Chong Ser Jing, Author at The Good Investors : Page 13 of 23

What We’re Reading (Week Ending 2 August 2020)

The best articles we’ve read in recent times on a wide range of topics, including investing, business, and the world in general.

We’ve constantly been sharing a list of our recent reads in our weekly emails for The Good Investors.

Do subscribe for our weekly updates through the orange box in the blog (it’s on the side if you’re using a computer, and all the way at the bottom if you’re using mobile) – it’s free!

But since our readership-audience for The Good Investors is wider than our subscriber base, we think sharing the reading list regularly on the blog itself can benefit even more people. The articles we share touch on a wide range of topics, including investing, business, and the world in general.

Here are the articles for the week ending 2 August 2020:

1. The Ugly Scramble – Morgan Housel

There is no topic in business and investing that gets more attention than risk. But it’s almost always viewed through a universal lens: “What risks are we going to face in the future?” Or just simply, “What’s the economy going to do next?”

But risk has little to do with what’s going to happen next and a lot to do with how much you can endure, and how calmly you can react to, whatever happens next.

To the leveraged investor a small setback is a huge risk because of how they’re forced to deal with decline: by selling to cover their debts, right now, this moment, whatever the price is. Don’t think, just scramble to do you gotta do in the face of panic. They’re like the cat locking its limbs into place, doing whatever they can to survive even if it breaks them to pieces.

To the patient investor with a ton of cash, a huge market decline requires no immediate action. And not because it doesn’t affect them – it often does – but because however it affects them can be dealt with slowly and methodically. Maybe they realize they want a more conservative allocation. They can come to that conclusion after thinking it through, hearing opposing views, weighing alternatives, and calmly executing at the right time. Doing so may lead them to a different choice than their initial gut reaction. Taking time to understand a complicated problem often does.

2. Everyone’s a Day Trader Now – Michael Wursthorn, Mischa Frankl-Duval, and Gregory Zuckerman

Much of the rapid-fire day trading culture plays out on social media, which has helped usher in a new class of social-media influencers who hype stocks to followers eager for get-rich-quick stock tips. They swap trading ideas over Twitter, Discord and Reddit, an update from the boiler-room chat rooms of the ’90s that sent dot-com stocks into a frenzy.

Stanley Barsch, Ms. Viswasam’s boss who got her into investing, touts the stocks he trades to his more than 76,000 Twitter followers, who refer to him by his handle, StanTheTradingMan. He also hosts his own Discord channel, where a tighter-knit group of day traders circulate unconfirmed rumors as potential catalysts for big gains.

Mr. Barsch, 42, is a former police officer turned real-estate broker, who said he had been making a steady six figures since 2010. Now, he boasts of how he says he turned the $20,000 he put into the market in January and February into more than $450,000 as of mid-July without any prior trading experience.

3. Statement by Jeff Bezos to the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary – Jeff Bezos

In my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the best way to achieve and maintain Day One vitality. Why? Because customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and a constant desire to delight customers drives us to constantly invent on their behalf. As a result, by focusing obsessively on customers, we are internally driven to improve our services, add benefits and features, invent new products, lower prices, and speed up shipping times—before we have to. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it. And I could give you many such examples. Not every business takes this customer-first approach, but we do, and it’s our greatest strength.

Customer trust is hard to win and easy to lose. When you let customers make your business what it is, then they will be loyal to you—right up to the second that someone else offers them better service. We know that customers are perceptive and smart. We take as an article of faith that customers will notice when we work hard to do the right thing, and that by doing so again and again, we will earn trust. You earn trust slowly, over time, by doing hard things well—delivering on time; offering everyday low prices; making promises and keeping them; making principled decisions, even when they’re unpopular; and giving customers more time to spend with their families by inventing more convenient ways of shopping, reading, and automating their homes. As I have said since my first shareholder letter in 1997, we make decisions based on the long-term value we create as we invent to meet customer needs. When we’re criticized for those choices, we listen and look at ourselves in the mirror. When we think our critics are right, we change. When we make mistakes, we apologize. But when you look in the mirror, assess the criticism, and still believe you’re doing the right thing, no force in the world should be able to move you.

