.  

"Reciprocation tendency subtly causes many extreme and dangerous consequences, not just on rare occasions but pretty much all the time."  Charlie Munger

An example may be a corporate acquisition. The seller makes a small concession; drops the price a little, waives a condition or two and then the acquirer feels an obligation to respond in kind. Or consider when a company provides assistance for an analyst report or invites the Wall Street analyst on a company tour; is the analyst more or less inclined to write a favourable report? When so-called 'Independent Experts' are appointed to report on the fairness of takeovers, I've noticed they rarely recommend against a transaction. Ditto auditors on company accounts. On the latter, Buffett has opined 'whose bread I eat, his song I sing.'

“It’s a Wall Street truism that good management is important to any company’s success, but the typical analysts report ignores the subject.” Chris Davis

"Analysts are competent gatherers of facts and figures, but few can be relied upon for much more. Their assessments of managements are superficial and far too uncritical." Ralph Wanger

“Broker/analysts rarely comment on management in any detail and if so they tend not to criticise." Marathon Asset Management

"Wall Street analysts are unlikely to issue sell recommendations due to an understandable reluctance to say negative things, however truthful they may be, about the  companies they follow. This is especially true when these companies  are corporate-finance clients of the firm." Seth Klarman

"Enron represents another instance, like the dot-coms, where a) most benignly, we’d have to say brokerage house analysts possess little insight and their opinions are of no value, and (b) cynically, it seems they’re not there to help investors as much as their companies’ investment banking efforts.” Howard Marks

"By occasionally giving privileged information to particular analysts, the recipient may have felt (consciously or not) that he or she owed management a favor - what is known as 'reciprocation tendency'." Marathon Asset Management

Directors fees may be considered another form of reciprocation.

"A director getting $150,000 a year from a company, who needs it, is not an independent director." Charlie Munger

"I’ve been on 19 boards. I have never seen a director, where the directors’ fees were important to them, object to an acquisition proposal, object to a compensation arrangement of the CEO. It’s just never happened." Warren Buffett

"The liberal pay [of boards of directors] is counterproductive to good management of the company. There’s a sort of a reciprocation. You know, “You keep raising me, and I keep raising you.” And it gets very club-like. And I think, by and large, the corporations of America would be managed better if the directors weren’t paid at all." Charlie Munger

You can see, even though I have only addressed two of Cialdini's tenets within this post, that the information is more than just valuable, its invaluable to investors. How many people or companies do you know that blindly follow 'consistency' to their detriment? I love Munger's humility in this - being able to acknowledge that he is able to learn from someone else is remarkable for someone with his track record. And not only did he learn, he turned that knowledge to profit and was able to reward Dr Robert Cialdini for the lessons. And when you consider what that single A Class share is worth today, it may seem a high price to pay for the knowledge. For me, the lesson is perhaps beyond invaluable - $300,000 for a book that earnt Munger's shareholders hundreds of millions of dollars is priceless as far as I'm concerned. So read the book - it may well be the best twenty bucks you'll ever spend.

Further Reading:
The Munger Series - ‘Learning from Robert Cialdini - Part II’
The Munger Series - ‘Learnings from Robert Cialdini - Part III’
The Munger Series - Lee Kuan  Yew - Charles Darwin

Follow us on Twitter: @mastersinvest

TERMS OF USE: DISCLAIMER

Buffett's Filing Cabinet

Having thoroughly enjoyed my time in Omaha a few weeks back, I found a recent illuminating post by John Huber of Saber Capital Management discussing his own key takeaways from this year's Berkshire meeting. Huber referenced an observation made in a speech on Buffett by Alice Schroeder, who wrote Buffett's authorised biography, 'The Snowball.' One of the most interesting points raised by Schroeder was how Buffett didn't use a computer to store information, he kept it all in his head.

“He’s created this immense, vertical filing cabinet in his brain of layers and layers and layers of files with information that he can draw back on from more than 70 years of data. He’s like a human computer. He’s wonderful at math. He can recall phone numbers from his childhood, and populations of cities from his childhood. He can do square roots in his head. He does present values and compound interest in his head… The biggest thing he’s done is to learn and create this cumulative base of knowledge in his head. So one reason he doesn’t use a computer is because, in a sense, he is one.”

It's well recognised that Buffett is a lifelong learner, or as Charlie puts it, 'a learning machine'. And Buffett started early. In that same speech, Schroeder explains... 

"Starting at the age of no later than six, he's read everything that he could find about business; the subject that interests him. He's read newspapers, biographies, trade press. He went over to his grandfather's who was a grocer and read the Progressive Grocer magazine and he read articles on how to stock a meat department. He's gone to visit every company that he could find that was even slightly interesting to him. He went down to visit a barrel maker and spent hours talking about how to make barrels. He went to American Express and he spent hours talking about that business. He went to Geico and talked about the insurance business. He has stacks of reports on his desk from the companies he owns - stalls, jewellery, boat winches - everything you can imagine. He reads hundreds of annual reports every year from companies that he doesn't own yet because he just wants to understand their business and when the opportunity arises then he's ready and he can make a decision."

It's likely that Alice Schroeder knows Buffett as well as anyone. After meeting Buffett as an insurance analyst on Wall Street, he encouraged her to write the book about himself that he would never write. Schroeder was given almost unlimited access to Buffett, his friends and colleagues, in the process spending around 2,000 hours with him.

Here are some great insights on Buffett from a 2010 interview with Schroeder.. 

"His knowledge of business history, politics, and macroeconomics is both encyclopedic and detailed, which informs everything he does. If candy sales are up in a particular zip code in California, he knows what it means because he knows the demographics of that zip code and what’s going on in the California economy. When cotton prices fluctuate, he knows how that affects all sorts of businesses. And so on."

"You’re sitting there talking about something like: “Isn’t it amazing that after Jack Welch left GE, the company started having all these problems because of buried accounting issues?” and he will say, “Yes, that’s like …” and pull a company from 30 years prior and start spouting numbers.  Then he will pick another more recent company, and another."

"He has accumulated a filing cabinet of knowledge about companies, and it's very big."

"Through this vast network of connections that he's built, he's created a sort of database of information about business and the economy that's probably irreplaceable."

"[He is] able to pull elaborate modules out of his memory bank. He has thought about so many things over the years that there are polished nuggets prepared to respond to almost any question."

"If there is new information the old version gets overwritten. It’s gone. He remembers stories and certain facts, and the rest is discarded as if for efficiency or comfort."

"His way of articulating ideas is very original. He is a great synthesizer and especially strong at pattern recognition."

"Pattern recognition is one of his primary skills and perhaps his greatest skill. So in terms of data points, unlike many people who learn by seeking information on an as-needed basis, Warren is always looking for fuel for pattern recognition before he needs it."

"If you look at the dotcom stocks, the meta-message of that era was world-changing innovation. He went back and looked for more patterns of history when there was a similar meta-message, great bursts of technological innovation in canals, airplanes, steamboats, automobiles, television, and radio. Then he looked for sub-patterns and asked what the outcome was in terms of financial results.

With the dotcoms, people were looking to see what was different and unique about them. Warren is always thinking what’s the same between this specific situation and every other situation.

That is the nature of pattern recognition, asking: “What can I infer about this situation based on similarities to what I already know and trust that I understand?” Pattern recognition is his default way of thinking. It creates an impulse always to connect new knowledge to old and to primarily be interested in new knowledge that genuinely builds on the old…"

"I don’t want to dispel any notion of his intuition. But he has internalized so much information over the years and uses so many mental models (to quote a Mungerism) that they have coalesced into an almost visceral reaction to an investing situation. And this is what you strive for. It’s not mystical, even if you can’t verbalize your analysis. Much of his decision-making has sunk to almost the unconscious realm, it is so refined."

"Well, I think there are things you can do to improve recall. But there is something to be said about being born with a prodigious memory. It seems to me that there are 3 qualities of great investors that are rarely discussed:

1. They have a strong memory;

2. They are extremely numerate;

3. They have what Warren calls a “money mind;” an instinctive commercial sense.

Warren is all of these."

John Huber noted as much on his trip to Omaha:"Last week I was in Omaha for the Berkshire annual meeting, and while I sat there in the CenturyLink arena, I was thinking about Schroeder’s description while listening to Buffett rattle off trade deficit data from 1970 off the top of his head in response to a question. His mind is an incredible machine, and it appears to be working as well as ever."

Buffett draws on his extensive experience in both investing and managing businesses to help formulate his investment decisions. In an interview with Buffett post the Berkshire meeting, CNBC's Becky Quick made the point that the combination of Warren and Charlie have 181 years of experience! And in investing, all experience is cumulative - provided you learn from the experiences.

Becky Quick noted how easy Buffett and Charlie made it look up on stage and wondered how much longer they could do it. Buffett responded..

"It is easy, actually, at this point. At some point it won't be. But, no, I would say it's as easy now as ever. I mean, you didn't see me enter the [Berkshire fun run] race that took place or anything of the sort. This job doesn't really require hand-eye coordination or stamina or anything. You know, you just sit at a desk and you apply things that you learned 60 or 70 years ago and they come in a little different form now, maybe-- this way or that way. But-- it's the perfect job for somebody that wants to be working at 80 or 90."

We know that Buffett spends his days learning - reading, observing, and thinking. He talks to businesspeople and he collects facts; the resource from which he draws investment wisdom. It's the same approach adopted by Charles Darwin and Leonardi Da Vinci which we learnt about in recent posts.

"Look, my job is essentially just corralling more and more and more facts and information, and occasionally seeing whether that leads to some action." Warren Buffett

"One of the beauties of the business that Charlie and I are in, is that everything is cumulative. The stuff I learned when I was 20 is useful today. Not in necessarily the same way and not necessarily every day. But it’s useful. So you’re building a database in your mind that is going to pay off over time." Warren Buffett

"The beauty of — to some extent — of evaluating businesses — large businesses — is that it is all cumulative. If you started doing it 40 or so years ago, you really have got a working knowledge of an awful lot of businesses. But there aren’t that many, to start with, that you can get a fix. You know, how many — what are there? Seventy-five, maybe, or so important industries. And you’ll get to understand how they operate. And you don’t have to start over again every day. And you don’t have to consult a computer for it or anything like that, it. So it has the advantage of accumulation of useful information over time. And, you know, you just add the incremental bit at some point. You know, why did we decide to buy Coca-Cola in 1988? Well, it may have been, you know, just a couple small incremental bits of information. But that came into a mass that had been accumulated over decades." Warren Buffett

“Things we learned 40 years ago, though, will help [us] recognize the next big idea.” Warren Buffett

And Buffett remembers. The more he learns and the more he reads, the better he gets.

"Investing is kind of a game of connecting the dots. The nice thing about it is the longer you are in the business, as long as you are intellectually curious, your collection of data points of dots gets bigger and bigger. That is where someone like Warren is just incredible. He has had a passion for investing for well over 70 years. He started by the age of 10 or 12. He keeps building that library of data, the ability to recognize patterns in data." Ted Weschler

Coincidentally, I took up the twenty hours travel time getting to Omaha this year re-reading an old favourite book of mine; 'Moonwalking with Einstein - the Art and Science of Remembering Everything,' by Josh Foerr.  I was prompted to re-read it by a recent short post by Chris Pavese of Broyhill Capital on the book highlighting the link between memory, information and creativity.

The book tells the true story of how a rookie journalist's coverage of the US memory competition one year spurred his fascination with memory that led to a journey which culminated in entering and winning the US Memory competition the following year. It's an illuminating story showcasing how an average person can empower the mind to do extraordinary things.

Bill Gates described the book as absolutely phenomenal, and noted "Part of the beauty of this book is that it makes clear how memory and understanding are not two different things. Building up the ability to reason and the ability to retain information go hand in hand."

In the book, Foerr takes the opportunity to delve into the history of memory and the relationship between memory, learning and creativity.  It's uncanny, the commonalities with Buffett's skillsets. Take note of some extracts from the book below ...

"The brain is a muscle .. memory training is a form of mental workout. Over time, like any form of exercise, it's make the brain fitter, quicker, and more nimble. Roman orators argued that the art of memory - the proper retention and ordering of knowledge - was a vital instrument for the invention of new ideas."

"The nonlinear associative nature of our brains makes it impossible for us to consciously search our memories in an orderly way. A memory only pops directly into consciousness if it is cued by some other thought or perception - some other node in the nearly limitless interconnected web."

"What makes the brain such an incredible tool is not just the sheer volume of information it contains, but the ease and efficiency with which it can find that information. It uses the greatest random-access indexing system ever invented - one that computer scientists haven't come even close to replicating." 

"Experts see the world differently. They notice things that non-experts don't see. They home in on information that matters most, and have an almost automatic sense of what to do with it. And most important, experts process the enormous amounts of information flowing through their senses in more sophisticated ways."

"What we call expertise is really just 'vast amounts of knowledge, pattern based retrieval, and planning mechanisms acquired over many years of experience in the associated domain.' In other words, a great memory isn't just a by-product of expertise; it is the essence of expertise."

"Memory is primarily an imaginative process. In fact, learning, memory, and creativity are the same fundamental process directed with a different focus. The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.

"If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you'll be at coming up with new ideas."

"The notion that memory and creativity are two sides of the same coin sounds counter-intuitive. Remembering and creativity seem like opposite, not complimentary processes. But the idea that they are one and the same is actually quite old, and was once even taken for granted. The Latin root 'inventio' is the basis of two words in our modern English vocabulary: inventory and invention. Where do new ideas come from if not some alchemical blending of old ideas? In order to invent, one first needed a proper inventory, a bank of existing ideas to draw on. Not just an inventory, but an indexed inventory. One needed a way of finding just the right piece of information at just the right moment. This is what the art of memory was ultimately most useful for. It was not merely a tool for recording but also a tool of invention and composition.

"You can't have understanding without facts. And crucially, the more you know, the easier it is to know more. Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches."

"People who have more associations to hang their memories on are more likely to remember new things, which in turn means they will know more, and be able to learn more."

You can see how Buffett has, over the years, accumulated vast sums of information that, because he is always learning and reading and absorbing new data, he can recall fairly easily when he most needs. It's an incredible skill and one that is invariably available to us all. As I understand it, we tend to remember the things that most interest us, and if investing and business are high on that list, our ability to store and then recall relevant information should be relatively easy. Buffett succeeds because he relies on his physical memory rather than an artificial one stored in a computer. We too can utilise our natural gift of memory, but it will only work if information is stored in our own vertical filing cabinet in the first place. So we need to learn. Every day. And we do that by listening, and reading and talking and only then we will have something worth remembering.

Further Reading:
Investment Masters Class Post - 'Connecting the Dots'
Interview with Alice Schroeder [Microsoft Research]
Interview with Alice Schroeder 2010 [SimoleonSense]
Josh Foerr, 'Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything'

Follow us on Twitter: @mastersinvest

TERMS OF USE: DISCLAIMER

Learning from Joel Greenblatt

You will have noticed, no doubt, my belief that the information we use to make investment decisions comes from a variety of sources. The data is lurking out there in a wide range of forms for us to discover. Reading is an obvious one, as is meeting and talking with interesting, successful people. Listening is another valuable source of information and I have found podcasts to be both an extremely informative and efficient way of digesting information over time. Given today's excellent variety of formats in which we could hear these sound bites, you can listen in the car on the way to the office, during lunch, or even at work.

One of the best Podcast series I've found is Barry Ritholtz's interviews titled, 'Masters In Business'. Ritholtz runs a great blog. He intuitively understands markets and investing, and he gets a first class line-up of interesting subjects from a diverse array of fields -  from finance to physics professors and even poker champions. Some of my favorites have included Ed Thorp, Brian Greene, Yuval Noah Harari, Marc Andreessen, Jeffrey Sherman and Ray Dalio to name but a few. I enjoyed a recent episode where Ritholtz interviewed Investment Master, Joel Greenblatt. Greenblatt's early success included running Gotham Capital, a hedge fund which compounded capital at an astonishing 50%+pa between 1985 and 1995. I've included some of my favourite comments below ... 

On Diversification...

Greenblatt notes one way to get high returns is to be concentrated. When he ran Gotham Capital, six to eight ideas comprised 80 percent of his fund. He notes that while portfolio management theory doesn’t agree with that strategy, Warren Buffett provides a useful counter:

"[Buffett says] Let’s say you sold out your business and you've got $1 million and you are living in town and you want to figure out something smart to do with it. So you analyze all the businesses in town and let’s say there's hundreds of business. If you find businesses where the management is really good, the prospects for the business are good, it’s run well, and they treat shareholders well, you divide your million dollars between eight businesses that you researched well. No one would think that’s imprudent, they would actually think that was pretty prudent.

"But when you call them stocks and you get stock quotes daily on these pieces of paper that bounce around, people put numbers on it, and volatility, and all these other things where really it’s not that meaningful. You know from one sense if you’re investing in businesses and you did a lot of research and invested in eight different businesses with the proceeds of your sale, people would think you’re a pretty prudent guy.

"All of a sudden if you invested in stocks and did the same type of work, people think you’re insane. It’s just an interesting analogy that I think of when people make fun of me that I was concentrated."

Patience and Hedge Fund Fees - A Conundrum

"I have sat on Penn’s investment board for 10 years, and I saw most of the [hedge fund] managers out there and not many justify one and a half and 20 or two and 20.

And the other part that’s wrong with the hedge fund businesses is that when people pay those kind of prices [ie fees], they are not very patient. So it’s the worst of all worlds. You know, you’re charging too much to your clients and they don’t stay very long because they’re impatient when they're paying so much."

Reading and Mentors

"One of the reasons I read books is because my mentors really came from reading. People who were kind enough to share with me their wisdom over time, people like Andrew Tobias and Benjamin Graham and even Buffett in his letters and David Dreman, who wrote Contrarian Investment Strategy and John Train who wrote the Money Masters. All these people really were helpful in forming and getting me involved in investing and you know I wanted to share some of the things that I learned too, because that’s how I learned.

It really wasn’t so much you know them, some of these people were dead and [yet] they were still sharing [knowledge] with me."

Investors Can't Stick with Winning Funds

"From 2000 to 2010, this was a period where the market was flat but the best-performing mutual fund for that decade was up 18 percent a year. The average investor in that fund managed to lose 11 percent a year on a dollar-weighted basis by moving in and out at all the wrong times. 

Every time the market went up, people piled into that fund, and when the market went down, they piled out. When the fund outperformed, they piled in, when the fund under-performed they piled out. They took that 18 percent annual gain when the market was flat, so that’s great on an annualized basis over 10 year period to beat the market by 18 points, but for outside investors, they went in and out so badly that the average investor on a dollar weighted basis lost 11 percent a year."

Great Managers Underperform & Are Hard to Stick With

"I wrote up a study of institutional managers that showed the top-performing institutional managers for the same decade, 2000 and 2010. Who ended up with the best ten-year record? And, who ended up in the top quartile, what did the results look like?

What the study showed was that 97 percent of those who ended up with the best 10-year record spent at least three of those 10 years in the bottom half of performance. Not shocking. But to beat the market you have to do something different. 

Seventy-nine percent of those who ended up with the best ten-year record spent at least three of those 10 years in the bottom quartile of performance.  And what I love is that 47 percent that ended up with the best 10-year record, spent at least three of those 10 years in the bottom decile, the bottom 10 percent of performers.

So, you know, no one stayed with them."

Remaining Independent & Disciplined

Greenblatt tells the story of how he used an experiment to teach a group of ninth graders from Harlem the concept of independent work and decision making.

"For just one day a week, for an hour a week, we'd come in and teach them [ninth graders] about the stock market ...   I had a fresh opportunity - blue sky with them not know anything about the stock markets - so I really thought long and hard about how I was going to explain the stock market to them.

And so on the first day's class, I brought in a big jar — one of those old-time glass jars filled with jellybeans.  I passed out 3 x 5 cards and I passed the jellybean jar around and I told them to count the rows and do whatever they had to do, and write down how many jellybeans they thought were in the jar. I then went around the classroom and collected the 3 x 5 cards.

Then I said I’m going to go around the room one more time and ask you in front of everybody else how many jellybeans you think are in the jar. I told them you can keep your guess from your 3 x 5 card, or you can change your guess, that’s completely up to you. One by one I went around the room and I asked each student how many jellybeans they thought were in the jar and I wrote that answer down.

So let me tell you the results of the experiment. The average for the 3 x 5 cards, the first guess, was 1771 jellybeans. That’s what it averaged to. There was actually 1776 jellybeans in the jar. So that was pretty good. When I went around the room one by one asking each person publicly how many jellybeans they thought, that average guess was 850 jellybeans.

I explained to the kids that the second guess was actually the stock market.  What I was trying to teach them to do is be the first guess; be cold and calculating, count the rows, be very disciplined in valuing the businesses and not influenced by everyone else around them. When the second guess came in what happened?  What everyone heard was what everyone else was saying and in the stock market, everyone reads the newspapers, they talk to their buddies, they see what everyone else is saying and doing and reading. They're seeing the results in the news every day and they are influenced by everything around them and they’re not being cold and calculating and disciplined.

And so I was going to teach [the students] how to be cold and disciplined and that’s what we try to do. We have a very disciplined process to value businesses and that’s what I was teaching them to do and that is what stocks are, ownership shares of businesses. All the noise, 99.9 percent of the noise you read in the paper every day is really noise, and so that’s — you know, that lesson really resonated"

The Big secret 

"If you can step back and take a longer time horizon, that is the big secret"

Summary

A lot of this speaks to my last post on independent thinking and being out of town. Joel's lesson to the ninth graders is a very powerful message on how we can be influenced by the noise from the herd. How, after careful analysis and independent thought, the class on average was able to accurately determine the contents of the jar. And then, when given another opportunity, they were influenced by the 'noise' of those around them, somehow believing the class knew more then they did, and changed their estimate to one that was inherently incorrect. And how true is that? How often is the market affected by uninformed decisions like this? How often are we influenced by others that know less than us? Joel's thoughts and opinions are valuable to us all and I strongly recommend that you listen to the podcast.

