Tag Archives: Buffett

Is Book Value as Relevant as it used to be? (Part 1)

What Worked in Investing-Tweedy Browne

WhatHasWorkedFundOct14Web

Low price to book value or high book value to price was an INDICATOR of value but no guarantee to coincide with intrinsic value as Buffett explains:

“In past reports I have noted that book value at most companies differs widely from intrinsic business value – the number that really counts for owners.” Berkshire 1986 Letter

“Book value’s virtue as a score-keeping measure is that it is easy to calculate and doesn’t involve the subjective (but important) judgments employed in calculation of intrinsic business value.

It is important to understand, however, that the two terms – book value and intrinsic business value – have very different meanings. Book value is an accounting concept, recording the accumulated financial input from both contributed capital and retained earnings. Intrinsic business value is an economic concept, estimating future cash output discounted to present value. Book value tells you what has been put in; intrinsic business value estimates what can be taken out.

An analogy will suggest the difference. Assume you spend identical amounts putting each of two children through college. The book value (measured by financial input) of each child’s education would be the same. But the present value of the future payoff (the intrinsic business value) might vary enormously – from zero to many times the cost of the education. So, also, do businesses having equal financial input end up with wide variations in value.” Berkshire 1983 Letter

“Some investors weight book value heavily in their stock-buying decisions (as I, in my early years, did myself). And some economists and academicians believe replacement values are of considerable importance in calculating an appropriate price level for the stock market as a whole.

Those of both persuasions would have received an education at the auction we held in early 1986 to dispose of our textile machinery. The equipment sold (including some disposed of in the few months prior to the auction) took up about 750,000 square feet of factory space in New Bedford and was eminently usable. It originally cost us about $13 million, including $2 million spent in 1980-84, and had a current book value of $866,000 (after accelerated depreciation). Though no sane management would have made the investment, the equipment could have been replaced new for perhaps $30-$50 million.
Gross proceeds from our sale of this equipment came to $163,122. Allowing for necessary pre- and post-sale costs, our net was less than zero. Relatively modern looms that we bought for $5,000 apiece in 1981 found no takers at $50. We finally sold them for scrap at $26 each, a sum less than removal costs.
Ponder this: the economic goodwill attributable to two paper routes in Buffalo – or a single See’s candy store – considerably exceeds the proceeds we received from this massive collection of tangible assets that not too many years ago, under different competitive conditions, was able to employ over 1,000 people.” Berkshire 1985 Letter

“Of course, it’s per-share intrinsic value, not book value, that counts. Book value is an accounting term that measures the capital, including retained earnings, that has been put into a business. Intrinsic value is a present-value estimate of the cash that can be taken out of a business during its remaining life. At most companies, the two values are unrelated.” Berkshire 1993 Letter

“We define intrinsic value as the discounted value of the cash that can be taken out of a business during its remaining life. Anyone calculating intrinsic value necessarily comes up with a highly subjective figure that will change both as estimates of future cash flows are revised and as interest rates move. Despite its fuzziness, however, intrinsic value is all- important and is the only logical way to evaluate the relative attractiveness of investments and businesses.

To see how historical input (book value) and future output (intrinsic value) can diverge, let’s look at another form of investment, a college education. Think of the education’s cost as its “book value.” If it is to be accurate, the cost should include the earnings that were foregone by the student because he chose college rather than a job.

For this exercise, we will ignore the important non-economic benefits of an education and focus strictly on its economic value. First, we must estimate the earnings that the graduate will receive over his lifetime and subtract from that figure an estimate of what he would have earned had he lacked his education. That gives us an excess earnings figure, which must then be discounted, at an appropriate interest rate, back to graduation day. The dollar result equals the intrinsic economic value of the education.

Some graduates will find that the book value of their education exceeds its intrinsic value, which means that whoever paid for the education didn’t get his money’s worth. In other cases, the intrinsic value of an education will far exceed its book value, a result that proves capital was wisely deployed. In all cases, what is clear is that book value is meaningless as an indicator of intrinsic value.” Berkshire 1994 Letter

Is Accounting as Useful as an Indicator as it Used to be?

Recent years has seen the brisk rise in market value of businesses defined by their network effects and operational leverage to the new economy rather than those dependent on traditional accounting defined forms of capital. Also, we have seen rising domestic Gini coefficients despite global improvements in aggregate output. Capitalism without Capital investigates the increased investment in intangible assets and their place in the modern economy.