4. Earth’s Asteroid Impact Rate Took A Sudden Jump 290 Million Years Ago – Phil Plait

We know that there’s a lack of old craters on the Earth, and it’s always been assumed that’s due to erosion. Wind, water, geologic activity: Over long stretches of time our Earth remakes itself, scrubbing the surface of blemishes like impacts*.

But the evidence for this is lacking. That’s what initially motivated the scientists, to try to see if there’s a way to support this idea. So they looked to the Moon. Our satellite is in the same region of space we are, so should get hit at very close to the same rate as Earth does. The idea is to look at big craters on the Moon, figure out a way to get their ages, do the same on Earth, then compare the two and see what you find.

The problem is getting the lunar crater ages, since very few have absolute ages found for them. But they came up with a clever idea. In a big impact, one that leaves a crater 10 kilometers across or wider, rocks from the lunar bedrock get ejected from the explosion and deposited around the crater. Over long periods of time these erode. Not due to air or water, of course, since the Moon doesn’t have those.

Instead, they erode from tiny micrometeorites raining down constantly. These sandblast the rocks, slowly wearing them away (this doesn’t happen on Earth because our atmosphere stops them). Also, the temperature change from day to night on the Moon is hundreds of degrees Celsius. The rocks are constantly expanding and contracting from this, which causes them to crack and erode.

They figured that by looking at the abundance of rocks around a crater compared to the fine powdery eroded rock material (called regolith), they can get a relative age; craters with more intact rocks are younger, and ones with more eroded ones are older.

5. Bill Gates says 3 coronavirus treatments being tested now ‘could cut the death rate dramatically.’ They may be available within months. – Hilary Brueck

“The very first vaccine won’t be like a lot of vaccines, where it’s a 100% transmission-blocking and 100% avoids the person who gets the vaccine getting sick,” the billionaire philanthropist told Insider.

Vaccine trials take months, they don’t have to create completely effective inoculations, and they won’t help protect people who are already sick.

That’s why Gates is more excited, in the immediate term, about coronavirus therapeutics.

6. How a power-hungry CEO drained the light out of General Electric – Mary Kay Linge

For years, GE’s profits had been a mirage built on whirlwind mergers and accounting sleight of hand. The funds that had been doled out to shareholders as fat dividends — and had covered its managers’ lavish perks and pay — had largely been borrowed on the strength of the company’s golden credit.

The book’s authors paint a damning portrait of Immelt’s 16 years at the helm of GE, where a rubber-stamp board of directors allowed him to hemorrhage money almost unchecked…

… At the same time, GE’s established divisions were expected to meet earnings goals far removed from reality. “Under Immelt, the company believed that the will to hit a target could supersede the math,” Gryta and Mann report.

It was a recipe for a disaster. Up-and-coming middle managers knew that a missed goal could stymie their climb up GE’s ladder; division heads “didn’t necessarily know how his underlings got to the finish line and it didn’t really matter,” the authors write.

Those toxic incentives drove the debacle that Flannery uncovered at GE Power. The division made its money not on the generators and turbines it built, but on the service contracts it sold to maintain the machines.

All a manager had to do was tweak the future cost estimates on those decades-long contracts to jack up profits as needed — and to paper over real losses from unsold inventory and declining demand.

7. Tweet storm from an executive who worked with Jeff Bezos to launch the Kindle – Dan Rose

Ignore the “institutional no”. Amazon’s core retail business was pummeled after dot-com crash, and we were still pulling out of the tail spin in 2004 when Jeff started the Kindle team (same year he started AWS team). Everyone told him it was a distraction, he ignored them.

Cannibalize yourself. Steve Kessel was running Amazon’s media business in 2004 (books/music/DVD’s). Books alone generated more than 50% of Amazon’s cash flow. Jeff fired Steve from his job and reassigned him to build Kindle. Steve’s new mission: destroy his old business…

… Make magic. Syncing over WiFi without cables was innovative, and our team was proud of it. But Jeff didn’t think it was magical enough. He insisted on syncing over cellular, and he didn’t want to charge the customer for data. We told him it couldn’t be done, he did it anyway.