Further Reading:
Greenblatt - WealthTrack Interview
Greenblatt - Talks at Google
Greenblatt - Interview with Howard Marks @ Wharton
Greenblatt - Graham & Doddsville Interview

Books: 

Follow us on Twitter: @mastersinvest

TERMS OF USE: DISCLAIMER

Out of Town

If there was one thing I learnt from my recent trip to Omaha, Nebraska (and let me tell you: I learnt a lot), it's that you don't have to be hunkered down in a glittering marble office in Wall Street to be a successful investor.

We all recognise Buffett and Munger as the Kings of the Game. Fifty years plus of successful investing has earned them the right to the crown. And they deserve it. Absolutely, without a doubt. And there they were, sitting comfortably and humbly before 20,000 adoring shareholders in one of the smaller towns in America's mid-west - Omaha, Nebraska. Which, if you don't know, is nowhere near Wall Street. In fact, Omaha is the polar opposite in many ways; a small population and very, very quiet. 

So why would the best investors in the world decide to grow roots in a place as divorced from Wall Street as you can get?

The answer is that the world's best investors are Independent Thinkers.

 “The consensus is often wrong, so I have to be an independent thinker. To make any money, you have to be right when they’re wrong.” Ray Dalio

"You can’t be a good value investor without being an independent thinker – you’re seeing valuations that the market is not appreciating." Joel Greenblatt

“Great investing requires an independent spirit, and the courage to acquire assets the crowd disdains.” Shelby Davis

Locating miles away from the noise of Wall Street allows Buffett to focus on what's important. Rather than obsess over geopolitical developments, analyst price targets, economist forecasts, interest rates, or the Fed's next move, instead Buffett focuses on the businesses as an owner would. He spends most of his day reading and thinking. Buffett only considers businesses he understands, scrutinising how sustainable their competitive advantages are, the quality of the management and their ability to deploy capital. He reads the raw financial statements, he talks to industry representatives and he collects the facts. Ultimately he's looking for wonderful businesses that can deliver more long-term value than the money that he puts in. It requires patience and discipline.

Like most great investors, Buffett is also somewhat of a contrarian. But not just for the sake of it; only when he has conviction. Basically speaking, if you do what everyone else does, you'll deliver average results. And remember, the average fund fails to beat the market over the long term.

Over the years I've noticed quite a lot of the world's best investors locate themselves away from the noise of Wall Street. I had the good fortune to speak with Chuck Akre while in Omaha and he reiterated his views on working well away from the distractions of Manhattan. Like Warren and Charlie, he prefers to do his thinking in a quieter place.

“The reason we are in a town with one traffic light and away from all the very bright and intellectually interesting people is that their stuff would be intellectually appealing to us and it would distract us from what it is we do well. And that’s a really important notion.” Chuck Akre

“If I was on Wall Street I’d probably be a lot poorer. You get overstimulated on Wall Street. You hear lots of things. You may shorten your focus and a short focus is not conducive to long profits. Here I can just focus on what businesses are worth. I don’t need to be in Washington to figure out what the Washington Post is worth, or be in New York to figure out what some other company is worth. Here I can just focus on what businesses are worth.” Warren Buffett

“We’ve found for the 22 years we’ve been away from Wall Street our performance has been better than the 22 years we managed from Radio City in New York. We went to the same meetings as the other analysts and the people who speak are so sensible that we can’t help but be influenced. It’s easier to be odd when your 1,000 miles away.” Sir John Templeton

"The advantage of being located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains is that we are outside of the fray. Removed from the noise, we are able to climb the mountain and survey the investment landscape with a rational, objective, long-term perspective." Chris Pavese

"It's a massive competitive advantage for us [being in Laguna Beach]. There's so much noise in New York and San Francisco and Chicago. The beauty of being in Laguna Beach is that you're not subject to the constant chatter that goes on, which really forces you to be short term in your orientation - to make decisions in 3 and 6 months periods of times versus five and seven year periods of times. We are able to be more thoughtful." Paul Black

“Seth Klarman, one of the most successful investors on the planet, works out of a decidedly unflashy office in Boston, far from the intoxications of Wall Street. If he wanted, he could easily rent the top floor of a gleaming skyscraper overlooking the Charles River.. And Buffett is tucked away in Omaha’s Kiewit Plaza – another building that is not exactly known for its razzamatazz. This strikes me as a significantly, yet largely unrecognized factor in the success of these investors. Small wonder, then, that I wanted to create my own version of Omaha.” Guy Spier

"Sufficiently removed from Wall Street's hullabaloo, Windsor applied our low P/E sometimes boring principles in consistent fashion. We weren't fancy just prudent and consistent. We always took note of prevailing opinion, but we never let it sway our investment decisions" John Neff

"There’s just so much buzz and craziness in finance in a place like Manhattan that I think it was actually an advantage for Warren to be brought up in a place out of Omaha." Charlie Munger

"You can think here. You can think better about the market; you don't hear so many stories, and you can just sit and look at the stock on the desk in front of you. You can think about a lot of things" Warren Buffett

“Boca Raton is far from New York, but we believe being disconnected is a good thing. We have a unique investment philosophy and process, which is built upon independent fundamental research. We are not concerned with what anyone else thinks of the companies we own. In that way, we think it is actually an advantage to be on an island of sorts.” Damon Ficklin

“It helps us not being in the midtown Manhattan rate race. I’m not comparing our firm’s AUM numbers or profitability with anyone else. I don’t care about that stuff. We can think and do our own thing.” Brian Bares

“Being in Edinburgh, having a bit of distance and perspective on what’s happening in financial markets may provide that ability to be patient in this most impatient of industries. We think that’s more likely to add value for our clients over time.” Tom Slater

“I worked in New York for a couple of years. And people kept whispering to me on street corners. And I kept listening, which was even worse. So I got back to Omaha where there’s less chance you’ll go way off the track. It’s one of the advantages of being in Omaha, frankly.” Warren Buffett

“I’ve realised that successful investors all live far from financial centres. For example, Buffett lives in Omaha and I live in Seattle. Places like Beijing, Shanghai, New York City or Hong Kong are not necessarily the best. All those highfalutin’ people are just noise. Why is it called noise? Because it ultimately produces next to nothing.” Li Lu

“Our journey in investment as a firm began in Edinburgh and it continues there. Our location puts us far from the madding crowd but our perspective on the world is wide open.” Baillie Gifford

“The by-product of removing yourself from the hustle and bustle of this industry - because it's a fire hose of data - when I got to Italy, by myself, in the quiet of my room, I could think about our companies in a way I couldn't do if I was in my office.” Reece Duca

In today's day and age, given the access to almost unlimited information on companies online, you don't need to be located on Wall Street to be successful. Many of the world's best sit in offices that are significantly divorced from the glitter and hype of that place and have sustained incredible track records because of it. So where are you? If you look around you and see a little less glitter and noise, don’t be discouraged, in fact it might be an edge you didn't know you had!

Follow us on Twitter : @mastersinvest

TERMS OF USE: DISCLAIMER

Overcoming Investment Fears

One of Warren Buffett's most famous sayings is: "To be Successful in the Stock Market, Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy and Greedy When Others Are Fearful.” The challenge for investors is that, as humans, we've evolved from hunters and gatherers and are hardwired to feel fear. In fact, fear is our most basic emotion.

One of the best explanations I've found to describe why this is the case can be found in the insightful book 'Sapiens', by Yuval Noah Harari. Mr Harari explains .. 

“For millions of years, humans hunted smaller creatures and gathered what they could, all the while being hunted by larger predators. It was only 400,000 years ago that several species of man began to hunt large game on a regular basis, and only in the last 100,000 years with the rise of Homo sapiens that man jumped to the top of the food chain.

That spectacular leap from the middle to the top had enormous consequences. Other animals at the top of the pyramid, such as lions and sharks, evolved into that position very gradually, over millions of years. This enabled the ecosystem to develop checks and balances that prevent lions and sharks from wreaking too much havoc. As lions became deadlier, so gazelles evolved to run faster, hyenas to cooperate better, and rhinoceroses to be more bad-tempered. In contrast, humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of domination have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position.”

Burdened by fears, it's little wonder the average investor underperforms the stock market. When we are fearful, our decision making is sub-optimal. We do the wrong things at the wrong time.

"Psychologists have persistently shown that pressures, anxieties, tensions and fears seriously degrade our skills as decision makers.” W Morris [1973]

Most investors sell when they are fearful and wait until conditions improve before they re-enter the market. They sell low and buy high.

And it's not easy to make the adjustment required for better investment results. But it's critical if we wish to succeed.

"Fear is overdone concern that prevents investors from taking constructive action when they should." Howard Marks

“Try not to let your emotions affect your judgement. Fear and greed are probably the worst emotions to have in connection with the purchase and sale of stocks.” Walter Schloss

"To remain calm and rational in the face of wild fluctuations in stock prices is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the most significant quality an investor can have or try to have." Francois Rochon

“Emotional mitigation – you’re trying to find some way to mitigate the emotional dimension which is constantly driving people to make incorrect decisions. Data that’s accumulating from behavioural finance substantiates the fact we are, by and large, horribly wired to be objective.” William Browne

"If you have a temperament that when others are fearful you’re going to get scared yourself, you know, you are not going to make a lot of money in securities over time, in all probability." Warren Buffett

The good news is that there are strategies an investor can employ to help overcome investment fears and stay the course for better investment returns. These include:

Know What You Own

When you know what you own, you're far less likely to be influenced by the actions of others and take your cues from the stock price. Imagine yourself standing in your office and seeing a lion on the other side of the glass. If you're like most people, you'd run. But imagine, the prior day you'd accidentally driven your car into the glass at high speed and bounced off. Later you found out it was toughened glass that not even a truck could drive through. With that knowledge in hand, you wouldn't run, no matter how large or aggressive the lion was.

And so it is with stocks; when you have confidence in the underlying business through a detailed assessment of the company, you're far more likely to act rationally when others are fleeing. You won't take price action as conveying news.

“Fear is overcome by clarity.” Bennett Goodspeed

“Knowledge is the antidote to fear.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

You may remember me writing about walking past someone on the street who is looking up, and without thought, or knowledge as to why, many of us will simply follow suit. Basically, in the absence of information, you'll look to others for guidance. Similarly in investing, most investors don't do the work to understand the businesses they own, so it's easy to see how the crowd can over react. They think someone else knows more and so jump onto that bandwagon, causing a negative feedback loop to emerge. The price becomes the news and stocks trade at levels far from what the fundamentals would suggest appropriate.

"[As humans] we imitate without thinking. Especially when many or similar people do it, when we are uncertain, in an unfamiliar environment, in a crowd, lack knowledge, or we suffer from stress or low self esteem." Peter Bevelin

"Be undeterred by fears or hopes based on conjectures, or conclusions based on surmises." Phil Fisher

"If you lack confidence, fear will drive you out at the bottom." John Train

Armed with knowledge you can take advantage of fear.

"We like it when others become fearful of the future. Particularly if they sell shares of companies we own (and would want to increase our ownership) at better prices!" Francois Rochon

"[During scary periods such as major market panics] you should never forget two things: First, widespread fear is your friend as an investor, because it serves up bargain purchases. Second, personal fear is your enemy. It will also be unwarranted." Warren Buffett

"Fear leads to selling. And a price that's low because of irrational fear can create an opportunity." Steve Romick

Don't Rely On Tips/Others

When you rely on a tip, you've outsourced the thinking to someone else. And there may not be a lot of thinking or analysis behind that tip. Furthermore, you can't possibly know the right thing to do should the share price start falling.

"In a panic it is not easy to avoid being swept along with the mad tide. [I] emphasize one thing - the importance of getting the facts of a situation free from tips, inside dope, or wishful thinking. In the search for facts I learned that one had to be as unimpassioned as an surgeon. And if one had the facts right, one could stand with confidence against the will or whims of those who were supposed to know best." Bernard Baruch

"A smart man cannot follow another man blindly even though the other man is right, because you cannot have the confidence and act on advice when you do not know what it is based on." William D Gann

"Relying on others’ analysis results in paralysis or panic under volatile conditions." Allan Mechum

Do Your Own Work

"There is an advantage to gathering your own information and making decisions based on facts that you have gathered yourself. Investing is more of an emotional than intellectual exercise, and it becomes very hard to stay on an even keel and to make rational, unbiased judgements if you’re making them based on someone else’s information.

"So if my buddy at hedge fund XYZ tells me that such and such company is a great investment, or if you go to any of these conferences where someone really smart comes up and makes a bold case on whatever company, it may seem compelling at first. So you think, “Maybe I’ll go out and buy it.” Then the stock goes down 40% and you get nervous. How much time did that really smart guy who made the original pitch spend thinking about this issue that is pressuring the stock? You don’t know, because you didn’t do your own work.

When you’re lost in the fog, you tend to make bad decisions because you’re scared. That’s why to me, you don’t necessarily have to know more than the next guy to have an informational advantage. But you are most certainly at an informational disadvantage if you haven’t made the effort to gather enough information to make an informed decision." John Harris

"Doing the analysis yourself gives you the confidence buying securities when a lot of the external factors are negative. It gives you something to hang your hat on." Peter Cundill

Acknowledge Markets will be Volatile

"We are always psychologically ready for recessions or market corrections." Francois Rochon

Buy Value / Seek a Margin of Safety

When you buy stocks based on value criteria and buy with a margin of safety you're more likely to have the confidence to hold on should markets turn down. By having an estimate of the value of the underlying businesses you own you have something to anchor to while others sell in despair.

Furthermore, stocks bought with a large margin of safety are more likely to hold up in difficult investment environments.

"You might want to give some thought to how you'll fare if the future doesn't oblige. In short, what is it that makes outcomes tolerable even when the future doesn't live up to your expectations? The answer is margin for error." Howard Marks

Buy Quality Companies

If you buy quality companies, those with good balance sheets, enduring competitive advantages and strong management, you can be more confident that the business will endure.

"People don't believe business quality is a hedge, but if your valuation discipline holds and you get the quality of the business right, you can take a 50 year flood, which is what 2008 was, and live to take advantage of it." Jeffrey Ubben

Take the Time to Think

It's natural for humans to act on emotion, without thinking. It's hardwired into our DNA. The world's best investors however have developed the ability to detach from their emotions and make good decisions. Before investing, try and consider what could go wrong.

When acting on an investment, take the time to consider whether you may be over-reacting to market noise. When a stock price falls in relation to stock specific news, its important to consider the implications of the news on the company's earnings over the long term. I've seen plenty of examples where a small earnings miss wipes hundreds of millions off a stock's market capitalization, which is many multiples of the implicit value of the miss. Just sitting back and considering whether that makes sense is a worthwhile exercise.

"'If noise behind the bush, then run'. It is a natural tendency to act on impulse - to use emotions before reason. The behavior that was critical for survival and reproduction in our evolutionary history still applies today." Peter Bevelin

Focus on the Facts Not the Story

“We must focus on facts – as Dragnet fans will recall, “Just the facts.” Stories usually have an emotional content, hence they appeal to the X-system – the quick and dirty way of thinking. If you want to use the more logical system of thought (the C-system), then you must focus on the facts. Generally, facts are emotionally cold, and thus will pass from the X-system to the C-system.” James Montier

Recognize the Crowd Might Be Wrong

If you maintain a contrarian mindset, and start with the premise that most investors do the wrong thing at the wrong time, you are less likely to be panicked and act on emotion when others do. That's not to say, you should blindly buy when others are selling or selling when others are buying; the facts must determine that.

"When the price of a stock can be influenced by a 'herd' on Wall Street with prices set at the margin by the most emotional person, or the greediest person, or the most depressed person, it is hard to argue that the market always prices rationally. In fact, market prices are frequently nonsensical." Warren Buffett

"None of this means, however, that a business or stock is an intelligent purchase simply because it is unpopular; a contrarian approach is just as foolish as a follow-the-crowd strategy. What's required is thinking rather than polling. Unfortunately, Bertrand Russell's observation about life in general applies with unusual force in the financial world: "Most men would rather die than think. Many do." Warren Buffett

Test Investment Ideas / Understand the Counter Arguments

Testing your investment thesis and seeking out and considering contrarian views can give you confidence to hold positions you may otherwise look to sell.

“I’m not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition. I think that I am qualified to speak only when I’ve reached that state.” Charlie Munger

Diversify / Size you Positions

It's inevitable as an investor that some investments won't work out as you expected. That's an unfortunate fact of life. But by ensuring your portfolio holds a collection of securities across a diverse cross section of industries, and maintaining position sizes that are appropriate, will help you maintain a rational viewpoint should a specific event impact those securities. 

"The larger the position, the greater the danger that trading decisions will be driven by fear rather than by judgment and experience" Steve Clark

"You want to limit your size in any position so that fear does not become the prevailing instinct guiding your judgment." Joe Vidich

Plan Ahead

It is at the height of fear when we are most likely to act on emotion. Having a plan ahead of time which has been developed when you are in an unemotional state, will improve your investment results. 

"[Investors should] prepare and pre-commit. We should do our investment research when we are in a cold, rational state - and when nothing much is happening in the markets - and then-pre-commit to following our own analysis and prepared action steps." James Montier

“When we go into a stock, one of the things we ask ourselves once we’ve decide to buy is ‘what will make us wrong.’ We try and decide in advance how strong the investment case is and when will we know that we are wrong. One of the things we have learnt over the years is that you don’t let the stock price tell you if you are wrong. The stock price might tell you something is going to go wrong, but the stock price by itself doesn’t contain any information, especially in this environment when everything is algorithmic and where prices are being marked against each other every day.” Bill Miller

Be Disciplined

“[You must] have the discipline to stay with your strategy when the market tests your confidence, as it inevitably will.” Leon Levy

"At the time of maximum pain, you need to maintain your discipline.” Lee Ainslie

"In my view, the best tools for dealing with volatility are preparation, intellectual humility, and the discipline to stick with ideas that are right in your wheelhouse." Allan Mecham

Remember you own a piece of a Business

"I think that whenever you go through a period of poor performance or sharp declines, you have to remind yourself that you own a real business, and over time, business results drive returns. You also need to instill a certain level of humility, which allows to re-assessing assumptions to identify mistakes. I fall back on those two ideas to help me make rational decisions in times of distress." Allan Mecham

Focus on Earnings 

It's important to recognize share prices can be volatile and that from time to time are unlikely to reflect the true underlying value of the business. By recognising shares are the fractional ownership of a business and focusing on the company's earnings as opposed to the share price, you are more likely to hold onto long-term winners. Provided the earnings are improving, there are no structural issues and the stock is reasonably priced, over time the price will reflect the fundamentals of the business as opposed to the emotions of the market.

"I know that stocks represent fractional ownership in businesses and that, over time, the stock market will reflect their true intrinsic values. And crises bring worries and fears that make many investors forget that simple fact." Francois Rochon

“What’s the cure for either the fear of stocks or the poor behaviour in regard to market volatility? My answer is quite simple: just don’t look at the market in the short run. If your obstacle to good results is your emotions about the ups and downs of the market, build a system that shields you from those emotions.” Francois Rochon

“I think the best way to keep emotions under control is to remain focused on business fundamentals rather than stock price. When we buy a stock, we establish a roadmap for how we expect the business fundamentals to progress. If the fundamentals are meeting our expectations but the stock has declined, we often use that as an opportunity to add to our position.” Bill Nygren

Maintain A Long Term View

The majority of the Investment Masters recognize successful investing is a long term game. In the short term prices can swing wildly. While the stock market has delivered 10%pa returns on average over the last century, the range of annual returns have been highly random. It pays to focus on the future; will the companies products continue to be demanded? Is there a long runway to growth? Is management capable? Is the company likely to be earning more in 5 years?

Avoid Leverage

"There is simply no telling how far stocks can fall in a short period. Even if your borrowings are small and your positions aren’t immediately threatened by the plunging market, your mind may well become rattled by scary headlines and breathless commentary. And an unsettled mind will not make good decisions." Warren Buffett

Be Optimistic

In times of extreme market stress, it pays to remember human ingenuity and the long term resilience of the developed world. Simply changing the environment such as taking a stroll outside and away from your desk, can help you think clearer. You're likely to find that not a lot has changed. People outside the confines of the financial markets will be doing what they were doing the day before.

"Since 1945, there have been 11 recessions. Four times, the stock market dropped by more than 40%. And crises have one thing in common: they all ended!" Francois Rochion

"An unwavering confidence in human potential in the long term stands as a lighthouse guiding us towards our destination in the investing world—particularly when the storms are raging.” Francois Rochon

Summary

None of the above, implies that acting when fearful is the wrong strategy. But the acting must be based on sound, rational and unemotional analysis, and you quite simply can't do that if you're afraid, and you certainly can't do that if the herd is afraid and you're blindly following them. And despite this, you will also not always be right, regardless of how well you plan and think and prepare - and you will still require humility to accept this on occasion.

Fear and emotions are the great undoers - allow them to control you and the outcomes will be less than ideal. 

I think Buffett said it best: "To be Successful in the Stock Market, Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy and Greedy When Others Are Fearful.”