The book is about the change in the type of investment observed in more or less all developed countries over the past forty years.  The authors argue:

  1. There has been a long-term shift from tangible to intangible investment.
  2. Much of that shirt does not appear in company balance sheets and national accounts because accountants and statisticians tend not to count intangible spending as an investment, but rather as day-to-day expenses.
  3. The tangible, knowledge-based assets that intangible investment builds have different properties relative to tangible assets: they are more likely to be scalable and have sunk costs; and their benefits are likely to spill over and exhibit synergies with other intangibles.

Is Book Value Irrelevant?

http://thereformedbroker.com/2018/04/30/is-book-value-irrelevant/

To be continued………..

Excellent Investing Video (Templeton, Buffett & Wilson)

HAPPY THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY for American readers.

Yes, I will still post on Sandstrom Gold (SAND) but another day.

The interviewer, “Adam Smith,” says the similarities among the investors are:

  • They have independence of mind
  • They trust their perceptions
  • They stick to what they know
  • They are intelligent
  • They have fun

After viewing the video, whip out a piece of paper and quickly jot down what EXACTLY can YOU use in your own investing approach?  Be specific! STOP! Take a walk for 20 minutes, then write down some more thoughts.   See the video again.  What can YOU implement?

I will post my thoughts next week.

Buffett on Inflation, Gold, and Investor Choices


GOLD

Buffett comments on the shiny metal in his discussion on investors’ choices: The Basic Choices for Investors and the One We Strongly Prefer

  • The second major category of investments involves assets that will never produce anything, but that are purchased in the buyer’s hope that someone else – who also knows that the assets will be forever unproductive – will pay more for them in the future. Tulips, of all things, briefly became a favorite of such buyers in the 17th century.

This type of investment requires an expanding pool of buyers, who, in turn, are enticed because they believe the buying pool will expand still further. Owners are not inspired by what the asset itself can produce – it will remain lifeless forever – but rather by the belief that others will desire it even more avidly in the future.

The major asset in this category is gold, currently a huge favorite of investors who fear almost all other assets, especially paper money (of whose value, as noted, they are right to be fearful). Gold, however, has two significant shortcomings, being neither of much use nor procreative. True, gold has some industrial and decorative utility, but the demand for these purposes is both limited and incapable of soaking up new production. Meanwhile, if you own one ounce of gold for an eternity, you will still own one ounce at its end.

What motivates most gold purchasers is their belief that the ranks of the fearful will grow. During the past decade that belief has proved correct. Beyond that, the rising price has on its own generated additional buying enthusiasm, attracting purchasers who see the rise as validating an investment thesis. As “bandwagon” investors join any party, they create their own truth – for a while.

Over the past 15 years, both Internet stocks and houses have demonstrated the extraordinary excesses that can be created by combining an initially sensible thesis with well-publicized rising prices. In these bubbles, an army of originally skeptical investors succumbed to the “proof” delivered by the market, and the pool of buyers – for a time – expanded sufficiently to keep the bandwagon rolling. But bubbles blown large enough inevitably pop. And then the old proverb is confirmed once again: “What the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end.”

Today the world’s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce – gold’s price as I write this – its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A.

Let’s now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world’s most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?

Beyond the staggering valuation given the existing stock of gold, current prices (In 2011, gold traded at an average price of $1,700 in $US) make today’s annual production of gold command about $160 billion. Buyers – whether jewelry and industrial users, frightened individuals, or speculators – must continually absorb this additional supply to merely maintain an equilibrium at present prices.

A century from now the 400 million acres of farmland will have produced staggering amounts of corn, wheat, cotton, and other crops – and will continue to produce that valuable bounty, whatever the currency may be. Exxon Mobil will probably have delivered trillions of dollars in dividends to its owners and will also hold assets worth many more trillions (and, remember, you get 16 Exxons). The 170,000 tons of gold will be unchanged in size and still incapable of producing anything. You can fondle the cube, but it will not respond.

Admittedly, when people a century from now are fearful, it’s likely many will still rush to gold. I’m confident, however, that the $9.6 trillion current valuation of pile A will compound over the century at a rate far inferior to that achieved by pile B.

  • Our first two categories enjoy maximum popularity at peaks of fear: Terror over economic collapse drives individuals to currency-based assets, most particularly U.S. obligations, and fear of currency collapse fosters movement to sterile assets such as gold. We heard “cash is king” in late 2008, just when cash should have been deployed rather than held. Similarly, we heard “cash is trash” in the early 1980s just when fixed-dollar investments were at their most attractive level in memory. On those occasions, investors who required a supportive crowd paid dearly for that comfort.