Disclaimer: The Good Investors is the personal investing blog of two simple guys who are passionate about educating Singaporeans about stock market investing. By using this Site, you specifically agree that none of the information provided constitutes financial, investment, or other professional advice. It is only intended to provide education. Speak with a professional before making important decisions about your money, your professional life, or even your personal life.

How You Can Beat Professional Investors

You can beat professional investors. Career risk is one of the biggest reasons that hold professional investors back from performing their best.

It’s only natural for us to believe that individual investors don’t stand a chance against professional investors. After all, the pros have access to research capabilities, analytical support, and technology that individuals don’t.

But if you’re an individual investor, you can still beat professional investors at their game. The trick is part patience, and part something else.

Long term investing

In Board Games, Coffee Cans, and Investing, I shared investment manager Robert Kirby’s Coffee Can Portfolio article that was penned in the 1980s. Here’s what I wrote in my piece:

“In The Coffee Can Portfolio, Kirby shared a personal experience he had with a female client of his in the 1950s. He had been working with this client for 10 years – during which he managed her investment portfolio, jumping in and out of stocks and lightening positions frequently – when her husband passed away suddenly. The client wanted Kirby to handle the stocks she had inherited from her deceased husband. Here’s what happened next, according to Kirby:
“When we received the list of assets, I was amused to find that he had secretly been piggy-backing our recommendations for his wife’s portfolio. Then, when I looked at the total value of the estate, I was also shocked. The husband had applied a small twist of his own to our advice: He paid no attention whatsoever to the sale recommendations. He simply put about $5,000 in every purchase recommendation. Then he would toss the certificate in his safe-deposit box and forget it.
Needless to say, he had an odd-looking portfolio. He owned a number of small holdings with values of less than $2,000. He had several large holdings with values in excess of $100,000. There was one jumbo holding worth over $800,000 that exceeded the total value of his wife’s portfolio and came from a small commitment in a company called Haloid; this later turned out to be a zillion shares of Xerox.”
The revelation that buying and then patiently holding shares of great companies for the long-term had generated vastly superior returns as compared to more active buying-and-selling helped Kirby to form the basis for his Coffee Can Portfolio idea. He explained:
“The Coffee Can portfolio concept harkens back to the Old West, when people put their valuable possessions in a coffee can and kept it under the mattress. That coffee can involved no transaction costs, administrative costs, or any other costs. The success of the program depended entirely on the wisdom and foresight used to select the objects to be placed in the coffee can to begin with.””

The twist

In his article, Kirby also shared how he would use the Coffee Can Portfolio concept to build an actual portfolio. His solution: (1) Select a group of 50 stocks with desirable investment-qualities, (2) buy them all in equal proportions, and then (3) simply hold the shares for a decade or more. Kirby’s reasoning that such a portfolio will do really well has two legs:

“First, the most that could be lost in any one holding would be 2% of the fund. Second, the most that the portfolio could gain from any one holding would be unlimited.”

But here’s the twist. Kirby did not put his solution into action, even when he thought it was a brilliant idea. There were two big problems. First, Kirby thought that the hurdles involved with assembling a team of investment professionals who can excel in constructing a long-term portfolio is too high to overcome. Second, there was massive career risk for him. “Who is going to buy a product, the value of which will take 10 years to evaluate,” Kirby wrote.

The latter problem holds the huge edge that individual investors have over professional investors: There is zero career risk. After all, you can’t fire ourselves, can you? This means that individual investors can use the best portfolio management idea they have.

Earlier, I said that the trick to beat professional investors at their game consists of part patience and part something else. The patience bit involves the necessity of investing for the long run. The something else refers to individual investors not having to face career risk.

Stacking the odds

I first came across Kirby’s The Coffee Can Portfolio article a few years ago. I remember I was stunned to learn that Kirby was unable to act on a great investing strategy due to something (the career risk) that was not at all related to the effectiveness of the strategy. Individual investors have the luxury of not having to worry about this.