Further suggested reading:
Investment Masters Class Tutorial - Weak Market, Pessimism, Uncertainty & Panic
Giverny Capital - [Francois Rochon] 2008 Letter 'The Opportunity of a Generation'

Follow us on Twitter: @mastersinvest

TERMS OF USE: DISCLAIMER

Stock Prices Follow Earnings

More than 50 years ago, Benjamin Graham, the 'Father of Value Investing', observed "In the short run the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine". That one quote contains as much wisdom today as it did then and it's implications have been long recognised by those we consider Investment Masters. 

What Graham was referring to were the two forces acting on securities, namely human psychology and business fundamentals. In the short run, human psychology can overwhelm fundamentals. However, over the long term it's a securities earnings that determines returns. 

Stocks are more than just pieces of paper. When you invest in stocks you are investing in the underlying businesses; management prowess, business culture, competitive advantages, re-investment opportunities and the like. The ultimate determinant of the price of the stock will be the underlying business' performance. Buffett once again reiterated this in his 2017 annual letter.. 

"Charlie and I view the marketable common stocks that Berkshire owns as interests in businesses, not as ticker symbols to be bought or sold based on their “chart” patterns, the “target” prices of analysts or the opinions of media pundits. Instead, we simply believe that if the businesses of the investees are successful (as we believe most will be) our investments will be successful as well."

The key to long term market beating results then is to identify quality businesses whose earnings will grow, buy them at a reasonable price and stick with them. It is the sticking with them where most investors come undone. Adopting the mindset of a business owner as opposed to a stock trader can help.

“Our business owner mentality.. allows us to virtually ignore the constant babble of short term macro noise." Allan Mecham

"People buy a stock and they look at the price next morning and they decide to see if they are doing well or not doing well. It is crazy. They are buying a piece of the business..  You are not buying a stock, you are buying part ownership in a business. You will do well if the business does well, if you didn't pay a totally silly price. That is what it is all about." Warren Buffett

There are some good reasons a focus on earnings works. Firstly, share prices are volatile, and far more so than corporate profits. Share prices are influenced by the emotions of the crowd. And even more relevant today, they can be driven by the flows of indexing, ETF's and momentum strategies. 

“Research has shown that over the last century, U.S. stock prices have been three times more volatile than fundamentals. In part due to financial innovation, volatility has accelerated since 1990, with stock prices fluctuating at 6–10 times the rate of change in fundamentals.” Frank Martin

"Securities prices rise and fall much more than profit ... Why is that so? Primarily, I think, because of the dramatic ups and downs in investor psychology” Howard Marks

“When an S&P 500 ETF is purchased, its underlying securities are not bought for their individual value, earnings potential, financial health, or any other metric. Those securities are purchased simply because they are on the ETF’s shopping list. This process is without regard to the price/value relationship. As a result, serious distortions in price have accumulated.” Frank Martin

"As a youthful analyst I used to have a notice on my desk that read, ‘Share prices are more volatile than corporate cash flow, which is more volatile than asset replacement cost’. It was a reminder to concentrate on non-transitory items. Today I would update such a notice to read, ‘share prices are more volatile than business values’, but the gist is the same: a reminder to focus on lasting value, not transitory prices." Nick Sleep

Consequently, short term share prices can do almost anything. The record amount of money in passive funds today, means you can and should, expect irrational prices. There is no price too high for an index fund to BUY and there is no price too low for an index fund to SELL. Prices get set by flow not fundamentals. 

Secondly, a business' value is a function of its future earnings, often estimated using a multiple of earnings approach. 

“Business value is rooted in long-term earnings.” Allan Mecham

"Investors own a claim to the current and future profits of a company." Christopher Bloomstran

“Past profits only rewards past investors not today’s buyers. And it is future earnings that make up intrinsic value.” Francois Rochon

“Behind all the smoke and noise on the market’s surface, it’s important to remember that companies — small, medium, and large — make up the market’s backbone. And corporate earnings drive stock prices.” Peter Lynch

“We own shares for multi-year periods and so our continued investment success has far more to do with the economics of the underlying businesses than it has to do with their last share price quote.” Nick Sleep

If you buy a business whose earnings are higher in the future, it's likely the share price will be as well. Consider a simple example: You buy a $100 stock earning $10, ie an undemanding P/E of 10X. If its earnings grow at 12%pa, in ten years it will be earning almost $28. Providing the P/E's unchanged, it will be trading at $280. If it is still trading at $100, the P/E would be just 3.6X, an unlikely scenario.

“There are only two things that matter in investing. What are they going to earn, and what multiple are people going to put on that.  Let’s not make our business any more complicated than this.” Larry Robbins

The good news for investors with a long term investment horizon is that in the long run, earnings and shares prices do converge.

“If the business does well, the stock eventually follows.” Warren Buffett

“Ultimately the market does reflect value, even if it may seem to lose its marbles for unbearably long periods.” Leon Levy

“Stock prices often move in opposite directions from fundamentals but long term, the direction and sustainability of profits will prevail.” Peter Lynch

"Over time, earnings determine a stock's value." Joel Tillinghast

"Our investment philosophy is that, in the long run, corporate earnings drive returns." Dan Davidowitz

"We believe that earnings growth is the primary driver of investment returns over the long run." Rajiv Jain

“We believe that the market performance of a share of common stock, over an extended period of time, is likely to follow the business performance of the underlying company.” Lou Simpson

"Market performance and corporate performance are rarely synchronized over the course of a calendar year. But as more time passes, the synchronization between the two inevitably begins to reveal itself.” Francois Rochon

“We recognize that over long periods of time, the share prices of our holdings should grow at a pace driven by the economics of the underlying businesses.” Chuck Akre

“Over the intermediate to long-term in the stock market, business performance has been inexorably reflected in share price performance.” Bill Ackman

“We believe when one pays a fair price for quality businesses and holds them for the long term, share prices and, thus, the aggregate return of the portfolio will follow the underlying earnings growth over time.” Jeff Mueller

"On any given day, market prices are driven almost 100% by sentiment. As one's investment horizon lengthens, however sentiment matters less and returns are more dominated by cash flows." Andy Redleaf

“One central premise we believe is that over time, the compounding of our long portfolio will revert to the underlying earnings power growth of the businesses we own.” Yen Liow

"For the most part, it is short-term trades that prices are driven by emotion. Mid-term and long-term investments are usually influenced more by fundamentals." James Rogers

“Long-term gains in the intrinsic value of a company are more important than short-term gains in stock prices. The market has a way of fairly pricing stocks over long periods. Provided a company performs well, its stock price will invariably reflect the performance.” Christopher Bloomstran

“Often, there is no correlation between the success of a company’s operations and the success of its stock over a few months or a few years. In the long term, there is 100 percent correlation between the success of the company and the success of its stock .” Peter Lynch

“As a bottom up investor, our investments over the long haul will largely mirror the performance of the underlying companies we invest in.” Li Lu

“A continuous focus on share price movements to the exclusion of the underlying fundamental economics of the companies is neither healthy nor useful. In the long term one will follow the other, and it is not the fundamentals which will follow the share price.” Terry Smith

Likewise, markets themselves follow earnings over the long run.

"In the long run, the stock market indexes fluctuate around the long-term upward trend of earnings per share." Sir John Templeton

Maintaining your focus on a company's earnings rather than the share price can give you the fortitude to hold-on when share prices maybe telling you to sell.

"Following Ben's teachings, Charlie and I let our marketable equities tell us by their operating results – not by their daily, or even yearly, price quotations – whether our investments are successful. The market may ignore business success for a while, but eventually will confirm it...  The speed at which a business's success is recognized, furthermore, is not that important as long as the company's intrinsic value is increasing at a satisfactory rate." Warren Buffett

“Note that I have no interest in the development of share prices. This is why I don’t waste your time with a discussion of the fund’s or individual company’s price development. If a company regularly increases its earnings power, the share price will track this over time. A robust investment process correctly identifies companies which increase their earnings power. A rising share price is the outcome. My sights are firmly trained on process.” Robert Vinall

“We do not evaluate the quality of an investment by the short-term fluctuations in its stock price. Our wiring is such that we consider ourselves owners of the companies in which we invest. Consequently, we study the growth in earnings of our companies and their long-term outlook.” Francois Rochon

“We prefer to judge our investments by what is happening in their financial statements than by the share price.” Terry Smith

And by thinking about future earnings you're also less likely to overpay for a stock or get caught in a value trap. 

“Bear in mind--this is a critical fact often ignored--that investors as a whole cannot get anything out of their businesses except what the businesses earn. Sure, you and I can sell each other stocks at higher and higher prices.” Warren Buffett

“Occasionally, people lose track of the fact that in the long run, shares can’t do much better than the companies that issue them.” Howard Marks

“The inescapable fact is that the value of an asset, whatever its character, cannot over the long term grow faster than its earnings do.” Warren Buffett

“Wild swings in market prices far above and below business value, do not change the final gains for owners in aggregate; in the end, investor gains must equal business gains.” Warren Buffett

It's time to look for businesses which offer the potential for sustainable earnings growth. Buy them at reasonable share prices and the returns will follow!

“Your goal as an investor should simply be to purchase, at a rational price, a part interest in an easily-understandable business whose earnings are virtually certain to be materially higher five, ten and twenty years from now ...  Put together a portfolio of companies whose aggregate earnings march upward over the years, and so also will the portfolio's market value.” Warren Buffett

Beware of Averages, Zeros & Non-Linearity

Over the two decades that I have been advising institutional clients on markets, I've experienced my fair share of extreme stock market volatility. This has included market crashes, stock price death spirals and short squeezes. During this time I've often witnessed whole analyst communities get blindsided by unexpected outcomes, rendering their forecasts and recommendations completely obsolete. I've also seen investors lose significant sums. Some of these outcomes may have been avoided by recognising a few simple mathematical concepts, namely Averages, Zeros and Non-Linearity. 

Understanding these three concepts, which as you'll see, can often be inter-related, can help you avoid the permanent loss of capital.

Averages

Averages are a form of simplification. They can summarize a lot of information into one key output. You'll often see market commentators reference an average to support a recommendation ... "Historically, the market has rallied/fallen x% when xyz happens."

The danger in relying on averages is that the range of historic outcomes may be very wide; the range may contain a zero, or the future outcome may end up being far outside those historic outcomes. It's also quite likely the outcome will be nowhere near the historic average.

“Averages mislead by hiding a spread in a single number.” Hans Rosling

The average annual stock market return over the last century is a case in point. While the average return for the S&P500 has been c10% pa, the typical yearly return is far from that. The average can conceal more than it reveals. Buffett made that point in his 2004 letter ... 

"In one respect, 2004 was a remarkable year for the stock market, a fact buried in the maze of numbers on page 2. If you examine the 35 years since the 1960s ended, you will find that an investor's return, including dividends, from owning the S&P has averaged 11.2% annually. But if you look for years with returns anywhere close to that 11.2% - say, between 8% and 14% - you will find only one before 2004. In other words, last year's 'normal' return is anything but."

Whenever I hear references to an 'average', I remind myself of the story of the 6-foot man who drowned crossing the river that was, on average, 5-feet deep. 

“Over the past 100 years, it is generally understood that the stock market’s annualized return is approximately 10%. That 100 year annualized return for the S&P 500 Index masks a great deal of volatility, or variability around the average. It calls to mind the parable of the 6-foot man who drowned in the 5-foot average depth river. The lesson: beware of averages!” Chuck Akre

"Never forget about the man who was six-foot-tall, who drowned crossing the stream that was five feet deep on average. To be a successful investor, at minimum, you have to survive. Surviving on the good days is not the issue. You have to be able to survive on the bad days. The idea of surviving on average is not sufficient. You have to be able to survive on the worst days." Howard Marks 

Another limitation of averages is that the future might look a lot different to the past. Billions of dollars were lost in the Global Financial Crisis as people relied on the notion that`On a National basis, US house prices never go down'. Never forget that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

“The mother of all harmful investment errors is mistaking the absence of evidence... for the evidence of absence. In other words, assuming that just because historically infrequent and potentially catastrophic events, known as Black Swans, haven’t happened… they won’t.” Frank Martin

As an investor you must structure your portfolio to cope with the unexpected. This means stress-testing individual ideas and the assumptions that underpin them and taking the time to think about what a worst case scenario might do to each position and the portfolio as a whole.

"We should all be humble enough to realize that once every 20 or 30 or 40 years, values go to real extremes. Any investment program must take into account the impossibility of knowing when and to what extent such extremes might occur." Paul Singer

Zeros

Averages also mask historic outcomes that resulted in zeros. Regardless of the potential return, if there is a possibility of a complete loss, investors should steer clear.

“Makes sure that the probability of the unacceptable (i.e: the risk of ruin) is nil.” Ray Dalio

Zero means game over.

"Never forget that anything times zero is zero. No matter how many winners you’ve got, if you either leverage too much or do anything that gives you the chance of having a zero in there, it’ll all turn to pumpkins and mice.” Warren Buffett

"In business and also investment, success is measured through the compounding of a series of returns. Mathematically, the biggest risk to a compounded series of returns is large negative numbers or even a single negative number, if large enough. Take however many spectacular annual outcomes and multiply them by just one zero and the answer is of course, zero." Marathon Asset Management

“There is a difference between opportunities missed and capital lost, with which most investors, anecdotally, do not appear adequately familiar. You can miss a million opportunities in a lifetime and still become very rich. Every asset that has risen in price that one didn’t purchase was an opportunity lost. Capital losses are not so forgiving. If you lose 100 percent of your capital – just once – you're broke.” Frank Martin

"One single loss can eradicate a century of profits." Nicholas Nassim Taleb

"No matter what price you pay for a stock, when it goes to zero you've lost 100% of your money." Peter Lynch

And, as we saw above, history may not be a good guide to the future. To manage that risk requires creative thinking, consideration of potential alternative outcomes and acknowledging worst case scenarios.

“In my book 'The Most Important Thing', I mentioned something I call “the failure of imagination.” I defined it as, “either being unable to conceive the full range of possible outcomes, or not understanding the consequences of the more extreme occurrences.” Howard Marks

"In life, both financial and social, sometimes events swing to extremes that seem inconceivable to conventional minds." Barton Biggs

As Warren Buffett noted above, a common cause of investment ruin is leverage. I've seen plenty of over-leveraged companies turn into zeros.

"The floor for any business is different. If a company is highly levered, the floor could be zero." Mohnish Pabrai

"More than anything else, it's debt that determines which companies will survive and which will go bankrupt in a crisis. Young companies with heavy debts are always at risk." Peter Lynch

Another danger is complex businesses that are difficult to understand or lack transparency. I recently witnessed a well-capitalized insurance company turn to dust when a fraction of its long-tail reinsurance liabilities blew up the balance sheet. Earlier this year Buffett said: "You can make big mistakes in insurance.”

It's no wonder the Investment Masters generally steer clear of companies with lots of debt, lack transparency or that are difficult to understand. 

Non-Linearity

Humans are wired to think in a linear fashion. Most things in life work that way, but we often fail to see the potential for non-linear outcomes.

“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” Albert Allen Bartlett

“Our intuitions are not cut out for nonlinearities. Consider our life in a primitive environment where process and result are closely connected. You are thirsty; drinking brings you adequate satisfaction. Or even in a not-so-primitive environment, when you engage in building, say, a bridge or a stone house, more work will lead to more apparent results, so your mood is propped up by visible continuous feedback.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Decades of research in cognitive psychology show that the human mind struggles to understand non-linear relationships. Our brain wants to make simple straight lines. In many situations, that kind of thinking serves us well: If you can store 50 books on a shelf, you can store 100 books if you add another shelf, and 150 books if you add yet another. Similarly, if the price of coffee is $2, you can buy five coffees with $10, 10 coffees with $20, and 15 coffees with $30. But in business there are many highly non-linear relationships, and we need to recognize when they’re in play. This is true for generalists and specialists alike, because even experts who are aware of non-linearity in their fields can fail to take it into account and default instead to relying on their gut. But when people do that, they often end up making poor decisions.” Whitney Tilson

But in markets small changes can have large impacts on outcomes. Sometimes things don't work in a linear fashion.

“With linearities, relationships between variables are clear, crisp, and constant, therefore platonically easy to grasp in a single sentence, such as, "A 10 percent increase in money in the bank corresponds to a 10 percent increase in interest income and a 5 percent increase in obsequiousness on the part of the personal banker." If you have more money in the bank, you get more interest. Non-linear relationships can vary; perhaps the best way to describe them is to say that they cannot be expressed verbally in a way that does justice to them.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Jamie Dimon touched on this topic in his recent annual letter ... 

"I am a little perplexed when people are surprised by large market moves. Oftentimes, it takes only an unexpected supply/demand imbalance of a few percent and changing sentiment to dramatically move markets. We have seen that condition occur recently in oil, but I have also seen it multiple times in my career in cotton, corn, aluminium, soybeans, chicken, beef, copper, iron – you get the point.

Each industry or commodity has continually changing supply and demand, different investment horizons to add or subtract supply, varying marginal and fixed costs, and different inventory and supply lines. In all cases, extreme volatility can be created by slightly changing factors.

It is fundamentally the same for stocks, bonds, and interest rates and currencies. Changing expectations, whether around inflation, growth or recession (yes, there will be another recession – we just don’t know when), supply and demand, sentiment and other factors, can cause drastic volatility."

Over the years I've witnessed numerous events cause unexpected negative outcomes due to non-linearity. Here are a few ..

High Fixed Operating Cost Businesses - when businesses have high fixed operating costs and low profit margins, small changes in top line revenue can have a huge impact on a businesses profitability. When sales are booming this is a great benefit, but when things turn down, profit can disappear quickly.

Highly Leveraged Businesses - when businesses carrying a lot of debt turn down, profit can disappear quickly. While the value of the enterprise might decline by 50%, if the business is 50% geared it means the equity is wiped out. These can be very profitable short candidates..

“You have to remember that if you are shorting a leveraged company, with 90% of the capitalization in debt and 10% in equity, a 50% decline in the stock only wipes out 5% of the total capitalization. You have to look at the total capitalization.” Jim Chanos

Commodity Companies - Analysts often expect supply and demand curves to be linear. Often they are not. A good example was when China entered the iron ore market in the early 2000's. The chart below shows a stable iron ore price from c1985 until 2009 when a supply bottleneck saw prices spike dramatically. Analysts expected the iron ore to be supported by the high Chinese marginal cost of production post c2012. Huge increases in supply and large debt loads that needed to be serviced saw iron ore prices collapse as the supply and demand curve proved non-linear.

Peter Brandt, a CTA since 1976, summed it up nicely in regards to commodities trading below costs ... "But, you might say, this kind of drop is impossible because producers must make money. Who says?? Markets in supply surplus tend to go the production price of the most efficient producers. Plus, who would have ever believed when Crude was at $148 in mid-2008 that prices would retreat to below $40 in just six months. So take your pet macro-economic/fundamental scenario and burn it with the trash!"

Non-linear outcomes can lead to extreme events, also known as 'tail risks'. They too, don't show up in past averages.

“Averages mask non-linearity and lead to prediction errors.” Bart de Langhe

Having an understanding and awareness of the possibility of non-linear outcomes can better prepare you and your portfolio for success in the markets. 

"Don’t project along a straight line." Jim Tisch

"Nonlinear outcomes, those exponentially greater than the apparent precipitating causes, are a great threat to financial and economic stability. Having even a crude understanding of power laws, as they are known,particularly in the area of fat tails, is critically important for effective risk management, for appreciating the potential magnitude of rare market upheavals." Frank Martin

I particularly like the anecdote about the six foot man to explain most of this. Consider that if the average depth of the river he wanted to cross was 5', and the shallowest depth was 0', the deepest part of the water could be well in excess of his 6' height. Which is why he drowned. The message is don't rely on averages. Or expect that all things will conveniently follow a straight line. Buffett's comment that the market's returns bore a resemblance to the average in only one year across the 35 years he was reviewing, is quite simply, astonishing. And let's face it, who wants to drown? Or suffer a permanent loss of capital? 

Follow us on Twitter: @mastersinvest

TERMS OF USE: DISCLAIMER

Buffett's Edge

“Defining what your game is, where you are going to have an edge is enormously important.”  Warren Buffett

Every successful investor has an edge. And when I say 'edge', I'm referring to the difference we have that gives us an advantage in a situation. In investing, this could be a structural edge such as access to better information or low-cost permanent capital, or it may be an intellectual edge derived from creativity or lateral thinking or a psychological edge like emotional rigor or temperament. It could also mean having a longer time horizon than other investors, or even a better reputation. Outperformance as we know it is usually derived from a combination of more than one edge.  

"First answer the question, 'What's your edge?" Seth Klarman

"You have to figure out where you have an edge." Charlie Munger

I've long thought about the edges Warren Buffett has. These are his differences that he has utilized to allow him to deliver returns far in excess of the market indices; you don't compound capital at nearly 20%pa for over 50 years without some sort of serious edge. 

I've outlined the multitude of Buffett's edges below. There are probably others however these tend to define the key differences for me...