My own preference – and you knew this was coming – is our third category: investment in productive assets, whether businesses, farms, or real estate. Ideally, these assets should have the ability in inflationary times to deliver output that will retain its purchasing-power value while requiring a minimum of new capital investment. Farms, real estate, and many businesses such as Coca-Cola, IBM and our own See’s Candy meet that double-barreled test. Certain other companies – think of our regulated utilities, for example – fail it because inflation places heavy capital requirements on them. To earn more, their owners must invest more. Even so, these investments will remain superior to nonproductive or currency-based assets.

Whether the currency a century from now is based on gold, seashells, shark teeth, or a piece of paper (as today), people will be willing to exchange a couple of minutes of their daily labor for a Coca-Cola or some See’s peanut brittle. In the future the U.S. population will move more goods, consume more food, and require more living space than it does now. People will forever exchange what they produce for what others produce.

Our country’s businesses will continue to efficiently deliver goods and services wanted by our citizens. Metaphorically, these commercial “cows” will live for centuries and give ever greater quantities of “milk” to boot. Their value will be determined not by the medium of exchange but rather by their capacity to deliver milk. Proceeds from the sale of the milk will compound for the owners of the cows, just as they did during the 20th century when the Dow increased from 66 to 11,497 (and paid loads of dividends as well). Berkshire’s goal will be to increase its ownership of first-class businesses. Our first choice will be to own them in their entirety – but we will also be owners by way of holding sizable amounts of marketable stocks. I believe that over any extended period of time this category of investing will prove to be the runaway winner among the three we’ve examined. More important, it will be by far the safest.

CSInvesting: I agree with all the above except that comparing gold as an investment to productive companies is not comparing like-with-like.   Of course, owning a highly productive company or business that can compound over time will beat a sterile asset like cash or gold, but even Buffett will hold cash if he can’t buy great businesses at a good price.   Gold is “money” that can’t be created by governments—by fiat. 

An excellent article: Inflation Swindles the Equity Investor by Buffett.

Other views on the current gold market:


QUESTIONS? Gold as money has far out-performed currencies over the past decades

 

What are your alternatives?  Quality ain’t cheap………..(source: seekingalpha.com)

and….assets to fin assets

 

Ticker Industry Group Price/ Earnings Forward % Free Cash Flow/ Market Cap % Forward Dividend Yield Debt to Equity Latest Qtr Financial Health Grade Economic Moat Stewardship
3M Co MMM Industrial Products 21.6 4.7 2.51 1.04 A Wide E
BlackRock Inc BLK Asset Management 18.25 3.06 2.56 0.17 B Wide E
Coca-Cola Co KO Beverages – Non-Alcoholic 22.17 3.57 3.55 1.21 A Wide E
Colgate-Palmolive Co CL Consumer Packaged Goods 25.25 3.83 2.1 A Wide E
CSX Corp CSX Transportation & Logistics 23.7 1.45 1.5 0.94 B Wide S
CVS Health Corp CVS Health Care Plans 13.81 9.46 2.47 0.7 B Wide S
Emerson Electric Co EMR Industrial Products 23.98 5.65 3.17 0.49 A Wide S
Exxon Mobil Corp XOM Oil & Gas – Integrated 19.76 1.75 3.67 0.17 A Narrow E
General Dynamics Corp GD Aerospace & Defense 19.27 3.17 1.61 0.27 A Wide E
Honeywell International Inc HON Industrial Products 17.73 4.63 2.13 0.63 A Wide S
International Business Machines Corp IBM Application Software 13.14 8.38 3.08 2.09 A Narrow S
Johnson & Johnson JNJ Drug Manufacturers 17.15 4.05 2.63 0.32 A Wide S
McDonald’s Corp MCD Restaurants 20.7 4.65 2.93 A Wide S
Nike Inc B NKE Manufacturing – Apparel & Furniture 22.22 2.85 1.25 0.28 A Wide E
PepsiCo Inc PEP Beverages – Non-Alcoholic 21.41 4.71 2.75 2.67 A Wide S
Procter & Gamble Co PG Consumer Packaged Goods 23.81 4.26 2.94 0.32 A Wide S
The Hershey Co HSY Consumer Packaged Goods 22.88 3.09 2.28 2.99 A Wide S
The Home Depot Inc HD Retail – Apparel & Specialty 20.24 4.74 2.46 3.97 A Wide E
United Technologies Corp UTX Aerospace & Defense 17.15 1.98 2.36 0.79 A Wide S
Wal-Mart Stores Inc WMT Retail – Defensive 16.47 9.73 2.86 0.54 A Wide S
Walt Disney Co DIS Entertainment 18.45 4.39 1.42 0.34 A Wide S
19.38 4.48 2.48 1.08