It is true that professional investors have a certain edge over individual investors in parts of the investing game. But not all hope is lost. Being able to invest for the long-term – a wise investing strategy, I should add – without career risk is a huge advantage that individual investors have over the pros.

Disclaimer: The Good Investors is the personal investing blog of two simple guys who are passionate about educating Singaporeans about stock market investing. By using this Site, you specifically agree that none of the information provided constitutes financial, investment, or other professional advice. It is only intended to provide education. Speak with a professional before making important decisions about your money, your professional life, or even your personal life.

What We’re Reading (Week Ending 26 July 2020)

The best articles we’ve read in recent times on a wide range of topics, including investing, business, and the world in general.

We’ve constantly been sharing a list of our recent reads in our weekly emails for The Good Investors.

Do subscribe for our weekly updates through the orange box in the blog (it’s on the side if you’re using a computer, and all the way at the bottom if you’re using mobile) – it’s free!

Here are the articles for the week ending 26 July 2020:

1. I Gave a Talk to a Federal Credit Union – Nathan Tankus

First we have the idea of a legal system. It may seem obvious that money starts with law, but that isn’t necessarily obvious to most academics. It’s certainly not where a traditional money and banking textbook would start. MMT emphasizes that money is inherently legally designed and grounds money in the functioning of the legal system which authorizes its existence and enforces legal obligations denominated in money. We’ll return to this crucial point in a bit.

Second there is the idea of physical resources. These are raw materials, physical land, machinery, factories etc. which are necessary to produce goods and services that the government needs to accomplish its goals. Production is the combination of these physical resources with labor and technology to produce useful goods and services. The most obvious example of this is of course war time. Governments need to produce tanks, guns, rations, uniforms etc. to fight wars and they need their domestic populations to produce those resources. Modern Monetary Theory may have “monetary” in the name, but the ultimate object of MMT academics in the policy sphere is to use our monetary system in order to mobilize physical resources. Thus, the availability and usability of physical resources is important to Modern Monetary Theorists.

The final part of the definition is the most important part. In my experience, this is the idea at the foundation of MMT that people learning about it tend to have the most difficult time grasping. It’s also a point that is consistently overlooked and underemphasized by mainstream journalists who try to produce “explainers” about MMT. This is the idea that specific financial instruments have value, in fact that they are monetized, because those instruments can be used to pay legally enforceable obligations. The most obvious and important obligation that money can settle is one’s tax bill, but all sorts of legal obligations can be settled with money. Lawsuits, child support, damages, fines, fees and all sorts of other court ordered monetary payments can be settled with specific financial instruments which legal systems treat as money. I can’t emphasize enough that money is money because it can be used to settle legal obligations within a specific jurisdiction.

2. Hacked Printers. Fake Emails. QuestionableFriends. Fahmi Quadir Was Up 24% Last Year, But It Came at a Price – Michelle Celarier

In response, she believes, the company initiated “cybersurveillance, including numerous hacking attempts with aggressive measures to obtain sensitive information about us and our personal lives,” she wrote to investors in August.

“We are not fearful,” she bragged in that letter. “When companies resort to such intrusive and illegal tactics against a small fry, perhaps we are not as small as they think we are and more importantly, perhaps it’s the company that’s shaking in its boots,” she added.

Quadir declined to tell Institutional Investor the name of the company, but said she’d received emails falsely purporting to be a journalist she knew, leading her to believe it was an attempted hacking.

That wasn’t all.

“We’ve received documents from lawyers, but it’s not actually from those lawyers. And there was a time in my home — I have a basically defunct printer at my home — when suddenly, in the middle of the night, I think it was like 2:00 a.m., the printer just turns on and starts printing emails from whistleblowers. In the middle of the night!”

Quadir has since brought on cybersecurity experts “to clean everything,” she says. “I’m not concerned for my safety; I think this just comes with the territory. Did we expect it to all happen in the first year of launching? No. But it’s just the lengths these companies go to intimidate.”

3. How the U.S. Consumer Became the Most Resilient Force in the Economy – Ben Carlson

To pay for all of this stuff the Roaring Twenties also introduced installment payment plans. The phrase “buy now, pay later” became part of the popular nomenclature during this time.