Reads & Thinks

“I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business." Warren Buffett

Discipline

"An investor cannot obtain superior profits from stocks by simply committing to a specific investment category or style.  He can earn them only by carefully evaluating facts and continuously exercising discipline." Warren Buffett

Unemotional

“If you’re emotional about investment you’re not going to do well.” Warren Buffett

Loves Investing

“I get to do what I love to do every day.” Warren Buffett

No Distractions

"The best CEO's love operating their companies and don't prefer going to Business Round Table meetings or playing golf at Augusta National." Warren Buffett

"The wooden shutters on the [office] windows are always closed. You get no sense that a world exists outside, which is what he wants, no distractions. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t need sunlight." Alice Schroeder

No Ulterior Motives

“There’s nothing material I want very much.” Warren Buffett

Humility

“You gotta hit a few in the woods.” Warren Buffett

"You have to put mistakes behind you and not look back. Tomorrow is another day. Just go on to the next thing and strive to do your best." Warren Buffett

Learns from Mistakes

“One of the reason Warren’s so successful is that he is brutal in appraising his own past.  He wants to identify mis-thinkings and avoid them in the future.” Charlie Munger

"It's good to learn from your mistakes. It's better to learn from other people's mistakes." Warren Buffett

A Learning Machine

“If you take Berkshire Hathaway, which is one of the best regarded corporations in the world and it may have the best long term investment record in the entire history of civilisation. The skill that got Berkshire through one decade, would not have sufficed to get it through the next decade with the achievements made. Without Warren Buffett being a continuous learning machine, the record would have been absolutely impossible.” Charlie Munger

Independent Thinker

“You will not be right simply because a large number of people momentarily agree with you.  You will not be right simply because important people agree with you. You will be right over the course of many transactions, if your hypothesis are correct, your facts are correct, and your reasoning is correct.” Warren Buffett

Contrarian in Nature

“We have usually made our best purchases when apprehension about some macro event were at a peak. Fear is the foe of the faddist, but the friend of the fundamentalist.” Warren Buffett

"Berkshire buys when the lemmings are heading the other way." Warren Buffett

Age

"It's hard to believe that he's getting better with each passing year. It won't go on forever, but Warren is actually improving. It's remarkable: Most seventy-two-year-old men are not improving, but Warren is." Charlie Munger

Communication Skills

"We also believe candor benefits us as managers: The CEO who misleads others in public may eventually mislead himself in private." Warren Buffett

"By our policies and communications, we can encourage informed, rational behavior by owners that, in turn, will tend to produce a stock price that is also rational. Our it's-as-bad-to-be- overvalued-as-to-be-undervalued approach may disappoint some shareholders. We believe, however, that it affords Berkshire the best prospect of attracting long-term investors who seek to profit from the progress of the company rather than from the investment mistakes of their partners." Warren Buffett

[Buffett's skill in writing has helped him develop a rapport with Berkshire's shareholders. He's under no pressure to buy or sell assets or keep up with an index. He doesn't have to worry investors will pull their money. Unlike most managers, it has allowed him to maintain a long term focus].

Away from Wall Street

“If I was on Wall Street I’d probably be a lot poorer. You get overstimulated on Wall Street. You hear lots of things. You may shorten your focus and a short focus is not conducive to long profits. Here I can just focus on what businesses are worth.  I don’t need to be in Washington to figure out what the Washington Post is worth, or be in New York to figure out what some other company is worth. Here I can just focus on what businesses are worth.” Warren Buffett

Value Approach

"As far as I can observe and speak to with statistics, there has only been one style which has reliably and safely brought investors exceptional long term returns: value investing. Today, Buffett has a 57-year track record." Li Lu

Generalist / Opportunistic

“Our rule is pure opportunism. If there is a masterplan somewhere in Berkshire, they’re hiding it from me. Not only do we not have a master plan, we don’t have a master planner.” Charlie Munger

"We do have a few advantages, perhaps the greatest being that we don't have a strategic plan. Thus we feel no need to proceed in an ordained direction (a course leading almost invariably to silly purchase prices) but can instead simply decide what makes sense for our owners." Warren Buffett

[Buffett doesn't have constraints such as benchmarks, indexes, asset types, time horizon, etc. There is no pressure to keep up with an index. As a private business owner, Buffett doesn't have to invest in any business if the return profile is unattractive. Furthermore, with a fortress balance sheet, Buffett is often sought out for transactions at times when others are constrained.]

Long Term Focus

"One factor that has caused some reluctance on my part to write semi-annual letters is the fear that partners may begin to think in terms of short-term performance which can be most misleading. My own thinking is much more geared to five year performance, preferably with tests of relative results in both strong and weak markets.” Warren Buffett

“I could do certain things to jiggle up the price of Berkshire - in the short run, that would not be good for the company over five or ten years.  [I] could  spin off one of our divisions, it might be a pretty big, hot division, but if it's a really good business, I just as soon a keep it for Berkshire.  I am running the company for people who want to stick around, not for the ones who are leaving.” Warren Buffett

[Having a long term focus allows Buffett to allocate capital to businesses which may depress short term earnings at the expense of long term gains. When investing, he can focus on what a business will be earning and likely worth many years into the future without the pressure of short term performance.]

Sticks with What he Knows / Defined Filters

“I don’t need to make money in every game. I don’t know what coca beans are going to do. There are all kinds of things I don’t know about. That maybe too bad but why should I know all about them, I haven’t worked that hard on them.” Warren Buffett

"We do have filters. And sometimes those filters are very irritating to people who check in with us about businesses - because we really can say "no" in 10 seconds or so to 90%+ of all of the things that come along simply because we have these filters." Warren Buffett

"Typically, and this is not well understood, his [Buffett's] way of thinking is that there are disqualifying features to an investment. So he rifles through and as soon as you hit one of those it’s done. Doesn’t like the CEO, forget it. Too much tail risk, forget it. Low-margin business, forget it. Many people would try to see whether a balance of other factors made up for these things. He doesn’t analyze from A to Z; it’s a time-waster." Alice Schroeder

Thinks as a Businessman

“When we buy a stock, we always think in terms of buying the whole enterprise because it enables us to think as businessmen rather than stock speculators.” Warren Buffett

“I did a lot of work in the earlier years just getting familiar with businesses and the way I would do that is use what Phil Fisher would call, the ―Scuttlebutt Approach - I would go out and talk to customers, suppliers, and maybe ex-employees in some cases. Everybody." Warren Buffett

“Warren Buffett can always put himself in the shoes of the management team and analyze the situation from management teams point of view instead of his own point of view. I think it is not easy to always try to understand what others think because we are so used to only look at the world from our own perspectives.” Lei Zhang

Buys Simple Businesses He Understands

“We try to stick to businesses we believe we understand. That means they must be relatively simple and stable in character.” Warren Buffett

Insists on Good Management

"In making both control purchases and stock purchases, we try to buy not only good businesses, but ones run by high-grade, talented and likable managers." Warren Buffett

Conservative assumptions

“.. take all of the variables and calculate ‘em reasonably conservatively .. don’t focus too much on extreme conservatism on each variable in terms of the discount rate and the growth rate and so on; but try to be as realistic as you can on these numbers, with any errors being on the conservative side. And then when you get all through, you apply the margin of safety.” Warren Buffett

Access to Information

"We have dozens and dozens and dozens of businesses. I've always said I'm a better investor because I've had experience in business and better businessman because I've had experience in investments. Berkshire is about as good a place as you can find to really understand competitive dynamics and all that." Warren Buffett

"There is almost no industry Berkshire doesn't touch in one form or another. I can't count the number of times when I'm looking at something and pick up the phone and talk to [one of our CEOs] and if it's in any one of their adjacent industries, they know more about it in 15 minutes than an investor can learn in a lifetime." Todd Combs

Looks at Price Last

“I always like to look at investments without knowing the price – because if you see the price, it automatically has some influence on you.” Warren Buffett

Doesn't Disclose Positions

“We cannot talk about our current investment operations. Such an “open mouth” policy could never improve our results and in some situations could seriously hurt us. For this reason, should anyone, including partners, ask us whether we are interested in any security, we must plead the “5th Amendment.” Warren Buffett

Buys Established, Predictable, Quality Businesses

"Experience indicates that the best business returns are usually achieved by companies that are doing something quite similar today to what they were doing five or ten years ago." Warren Buffett

“At Berkshire we will stick with businesses whose profit picture for decades to come seems reasonably predictable.” Warren Buffett

"It must be noted that your Chairman, always a quick study, required only 20 years to recognize how important it was to buy good businesses. In the interim, I searched for "bargains" - and had the misfortune to find some.  My punishment was an education in the economics of short-line farm implement manufacturers, third-place department stores, and New England textile manufacturers." Warren Buffett

Controls Capital Allocation

Buffett gets to decide where and when the companies he controls direct their capital. Businesses with solid re-investment opportunities receive capital, while other businesses, while they maybe highly profitable don’t have those allocation opportunities.

“When we control a company we get to allocate capital, whereas we are likely to have little or nothing to say about this process with marketable holdings.” Warren Buffett

“Buffett solves the reinvestment conundrum unlike almost any other business we know of. Sure, Buffett can allow CEOs to reinvest in carpets or bricks – but only if the CEO can convince Buffett that these reinvestment opportunities are superior to Buffett’s exceptionally wide canvas of reinvestment opportunities.” David Rolfe

No Committees / Groupthink

"As your company gets larger and larger and you have larger groups making decisions, the decisions get more homogenised.  I don't think you will ever get brilliant investment decisions out of a large committee." Warren Buffett

"We try very hard, Charlie and I, not to get eager to do a deal [ie acquisition]. We’re just eager to do a deal that makes sense. And that would be a lot harder if we had directors, strategy departments, whatever it might be, all pushing us toward, you know. So the setting in which you operate really can be very important." Warren Buffett

Aligned Shareholders

“Boredom is a problem with most professional money managers. If they sit out an inning or two, not only do they get somewhat antsy, but their clients start yelling ‘swing you bum’ from the stands.” Warren Buffett

"We do not view Berkshire shareholders as faceless members of an ever-shifting crowd, but rather as co-venturers who have entrusted their funds to us for what may well turn out to be the remainder of their lives." Warren Buffett

"We have an ownership structure that is probably more stable than any company our size, or anywhere near our size, in the country. And that’s attractive to people." Warren Buffett

Avoids Leverage

"Borrowed money has no place in the investor’s tool kit: Anything can happen anytime in markets." Warren Buffett

Maintains Significant Cash

"There will be some incident, it could be tomorrow. At that time, you need cash. Cash at that time is like oxygen. When you don't need it, you don't notice it. When you do need it, it's the only thing you need. We operate from a level of liquidity that no one else does." Warren Buffett

"The ability to say 'yes' very quickly [in turbulent times] with very large sums sets you apart from virtually anybody in the investing universe." Warren Buffett

No Guidance to Hit / Analysts to Please

"We do not follow the usual practice of giving earnings 'guidance.'" Warren Buffett

"We’ve not had to bow to any of the urgings of Wall Street or, you know, whatever may be the fad of the day." Warren Buffett

Zero Cost Permanent Capital

"Berkshire has access to two low-cost, non-perilous sources of leverage that allow us to safely own far more assets than our equity capital alone would permit: deferred taxes and "float," the funds of others that our insurance business holds because it receives premiums before needing to pay out losses." Warren Buffett

"Well obviously there was a little leverage buried in the Berkshire numbers.  Obviously the insurance business provided some of that.  It’s not over-whelming in its consequences." Charlie Munger

Better yet, this funding to date has been cost-free. Deferred tax liabilities bear no interest.  And as long as we can break even in our insurance underwriting - which we have done, on the average, during our 32 years in the business - the cost of the float developed from that operation is zero. Neither item, of course, is equity; these are real liabilities. But they are liabilities without covenants or due dates attached to them. In effect, they give us the benefit of debt - an ability to have more assets working for us - but saddle us with none of its drawbacks." Warren Buffett

"[If your float costs you zero it's like] free money, it’s worth a lot of money. And that growth [in float] has not, probably, generally, been appreciated fully in connection with Berkshire nor has the interplay of how having zero-cost money, in terms of affecting our gain in value over time. People have looked at — always looked at our asset side, but they haven’t paid as much attention to the liability side." Warren Buffett

Berkshire's insurance operations have their own significant edges versus competitors, including the absence of pressure to grow premiums if/when pricing is unattractive, the ability to write premiums no other insurer has the balance sheet to write [a size advantage], speed of response time, lack of bureaucracy, lowest costs (Geico), ability to accept fluctuating earnings etc ....

"I would say that the main difference between our practice and that of most other people is that we are deliberately seeking a method of operation which will give us occasional big losses in a single year, big overall losses.  And everybody else is trying to avoid that. And we just want to be rich enough so a big loss in a single year is a blip. And that’s a competitive advantage, that willingness to endure fluctuating annual results." Charlie Munger

“The reaction of other people when premiums are wrong is to take more risk. And our reaction when premiums are wrong is just to go play golf or something and tell somebody to call us when premiums get right again.” Warren Buffett

"We have promised people, at all of our insurance operations, that we will never have layoffs because of a drop in volume. We do not want the people who run our insurance business to feel they have to write X dollars in order to keep everybody there." Warren Buffett

No Mark to Market on Wholly Owned Businesses

"Our equity holdings have fallen considerably as a percentage of our net worth, from an average of 114% in the 1980's, for example, to less than 50% in recent years. Therefore, yearly movements in the stock market now affect a much smaller percentage of our net worth than was once the case, a fact that will normally cause us to underperform in years when stocks rise substantially and over perform in years when they fall." Warren Buffett 2004

[While Berkshire owns marketable securities that fluctuate with markets, wholly owned subsidiaries are not marked to market. On a short term basis this limits exposure to large stock market declines. Over the long term, it's the business performance that drives returns. Buffett focuses on the earnings of the businesses he owns not the share prices]

Avoids Potential Blow-Ups / Focuses on Downside

“If we can’t tolerate a possible consequence, remote though it may be, we steer clear of plantings its seeds.” Warren Buffett

Avoids Turnarounds, Start-Ups and IPO's

"Start-ups are not our game." Warren Buffett

"I've never swung at a ball while it's still in the pitcher's glove." Warren Buffett

“After 25 years of buying and supervising a great variety of businesses, Charlie and I have not learned how to solve difficult business problems.  What we have learned is to avoid them.” Warren Buffett

“It’s almost a mathematical impossibility to imagine that, out of the thousands of things for sale on a given day, the most attractively priced is the one being sold by a knowledgeable seller (company insiders) to a less-knowledgeable buyer (investors).” Warren Buffett

Ethical

“Both of us [Warren] know that we’ve done better by having ethics.” Charlie Munger

Seeks Win-Win Outcomes

“He [Buffett] wanted win/win results everywhere - in gaining loyalty by giving it, for instance." Charlie Munger

Good Home for Businesses

"We have some significant advantages in buying businesses over time. We would be the preferred purchaser, I think, for a reasonable number of private companies and public companies as well." Warren Buffett

"I won’t close down businesses of sub-normal profitability merely to add a fraction of a point to our corporate rate of return. However, I also feel it inappropriate for even an exceptionally profitable company to fund an operation once it appears to have unending losses in prospect. Adam Smith would disagree with my first proposition, and Karl Marx would disagree with my second; the middle ground is the only position that leaves me comfortable." Warren Buffett

"We are also very reluctant to sell sub-par businesses as long as we expect them to generate at least some cash and as long as we feel good about their managers and labor relations. We hope not to repeat the capital-allocation mistakes that led us into such sub- par businesses." Warren Buffett

“You can sell it to Berkshire, and we’ll put it in the Metropolitan Museum; it’ll have a wing all by itself; it’ll be there forever. Or you can sell it to some porn shop operator, and he’ll take the painting and he’ll make the boobs a little bigger and he’ll stick it up in the window, and some other guy will come along in a raincoat, and he’ll buy it.” Warren Buffett

"Big private acquisitions are going to come to Berkshire because they want to come to Berkshire. And that’s a significant competitive edge, and I don’t see how anybody really challenges us on that." Warren Buffett

"We can promise that we won’t sell their business, for example, if it turns out to be disappointing, as long as it doesn’t run into the prospect of continuing losses or having significant labor problems. But we keep — we are keeping — certain businesses that you would not get a passing grade at business school on if you wrote down our reasons for keeping them. We promise the managers, you know, that they are going to continue to run their businesses. And believe me, if we didn’t do it, the word would get around on that very quickly. But we’ve been doing it now for 49 years. And we’ve put ourselves in a class that is hard for other people to compete with, if that’s important to the seller of a business." Warren Buffett

"Financial profit was not the key to ISCAR's sale. We wanted to ensure that ISCAR could continue to grow, and we saw Warren Buffett as the person who would help achieve that.. In truth, the money - $4b for 80% of ISCAR - was not the most important consideration for us in this deal .. I liked the fact that Buffett does not operate in the stock market as a speculator but as an investor. He does not look for a rapid profit but instead for stability and growth potential in the companies he acquires. He has said that he buys businesses, not stocks, they are businesses he wants to own forever. For us, the deal was more than a tribute to the unique value of the company I had founded fifty-four years earlier with an old lathe in our two-room apartment in Nahariya." Stef Werthheimer

"There seem to be enough people that have built businesses lovingly over 50 or 100 years, and their parents before them and grandparents, that really do care about the eventual disposition of them in some way beyond getting the last dollar that day, that we have a supply from time to time of those businesses. And I think we’ll continue to see them." Warren Buffett

“For somebody that’s built up their company over 20 or 30 or 40 years — and maybe their father or grandfather built it up even before that — some of those people care about where their businesses go. They’re very rich, they’ve accomplished all kinds of things in life. And they don’t want to build up something which somebody else tears apart very quickly believe they handing it over to a few MBAs who want to show their stuff. So, we do have a unique — close to a unique — asset at Berkshire. And as long as we behave properly, we will maintain that asset. And really, no one else will have much luck in competing with us.” Warren Buffett

[Over time Buffett has attracted more and more quality businesses to join Berkshire. Business founders often prioritize legacy, staff morale, business continuity and management independence above financial gain. Buffett has developed an enviable track record and a reputation as an ethical, discreet, and timely buyer who will maintain a business for the long term. A seller won't be at risk from funding conditions or onerous due diligence requirements or conditions.

"We have a significant advantage, and it gets bigger as we get bigger, because, in terms of big deals, people rely more and more often on process [ie due diligence requirements] in that when people want to get a deal done, they want to know it’s going to be done, they will come to us." Warren Buffett

"We’re so peculiar that there actually are a good number of businesses in America where they prefer selling to us than to other people. That’s very helpful." Charlie Munger

Buffett doesn't participate in auctions (another edge!) and is often the only party to be offered the businesses he buys. The counter to this is that negotiated private asset sales are rarely done at knock-down prices as they occasionally are in the stock market .. Buffett notes .. "You will never make the kind of buy in a negotiated purchase that you can in a bad market— that you can make via stocks in a stock — in a weak stock market. It just isn’t going to happen." ]

Disadvantages

While the list of Buffett's edges is long and I'm sure you can think of others, he does have some headwinds. While size can be an advantage in terms of writing insurance deals no-one else can or seeing business opportunities …

“The one thing about Berkshire is that we do get some opportunities that other people don’t get. If you’re 3G and want a partner for you’re next deal, who in the hell are you going to come to? We know, they know we’re a good partner, so we see stuff other people don’t see. That helps” Charlie Munger

It is also a major disadvantage … 

"The biggest disadvantage we have is size." Warren Buffett

Another is the fact he doesn't close under-performing businesses - that's the likely cost of seeing more private opportunities. He's also conservative. Carrying more debt would have generated even more returns, but it could also have led to the permanent loss of capital. And that would have broken Buffett's first rule: Don't lose money.

Summary

Many of Buffett's edges are available to all investors. He certainly doesn't hide them; he's been writing about them for the last 50 years. But there's one other edge I haven't mentioned, and it could be the most important of all - Charlie Munger. And what an edge that is. Buffet has given us much in the way of learning over those 50 years, and Charlie has as much and more to teach. And if you're looking for more, you could certainly start with him. 

Further Reading: Charlie Munger 50th Anniversary Letter

Follow us on Twitter: @mastersinvest

TERMS OF USE: DISCLAIMER

Learning From Jamie Dimon

There are a number of letters that I look forward to reading each year. Some of them are well known and Buffett's are, of course, a classic example. There are also others that have added enormous value to my thinking over the years, and that have opened my eyes to many new and varied investment opportunities. They have also helped me spot emerging themes, new ideas, thought processes and mental models. I mentioned Buffett because his 2011 letter is a case in point. In that letter, Buffett recommended reading Jamie Dimon's annual letters. And it's little wonder; Buffett has said this about Dimon in the past...

"I think he knows more about markets than probably anybody you could find in the world." 

"I recommend you read Jamie Dimon’s letter, at JPMorgan, is a tour de force, in terms of describing the banking scene, the economic scene. He has some real insights in there about some very important subjects."

“We don’t own that stock, but it’s a letter that I think everybody could learn a lot from reading.”

Jamie Dimon, the son of a stockbroker, has been at the helm of JP Morgan [and it's predecessor firm 'Bank One'] since March 2000. In that time the tangible book value has compounded at 11.8%pa vs 5.2%pa for the S&P500. Not surprisingly, the stock price has followed, delivering a 12.4%pa return vs the S&P500's 5.2%pa over that period. A cumulative gain of 691% versus 147% for the S&P500. Not bad considering the multitude of challenges that have faced global banks over that period, including the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Source: Jamie Dimon Annual Letter [JP Morgan]

What's evident from Dimon's letters is his grasp of both investing and business; two essential characteristics according to Buffett which are required for success. 

"Being an investor you're buying pieces of a business. And being a businessman, you better understand alternatives for money, in terms of allocating capital - and therefore you are partially an investor. So I've benefited in both roles by the fact I was in the other one." Warren Buffett

Dimon's 2017 letter covers off on many of the themes we have highlighted in other posts that define successful businesses and CEOs. Dimon's information is likely as good as it gets, he has a bird's eye view of the global economy and his letter provides insights into markets, the economy and possibilities for the future. At 47 pages, it's comprehensive. But it's an easy read and for that you can thank Warren Buffett...