Data source: Morningstar

Buffett’s Search and Analysis Techniques; Economic Fitness

investor-trait

Wise Thoughts from Buffett on Finding Stocks

  1. I started at page one [of these manuals-Moody’s and Value-Line] and went through every company that traded, from A to Z. When I was done I knew something about every company in the book.
  2. I like businesses that I can understand. Let’s start with that. That narrows it down by 90%. There are all types of things I don’t understand, but fortunately, there is enough I do understand. You have this big wide world out there and almost every company is publicly owned. So you have all American business practically available to you. So it makes sense to go with things you can understand.
  3. First, you need two piles. You have to segregate businesses you can understand and reasonably predict from those you don’t understand and can’t reasonably predict. An example is chewing gum versus software. You also have to recognize what you can and cannot know. Put everything you can’t understand or that is difficult to predict in one pile. That is the too-hard pile. Once you know the other pile, then it’s important to read a lot, learn about the industries, get background information, etc. on the companies in those piles. Read a lot of 10Ks and Qs, etc. Read about the competitors. I don’t want to know the price of the stock prior to my analysis. I want to do the work and estimate a value for the stock and then compare that to the current offering price. If I know the price in advance it may influence my analysis. We’re getting ready to make a $5 billion investment and this was the process I used.
  4. You have to turn over a lot of rocks to find those little anomalies. You have to find the companies that are off the map – way off the map. You may find local companies that have nothing wrong with them at all
  5. Most people get interested in stocks when everyone else is. The time to get interested is when no one else is. You can’t buy what is popular and do well.
  6. I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.
  7. If we were to do it over again, we’d do it pretty much the same way. The world hasn’t changed that much. We’d read everything in sight about businesses and industries we think we’d understand. And, working with far less capital, our investment universe would be far broader than it is currently.

7 Gems from Buffet on Analyzing Stocks

  1. You don’t need to be an expert in order to achieve satisfactory investment returns. But if you aren’t, you must recognize your limitations and follow a course certain to work reasonably well. Keep things simple and don’t swing for the fences. When promised quick profits, respond with a quick “no.”
  2. There’s nothing different, in my view, about analyzing securities today vs. 50 years ago.
  3. We favor businesses where we really think we know the answer. If we think the business’s competitive position is shaky, we won’t try to compensate with price. We want to buy a great business, defined as having a high return on capital for a long period of time, where we think management will treat us right. We like to buy at 40 cents on the dollar, but will pay a lot closer to $1 on the dollar for a great business.
  4. Munger: Margin of safety means getting more value than you’re paying. There are many ways to get value. It’s high school algebra; if you can’t do this, then don’t invest.
  5. If you’re going to buy a farm, you’d say, “I bought it to earn $X growing soybeans.” It wouldn’t be based on what you saw on TV or what a friend said. It’s the same with stocks. Take out a yellow pad and say, “If I’m going to buy GM at $30, it has 600 million shares, so I’m paying $18 billion,” and answer the question, why? If you can’t answer that, you’re not subjecting it to business tests.
  6. Capital-intensive industries outside the utility sector scare me more. We get decent returns on equity. You won’t get rich, but you won’t go broke either. You are better off in businesses that are not capital intensive.
  7. No formula in finance tells you that the moat is 28 feet wide and 16 feet deep. That’s what drives the academics crazy. They can compute standard deviations and betas, but they can’t understand moats. Maybe I’m being too hard on the academics.

7 Nuggets from Buffett on Valuing Stocks

  1. When Charlie and I buy stocks which we think of as small portions of businesses our analysis is very similar to that which we use in buying entire businesses. We first have to decide whether we can sensibly estimate an earnings range for five years out, or more. If the answer is yes, we will buy the stock (or business) if it sells at a reasonable price in relation to the bottom boundary of our estimate. If, however, we lack the ability to estimate future earnings – which is usually the case we simply move on to other prospects. In the 54 years we have worked together, we have never foregone an attractive purchase because of the macro or political environment, or the views of other people. In fact, these subjects never come up when we make decisions.
  2. In 1986, I purchased a 400-acre farm, located 50 miles north of Omaha, from the FDIC. It cost me $280,000, considerably less than what a failed bank had lent against the farm a few years earlier. I knew nothing about operating a farm. But I have a son who loves farming, and I learned from him both how many bushels of corn and soybeans the farm would produce and what the operating expenses would be. From these estimates, I calculated the normalized return from the farm to then be about 10%. I also thought it was likely that productivity would improve over time and that crop prices would move higher as well. Both expectations proved out.
  3. Intrinsic value is terribly important but very fuzzy. We try to work with businesses where we have fairly high probability of knowing what the future will hold. If you own a gas pipeline, not much is going to go wrong. Maybe a competitor enters forcing you to cut prices, but intrinsic value hasn’t gone down if you already factored this in. We looked at a pipeline recently that we think will come under pressure from other ways of delivering gas [to the area the pipeline serves]. We look at this differently from another pipeline that has the lowest costs [and does not face threats from alternative pipelines]. If you calculate intrinsic value properly, you factor in things like declining prices.
  4. Investors making purchases in an overheated market need to recognize that it may often take an extended period for the value of even an outstanding company to catch up with the price they paid.
  5. We use the same discount rate across all securities. We may be more conservative in estimating cash in some situations.
  6. Just because interest rates are at 1.5% doesn’t mean we like an investment that yields 2-3%. We have minimum thresholds in our mind that are a whole lot higher than government rates. When we’re looking at a business, we’re looking at holding it forever, so we don’t assume rates will always be this low.
  7. The appropriate multiple for a business compared to the S&P 500 depends on its return on equity and return on incremental invested capital. I wouldn’t look at a single valuation metric like relative P/E ratio. I don’t think price-to-earnings, price-to-book or price-to-sales ratios tell you very much. People want a formula, but it’s not that easy. To value something, you simply have to take its free cash flows from now until kingdom come and then discount them back to the present using an appropriate discount rate. All cash is equal. You just need to evaluate a business’s economic characteristics.