Robert Gordon estimates by the end of the 1920s consumer credit financed 80-90% of furniture sales, 75% of washing machines, 65% of vacuums, 25% of jewelry and 75% of radios.

Previous generations attached a social stigma to borrowing. The 1920s chipped away at this idea as people purchased products that didn’t exist for those generations.

And while the country as a whole achieved a level of prosperity from 1923-1929 like never before, farmers were decimated. The depression of 1920-1921 cut the price of farm products in half and they regained just a fraction of those losses by the end of the decade. Incomes for farmers fell more than 60%.

The end of agriculture as the dominant career choice in the early part of the 20th century led to an urbanization boom. The first Sears store opened in Chicago in 1925. By the time the expansion was coming to an end in 1929 they were up to 300 stores, mainly in big cities.

4. Quarterly Investment & Market Update, Summer 2020 Q2 – Ensemble Capital

One mistake we think some investors have made during this unprecedented period is substituting a forecast of the virus for a forecast about the economy or financial market performance.

While clearly, the pandemic is a huge negative impact on the economy, they are not the same thing. And stocks are not a direct reflection of the US economy.

The market doesn’t care about the economy today, it cares about corporate cash flows over time.

So while today it seems that the stock market and the economy are totally disconnected, in reality stock prices are reflecting a view that while the economy is very bad now, it will recover in the years ahead. And in fact, you don’t even need to believe the entire US economy will recover to understand the rebound in the market.

While the S&P 500 is often referred to as “the market” and is the benchmark by which we evaluate our strategy, it represents what are essentially the 500 largest, most well capitalized companies in the country. These are the companies best positioned to manage through a period of very severe economic conditions. Meanwhile, the S & P 600, an index of smaller companies shown by the dotted orange line on the chart, is still down 20% this year.

5. The Nine Essential Conditions to Commit Massive Fraud – Josh Brown

When it comes to the massive frauds – the kind that wipe out tens of billions of dollars and result in career-ending, corporation-killing infernos, there are some necessary conditions that seem to appear with great regularity accompanying them. These are the conditions that allow the seed of a fraud to take root and germinate, they provide the fertile ground and atmosphere letting the sprout become something larger, thornier and more interconnected with the flora around it.

Ivar Krueger aka The Match King was one of the most notorious purveyors of investment fraud who ever lived. His story is relatively unknown in modern times despite the fact that the global scale of what he did was ten times more intricate and ultimately destructive than anything Madoff attempted. When you read about the details of the Krueger saga, you realize that everything that’s happened since (and will happen hence) is merely an echo of an old story.

6. Repetition Economics: The Story of the Hunter, the Mammoth, and The Wolves – Breaking The Market

You decide to throw the wolves a bone, literally, and give up the deer to them. As hoped, they leave you alone and start to eat the deer. Oh well, there is still some food at home. Hopefully you don’t see them again.

But the next day you catch another deer and on your way back the wolves show up again. It was pretty clear the way they devoured the deer last time they can be vicious animals so you don’t really want to mess with them. You lose the deer to the wolves again and leave. There’s not as much food at home, but there is still some.

Same thing happens again the next day, losing the deer to the wolves.

And then on the 4th day, when the wolves show up to the hunt again, you’ve had enough. The food has run out at home. It’s pretty clear if you keep losing your kills to the wolves you’re going to starve. You can’t keep repeating this process. And so on day 4 you decide to roll the dice and fight them off.

7. A Golden Oldie: The Best Investor You’ve Never Heard Of – Jason Zweig

That was the same year that another Grinnell trustee, Robert Noyce, called Rosenfield to tell him about a new company he was starting. Noyce had been kicked out of Grinnell in his junior year for stealing a 25-pound pig from a nearby farm and roasting it at a campus luau; his physics professor, who felt Noyce was his best student ever, got the expulsion reduced to a one-semester suspension. Noyce had never forgotten the favor, which was why he was offering the college a stake in his start-up, NM Electronics.

Was Rosenfield interested? “The college wants to buy all the stock that you’re willing to let us have,” he told Noyce instantly.