"I read his [Buffett's] partnership letters when I was in high school or college and he would say 'I'll speak to you as if you're my smart sister who doesn't know everything I know so I have to go out of my way to explain it to you and business isn't complicated'. I always felt exactly the same way." Jamie Dimon

I've included some of my favourite extracts below..

How to Consider Banks

" .. we believe tangible book value per share is a good measure of the value we have created for our shareholders. If our asset and liability values are appropriate — and we believe they are — and if we can continue to deploy this capital profitably, we now think that it can earn approximately 17% return on tangible equity for the foreseeable future. Then, in our view, our company should ultimately be worth considerably more than tangible book value."

"... tangible book value “anchors” the stock price."

Source: Jamie Dimon Annual Letter [JP Morgan]

Buybacks

"In prior years, I explained why buying back our stock at tangible book value per share was a no-brainer.. While we prefer buying back our stock at tangible book value, we think it makes sense to do so even at or above two times tangible book value."

" ... we much prefer to use our capital to grow than to buy back stock. Buying back stock should only be considered when we either cannot invest (sometimes that’s a function of regulatory policies) or when we are generating excess, unusable capital."

Quarterly Earnings & Stock Price

"Our stock price is a measure of the progress we have made over the years. This progress is a function of continually making important investments, in good times and not-so-good times, to build our capabilities — people, systems and products. These investments drive the future prospects of our company and position it to grow and prosper for decades."

"We do not worry about the stock price in the short run, and we do not worry about quarterly earnings. Our mindset is that we consistently build the company — if you do the right things, the stock price will take care of itself."

Source: Jamie Dimon Annual Letter [JP Morgan]

"Do not confuse financial success with profits in a quarter or even in a year. All businesses have a different customer and investment life-cycle, which can be anywhere from one year to 30 years – think of building new restaurants to developing new airplanes or building electrical grids. Generally, anything our business does to grow will cost money in the short term (whether it’s opening branches or conducting research and development (R&D) or launching products), but it does not mean that it is not the right financial decision.

A company could be losing money on its way to bankruptcy or on its way to a very high return on invested capital. Diligent management teams understand the difference between the two scenarios and invest in a way that will make the company financially successful over time.

You need to invest continually for better products and services so you can serve your customers in the future. A bank cannot simply stop serving its clients or halt investing because of quarterly or annual earnings pressures.

It does not work when long-term investing is changed because of short-term pressures – you cannot stop/start training programs and the development of new products, among other investments. You need to serve your clients and make investments while explaining to shareholders why certain decisions are appropriate at that time. Earnings results for any one quarter or even the next few years are fundamentally the result of decisions that were made years and even decades earlier."

Satisfy Your Customers

"It is a given that you will not grow your share – unless you are satisfying your customers – and we know they can always walk across the street to be served by another bank."

Culture

"If you build the right culture, where management teams are intensely analytical and critical of their own business’ strengths, weaknesses and opportunities, you can create great clarity about what those opportunities are."

Win-Win

"Building shareholder value is the primary goal of a business, but it is simply not possible to do well if a company is not properly treating and serving its customers, training and motivating its employees, and being a good citizen in the community. If they are all done well, it enhances shareholder value."

Importance of Employees

"Talented, diverse employees deliver lifelong – and satisfied – customers. They also deliver innovative products, excellent training and outstanding ideas. Basically, everything we do emanates from our employees. And all of this creates shareholder value."

"We want to have the best people, period. We know happy customers start with happy employees, and we want to be the best place to work everywhere we do business."

Long Term

"We would rather earn a fair return and grow our businesses long term than try to maximize our profit over any one time period."

"Diligent management invest in a way that will make the company financially successful over time."

"[Public companies] can continue to resist pressures to focus on the short term at the expense of long-term strategy, growth and sustainable performance. And in my mind, quarterly and annual earnings per share guidance is a major contributor to that short-term focus.

It can cause companies to hold back on technology spending, marketing expenditures and other investments in their future in order to meet a prognostication affected by factors outside the company’s control, such as fluctuations in commodity prices, stock market volatility and even the weather.

That’s why during my time as JPMorgan Chase’s CEO we’ve never provided quarterly or annual net earnings guidance and why we would support any company that considers dropping such guidance in the future. We totally support being open and transparent about our financial and operational numbers with our shareholders – this includes providing guidance or expectations around number of branches, likely expense levels, “what ifs” and other specific items."

"With their own sizable investment portfolios, most public companies could use their power as shareholders to urge public companies and asset managers to take a relentlessly long-term focus... That may mean using performance benchmarks over three-, five- and even 10-year periods, in addition to shorter period benchmarks."

Fortress Balance Sheet

"Our bank operates in a complex and sometimes volatile world. We must maintain a fortress balance sheet if we want to continually invest and support our clients through thick and thin."

"We have always believed that maintaining a strong balance sheet (including liquidity and conservative accounting) is an absolute necessity."

"JPMorgan Chase has to be prepared to handle multiple, complex, global and interrelated types of risk."

Stress Testing

"To explain how serious we are about stress testing, you should know that we run several hundred tests a week – including a number of complicated, potentially disastrous scenarios – to prepare our company for almost every type of event. While we never know exactly how and when the next major crisis will unfold, these rigorous exercises keep us constantly prepared."

Consider Alternative Scenarios

"In the financial markets, we must be prepared for the full range of possibilities and probabilities."

"We strive to try to understand the possibilities and probabilities of potential outcomes so as to be prepared for any outcome. We analyze multiple scenarios (in addition to the stress testing I wrote about earlier in this section). So regardless of what you think about the probabilities, we need to be prepared for the possibilities, including the worst case."

"In essence, we try to manage the company such that all possibilities, including the “fat tails” (the worst-case scenarios), cannot hurt the company."

Mitigate Risk

"When I hear people talk about banks taking risks, it often sounds as if we are taking big bets like you would at a casino or a racetrack. This is the complete opposite of reality.

Every loan we extend is a proprietary risk. Every new facility we build is a risk. Whether we are adding branches or bankers – or making markets or expanding operations – we perform extensive analytics and stress testing to challenge our assumptions. In short, we look at the best- and worst-case scenarios before we “take risk.” Much of what we do as a bank is to mitigate or manage the risk being taken."

Don't Overly Rely on Models

"We try to intelligently, thoughtfully and analytically make decisions and manage risk (and not overly rely on models)."

"We rely heavily on detailed and constantly improving models as a foundational element of that analysis. But we are cognizant of the fact that models by their nature are backward looking and have a difficult time adjusting to material items, including the following:

• The character and integrity of those with whom you are doing business
• Changing technology as it impacts industries (including the banking industry)
• Future changes in the law or even how the law might be interpreted differently 10 years from now
• Deteriorating international competiveness (as what happened to our tax code)
• Emerging competitive threats
• Changes in industrial structure; e.g., new sources of competition
• Political influence and unexpected litigation
• Public sector fiscal challenges, demographic changes and challenges managing the nation’s healthcare resources

There are other items – but you get the point. Judgment (which will never be perfect all of the time) cannot be removed from the process."

"There has been an excessive reliance on models [in markets]"

"Banks and regulators need to be more forward looking and less backward looking — particularly when examining risks across the system."

Mistakes

"Since we know we will be wrong sometimes, we almost always look at the worst possible case – to ensure JPMorgan Chase can survive any situation."

Understand Volatility and Non-Linearity

"We are always prepared for volatility and rapidly moving markets – they should surprise no one.

I am a little perplexed when people are surprised by large market moves. Oftentimes, it takes only an unexpected supply/demand imbalance of a few percent and changing sentiment to dramatically move markets. We have seen that condition occur recently in oil, but I have also seen it multiple times in my career in cotton, corn, aluminium, soybeans, chicken, beef, copper, iron – you get the point.

Each industry or commodity has continually changing supply and demand, different investment horizons to add or subtract supply, varying marginal and fixed costs, and different inventory and supply lines. In all cases, extreme volatility can be created by slightly changing factors.

It is fundamentally the same for stocks, bonds, and interest rates and currencies. Changing expectations, whether around inflation, growth or recession (yes, there will be another recession – we just don’t know when), supply and demand, sentiment and other factors, can cause drastic volatility."

"The biggest negative effect of volatile markets is that it can create market panic, which could start to slow the growth of the real economy."

Avoid Bureaucracy

"Bureaucracy is a disease. Bureaucracy drives out good people, slows down decision making, kills innovation and is often the petri dish of bad politics"

"Leaders must continually drive for speed and accuracy to eliminate waste and kill bureaucracy. When you get in great shape, you don’t stop exercising."

Innovation

"We need to simplify our processes while accelerating the pace of change and driving new innovations."

"You can take any part of your business and re-imagine it. You can get all the right people in the room to think about a certain process and re-imagine how it could be done from the ground up."

Complacency

"Complacency is another disease. It is usually borne out of arrogance or success, but it is a guarantee of future failure. Our competitors are not resting on their laurels – nor can we. The only way to fight complacency is to always analyze our own actions and point out your own weaknesses. It’s great to openly celebrate our successes, but when the door is closed, management should emphasize the negatives."

Continue Learning

"In less mutable times, a degree meant that formal learning was complete. You had acquired what you needed for a successful career in your field. A degree in today’s world cannot mean the end of your studies. New discoveries, new advancements, new technologies and new terminology all mean that a degree will not carry you as far into the future as it once did. We must place a higher premium on lifelong learning. Corporations can do a lot to encourage and foster such a shift."

Geopolitics

"I will not spend time dwelling on geopolitics here, which can – but rarely does – upset the global economy."

US Economy

"Unemployment may very well drop to 3.5% this year, and there are more and more signals that business will improve capital expenditures and raise payrolls. Credit is readily available (though still not enough in some mortgage markets). Wages, jobs and household formation are increasing. Housing is in short supply. Underlying consumer and corporate credit have been relatively strong. All these signs lead to a positive outlook for the economy for the next year or so."

US Tax Changes

"The good news is that the recent changes in the U.S. tax system have many of the key ingredients to fuel economic expansion: a business tax rate that will make the U.S. competitive around the world; provisions to free U.S. companies to bring back profits earned overseas; and, importantly, tax relief for the middle class."

"I believe tax reform will have both short and long-term benefits. In the short term, we already are seeing some companies increasing capital expenditures, hiring and raising wages."

"Some argue that the added cash flow going to dividends and buybacks is a negative – it is not. It simply represents capital finding a higher and better use than the current owner has with it. And that higher and better use will be reinvestment in companies, innovation, R&D or consumption. Thinking this is a bad thing is just wrong. Tax reform’s real benefit will be the long-term cumulative effect of retained and reinvested capital in the United States, which means more companies, innovation and employment will stay in this country."

Inflation

"Importantly, as long as rates are rising because the economy is strengthening and inflation is contained, it is reasonable to expect that the reversal of QE will not be painful. The benefits of a strong economy are more important than the negative impact from modest increases in interest rates."

"I believe that many people underestimate the possibility of higher inflation and wages, which means they might be underestimating the chance that the Federal Reserve may have to raise rates faster than we all think. While in the past, interest rates have been lower and for longer than people expected, they may go higher and faster than people expect. If this happens, it is useful to look at how the table is set – what are all the things that are different or better or worse than during prior crises, particularly the last one – and try to think through the possible effects."

Uncertainty of QE

"One scenario that we must be prepared for is the possibility that the reversal of quantitative easing (QE) by the world’s central banks — in a new regulatory environment — will be different from what people expect."

"Since QE has never been done on this scale and we don’t completely know the myriad effects it has had on asset prices, confidence, capital expenditures and other factors, we cannot possibly know all of the effects of its reversal. We have to deal with the possibility that at one point, the Federal Reserve and other central banks may have to take more drastic action than they currently anticipate – reacting to the markets, not guiding the markets"

Passive Investing and ETF's

"Far more money than before (about $9 trillion of assets, which represents about 30% of total mutual fund long-term assets) is managed passively in index funds or ETFs (both of which are very easy to get out of). Some of these funds provide far more liquidity to the customer than the underlying assets in the fund, and it is reasonable to worry about what would happen if these funds went into large liquidation.

Bonds

"It would be a reasonable expectation that with normal growth and inflation approaching 2%, the 10-year bond could or should be trading at around 4%. And the short end should be trading at around 2½% (these would be fairly normal historical experiences). And this is still a little lower than the Fed is forecasting under these conditions. It is also a reasonable explanation (and one that many economists believe) that today’s rates of the 10-year bond trading below 3% are due to the large purchases of U.S. debt by the Federal Reserve (and others)."

"This situation is completely reversing. Sometime in the next year or so, many of the major buyers of U.S. debt, including the Federal Reserve, will either stop their buying or reverse their purchases (think foreign exchange managers or central banks in Japan or China and Europe). So far, only one central bank, the Federal Reserve, has started to reverse QE – and even that in a minor way. However, by the end of this year, the Fed has indicated it might reduce its holding of Treasuries by up to $150 billion a quarter. And finally, the U.S. government will need to sell more than $250 billion a quarter to fund its deficit."

"... we could be going into a situation where the Fed will have to raise rates faster and/ or sell more securities, which certainly could lead to more uncertainty and market volatility. Whether this would lead to a recession or not, we don’t know – but even that is not the worst case. If growth in America is accelerating, which it seems to be, and any remaining slack in the labor markets is disappearing – and wages start going up, as do commodity prices – then it is not an unreasonable possibility that inflation could go higher than people might expect. As a result, the Federal Reserve will also need to raise rates faster and higher than people might expect. In this case, markets will get more volatile as all asset prices adjust to a new and maybe not-so-positive environment."

Technology

"Overall, technology is the greatest thing that has ever happened to mankind. It is the reason why we enjoy our high living standard. It is staggering how our lives have changed when compared with 100 years ago. We live longer and work less; we are healthier and safer; and during that time period, billions of people have been pulled out of poverty."

".. our vibrant economy has always found a way to adjust to job loss by creating new jobs and sometimes changing the way we work by reducing work days and work hours.

"We know technology has been a great force, and for the benefit of mankind, that force should be left unleashed. In the event that it creates change faster in the future than it has in the past – and the economy is unable to adjust jobs fast enough – the best protection is continual workforce training, education and re-education, supplemented by income assistance and relocation."

Trade & Global Engagement

"Global engagement, trade and immigration — America’s role in the world is critical."

"As a nation, we cannot isolate ourselves any more than we can stem the ocean’s tide."

"Any system created by humans, however, is ultimately fallible. Sustaining the current order and ensuring its longevity mean acknowledging its flaws."

"Retreating from the world is not the solution, nor is burning down the current system and starting anew. At the same time, we cannot and should not turn a blind eye to the real pressures millions of families face at the hands of globalization, technological advances and other factors."

"We should acknowledge many of the legitimate complaints around trade. Tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade are often not fair; intellectual property is frequently stolen; and the rights to invest in and own companies in some countries, in many cases, are not equal. Countries commonly subsidize state-owned enterprises. When the U.S. administration talks about “free” and “fair,” it essentially means the same on all counts. This is not what has existed. It is not unreasonable for the United States to press ahead for more equivalency."

"China has realized significant economic and employment gains since joining the WTO in 2001. China was expected to continue on an aggressive path of opening up its economy, but this has happened at a much slower pace than most nations expected. Now, more than 16 years later, it has the second-largest economy in the world and is home to 20% of the Fortune 500 companies, yet it still considers itself a “developing” nation that should not be subject to the same WTO standards as the United States and other “developed” countries."

"Anything that starts to resemble a trade war creates risk and uncertainty to the global economic system."

I don't think that it needs to be said how remarkably similar Jamie Dimon's thinking is to other great Business and Investment Masters. We have written about their collective emphasis on innovative thinking and learning from mistakes, understanding non-linearity and volatility, whilst avoiding things like bureaucracy and an over reliance on models many times before. And this is not a coincidence; these are important fundamentals that each of these Masters value as the reason for their success. And the good news is that you can access this learning without having to have gained the many years of experience each has had to undergo to obtain it in the first place. Lucky you! I strongly recommend reading the entirety of Jamie's letter - it is both insightful and educational and should add as much value to you as it has to me.

Sources: Jamie Dimon, Annual Letter 2017, JP Morgan

Learning from Panera’s Ron Shaich

The restaurant industry is a hyper competitive industry - this has long been the case. It's mature, fragmented and has negligible barriers to entry. New entrants are attacking all the time. And it's an industry which is as “tough as hell” to succeed - did you know that more than one third of restaurant chains are out of business within a decade or two? If that's the case, how on earth can a bread company significantly outperform Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway over two decades?

The answer to that question lies at the feet of Ron Shaich, the founder and Chairman of Panera Bread. Panera was the best-performing restaurant stock of the past 20 years, delivering a total shareholder return up 86-fold from 1997 to July 2017 [before being taken private], compared to a less than two-fold increase for the S&P 500 during the same period. The stock annualised returns at an astonishing 25 per cent per annum.  

Source: Bloomberg

It's no secret that I'm always interested in learning from great CEO's and investors - those people with outstanding track records of success regardless of the industries they work within. I recently enjoyed listening to a Forbes interview by Steven Bertoni with Ron Shaich. This prompted me to learn more about how this 26-year veteran CEO successfully navigated the changing dynamics of the restaurant business, empowered his staff and adjusted to change to maintain a competitive advantage over the long term. And once again, you'll find many of the characteristics that define Mr Shaich define other world class CEO's. 

Here are some of my favourite snippets from both the Forbes Podcast and Ron Shaich's excellent website ...

Leadership

"This is what we do as business leaders; we discover today what is going to matter tomorrow and make sure our companies are prepared and ready for that as the world unfolds."

"The role of leadership is to separate the wheat from the chaff and know what the deeper trends are. We don't follow fads. What we do it try to figure out is what is going to really matter in a deep and profound way three to five years from now."

"Leadership always requires developing a hypothesis, understanding where the world is going and making a smart bet into that."

"I believe one of our roles as leaders is to tell the truth, and tell the truth most importantly to ourselves."

Learning

"I go to work to learn .. I love the sense of making a difference and figuring things out."

“We as leaders don’t take enough time to learn. The one thing that I don’t think we learn and value enough is empathy. We don’t feel what the customer feels.”

"I view my work as a lifelong learning journey. I go to work to learn about how the world works. How humanity works. And what will work in the world."

Walk The Floors

"The British author John le Carré once quipped, "The desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world." I couldn't agree more. I visit anywhere from 25 to 100 Panera cafes every month. And what I always find is a kind of real-time performance art—dynamic interactions between our frontline crews and constantly shifting casts of customers, with the overriding goal of ensuring that when customers exit our "stage," they are nourished in soul as well as body. The performances always differ. And I inevitably learn something new. When I learn, the results are actionable ideas and a broadened vision. Opportunities for change are revealed."

Three-Step Process

"It's not complicated. It starts first by telling ourselves the truth. In a really ruthless way. Second, to understand what few things really matter to get the jobs done that consumers are hiring us to do.  What do we really have to do and how do we prepare ourselves to be able to do that as the world plays out over the next two to five years. Thirdly, we get it done. You take those three things and you can have success."

"I tell my team all the time that Panera’s success comes down to three things we’ve always been able to do: 1. Tell the truth. 2. Know what matters. 3. Get the job done. Most people do not have the insight, foresight, or wherewithal to do all three. But I firmly believe that doing all three is the key to success in business and in life."

What Job Clients Hire For

"[With Panera] it was very clear to me we were serving real consumer needs. We had a dominant position, a better competitive alternative in a range of different jobs that consumers were willing to hire us for. That manifested itself in very high unit volumes, consistent from Detroit, Portland to Miami. You could see its reproducability."

Long Term

"I think long term."

"I've won because I had enough credibility, I voted enough stock, that I was able to make these long term bets. That's what gave us competitive advantage."

"What drove our outperformance was our ability to make long-term transformations multiple times over 36 years. As a long term CEO; 26 years, I've had the opportunity to really look back and really reflect on the public markets. And here is what I see - I see investors no longer owning companies but renting stock. Forty years ago the average holding time for a public company was 8 years, today it is 8 months. People are renting their stock. You have a very different world.

Source: Ron Shaich IGNITE 2010 Presentation

You have activists, you have a lot of money managed passively and you have the index funds deferring often to ISS to make judgments, and nobody feels capable of separating the wheat from the chaff. So we go to the path of least resistance and say it can't hurt to help the activists. We see it across multiple industries - a company has a flat year after years of success, and activists get voted in to control the board. Someone can walk in and say I own 2% of the company and another 6% in derivatives, I'm your owner, cut costs in half and R&D, lever up the balance sheet, sell the stock and let someone worry about the carcass.

That has an effect on CEO's. At the same time we see the FANG companies. The hottest companies in the public markets.  They are the ones who are winning. What is their competitive advantage? They have capital structures that let them make long term decisions.

I was on the board of Wholefoods which was sold to Amazon. And what is Amazon doing? The same things we would have done at Wholefoods; investing in digital and cutting prices because the competitive environment changed. But in Wholefoods we couldn't do it because of the short term pressures coming at us from people who wanted us to produce the results right now. What has Amazon got? The room and time to make these kinds of investments.

Here's my point. These put CEO's in a very weak position. CEO's want to please. They don't want the vulnerability of someone walking in and taking control. So they tighten up. They get short term. That's the reality. They go for cost cutting, and ignore innovation and building community and taking care of team members. The ultimate result is that it dramatically affects the ability to do long term transformation, dramatically effects GDP growth and economic competitiveness for society."