More Reading

Most of these quotes came from Buffett FAQ which contains the Q&A from shareholder meetings and goes beyond what you’ll find in the annual letters.

Just from these small selection of quotes, you can see how Buffett manages to dance in zone 4.

Take his words to heart and let’s join him on the dance floor because the sweet spot is where we belong. Read more: http://www.oldschoolvalue.com/blog/investing-perspective/warren-buffett-analyze-value-stocks/#ixzz3iofOBNF9

Economic Review & Fitness

Boot Camp  A good resource for students

Consequence of ZIRP

What is money?

Economic Conversations

How the economy works by Ray Dalio

Sentiment

Crude-Oil-Returns

oil Sentiment

oil carnage

Oil headed to $10 a barrel

HAVE A GOOD WEEKEND!

Berkshire: Part 2

Berkshire Graph

More commentary on the 2014 Berkshire Letter

Did-warren-buffett-move-the-goalposts-in-the-latest-letter

Berkshire-hathaway-2015-coverage

Buffett is a Lucky Coin-flipper?

I enjoyed reading Berkshire -Past, Present and Future, pages 24-28 2014ltr

Mr. Buffett’s anger at Stanton’s chiseling cost dearly because he didn’t sell at the first puff of the “cigar-butt” (Berkshire’s Textile Division). Buffett suffered in a value trap.

Notably, Buffett’s cigar-butt strategy worked well when managing small sums–the best of Buffett’s life in terms of relative and absolute investment performance.  However, cigar-butt investing was not scalable or enduring with larger sums.  Buffett then turned towards buying wonderful businesses at fair prices or, in other words, franchises with honest and able management.

His investment in See’s Candies was a turning point because the company generated high returns on invested capital which Buffett could then redeploy into other businesses.  Note that See’s could only grow profitably within a defined region (Calif.?).  A powerful brand coupled with economies of scale makes for a great business.

Berkshire Today (page 29) provides a description of Conglomerates and the mania that occurred in the 1960s with ponzi-scheme pooling of interests accounting and ever-rising P/E multiples–until the game crashed.

Buffett points out the folly of spin-offs, whereby the owning company loses purported “control-value” without any compensating payment.  Investment bankers and private equity buccaneers were heartily savaged by Mr. Buffett’s pen.

Articles and Videos of Interest

25-old-investor-spurred-lumber  A short-sellers uncovers Lumber Liquidators.

shark-tank-the-speculators-guide-to-junior-mining-investment-session-1-with-rick-rule/  A series of talks on speculating in junior miners.

Back to Deep Value

Before we dig deeper into Chapter Five in Deep Value, I thought we should read Chapter 2 in Quantitative Value so as to not skip over several important points.  I will make sure new students receive a link to the books in the course.

Buffett’s 2014 Letter to Shareholders

buffett

Decades ago, Ben Graham pinpointed the blame for investment failure, using a quote from Shakespeare: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

Comments on the Berkshire Hathaway 2014 letter,  Part 1

Note the plug (page 6) for Where Are the Customers’ Yachts by Fred Schwed. That along with the Money Game by Adam Smith will teach you the ways of Wall Street. Also, see:

Intrinsic Value: Buffett reiterates that it is not a precise number for Berkshire nor, in fact for ANY stock.

GEICO delivers savings to its customers because it is a low-cost operation (source of structural competitive advantage).  The company’s low costs create a moat—an enduring one—that competitors are unable to cross.  Note Buffett’s comment on the animated gecko, a LOW-COST spokesperson.