Grinnell’s endowment put up $100,000, while Rosenfield and another trustee each kicked in $100,000 more, enabling the school to supply 10% of the $3 million in venture capital that Noyce and his sidekicks, Gordon Moore and Andrew Grove, raised for the company that they soon renamed Intel.

By 1974, three years after Intel went public, Grinnell’s endowment had more than doubled to $27 million — even as the stock market lost 40% of its value.

Meanwhile, Rosenfield was keeping his eyes, and his mind, wide open. In 1976, Rosenfield heard from Buffett that a TV station, WDTN of Dayton, was for sale. Endowments rarely control private companies, but Rosenfield thinks like a businessman, not a bureaucrat. He grabbed WDTN for Grinnell at just $12.9 million, or a mere 2 1/2 times revenues at a time when TV stations were selling for three to four times revenues.

Board Games, Coffee Cans, and Investing

Doing nothing is one of the most important actions we can take as stock market investors, but it is also one of the hardest things to do.

David Gardner is the co-founder of The Motley Fool, and he’s one of the best stock market investors I know.

There’s a fascinating short story involving David that can be found in a 2016 Fool.com article written by Morgan Housel titled Two Short Stories to Put Successful Investing Into Context.

In the article, Morgan shared a conversation he had with David. Once, Morgan spotted David playing video games at the Fool’s office and asked him in jest: “If you had to give up board games, video games, or stocks, which would you quit?” (For context, David is a huge fan of board games.)

David’s response surprised Morgan: He would choose to quit stocks rather than board games or video games. Here’s Morgan recounting David’s brilliant explanation in Two Short Stories to Put Successful Investing Into Context:

“Games are hands-on by design. They are meant to be played, not left alone.
But a good portfolio can prosper for decades with minimal intervention. A basket of stocks is not a board game with turns and rounds. It’s something that should be mostly hands-off. After a proper allocation is set up, one of the biggest strengths of individual investors is what they don’t do. They don’t trade. They don’t fiddle. They don’t require daily monitoring. They let businesses earn profit and accrue to shareholders in uneven ways.
David’s point was that he could be happy never touching his investments again, because he currently owns a big, diverse set of companies whose long-term future he’s bullish on.”

David’s response echoes one of my favourite investing articles, The Coffee Can Portfolio, written by investment manager Robert G. Kirby in the 1980s.

In The Coffee Can Portfolio, Kirby shared a personal experience he had with a female client of his in the 1950s. He had been working with this client for 10 years – during which he managed her investment portfolio, jumping in and out of stocks and lightening positions frequently – when her husband passed away suddenly. The client wanted Kirby to handle the stocks she had inherited from her deceased husband. Here’s what happened next, according to Kirby:

“When we received the list of assets, I was amused to find that he had secretly been piggy-backing our recommendations for his wife’s portfolio. Then, when I looked at the total value of the estate, I was also shocked. The husband had applied a small twist of his own to our advice: He paid no attention whatsoever to the sale recommendations. He simply put about $5,000 in every purchase recommendation. Then he would toss the certificate in his safe-deposit box and forget it.
Needless to say, he had an odd-looking portfolio. He owned a number of small holdings with values of less than $2,000. He had several large holdings with values in excess of $100,000. There was one jumbo holding worth over $800,000 that exceeded the total value of his wife’s portfolio and came from a small commitment in a company called Haloid; this later turned out to be a zillion shares of Xerox.”

The revelation that buying and then patiently holding shares of great companies for the long-term had generated vastly superior returns as compared to more active buying-and-selling helped Kirby to form the basis for his Coffee Can Portfolio idea. He explained:

“The Coffee Can portfolio concept harkens back to the Old West, when people put their valuable possessions in a coffee can and kept it under the mattress. That coffee can involved no transaction costs, administrative costs, or any other costs. The success of the program depended entirely on the wisdom and foresight used to select the objects to be placed in the coffee can to begin with.”

Doing nothing is one of the most important actions we can take as stock market investors, and it has served me immensely well. It is also one of the hardest things to do. But I hope those of you reading this article can achieve this. Don’t just do something – sit there!