"I began to recognise for our ability to continue to do great work, I could think of no place better than with an ultra-long term investor, that allowed our people to do it."

"Studies such as this one from the Harvard Business Review conclude that founder-led businesses often outperform professionally managed firms. I would suggest that
they do so because the founder's commitment runs far deeper and is often longer-term in nature than that of the professional manager. And commitment and focus is what drives performance."

Importance of Competitive Advantage

"I've learned that competitive advantage is everything. Simply put, competitive advantage is what prompts customers to choose you over your competitors. Without it, your business just fades away."

"You must develop true competitive advantage. You must be the best alternative for certain guests, so much so that they walk past the establishment next door to visit your concept. Sounds easy, right? Well, in a world where a new restaurant pops up every day, true competitive advantage is one of the most difficult things to attain. But it is the critical piece that separates those who succeed from those who fail."

"You will accomplish little if you don’t maintain long term competitive advantage. It will take courage. Whatever your situation, you will ultimately fail if you don’t deliver a superior experience for your target customer by doing what competitors don’t."

"What sustains a company over the long term is how it thinks, not what it does. Because what it does is a by-product of how it thinks. Panera in its core comes from a view that competitive advantage is everything. If we don't have a reason for people to walk past competitors and come to Panera, then we don't exist. Losing competitive advantage is the greatest risk in business, and that's where our focus is." 

"When [EPS] growth does occur, it’s only because the management team is intently focused on continually sharpening the concept’s competitive position through food, experience, people, communication and operational excellence."

"Focus intensely on making the right decisions today to build your same-store profitability in the future. Recognise that same-store profitability is, in the long term, most directly impacted by your competitive position. Bet on the things that will improve your competitive position. I call these ‘smart bets.’ Making these bets requires an understanding of what the competitive landscape will look like two, three or more years in advance."

"I view my role as CEO as protecting those that discover ways to build competitive advantage."

How to Develop Competitive Advantage

“We may serve 10 million people a week, but if we’re going to be competitive, it’s all about one guest’s experience.”

"So how do you create competitive advantage?

First, make sure the niche you focus on is big enough to sustain you, but not so easily duplicated that you simply become a test lab for larger competitors.

Second, recognise that you can’t please all the people all the time. Instead, develop a concept that’s the singular best choice for some customers on some days rather than the second-best choice for everyone, every day.

Third, accept that maintaining competitive advantage in this industry — with its low barriers to entry — is really difficult. One day you’re the most attractive alternative on the block. The next day your target customer is walking past your door to a ‘new and better place’ down the street.

Fourth, recognise and avoid the reactionary nature of our industry, which often leads to diminished competitive advantage. As concepts begin to look more and more alike, companies move further away from being the best competitive alternative for a certain group of customers. And before you know it, yesterday’s favourite is suddenly an industry has-been.

To avoid this you must stand for something over the long term. You have to mean something to your target customer. You can’t be changing every day."

Long Term Transformation

"The key to me has been to try to find means and mechanisms for competitive advantage and opportunities for long term growth. If you look at it, Panera has continued to transform itself - six different transformations over the 36 years I have run this company. You can go all the way back to its formation. I formed it initially as a 400 square foot cookie store in downtown Boston."

Innovation

"Driving innovation is the most important role of the CEO."

"Innovation begins with understanding what job you're trying to complete for whom, and then determining what matters to that audience, looking for patterns, and trying to understand it."

"Most companies' systems and functions are designed to efficiently deliver a business model that was successful yesterday. But what you accomplished yesterday won't help you succeed tomorrow. For that, you must continually turn to discovery."

"We must avoid the trap that befalls many big companies. That is, they bulk up their delivery muscle while letting their discovery muscle wither. Instead of innovating and doing the things that will help them discover the next growth opportunity, they devote an inordinate amount of resources and focus to getting the work done, on time and on budget. Of course, delivery matters. A company that busts its budgets and misses its sales targets won't endure for very long. But in terms of the competitive advantage it can generate, discovery matters more. Much more. When it reverses its priorities and puts discovery at the forefront, a company stands a far better chance of getting to the future first."

"I often think of myself as the discoverer-in-chief. The most powerful role I have is protecting the people that are dreaming about where this company can be in two to three to five to 10 years."

"I have long believed that every innovation process starts with learning. And learning depends on observing and questioning, which in fact led to the creation of Panera itself. In 1993, when I was the CEO of Au Bon Pain, we acquired a 19-store chain called the Saint Louis Bread Company, which we believed would help us build a gateway to the nation's suburbs. But instead of immediately trying to scale Saint Louis Bread, we spent the next two years studying it."

"We ran down more than a few dead ends on the road to creating Panera. Nor did we seamlessly move from question to solution. There were many interim steps along the way: observing, brainstorming, testing, prototyping, iterating, retesting, and more. But our innovation process started by asking questions."

People and Incentives

"If an organization is to build same-store profitability, it is essential that it have the right people to actually get the job done. And it must incentivise them to do so. I’m always amazed at the number of restaurant companies that incentivise their operators on the wrong things when it comes to building value. They incentivise on actual versus budgeted results, instead of base store profit growth year over year over year. Frankly, this misguided focus on short-term metrics degrades shareholder value."

Culture

Source: Ron Shaich IGNITE 2010 Presentation

"We Made a Smart Bet on a Clear Set of Shared Behaviours: Cultural Values."

"Ask any of Panera’s 100,000 employees what they like most about our corporate
culture and they will undoubtedly reply, ‘No jerks.’ Those two words — No. 1 on our
list of cultural values — set Panera apart as an enterprise. They ensure that our
relationships with each other and with our guests are based on respect and honesty, and they establish a standard for our conduct."

Growth

"In my opinion, growth is not a pedal to be pushed. It is not an end in itself. Rather, growth is simply a means of building shareholder value by capitalising on a successful business model.

Growth is a double-edged sword; it is either additive or subtractive of economic value. The bottom line is that growth can only build value if the underlying business model is worthy of being reproduced. Because let’s face it, the world does not need another restaurant — not unless that restaurant actually offers its customers something better.

Growth only makes sense once you have already built a business model that offers a better competitive alternative, and if management is highly confident they can deliver strong and consistent returns on investment. You must have these two elements in place or else you really have no right growing. Indeed, without these two elements in place, growth simply becomes a form of gambling with your stakeholders’ money — foolishly placing bets when the odds are strongly stacked against you."

"We can all recall numerous concepts that said they “needed to grow” to keep their P/E high and their shareholders happy. Unfortunately, a misguided focus on growth as an end often leads to more bad outcomes than good. Like lemmings, those management teams that encourage reckless growth march their companies right off the side of the cliff."

Contrarian Approach

"I'm contrarian by nature. I am looking for where the world is going to be in three to five years and where am I going to be."

"Your management team must be prepared to go against the herd. I call this being contrarian."

“'Contrarianism' is not unique to Panera. In fact, I would argue that the most successful companies in our industry — the McDonald’s, Dardens, Starbucks, Chipotles and Yum! Brands of the world — have all utilized contrarian thinking, applied consistently over the long term, to build competitive advantage. Each of these companies is obsessively focused on their target niches, steadfast in their long-term strategy and contrarian in their thinking — all to build further competitive advantage."

Stock Prices

"I have never focused on the stock price or the financial performance. It's a by-product. I don't make the financial performance . What I can make is a better guest experience. And when you deliver on the guest's experience in an absolutely committed fashion, the by-product is performance. One of the things we often confuse in business and life is the difference between means, ends and byproducts.

Source: Ron Shaich - IGNITE 2010 Presentation

I focus on the guest experience. When we deliver a superior guest experience, when we deliver large runways for growth, we then have a future. That is what drive's the financial performance.

The folks that focus on the stock price, in the end, always hit the rocks. They are giving me a great competitive alternative because they're short terming. When you're focused on the next quarter and squeezing the company, you're giving me a great big opportunity to do a better job than you are. Because things of value take time."

Quarterly Earnings

"Wall Street judges Panera and every other public company by what we've achieved over the previous thirteen weeks and what it appears we'll achieve over the next thirteen. Such shortsightedness is one reason why I pay very little attention to quarterly earnings. Today's performance is the byproduct of discoveries and decisions that we made many months and often even years ago. Our time horizon must always extend far beyond the next quarter. As always, that means doing the hard work of imagining what the world will look like in five years and aligning ourselves with those long-term consumer trends."

"Every 13 weeks brings the beginning of yet another cycle of reporting to our investors, analysts, board, banks, franchisees, and team members. After hearing our reports, many of these stakeholders focus on a metric that means a lot to them but comparatively little in and of itself to me, earnings-per-share growth. In the aftermath of every call, we get either applause or boos based solely on how our EPS growth has fared against analysts’ estimates, which always amuses me. If we exceed Wall Street’s consensus estimates for the quarter, we are deemed a brilliant, forward-thinking management team. If we miss the Street’s estimate, we land on the list of downwardly spiralling companies that are plagued with questionable leadership. That’s an awfully wrongheaded approach to gauging a company’s long-term prospects."

"Despite the constant pressure to submit to quick fixes, you stand a far better chance of delivering strong quarterly results year after year when you focus on strengthening your competitive advantage and growing only when your business model offers a proven competitive alternative."

Win-Win Approach

Source: Ron Shaich 2010 IGNITE presentation

"When I go to the ATM, I'm usually required to make a deposit before I make a withdrawal. I'd argue it's the same in business. We have to spend less time figuring out how to extract economic value from our stakeholders and more time creating what is valuable to them. Doing so is what ultimately creates long-term value."

"From its inception, Panera has utilized the principles that some call conscious capitalism, and which we at Panera like to call “enlightened self-interest.” This notion of a conscious approach to value creation is built on the fundamental premise that every business has a deeper purpose than short-term profit maximization. Indeed, we regard profit and the creation of shareholder value as the byproduct of making a difference for our key stakeholders and society. When we deliver for our customers, employees, vendors, and the wider community, shareholder value follows."

Turnarounds

"Turnarounds are long-shots, and almost impossible to pull off. Business books abound with stories of heroic CEOs who come to the rescue of once proud companies that failed to adapt to a changing world.

There's Lou Gerstner's turnaround at IBM. Steve Jobs' improbable resurrection of Apple. And Lee Iacocca's stirring rescue of Chrysler. We can celebrate those stories, even as we recognize that turnaround attempts seldom turn out very well. Equally problematic, a turnaround is an expensive substitute—in terms of squandered resources and the toll its takes on associates—for serial innovation. As the strategist Gary Hamel puts it in The Future of Management, a turnaround "is transformation tragically delayed." For any executive team, the real challenge is "to build organizations that are capable of continuous self-renewal in the absence of a crisis [my emphasis]."

"My message: Don’t avoid the inevitable. Be a realist now and innovate while you have the breathing room, the resources, and the credibility with your stakeholders. Do that, and your company will avoid the need for a “radical turnaround” expert in the future."

Spreadsheets

"Many executives have a love affair with spreadsheets. I am not one of them. In fact, I encourage my team to approach spreadsheets with a healthy dose of skepticism, and I caution everyone else to do the same.

The future is filled with uncertainty and no one likes uncertainty. Uncertainty implies risk, and we all seek ways to minimize risk. The hard numbers of the spreadsheet make the future seem more certain. However, a spreadsheet is only one possibility of the answer, not the answer itself. A spreadsheet is merely a way to organize data. Its numbers generally capture trends of the past, but it is in no way predictive of what’s to come.

The best strategic decisions reflect a healthy balance of historic data and well-considered knowledge. We need to look to other companies and industries as models for what will happen in the future.

Here’s a metaphor: 16-year-olds. If you are familiar with any 16-year-olds, you know
they can be terrors to live with. Given raging hormones and the developmental need to
question and reject authority, 16-year-olds can truly test the parent-child bond. I know
of what I speak. If I looked at the accumulating data related to my 16-year-old son’s
recent behavior and projected that into the future, I would consider putting him up for
adoption. I’m not going to do that, however, because I know the past is not likely to
be predictive of what’s to come. By the time most 16-year-olds reach the age of 25,
they lose much of their edge and morph into wonderful adults — at least that’s what I
see when I look at my friends’ older children. The spreadsheet I would build based
solely on the behavior of 16-year-olds may reflect what is going on in the recent past and today, but not the changes that looking to other models tell us will occur in future months and years.

"French writer and philosopher Voltaire noted long ago that, “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” Today’s executives would be wise to apply that thinking to spreadsheets. Their data reveals yesterday’s truths; their spreadsheets of tomorrow are merely one possibility, but not a likely outcome. What they need is perspective and guardrails."

Questions

"I wrote a memo for the guy who took over from me, and I basically defined how I would compete with Panera if I wasn't part of Panera. How I would take out Panera. Our CEO asked me to work on it. I ended up painting a vision for how Panera could re-transform itself. That transformation was rooted in using digital to fix guest experience. Redefining how we innovate. Build a loyalty program. Finding large adjacent billion dollar businesses we could enter. I was asked to step back in as CEO [as the CEO was sick] and I did and I used this transformation model."

"I think we've approached technology very different from anybody else. Back in 2011 we didn't start out to create a digital program or a mobile app. We started out to solve a guest experience. And so much of what we do as business people is rooted in empathy. Empathy for our guests. That's one of the most powerful skills we as business leaders can have. On my way to work I would call Panera ahead and speak to a manager to make an order and my son would run in and pick up in 30 seconds. He'd do that and I thought wow this is phenomenal. What about the other 8.5m people we serve every week, they don't have that experience. It was great to have your food made simultaneously with your trip to the store. I began to imagine how we would do that. I began to say digital offered a powerful alternative to meet a guest need."

What I find particularly enlightening about Mr Shaich's approach, beyond the obvious similarities between his own and other Investment and Business Masters' approaches, is that he dares to think differently. It obviously has made a  profound difference to his company's performance. You can't argue against an 86-fold increase in shareholder returns over 20 years! Even Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway hasn't done that well, and Berkshire is a shining light for most investors. By simply thinking differently, Shaich has been able to transform his business multiple times and after some trial and error, and learning along the way, develop a brand and customer experience that offers tremendous value to all stakeholders - customers, staff and shareholders alike. Its truly remarkable to see.

His approach also makes me question my own portfolio - am I a business owner or a mere renter of stocks? I know what I would prefer to be. How about you?

Follow us on Twitter: @mastersinvest

TERMS OF USE: DISCLAIMER

Further Reading on CEO Masters:

Charles Koch - Koch Industries

Howard Schultz - Starbucks

Ken Iverson - Nucor

Ed Catmull - Pixar

Jeff Bezos - Amazon

Arthur Blank - Home Depot

The Investment Masters on bonds...

If we were asked to come up with 5 or 10 names of the world's greatest stock market investors, most of us could do it easily and many of us would probably include one or more of the following - Buffett, Munger, Graham, Templeton, Lynch, Fisher, Steinhardt et, al. But picking bond market gurus is a much more difficult task, however. Bill Gross and Jeff Gundlach are two names that come to mind for me, and to be honest, I can't think of many others.

Gross and Gundlach's ability to unravel the economic landscape has allowed their portfolios to beat their bond market benchmarks time and time again, and fund inflows have followed. But relative to the great stock market investors, their returns have been rather pedestrian. That's in no way to say they're inferior investors, they're just fishing in a different pond. 

Most of those people we consider the investment greats have made their money, not in bonds or 60:40 stock/bond allocations, but through owning stocks. If anything, they've shunned bonds.

"On the whole we are allergic to bonds.” Walter Schloss

"Gentlemen who prefer bonds don't know what they're missing." Peter Lynch

In recent years, I can't recall one Investment Master recommending government bonds as an investment. It's fair to say that most have been outright dismissive....

"If I had a choice between holding a US Treasury bond or a hot burning coal in my hand, I would choose the coal. At least that way I would only lose my hand." Paul Tudor Jones

“With interest rates being historically low right now I would not want to invest in bonds. Also a bond is a contract and you can’t do anything with that.” Ted Weschler

“I believe the risk lies in the risk-free rate.” Sir Michael Hintze

“It absolutely baffles me who buys a 30 year bond. I just don't understand it. And, they sell a lot of them so clearly, there's somebody out there buying them." Warren Buffett

"It is very strange situation to have the Fed say our goal is 2% inflation and people buy Treasury bills at 1.5% and have to pay tax on it. The government has announced to you it doesn’t pay to save. You will have nothing in the way of purchasing power.  To me it has just been absurd to see pension funds [in 2013 and future years] saying we ought to have 30% in bonds.” Charlie Munger

"Anyone betting on much lower interest rates in the next five years is making a big mistake." Steven Einhorn

“Almost anybody who trades risk assets has felt the impact of low rate policies. If there is a bubble, it is probably in the price of sovereign debt globally.” Jon Pollock

"Switzerland raised 50-year money at negative interest rates. A guy who owns a home in Denmark will get a check every month because he has a negative interest rate on his mortgage. It’s crazy, right? It makes no sense." Leon Cooperman

"Long-term government bonds are ridiculous at current yields. They are not safe havens. Investors who have experienced the price run-up in the bond market but who have not marked down their forward expected portfolio rate of return are making, in our view, a possibly fatal mistake.” Paul Singer

There are a few good reasons that the Investment Masters haven't been advocating bonds; they're expensive, the return profile is asymmetric, there's no upside participation, prices have been manipulated, and a bout of unexpected inflation would mean some seriously permanent capital losses. Furthermore, over the long term bond returns have significantly lagged equities, and that's not likely to change in the future. 

Let's consider some of those..

Bonds are Expensive

Buffett advocates a common sense approach to buying bonds; that is, viewing bond investments with a businessman’s perspective. What does the return profile look like? What is an equivalent PE ratio? How long would it take to double your money? On this basis, and relative to equities, bonds have looked horribly expensive.

“The ten-year bond is selling at 40 times earnings. And it's not going to grow. And if you can buy some business that earns high returns on equity and has even got mild growth prospects, you know, at much lower multiple earnings, you are going to do better than buying ten-year bonds at 2.30 or 30-year bonds at three, or something of the sort." Warren Buffett

“A bond that pays you 2% is selling at 50X earnings and the earnings can’t go up. And the Government has told you we would like to take that 2% away from you by decreasing the value of money. That is to absurd to own something like that. To make that a voluntary choice in the last ten years against owning assets has struck me as absolutely foolish." Warren Buffett

No Upside Participation

When you hold a bond you get paid a coupon and hopefully receive your face value at maturity. You don't get more coupons if the government or the company issuing the bond does well. Unlike owning a stock, there is no upside optionality. That's why it's called 'fixed' income. The coupon, maturity date and repayment of par are all fixed.

“Bonds offer no growth in intrinsic-worth opportunities comparable to equity securities. A bond indenture makes two primary promises: to make generally fixed semi-annual interest payments and to redeem the bond at par value on maturity date. If there is no upside, it makes no sense to us whatsoever to expose our clients to risk on the downside.” Frank Martin

"Whereas companies routinely reward their shareholders with higher dividends, no company in the history of finance, going back as far as the Medicis, has rewarded its bondholders by raising the interest rate on a bond." Peter Lynch

“In fixed income.. returns are limited and the manager's greatest contribution comes through the avoidance of loss. Because the upside is truly "fixed," the only variability is on the downside, and avoiding it holds the key. Thus, distinguishing yourself as a bond investor isn’t a matter of which paying bonds you hold, but largely of whether you're able to exclude bonds that don't pay. According to Graham and Dodd, this emphasis on exclusion makes fixed income investing a 'negative art.'" Howard Marks

"In stocks you've got the company's growth on your side. You're a partner in a prosperous and expanding business. In bonds, your nothing more than the nearest source of spare change. When you lend money to someone, the best you can hope for is to get it back, plus interest." Peter Lynch

Asymmetry of Bond Yields

When interest rates on bonds are plumbing record lows, close to zero or in some cases negative, it's difficult to imagine them falling much further. However, should yields rise to a level more consistent with history and economic theory [eg Taylor rule], bond prices could fall a lot. The lower the coupon the more downside there is from interest rates rises. If you have to sell before maturity, you could be wearing a large loss. This is the exact opposite type of asymmetry the Investment Masters seek; limited upside, big downside.

“When the [Treasury] yield is below 2.50%, it doesn't take much of either an inflation scare or something else—but it would most likely be an inflation scare—to make rates rise. And as they rise from such low levels, the mathematics are just brutal, and you can get your clock cleaned by going long Treasuries or high-grade bonds.” Michael Lewitt

“How in the world could we be talking about rates never going up when in fact rates have bottomed?…In the investment world when you hear ‘never,’ as in rates are ‘never’ going up, it’s probably about to happen.” Jeff Gundlach

"It would only take a 100 basis point rise in Treasury bond yields to trigger the worst price decline in bonds since the 1981 bond market crash." Ray Dalio

"An investor in fixed income today is beginning a compounding stream with the curve at the mid-1% level on cash to under 3% at 30 years. A rising interest environment will penalise the owner of long-dated debt with price declines, the longer the maturity the more severe the decline. A sustained increase in rates will help by allowing for re-investment at higher yields, but an expectation of returns much above initial yields would be asking for a lot." Christopher Bloomstran

"The Federal Reserve was founded in 1913. This is the first time in 102 years that the central bank bought bonds, and that we've had zero interest rates, and we've had them for five or six years. So do you think this is the worst economic period looking at these numbers we've been in in the last 102 years? To me it's incredible." Stanley Druckenmiller

US10yr Bond Yield Vs S&P500 Earnings Yield  [Source Bloomberg]

Permanent Capital Loss

Successful investing requires avoiding the permanent loss of capital. This means not only avoiding absolute capital losses but also the loss of purchasing power inflicted by inflation.