TESCO

Here’s how he explained it:

“In 2013, I soured somewhat on the company’s then-management and sold 114 million shares, realizing a profit of $43 million. My leisurely pace in making sales would prove expensive. Charlie calls this sort of behavior “thumb-sucking.” (Considering what my delay cost us, he is being kind.)

“During 2014, Tesco’s problems worsened by the month. The company’s market share fell, its margins contracted and accounting problems surfaced. In the world of business, bad news often surfaces serially: You see a cockroach in your kitchen; as the days go by, you meet his relatives.”

Buffett said the dawdling resulted in an after-tax loss of $444 million by the time Berkshire was no longer a Tesco shareholder. That, he added, is about 0.2% of Berkshire’s net worth. Only three times in 50 years has Berkshire recorded losses from a sale equal to more than 1% of its net worth.

Unfortunately, we don’t learn what exactly caused the loss. How did Buffett miscalculate intrinsic value?    Did management worsen, but if so, then how can an investor sidestep that?   I believe the economics changed as customers had more in-home deliveries and other choices coupled with poor store execution from Tesco.  I was disappointed with this explanation of the Tesco loss, but Buffett would reply that it was only 1/5 of 1%.

Nominal vs. Real Returns

During the 1964-2014 period, the S&P 500 rose from 84 to 2,059, which, with reinvested dividends, generated the overall return of 11,196% shown on page 2. Concurrently, the purchasing power of the dollar declined a staggering 87%. That decrease means that it now takes $1 to buy what could be bought for 13 cents in 1965 as measured by the CPI (Flawed or whats wrong with cpi)

I prefer measuring in gold grams, because gold is a store of value and market-based rather than concocted by Federal bureaucrats.DJIA-1900

There is an important message for investors in that disparate performance between stocks and dollars. Think back to our 2011 annual report, in which we defined investing as the transfer to others of purchasing power now with reasoned expectation of receiving more purchasing power–after taxes have been paid on nominal gains—in the future.”   (I wonder why Mr. Buffett makes no mention of the financial repression of ZIRP and NIRP?  It is the elephant in the room because of the devastating effect it has on savers and on calculating discount rates for investment.)

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.  Buffett’s comments are backed up by history as shown here:Triumphand triumph_of_the_optimists

Stock prices will always be far more volatile than cash equivalent holdings. Over the long term, however, currency-denominated instruments are riskier investments—far riskier investments. Than widely –diversified stock portfolios that are bought over time and that are owned in a manner invoking only token fees and commissions. That lesson has not customarily been taught in business schools, where volatility is almost universally used as a proxy for risk.  Though this pedagogic assumption makes for easy teaching, it is dead wrong. Volatility is far from synonymous with risk. Popular formulas that equate the two terms lead students, investors and CEOs astray.

It is true, of course, that owning equities for a day or a week or a year is far riskier (in both nominal and purchasing power terms) than leaving funds in cash-equivalents. That is relevant to certain investors-say, investment banks—whose viability can be threatened by declines in asset prices and which might be forced to sell securities during depressed markets. Additionally, any party that might have meaningful near-term needs for funds should keep appropriate sums in Treasuries or insured bank deposits.

For the great majority of investors, however, who can—and should—invest with a multi-decade horizon, quotational declines are unimportant. Their focus should remain fixed on attaining significant gains in purchasing power over their investing lifetime. For them, a diversified equity portfolio, bought over time, will prove far less risky than dollar-based securities.

Note the multi-decade horizon. Stocks were unchanged from 1964-1981, please see page 79: A Study of Market History through Graham Babson Buffett and Others.  Read what Buffett has to say about stock markets. Some say it is Time to exit because of high valuations for big-cap stocks in the U.S. market. So even if stocks decline for a decade but your holding period is MULTI-Decade, then hold tight.  Tough to do, but history seems to bear his thesis out: valuing-growth-stocks-revisiting-the-nifty-fifty.  I prefer to act like the pig farmer in A Study of Market History (see link above).

If the investor, instead, fears price volatility, erroneously viewing it as a measure of risk, he may, ironically, end up doing some very risk things. Recall, if you will, the pundits who six years ago bemoaned falling stock prices and advised investing in “safe” Treasury bills or bank certificates of deposit. People who heeded this sermon (to panic) are now earning a pittance on sums they had previously expected would finance a pleasant retirement. (The S&P 500 was then below 700; now it is about 2,100.) If not for their fear of meaningless price volatility, these investors could have assured themselves of a good income for life by simply buying a very low-cost index fund whose dividends would trend upward over the years and whose principal would grow as well (with many ups and downs, to be sure).

spx

Investors, of course, can, by their own behavior, make stock ownership highly risky. And many do. Active trading, attempts to “time” market movements, inadequate diversification, the payment of high and unnecessary to managers and advisors and the use of borrowed money can destroy the decent returns that a life-long owner of equities would otherwise enjoy. ….Anything can happen anytime in markets. And no advisor, economist, or TV commentator–and definitely not Charlie nor I–can tell you when chaos will occur. Market forecasters will fill your ear but will never fill your wallet.