“I define risk as the chance of permanent capital loss adjusted for inflation." Bruce Berkowitz

"What we care about is avoiding the permanent loss of capital and, increasingly relevant today, the permanent loss of purchasing power.” David Iben

“The goal of investing is to protect and increase your portfolio in inflation-adjusted dollars over time.” David Dreman

"There is no real safety without preserving purchasing power.”  Sir John Templeton

"The riskiness of an investment is .. measured by the probability — the reasoned probability — of that investment causing its owner a loss of purchasing power over his contemplated holding period." Warren Buffett

Ordinarily, one hundred dollars today will buy you more than $100 in ten years as inflation raises the cost of goods over time. Historically bonds have compensated investors for inflation, providing a real return of a few percent [see chart below]. In recent years, real returns have shrunk and in some instances turned negative.

“In our opinion, the only thing that is guaranteed with a bond that has a lower interest rate than the rate of inflation is impoverishment. Generating negative real returns goes against the very concept of investment. With each passing year, the holders of this asset class have their capital slowly crumble. From our perspective, the certainty of capital loss in purchasing power is the very definition of risk.” Francois Rochon

For the first time in history, some government and corporate bond yields have ventured below zero. Holding these bonds to maturity guarantees a permanent loss of capital even before inflation. Little wonder, the Investment Masters have steered well clear of buying bonds. 

US10Year Yield less Inflation [Source Bloomberg]

Inflation Risks

As we know, investors are prone to focus on the rear-view mirror. Prominent in most investor's rear view mirror has been the financial crisis, where the collapse in aggregate demand raised the prospects of deflation. The subsequent recovery has been characterised by low inflation which has conditioned investors to expect more of the same; extrapolating the last 10 years. But the future could be very different.

In a post last year titled 'The Buffett Series - Thinking About Bonds' I recommended reading the chapter 'The Last Hurrah for Bonds' in the excellent book, 'The Davis Dynasty'. Investment Master, Shelby Davis was an outspoken critic of bond investments in the 1940's. Here's an extract ... 

"[Shelby Davis] became an anti-bond maverick. The recent past had told people bonds were attractive and safe, but the present was telling Davis they were ugly and dangerous. Interest rates were fast approaching what economist John Maynard Keynes called the "balm and sweet simplicity of no percent." Keynes was exaggerating, but not by much - the yield on long-term Treasuries hit bottom-2.03 percent in April 1946. Buyers would have to wait 25 years to double their money, and, to Davis, this was pathetic compounding. He saw the threat in the "sea of money on which the U.S. Treasury has floated this costliest of wars." With the government deep in hock and forced to borrow another $70 billion to cover its latest shortfall, he was certain lenders soon would demand higher rates, not lower.  The most reliable inflation gauge, the consumer price index, rose sharply in 1946."

What followed was a 34-year bear market in bonds that lasted from the Truman era to the Reagan years. The 2 to 3 percent bond yields in the late 1940's expanded to 15 percent in the early 1980's and, as yields rose, bond prices fell and bond investors lost money. The same government bond that sold for $101 in 1946 was worth only $17 in 1981! After three decades, loyal bondholders who had held their bonds lost 83 cents on every dollar they'd invested. Ignoring the scene in the rear-view mirror, Davis focused his attention on navigating the future. 

The biggest dupes in the triple swindle were fat cats and institutions (pension funds, insurance companies, and their ilk). These sophisticated types who could afford bonds might have seen the folly in owning government paper in the late 1940's, but most didn't. Fanciful arguments tranquilized the bond bulls. They believed that because bonds were profitable in the past decade, they’d be profitable in the next. They convinced themselves that the Fed could keep interest rates from rising, indefinitely.  A government that controlled the price of pork chops, it was widely assumed, could also control the price of money."

And Davis was right ...

“An individual in a 50% bracket who put money into T-bills or government bonds after World War 2 and kept re-investing in these instruments to 1996, lost the major part of his or her capital.”  David Dreman

Sound familiar? Since the Financial Crisis, investors have allocated significantly more funds into bonds than stocks. Only now are investors awakening to the risks of rising inflation. 

"What is the worst investment against inflation? Bonds. The objective of governments who are overly indebted will be to devalue bonds so that their burden can be reduced. Yet, what are investors doing these days? They are aggressively buying bonds and moving away from equities. They rant against debt but continue to buy government notes or leave cash in the bank at 1% interest." 

What is the best hedge against inflation? Owning companies with unique products that have high pricing power. If I were a German investor in 1945, I would have wanted to own Porsche, Beck’s, Hugo Boss, Bayer, Braun, and Nivea. The value of the German currency could have gone to zero, but if the brands were solid, you still could have realized a profit in any currency. Our job is to select solid companies that can withstand inflation and other economic risks." Francois Rochon, 2010

Prices are being Manipulated

The global central banks have become the price setter in the bond market. Having taken short rates to zero, for the first time in history, the global central banks sought to lower the long end of the curve by buying bonds. The endgame was to force investors into riskier assets, [e.g. junk bonds, equities, real estate], create a wealth effect, and stimulate the economy. This may very well be the biggest 'peg' in financial history. 

"While we are aware that debt markets can persist at zero or even modestly negative rates for a period of time, we believe it is best to make capital allocation decisions on the basis that fixed income securities will eventually trade where a fixed income investor would own them rather than where governments and fixed income traders will push them." Larry Robbins

Historic Underperformance

Earlier this century, only bonds were deemed a safe investment; equities were considered too speculative. As a result, bond yields were lower than the yields on common stocks.

"After the great market decline of 1929 to 1932, all common stocks were widely regarded as speculative by nature. A leading authority stated flatly that only bonds could be bought for investment." Benjamin Graham

This changed after the 1930's when it dawned on investors that stocks offered more upside than bonds, as the retained earnings after dividend payments could compound within the company... 

"To report what Edgar Lawrence Smith discovered, I will quote a legendary thinker - John Maynard Keynes, who in 1925 reviewed the book, thereby putting it on the map. In his review, Keynes described 'perhaps Mr. Smith's most important point ... and certainly his most novel point. Well-managed industrial companies do not, as a rule, distribute to the shareholders the whole of their earned profits. In good years, if not in all years, they retain a part of their profits and put them back in the business. Thus there is an element of compound interest (Keynes' italics) operating in favor of a sound industrial investment.

"It was that simple. It wasn't even news. People certainly knew that companies were not paying out 100% of their earnings. But investors hadn't thought through the implications of the point. Here, though, was this guy Smith saying, "Why do stocks typically outperform bonds? A major reason is that businesses retain earnings, with these going on to generate still more earnings--and dividends, too." Warren Buffett

“In the 1920s, a brilliant and important book by Edgar Smith, Common Stocks for Long-Term Investment, became a prime market influence. It was still popular in the fall of 1929, but most people read it too late. Mr. Smith advocated the benefit to corporate growth of the application of retained earnings and depreciation. Thus capital appreciates. The book may have been influential in changing accepted multiples of 10 x earnings to higher multiples of 20 to 30 x earnings."  Roy Neuberger

And outperform they did. Analysis by Professor Siegel of the Wharton School of Business highlights returns on several major classes of financial assets, including stocks and bonds, in the US during the past two hundred years. The figures are staggering. Long term bonds significantly under-performed stocks.

Source: Li Lu's Lecture 'The Prospect of Value Investing in China'

"Here is the result: 1 US dollar in stocks, after discounting for inflation, experienced an appreciation of 1 million times the original value over the past 200 years! Its value today would be 1.03MN US dollars. Even the remainder of this number is bigger than the return on every other class of assets. What are the reasons behind such an astonishing performance? The answer lies in the power of compounding. The average annualized rate of return for stocks, discounting inflation, is only 6.7%. No wonder Einstein called compound interest the eighth wonder of the world." Li Lu

David Dreman's excellent book 'Contrarian Investment Strategies' contains a chapter titled 'An Investment for All Seasons' which states; "I will make clear, the crucial but little known fact that stocks are not a risky investment, if you hold them for a number of years... stocks also keep their value better than almost any other investment through hyperinflation and most other crises."

Source:Masterinvestor

Dreman noted .. "Stocks outperformed T-bills 73% of the time for all five year periods between 1802 and 1996, 81% for ten year periods, 95% and 97% respectively for 20- and 30- year periods. The results after the war are better yet. For any five year period stocks outdistanced T-bills 82% of the time, and for any 20-year or 30-year period 100% of the time. The comparison with long bonds are nearly identical." David Dreman

Source: Masterinvestor

Mr Dreman concludes.. "the probability that the investor holding stocks will double her capital every 10 years after inflation, quadruple every 20, combined with 100% odd that she will outperform T-bills or government bonds in 20 years, can hardly be called risky. Conversely, the supposedly 'risk-free' assets actually display a large and increasing element of risk over time."

Mr Dreman is not alone. The Investment Masters recognise this ... 

"The S&P outperformed inflation, Treasury bills, and corporate bonds in every decade except the ‘70’s, and it outperformed Treasury bonds – supposedly the safest of all investments – in all four decades.”  Sir John Templeton

"Stocks outperformed bonds, as Edgar Lawrence Smith, Irving Fisher, and John Maynard Keynes noted as far back as the twenties." David Dreman

"Practical experience demonstrates that stocks provide superior returns over reasonably long holding periods." David Swenson

"Not every time in my life, but probably 90 percent of the time in my life, it’s made more sense [owning equities] than owning fixed-dollar investments" Warren Buffett

"In spite of crashes, depressions, wars, recessions, ten different presidential administrations, and numerous changes in skirt lengths [for 60 years until 1987], stocks in general have paid off fifteen times as well as corporate bonds, and well over thirty times better than Treasury bills" Peter Lynch

"In the very long term, equities represent the best investment class." Francois Rochon

"Stocks have historically outperformed over moderate to longer periods by a significant amount." Ed Thorp

“History has shown that equities are the best way to build long-term wealth.” Shelby Davis

And that's likely to continue in the future.. 

"In the long run, a portfolio of well-chosen stocks and/or equity mutual funds will always outperform a portfolio of bonds or a money-market account. In the long run, a portfolio of poorly chosen stocks won't outperform the money left under the mattress." Peter Lynch

"The unconventional, but inescapable, conclusion to be drawn from the past fifty years is that it has been far safer to invest in a diversified collection of American businesses than to invest in securities – Treasuries, for example – whose values have been tied to American currency. That was also true in the preceding half-century, a period including the Great Depression and two world wars. Investors should heed this history. To one degree or another it is almost certain to be repeated during the next century." Warren Buffett

Notwithstanding, there may be occasions where it makes sense to invest in bonds.  

"... though the value equation has usually shown equities to be cheaper than bonds, that result is not inevitable:  When bonds are calculated to be the more attractive investment, they should be bought."  Warren Buffett

The last time was back in the 1980's when bond yields peaked at 15% plus.

“We remember vividly 35 years ago staring at long-term impeccable bonds trading at 15% to 17% yields, thinking; “Why bother trading, hedging and knocking ourselves out? Why not just liquidate the whole portfolio and own these things and go on vacation for 10 years?” Paul Singer

“Anyone with a sense of contrarian mentality had to look at interest rates in the early 1980’s as presenting a potentially great opportunity. You knew the Fed would have to ease as soon as business started to run into trouble. In addition, we had already seen an important topping in the rate of inflation.”  Michael Steinhardt

"In 1981 the public should have seen Volcker's jacking up of short-term rates to 21 percent as a very positive move, which would bring down long-term inflation and push up bond and stock prices." Stanley Druckenmiller

"When I purchased long-term zero-coupon bonds in the early 1980's at market yields in excess of 13%, I welcomed the prospect of outsized volatility because I felt it would eventually work in my favour." Frank Martin

That's not the case today..

“It is possible that there could be a time where a wise investor could be all in treasuries. It is virtually impossible for me to see when. I guess I could imagine it, but I haven’t seen it. Long-term treasuries are a losing battle over the long pull.” Charlie Munger, 2018

Warren Buffett once again espoused his thoughts in his most recent letter ...

"I want to quickly acknowledge that in any upcoming day, week or even year, stocks will be riskier – far riskier – than short-term U.S. bonds. As an investor’s investment horizon lengthens, however, a diversified portfolio of U.S. equities becomes progressively less risky than bonds, assuming that the stocks are purchased at a sensible multiple of earnings relative to then-prevailing interest rates.

It is a terrible mistake for investors with long-term horizons – among them, pension funds, college endowments and savings-minded individuals – to measure their investment “risk” by their portfolio’s ratio of bonds to stocks. Often, high-grade bonds in an investment portfolio increase its risk."

So let's wrap it up.. over the very long term, stocks have outperformed bonds by a significant margin. As an investor's holding period lengthens, the chances of a portfolio of quality businesses [low debt, good management, pricing power, etc.] purchased at reasonable prices outperforming a bond portfolio rises. Notwithstanding, if you require funds in the short term, or you can't stomach a large decline in the quoted prices of your portfolio of stocks, you probably shouldn't be investing in the stock market. With rates as close to zero as they've been in decades, today's bond market looks like a bubble to me. It's little wonder the world's greatest investors continue to favour quality businesses over bonds. Wouldn't you?

Further Reading:

David Dreman, 'Contrarian Investment Strategies' - Chapter 13/14 'An Investment for All Seasons'/'What is Risk?'

Peter Lynch, 'One up on Wall Street' - Chapter 3 'Is this Gambling or What'

Follow us on Twitter: @mastersinvest

TERMS OF USE: DISCLAIMER

Chris Bloomstran - Annual Letter [Part II]

As I mentioned in my last post, Chris Bloomstran's latest letter is a very worthwhile read. Not only does it cover his views of the market's new breed of Super Investors, it also offers insights into the current market environment. And this is valuable to all of us. Hearing the views of someone with skin in the game and a long term track record of success is going to always offer more value than an analyst's perceptions.

Once again I hope you'll note the similarities between his insights and the Investment Masters Class tutorials. Below are his key points concerning recent market activity and his investment considerations ...

Time for caution?

"When smooth sailing is the forecast, it’s usually a good time for caution."

"When the herd stampedes, danger rises."

"Recent returns over the last several years have outpaced underlying fundamentals across nearly all asset classes"

Reversing the Fed's Balance Sheet

"We have no idea how this reversal in the Fed’s balance sheet plays out. The increase was unprecedented and so will be the reversal."

"Think about interest rate increases as the Fed reloading its pistol. You need ammo if you are going to a gun fight, and when rates were taken to zero, the Fed was out of bullets. It needs to reload to fight the next slowdown, and if rates are zero it has no bullets (that’s how we got QE)."

Bond Buyers?

"With the Fed, for now, no longer in the bond buying business, but rather net selling its debt holdings, who will lend needed capital to the US Treasury, especially if the deficit is growing? The answer can only be private investors, those same investors who were able to allocate capital to assets other than Treasuries when the Fed was scarfing up issuance."

"An investor in fixed income today is beginning a compounding stream with the curve at the mid-1% level on cash to under 3% at 30 years. A rising interest environment will penalise the owner of long-dated debt with price declines, the longer the maturity the more severe the decline. A sustained increase in rates will help by allowing for re-investment at higher yields, but an expectation of returns much above initial yields would be asking for a lot"

Rate Hikes and Recessions

"Every major stock market decline and every recession in the last 100 years was preceded by the Federal Reserve raising short term interest rates by enough to provide the pin to prick the balloon. Note the emphasis on every. Yes, there have been periods where the Fed raised rates and a recession didn’t ensue. Everyone knows the famous saw about the stock market having predicted nine of the past five recessions! That may be true, that rising rates don’t necessarily cause a recession. But as an investor you must be aware that every major stock market decline occurred on the heels of a tightening phase by the Fed. More importantly, there have been no substantive Fed tightening phases that did not end with a stock market decline."

The Importance of Price

"The price paid for an investment is a key determinant of outcome."

"The price paid is the initial bracketing endpoint in a compounding series. The same business at twice or thrice the price can’t be as nice."

Time Arb and Patience

"Time is generally required for investment decisions to bear fruit. We think it is a huge advantage to have the patience, and patient clients, to allow prices to ultimately reflect underlying fundamentals."

Dual Margin of Safety: Price and High Quality

"Our dual margin of safety approach combines high business quality with attractive price. One important aspect of business quality is a modest to reasonable use of debt in the capital structure."

Low Corporate Debt and Outperformance

"We believe the far more modest use of leverage [on balance sheets] is important in many ways and strongly has contributed to our outperformance during all bear markets and times of financial crisis over our two-decade existence. Included are the 2000-2002 and the 2008-2009 episodes, which shaved 50% and 65%, respectively, from the index."

"Low debt levels allow managements versatility on the capital front in times of crisis or distress. An unencumbered balance sheet can tolerate the addition of debt when opportunity presents itself."

Earnings Yield

"The inverse of the P/E is the earnings yield, and it’s one of the most important numbers in investing."

"Our core assumption over time, [is that] if we've assessed profitability properly, we should earn the earnings yield of the portfolio, not even allowing for future growth. In addition, we also expect to earn the closing of any discount to our appraisals of intrinsic value"

Source: Semper Augustus 2017 Letter

Portfolio Analysis

"The stock portfolio is now priced at 13.7 times normalised earnings [versus 23.4X for the S&P500], giving us a 7.3% earnings yield, which becomes our new base case return expectation for a ten to fifteen year horizon."

"Our businesses possess a higher margin structure than the amalgamation of the businesses comprising the S&P500"

"As we survey the managements of the companies we own, we have never had a better roster of management teams"

"Our companies earn far more on their invested capital, which we think is a huge advantage. We also possess far higher EBIT on total capital invested."

"We have $73,000 in earnings power per $1 million working for us against $43,000 for the market. Our relative advantage is as great as it was at the last peak in 2000"

Buy-Backs and Incentives

"Captains of industry, who spend scant few years at the helm, on average, have little incentive to think long-term about return on capital when their horizon to get crazy rich spans the short-term. Stock buybacks, regardless how expensive, are a buy ticket. They reduce shares outstanding and are accretive to earnings per share, period. That they are made at absolute levels which drive profits properly measured downward is largely irrelevant."

Capital Allocation

"The reinvestment of retained earnings is one of the most important jobs of the managers of public companies that retain shareholder profit. Assessing how well they invest those retained profits is one of our most important jobs as investors."

Great Investors don't always Outperform

"The great track records are not produced in linear fashion, and are far from consistent. Outperforming over many market cycles is not done each year, or every three years, or five years, or ten years. There are long periods of underperformance that go with every outstanding track record. All the great investors have had clients leave them after periods of underperforming. Walter Schloss, who compiled one of the all-time brilliant track records, shrugged as he was losing clients in the late 1990’s because he was underperforming and wouldn’t give them the tech and internet exposure they felt they needed. He had seemingly “lost his touch” and was out of touch with modern thinking. Many that fired him had been clients for decades, having invested with him since the 1950’s and 1960’s. It must be expected that long term outperformance will come with durations of underperformance, perhaps as much as half of the time over short-term intervals. As the intervals lengthen, periods of underperforming recede. At the end of the day, we all know what happened with the tech bubble. It ended badly."

Acknowledging Fear

"How many investors do you know that sold everything in 1974, or 1987, or 2002, or 2009? We’ve met plenty. And of those, most have rushed back in, but only after sustained recoveries, when the appearance of risk has receded."

Recommended Books

"Ben Graham’s, The Intelligent Investor - the best investment book ever written for the lay person"

"Ben Graham and David Dodd’s Security Analysis is the bible for value investors."

Passing Investing

"A takeaway for those passively invested or index-hugging: It is very difficult making money when the price paid is high."

"The proportion of the stock market passively owned and flowing into passive investment strategies are at records. The concept of passive investing is simple, efficient and grounded in logic. However, a good idea taken to excess can produce a terrible outcome."

"An index holder owns the whole index – every component at the prevailing price, regardless of quality or price. No exclusions. We saw this picture show in the 1990’s and it ended badly. Money is funnelling into the largest of index components, pushing valuations and index weights to extremes. Risk is mounting in passive portfolios, and it’s largely of the passive investor’s own making."

"Large flows [from indexing] can impart a momentum effect, driving narrowing prices in certain assets higher. Often, those allocating capital don’t even realize they are contributing to momentum-induced returns. Many are simply reacting to a fear or envy of not having an allocation in microcaps in countries beginning with Z, especially if all the other kids are already there and making money. The mindset breeds mediocrity at best, and ultimately can be a dangerous thing."

"If we owned the S&P 500 we’d probably be ill from watching companies squander capital. We’d own companies with aggressive accounting that write down assets to boost returns on equity and capital. We’d have shares being bought at prices that we would never pay. We’d own businesses with huge unfunded pension funds that have little chance to earn enough on their plan assets to fund plan liabilities. We’d own companies that exclude one legitimate expense after another from their “pro-forma” or “adjusted” earning presentations. No thanks."

"Mr. Buffett has made clarifying remarks about his advice regarding indexing and passive investing. He duly notes that outperformance can’t be accomplished without certain elements. It requires devoted work and proper wiring, which involves a willingness to deviate from the herd or the crowd. Outside of a value-based approach, there aren’t approaches that have the right orientation."

"As money moves from ETF to ETF, somebody is making an active decision with passive investments. You could make the case that flows to the ETF world are done with less, or little, concern for valuation, with no attempt to capture a disparity that may exist between price and underlying value."

"At what point does the growing proportion of indexed assets become dangerous? The S&P 500 as a proportion of the stock market is far more concentrated now than at any time. Some of the increase is surely the result of mergers and acquisitions. But the degree is concerning. Also, as the index marches higher, it attracts more capital and the momentum drives prices up far faster than underlying value, at a point making it impossible for future results to come close to anything reasonable or expected."

"Recall the logic, or lack of, that for every $100 invested, $3.80 must now go to Apple shares. $2.90 must be allocated to Microsoft. Amazon gets two bucks, Facebook a buck eighty, and so on. It does not matter the price to value. It does not matter if the business will go bankrupt. If it’s in the index you must own it, in the proportion at which it exists. The more money gravitates to the index, away from other pools or strategies, the higher the largest components will rise. Somewhere between then and now, the amount of momentum-induced concentrated risk rises. At a point, prices are no longer reflective of fundamentals. To a passive investor, it matters not. It matters quite a bit to us, however, and it presents opportunity."

"Large cap active investors have been replaced en masse with a passive approach."

"Words can't do justice to the degree to which passive investing is now in an epic bubble, with money funnelling into a narrow group of names. Behold the insanity... Wow, I would never have guessed that passive index flows could create this kind of unnatural disparity across every major equity index! [see table below]"

Source: Semper Augustus 2017 Letter

"Capital allocators keep feeding the fat kid"

"Money is pushing the largest even higher and it likely doesn't correlate to underlying fundamentals. It's flow, baby"

Source: Semper Augustus 2017 Letter

"We don’t know when the situation will reverse itself. If you believed flows to passive funds and strategies would continue to run, why not just own the five biggest components of each index? Had you done that in 2017, you would have looked like a genius. When the flows finally reverse course, the money invested in passive portfolios is going to get hurt."

"Capitalizing on opportunity requires thought, which can’t be done with software allocating $3.80 of every dollar invested to Apple because that happens to be its weight in an index."

"Passive investing is done with computers allocating capital based on component size in an index. Attention is not paid to business quality, and a rising price attracts more capital. It can be a self-fulfilling phenomenon, until flows reverse. Investing as we know it requires thought, experience, patience and reason. Too much active investing is done poorly." 

Chris has identified many important aspects in his commentary that should provide valuable insight to us all.  Whether its the history of Fed hikes, the evolving status of central bank balance sheets, the comparisons of the similarities between the tech bubble and today, or any of his other perceptions, all should go a long way to assisting you to look at your own investment activity with a little more knowledge. And that can't hurt, right? 

Follow us on Twitter: @mastersinvest

TERMS OF USE: DISCLAIMER

Learning from Einstein

In my post on Leonardo DaVinci, I spoke about the man's defining success characteristic - curiousity. Despite his multi-disciplinary genius and innovative mindset, his natural curiousity set him apart in his time and allowed him to develop skills and ideas that still shape the world 500 years later.

But he was not alone.

We know that successful investing requires a curious mind, a multi-disciplinary approach and an ability to see what others can't. The same characteristics that defined DaVinci also are encompassed in Albert Einstein, who was eloquently described by Walter Isaacson as 'the most thoughtful wonderer who appeared among us in three centuries.' It's little wonder many of the Investment Masters admire Albert Einstein, and that they have spent time studying his characteristics and processes as an aid to better thinking and more successful investing.

"To me, heroes were people like Albert Schweitzer, Albert Einstein, and David Ben-Gurion, none of whom was rich but each of whom had enriched the world." Michael Steinhardt

"For Einstein simplicity was simply then the highest level of intellect. Everything about Warren Buffett's investment style is simple. It is the thinkers like Einstein and Buffett, who fixate on simplicity, who triumph." Mohnish Pabrai

"One of my favourite books is 'Einstein's Mistakes' ... Provide people with as much exposure as possible to what’s going on around them. Allowing people direct access lets them form their own views and greatly enhances accuracy and the pursuit of truth." Ray Dalio

"There are many historical figures that I admire greatly. Newton, Einstein, and Darwin among them." Ed Thorp

"I read scientific biography as a permanent, lifelong habit. That has given me insight into how the scientific achievements have occurred. The most interesting man to me is Einstein. Einstein came very close to dying in total obscurity. If it had not been for his friends, his pals with whom he discussed physics he never would have gotten the job in the patent office that enabled him to survive in life at a time when he was failing. If he had not had people to talk to about physics he would not have been able to make his discoveries. He got a reputation for being alone, but he wasn’t totally alone. Even Einstein needed to talk to other people who knew a lot about physics." Charlie Munger

"Visionaries are not people who see things that are not there, but who see things that others do not see. As Einstein quipped, "Why do some people see the unseen?" (It should be noted that Einstein's 'thought experiences' were frequently visual)." Bennett Goodspeed

“I admit that I have always harbored an exaggerated view of my self-importance—to put it bluntly, I  fancied myself as some kind of god or an economic reformer like Keynes (each with his General Theory) or, even better, a scientist like Einstein" George Soros

I always enjoy reading those books recommended by the Investment Masters and Walter Isaacson's biographies are regular fare. Ray Dalio, in his recently released book 'Principles' shares his endeavors to learn more about the people he considered 'shapers.' These are people whom he defines as, 'a person who comes up with unique and valuable visions and builds them out beautifully, typically over the doubts and opposition of others.' Examples Dalio cites include Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Lee Kuan Yew, Andrew Carnegie, Einstein, Darwin et al.

After reading Isaacson's book on Steve Jobs, Dalio sought out Isaacson to help understand Steve Job's qualities and principles in an attempt to form an archetype of a typical 'shaper.' Dalio explains, "I started by exploring the qualities of Jobs and other shapers with Isaacson, at first in a private conversation in his office, and later at a public forum at Bridgewater. Since Isaacson had also written biographies of Albert Einstein and Ben Franklin - two other great shapers - I read them and probed him about them to try to glean what characteristics they had in common."

I've included some of my favourite excerpts from Isaacson's 'Einstein - His Life and Universe' below...

"In 1915, he [Einstein] wrestled from nature his crowning glory, one of the most beautiful theories in all of science, the general theory of relativity. As with the special theory, his thinking had evolved through thought experiments." 

"[Einstein] was comfortable not conforming. Independent in his thinking, he was driven by an imagination that broke from the confines of conventional wisdom."

[Einstein] made imaginative leaps and discerned great principles through thought experiments rather than by methodical inductions based on experimental data"

"As a young student he never did well with rote learning. And later as a theorist, his success came not from the brute strength of his mental processing power but from his imagination and creativity."

"He was very uncomfortable in school. He found the style of teaching - rote drills, impatience with questioning - to be repugnant."

"[Einstein said] 'The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.'"

"Skepticism and a resistance to received wisdom became a hallmark of his life."

'Einstein once explained, 'The ordinary adult never bothers his head about the problems of space and time. These are things he had thought of as a child. But I developed so slowly that I began to wonder about space and time only when I was already grown up. Consequently, I have probed more deeply into the problem that an ordinary child would have.'"

"[Einstein] wrote a friend in later life: 'We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born."

"[Einstein] generally preferred to think in pictures, most notably in famous thought experiments, such as watching lightning strikes from a moving train or experiencing gravity while inside an elevator. 'I rarely think in words at all', he later told a psychologist."

"The visual understanding of concepts .. became a significant aspect of Einstein's genius"

"[Einstein's] visual imagination allowed him to make the conceptional leaps that eluded more traditional thinkers"

"His success came from questioning conventional wisdom, challenging authority, and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane."

"[Einstein's] view of maths and physics as well as of Mozart, 'like all great beauty, his music was pure simplicity'."

"Throughout his life, Albert Einstein would retain the intuition and the awe of a child. He never lost his sense of wonder at the magic of nature's phenomena - magnetic fields, gravity, inertia, acceleration, light beams - which grown-ups find so commonplace."

"'A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way,' Einstein once said."

"Einsteins's discovery of special relativity involved an intuition based on a decade of intellectual as well as personal experiences."

"He postulates grand theories while minimising the role played by data ... he described his approach .. 'The truly great advances in our understanding of nature originated in a way almost diametrically opposed to induction. The intuitive grasp of the essentials of a large complex of facts leads the scientist to the postulation of a hypothetical basic law or laws. From these laws, he derives his conclusions.'"

"Einstein invited Saint-John Perse to Princeton to find out how the poet worked. 'How does the idea of a poem come?' Einstein asked. The poet spoke of the role played by intuition and imagination. 'It's the same for a man of science,' Einstein responded with delight. 'It is a sudden illumination, almost a rapture. Later, to be sure, intelligence analyses and experiments confirm or validate the intuition. But initially there is a great forward leap of the imagination.'"

"There was a link between his [Einstein's] creativity and his willingness to defy authority. He had no sentimental attachment to the old order, thus was energised by upending it."

"Among many surprising things about the life of Albert Einstein was the trouble he had in getting an academic job."

"Einstein believed there was 'a definite connection between the knowledge acquired at the patent office and the theoretical results.'"

"[Poincare spoke of Einstein, noting he] 'adapts himself to new concepts. He does not remain attached to classical principles, and, when presented with a problem in physics, is prompt to envision all the possibilities.'"

"Although he was tenacious, he was not mindlessly stubborn. When he finally decided his 'Entswurf' approach was untenable, he was willing to abandon it abruptly."

"Like a good scientist, Einstein could change his attitudes when confronted with new evidence."

"For a scientist, altering your doctrines when the facts change is not a sign of weakness."

"For a scientist to change his philosophical beliefs so fundamentally is rare."

"When shown his office [at Princeton], he was asked what equipment he might need. 'A desk or table, a chair, paper and pencils," he replied. "Oh yes, and a large wastebasket, so I can throw away all my mistakes."

"His life was a constant quest for unifying theories."

"When excited discussion failed to break the deadlock, Einstein would quietly say in his quaint English, 'I will a little tink.'"

"Einstein proclaimed 'Blind respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.'" 

"[Einstein] had an urge - indeed, a compulsion, to unify concepts from different branches of physics. 'It is a glorious feeling to discover the unity of a set of phenomena that seem at first to be completely separate' he wrote."

"The wariness of authority reflected the most fundamental of all Einstein's moral principles: Freedom and individualism are necessary for creativity and imagination to flourish."

"Creativity requires a willingness not to conform. That required nurturing free minds and free spirits, which in turn required a 'spirit of tolerance', And the underpinning of tolerance was humility - the belief that no one had the right to impose ideas and beliefs on others."

"[Einstein's] mind and soul were tempered by this humility. He could be serenely self-confident in his lonely course yet also humbly awed by the beauty of nature's handiwork."

"How did he get his ideas? 'I'm enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imaginations encircles the world.'"

"Simplicity and unity, he believed, were hallmarks of the Old One's handiwork. 'A theory is more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different things it relates, and the more expanded its area of applicability' he wrote."

'[Einstein said] 'I simply enjoy giving more than receiving in every respect, do not take myself nor the doings of the masses seriously, am not ashamed of my weaknesses and vices, and naturally take things as they come with equanimity and humour."

"As he put it near the end of his life, "I have no special talents: I am only passionately curious." 

And a few of my favorite quotes ... 

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift." Albert Einstein

“Don’t think about why you question, simply don’t stop questioning. Don’t worry about what you can’t answer, and don’t try to explain what you can’t know. Curiosity is its own reason. Aren’t you in awe when you contemplate the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure behind reality? And this is the miracle of the human mind—to use its constructions, concepts, and formulas as tools to explain what man sees, feels and touches. Try to comprehend a little more each day. Have holy curiosity.” Albert Einstein

"Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving." Albert Einstein

Like many of the individual Investment Masters, Einstein's genius stems from those same traits that define so many of the Investment and Business success stories of both our time and history. Challenging conventional wisdom and rational thought, non conformism, humility, independent thinking, intuition above induction, adopting a multi-disciplinary mindset, learning from mistakes and indeed, happily abandoning the ideas he knew were wrong; creativity and imagination and of course, curiosity. These traits allowed Einstein, like so few others, to see what others couldn't and to develop insights that have helped shape our world. Despite knowing all this, you don't need to be 'Einstein' to be successful in the world of Investing. These traits can be found in many ordinary people and the smartest people out there aren't necessarily good at investing. Remember: Imagination is more important than knowledge... 

Follow us on Twitter: @mastersinvest

Christopher Bloomstran: The New Super Investors

I always enjoy reading the letters of investment managers with long term records of success; whether it's a new investment idea or perhaps a new ways of thinking about the economy, markets, psychology, risk or market history, there is always something to learn. Give me a letter from a practitioner with skin-in-the-game over a Wall Street analyst any day of the week.

And Christopher Bloomstran's are no exception.

Christopher Bloomstran founded his firm Semper Augustus Investments in late 1998, toward the peak of the internet bubble. He named the firm Semper Augustus after the most rare and valuable of the high-end tulips during the Tulip mania.

Bloomstran's 2017 Annual Letter, is a fascinating 44 page journey through the current market environment. There are two key areas of learning within its pages. Firstly, as it wades through Bloomstran's perceptions of the market, it compares the similarities between the tech bubble and today, provides insights into the history of Fed hikes, delves into the evolving status of central bank balance sheets, ponders the implications of the transition away from quantitative easing, and provides metrics delineating the Semper Augustus portfolio with the S&P500. It also highlights the trends and risks in passive investing. Secondly, and for me the most enjoyable section of the letter, it identifies the common threads that run through what Bloomstran refers to as, the New Super Investors.

Given its size and the amount of territory it covers, I've decided to split his letter into those two areas and therefore two separate posts - the current market environment, and the topic for this post; the New Super Investors.

The New Super Investors

One of the things that should strike you almost immediately is the striking parallels between the characteristics and traits Chris identifies of these Super Investors, and the topics contained in the Investment Masters Class tutorials.

"It’s not the nuts and bolts that go into a track record that matter. It’s the people behind the record. The light finally went on once real thought went into identifying the commonality between these investors and friends."

It’s not why they own a certain company or even how high is too high a price to pay for an outstanding business. The single common thread shared by the very best investors in our circle is a love of and passion for business analysis. Ours is not a business but a profession, and the best live, breathe and eat it. Understanding a business is like a solving a puzzle. They are curious. They are also deeply devoted to their families and live moral and ethical lives. Knowing them is a privilege. In thinking about them collectively, those who would be perfectly suited at managing our families’ capital if we couldn’t do it, what they earned over the last one, three or five years is irrelevant. Each should outperform markets over the very long haul, but that’s not what’s relevant either. It’s the threads regarding character and philosophy that count, with character being by far the most important.

On Character: Every outstanding investor we know is humble. The investment business teaches it, as does life. At the same time, each is happy and successful.

An ability to admit and know when they are wrong. Investing provides plenty of mistakes to be made and to learn from. Mistakes learned from lead to confidence. Confidence can only be earned through failure. The best freely discuss mistakes and use them as lessons.

All have an insatiable desire to learn, and a high work ethic. Intellectual curiosity is hard wired.

It’s never a job and there is no time clock. Some snuck in annual reports on honeymoons (not advice for you young guys who haven’t yet been initiated to the bliss of marriage). Some friends would lay on the floor reading company filings by the tub as their toddlers bathed.

Many had a chip on their shoulder. Each wanted a better life and independence from worries about money.

Perhaps it’s the nature of our small corner of the value world but everyone is extremely collegial and nice.

Willingness to teach and give back for the gifts of wisdom learned from others is a common thread.

Contrarianism. When it matters, not for the sake of it.

Extreme patience.

Independence of thought. This goes hand in hand with contrarianism. None are hindered by large group think or decision by committee. Even in larger groups, the individual is allowed autonomy of process and thought. In fact, some of the very best investors work together in partnership with like-minded peers and as a group are collectively outstanding.

On Philosophy: All possess a core belief that a disparity can exist between price and value. It’s the key concept of value investing. Price matters greatly. The best are disciplined on both business quality and price. Growth is a part of the value equation and the price paid for it matters. The investment process to each is consistent, repeatable, easily understood and explained, and is a competitive advantage.

Risk is a permanent loss of capital. It’s not the volatility of price. Price volatility simply creates opportunity at times when price and value are disparate. The best I know spend far more time worrying and thinking about what can go wrong than modeling what will go right. Without a deep understanding of the downside, even of the unfathomable, conviction and concentration can be dangerous to disastrous.

Each own concentrated stock portfolios in deeply understood businesses, with high conviction about the business and its value. Without the appreciation of risk, however, these unique aspects of great investing can become the Achilles heel of value investing. We see too many young bucks wanting to build a track record in three years, swinging for the fences in only a few extremely concentrated ideas. Stewardship isn’t on the radar. When the unanticipated comes along, and we’ve seen it with the young and inexperienced as well as with the seasoned, big bets that weren’t well thought out or that misunderstood risk that was there all along, can produce disaster. The best investors understand diversification but know when it’s too much, and when it’s not enough. None are index huggers, it would be anathema to their belief system. None are concerned about having investments across multiple or all sectors. But they all appreciate risk.

Unconstrained. You don’t know where the next opportunity will come from, you have the capability to research and understand it, and you have the mandate to invest in it. Those that are boxed into certain segments invariably must invest in those segments, even if the entire segment is uninvestable from a business quality or price standpoint. We know very good industry analysts that wouldn’t make for good investors.

Not managing too much money. Many have stopped taking new assets or clients on. An ability to buy smaller cap and mid-sized businesses in meaningful enough size when value exists in smaller names is important to the best we know. One of the silliest things seen is the investor who must sell an outstanding business that has grown too large for his “mandate.” Size is an anchor, but so is too little time. Knowing if you are being pulled in too many directions is a common issue and the best understand and deal accordingly with it. Time for reading and thinking is a necessity and the best guard it well.

Every outstanding investor we know lives in the footnotes. Deep research on individual companies is in their DNA, and it’s a never-ending process. Business changes, risks that didn’t exist appear, sometimes slowly and sometimes suddenly. At the same time, however, living in the footnotes isn’t done so deeply that you get so bogged down in an irrelevant data point that you miss the Mack truck barreling full speed right at you.

Patient temperament that results in low portfolio turnover. Active management shouldn’t require activity. Until you own businesses whose share prices grow to three, five, ten times your original investment, you don’t really have an appreciation for compounding. Time is the arbiter of value, and when you have businesses that grow, and those that don’t, only then, over the passage of time, can you truly understand the drivers of compounding. It’s all right there in a discounted cash flow formula, but until you live and breathe it, I don’t think you can understand or appreciate it. Investors that buy and sell all the time, thinking high levels of activity add value, don’t allow themselves to learn the nature of compounding. All great investors we know have companies in their portfolios that have compounded for years.

Expanding on the last point, by owning businesses that have compounded for years, an appreciation for growth and what growth is worth is a common characteristic. Mr. Munger talks about Mr. Buffett’s evolution as an investor. We see it in the businesses our contemporaries have owned for years and decades. Cash is another anchor, and held too long drags returns downward. Holding cash for long periods of time doesn’t help. We’ve never seen it help others. It certainly hasn’t helped us. Allowing cash to accumulate briefly as part of the investment process can be necessary to the process. When it happens, it should be during the rare times of very high market overvaluation. The opportunity cost of waiting around for years for prices to fall is an expensive one, particularly when cash yields are far below available earnings yields.

Aware of one’s circle of competence. This comes with the humility listed first that we see every day in the best investors, and it also comes with having made mistakes by treading too far outside the circle. Universally, mistakes aren’t brushed under the rug but they are studied and used as teaching tools or reminders. The passion for the business and the amount of ongoing learning that goes on works to expand the circle over time.

Act like business owners. No one thinks about stocks without thinking about owning the business first.

Investing is a profession, not so much a business. They don’t invest using different “strategies”. Investing is not a strategy but a philosophy. Some do have multiple “products” and make it work, but the core research process is the same. The very best don’t have teams covering myriad sectors or caps or regions. The best groups are made up of generalists, and the investment philosophy is universally shared. There is a sacrifice involved in investing well, and it often results in fewer assets managed. You can’t be all things to all people and you can’t serve multiple masters, and they don’t.

Expectation of underperformance, even for many years. Intelligent allocation of capital takes time to work. Good investors understand this, and don’t think in the same time intervals as many who allocate capital to them for management. It’s an enigma of the investment world. Too often, when periods of underperformance create doubt, both from within and from the outside, the temptation exists to change from what is seemingly not working, not producing relative results, for what apparently is. Those who understand why what they do works over time don’t change philosophy and do develop the ability to deal with and address the doubts. It often requires the ability to communicate well.

Whether working individually or as a group, a culture of excellence and stewardship exists. Compensation and ownership is structured logically and avoids any motivation to behave badly.

Much more could be added to these common threads of character and philosophy, only because we are blessed to know some outstanding human beings. Life is easy when the people around you are extraordinary. Whether in the investing arena or at home with family, life is a joy thanks to people that make it that way. The motivation for discussing the commonalities among the great investors and friends we have the privilege of sharing the arena with wasn’t to let you know we have the succession planning box checked. We do, but that’s not it. We wanted to highlight the characteristics of active investors that do it right and who understand risk deeply. With the capital allocation world pouring money into passive strategies, there is going to be a reminder that risk is a four-letter world. The logic behind indexing makes perfect sense, but its overuse today is likely going to harm a lot of people.

It really is no surprise to me that Chris also recognises these success traits among both the Investment Masters and the new Super Investors. Time and time again we see the similarities that exist in all of these people, even as we notice their tremendous track records.

Chris' letter also contains a significant amount of insight into the current market environment and his portfolio characteristics that we will cover in our next post.

Further Reading:
'100 Common Threads of the Investment Masters' Investment Masters Class

Follow us on Twitter: @mastersinvest