A plug for Jack Bogle’s The Little Book of Common Sense Investing.  Basically, Buffett is saying keep it simple, think and hold L O N G – T E R M, avoid high fees and commissions, and don’t use leverage. 

Next, let’s look at Berkshire–Past, Present and Future in Part II

Buffett on Valuation

Aesop

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ben Graham told a story 40 years ago that illustrates why investment professionals behave as they do: An oil prospector, moving to his heavenly reward, was met by St. Peter with bad news. “You’re qualified for residence”, said St. Peter, “but, as you can see, the compound reserved for oil men is packed.

There’s no way to squeeze you in.” After thinking a moment, the prospector asked if he might say just four words to the present occupants. That seemed harmless to St. Peter, so the prospector cupped his hands and yelled, “Oil discovered in hell.” Immediately the gate to the compound opened and all of the oil men marched out to head for the nether regions. Impressed, St. Peter invited the prospector to move in and make himself comfortable. The prospector paused. “No,” he said, “I think I’ll go along with the rest of the boys. There might be some truth to that rumor after all.”

Buffett-on-Valuation   Worth a review.

Speculation vs. Investment (2000, Berkshire Hathaway Letter)

The line separating investment and speculation, which is never bright and clear, becomes blurred still further when most market participants have recently enjoyed triumphs. Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball. They know that overstaying the festivities ¾ that is, continuing to speculate in companies that have gigantic valuations relative to the cash they are likely to generate in the future ¾ will eventually bring on pumpkins and mice. But they nevertheless hate to miss a single minute of what is one helluva party. Therefore, the giddy participants all plan to leave just seconds before midnight. There’s a problem, though: They are dancing in a room in which the clocks have no hands.

Last year (1999), we commented on the exuberance ¾ and, yes, it was irrational ¾ that prevailed, noting that investor expectations had grown to be several multiples of probable returns. One piece of evidence came from a Paine Webber-Gallup survey of investors conducted in December 1999, in which the participants were asked their opinion about the annual returns investors could expect to realize over the decade ahead. Their answers averaged 19%. That, for sure, was an irrational expectation: For American business as a whole, there couldn’t possibly be enough birds in the 2009 bush to deliver such a return.

Far more irrational still were the huge valuations that market participants were then putting on businesses almost certain to end up being of modest or no value. Yet investors, mesmerized by soaring stock prices and ignoring all else, piled into these enterprises. It was as if some virus, racing wildly among investment professionals as well as amateurs, induced hallucinations in which the values of stocks in certain sectors became decoupled from the values of the businesses that underlay them.

Burning Up the Dotcons

http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/darkside/articles/cashburn.htm

See’s Candies, Sanborn Map, and Inflation Article

SeesA Nor’easter is coming my way (up to two to three feet of snow with high winds) so I may be out of contact for two or three days.  But push on we must. We continue to study Chapter 3, in Deep Value and Buffett’s investing career.Sees 2

The best investment article I have ever read of Buffett’s is:

Buffett & Inflation Highlighted plus if you wish to read all that Buffett has said about inflation then Buffett inflation file.

A key case for you to focus on is See’s_Candies_Case_Study. Combined with Buffett’s Inflation Swindles the Equity Investor (Fortune Article: Buffett – How Inflation Swindles the Equity Investor), you will see a leap in Buffett’s thinking. Both are important to understand and complementary to each other.

Finally, Sanborn_Map_Case_Study_BPLs is another case mentioned in Chapter 3 of Deep Value.

Hopefully, students will discuss in the comments section.

Time to bring out the snowshoes!

It’s not entirely clear what will happen in the near term, but the financial markets are already pushed to extremes by central-bank induced speculation. With speculators massively short the now steeply-depressed euro and yen, with equity margin debt still near record levels in a market valued at more than double its pre-bubble norms on historically reliable measures, and with several major European banks running at gross leverage ratios comparable to those of Bear Stearns and Lehman before the 2008 crisis, we’re seeing an abundance of what we call “leveraged mismatches” – a preponderance one-way bets, using borrowed money, that permeates the entire financial system. With market internals and credit spreads behaving badly, while Treasury yields, oil and industrial commodity prices slide in a manner consistent with abrupt weakening in global economic activity, we can hardly bear to watch..   John Hussman, Jan. 26, 2015   www.hussmanfunds.com

Warren Buffett: Liquidator to Operator

Dempster Mills

Dempster Mills Case Study:

Dempster_Mills_Manufacturing_Case_Study_BPLs  Note the difference in strategy between Buffett and Graham in this type of investment.

As previously discussed, we have read the Preface and Chapter 2, Contrarians at the Gate in Deep Value where we learned about Graham and liquidations and the great mean-reverting mystery of value investment. Klarman’s writings were also read (Margin of Safety) to learn about his approach to liquidation and valuation. Valuation is an imprecise art where value is no one precise number.  Finally, Mr. Market is there to serve us not guide us. Therefore, think of all the pundits, experts, and CNBC commentators we can ignore for the rest of our investing careers.

If readers have questions or comments, do not hesitate to write. I try not to look at my emails but once a week. I neither have a cell phone nor a TV, but time is scarce so I can respond faster (or another student can to your questions) here in the comments section.

Now we transition into reading Chapter 3 of Deep Value, “Warren Buffett: Liquidator to Operator.”  Buffett was Graham’s prized student who forged his own way.   There are about ten books written on Buffett every year. We will now focus on his early career by going through his Complete_Buffett_partnership_letters-1957-70_in Sections

After Dempster, we will study Sanborn Map and then See’s Candies. Put on your thinking caps.   Go the extra mile and find out more about these companies if you have the interest.   Focus on how Buffett estimated the intrinsic value of Dempster Mills AND how he managed the investment over time.   What made up his margin of safety BESIDES the price discount?

Reader Question:   Do I know Toby Carlisle, and do I think his approach works?

Yes, I have had the pleasure of meeting Toby. A nice guy who seems like a Renaissance man similar to Graham but with a darker sense of humor. Toby taught me how to speak Australian English.   You don’t thank your host for a delicious meal by saying, “That was excellent.!”   You say, “What a belly-bust!”   You don’t go out to drink beers, you go out to “rip down a frosty.”  I am indebted for those tips.  I learned during my working days in Cairns, Australia that fly-crawling was the national sport.  If you could choose which fly could crawl the furthest along a wall or ceiling, you were the champ.  The game had a huge element of randomness. I digress…

Since we haven’t finished our course of study on Deep Value Investing, I am no expert to comment upon his approach. But Deep Value investing can work since it does the opposite of a naive strategy. Hard-core contrarian-investing is difficult because buying what has been losing or is obscure, despised, and loathed goes against human nature.  Are you more attracted to go into a full restaurant than one with cobwebs across the window?   So far in our readings, net/nets seem more likely to be small, illiquid securities, so the investing approach may be more suited for individuals with a limited amount of capital who can go anywhere to find bargains.

Even the great Walter Schloss managed small amounts of money using his deep value approach. As his accounts grew, he would return capital to his partners, thus keeping the amounts of money he managed appropriate for the illiquidity of the names he bought and sold.  He would also buy and sell scale down and up, I heard.

Why don’t you call him at his firm, Eyquem Investment Management LLC or visit www.greenbackd.com and find his email address. Ask for his record so far in managing accounts.  What happens when there are only six or seven net/nets–does he concentrate into those?

Are my instructions clear?

Addendum: Does Intuition Have a Role in Quantitative Investing?

http://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2015/01/19/theres-alpha-in-your-right-brain/

Reading for this weekend

Snails

Bubble Watch

GMO_QtlyLetter_1Q14_FullVersion

ABOOK-Mar-2014-Valuations-Stocks-to-GDP

Momentum Stocks Crushed

Momentum Crush

http://www.acting-man.com/?p=30382#more-30382

Buffett Notes

BN-CQ488_0503be_M_20140503154303

http://covestreetcapital.com/Blog/?p=1173    Icahn slams Buffett on his cowardice.

Warren-Buffett-Katharine-Graham-Letter on Pensions 1975

Warren-Buffett-Florida-Speech

Buffett1984Retail Stores and Clean Surplus

Berkshire_Hathaway_annual_meeting_notes_5-3-2014

20140424_CNBC_Transcript__Legendary_Investor_Warren_Buffett_Speaks_with_Becky_Quick

BRK_annual_letter-2014

Have_Researchers_Uncovered_Buffetts_Secret

20140224_Preview_of_Buffett’s_annual_letter__Learn_from_my_real_estate_investments

And in case of Buffett overdoseCrony Capitalist

Resource StocksRules of Thumb for Junior Mining Speculators and A Light at the End of the Tunnel