The Fascinating Facts Behind Warren Buffett’s Best Investment

The Washington Post Company is one of the best – if not the best – investment that Warren Buffett has made in percentage terms. What can we learn from it?

One of the best returns – maybe even the best – that Warren Buffett has enjoyed came from his 1973 investment in shares of The Washington Post Company (WPC), which is now known as Graham Holdings Company. Back then, it was the publisher of the influential US-based newspaper, The Washington Post.

Buffett did not invest much in WPC. He controls Berkshire Hathaway and in 1973, he exchanged just US$11 million of Berkshire’s cash for WPC shares. But by the end of 2007, Buffett’s stake in WPC had swelled to nearly US$1.4 billion. That’s a gain of over 10,000%.

There are two fascinating facts behind Buffett’s big win with the newspaper publisher.

First, WPC’s share price fell by more than 20% shortly after Buffett invested, and then stayed there for three years.

Second, WPC was a great bargain in plain sight when Buffett started buying shares. In Berkshire’s 1985 shareholders’ letter, Buffett wrote:

“We bought all of our WPC holdings in mid-1973 at a price of not more than one-fourth of the then per-share business value of the enterprise. Calculating the price/value ratio required no unusual insights. Most security analysts, media brokers, and media executives would have estimated WPC’s intrinsic business value at $400 to $500 million just as we did. And its $100 million stock market valuation was published daily for all to see.
Our advantage, rather, was attitude: we had learned from Ben Graham that the key to successful investing was the purchase of shares in good businesses when market prices were at a large discount from underlying business values.”

How many investors do you think have the patience to hold on through three years of losses? Buffett did, and he was well rewarded. Patience is the key to successful investing. It is necessary, even if you have purchased shares of the best company at a firesale-bargain price.

Warren Buffett has investing acumen that many of us do not have. But there are also times when common sense and patience is more important than acumen in making a great investment. Buffett himself said that no special insight was needed to value WPC back in 1973. What was needed to earn a smashing return with the company was the right attitude and patience.

An Important Thing To Know About Stock Market Risk

Stock market risk is at its highest when everyone thinks there’s no risk; conversely, risk is at its lowest when everyone thinks it’s very risky.

A few days ago, I published Investing is Hard. In the article, I shared two things:

One, snippets of the State of the Union Address that two former US presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, gave in January 2000 and January 2010, respectively.
Two, the subsequent performance of US stocks after both speeches. Clinton’s speech was full of optimism but the US stock market did poorly in the subsequent decade; on the other hand, Obama’s bleak address was followed by a decade-plus of solid gains for US stocks.

Here’s the snippet from Clinton’s State of the Union Address:

“We are fortunate to be alive at this moment in history. Never before has our nation enjoyed, at once, so much prosperity and social progress with so little internal crisis and so few external threats. Never before have we had such a blessed opportunity — and, therefore, such a profound obligation — to build the more perfect union of our founders’ dreams.

We begin the new century with over 20 million new jobs; the fastest economic growth in more than 30 years; the lowest unemployment rates in 30 years; the lowest poverty rates in 20 years; the lowest African-American and Hispanic unemployment rates on record; the first back-to-back budget surpluses in 42 years. And next month, America will achieve the longest period of economic growth in our entire history.

My fellow Americans, the state of our union is the strongest it has ever been.”

This is the S&P 500 from January 2000 to January 2010:

The snippet from Obama’s State of the Union Address is this:

“One in 10 Americans still cannot find work. Many businesses have shuttered. Home values have declined. Small towns and rural communities have been hit especially hard. And for those who’d already known poverty, life has become that much harder. This recession has also compounded the burdens that America’s families have been dealing with for decades — the burden of working harder and longer for less; of being unable to save enough to retire or help kids with college.”

The chart below shows the S&P 500 from January 2010 to today:

I think that Investing is Hard highlights an important idea about stock market risk: The riskiest time to invest is when everyone thinks there’s no risk; conversely, it’s the safest time to invest when everyone thinks risk is at its highest.

But why is this so? We can turn to the ideas of the late economist, Hyman Minsky, who passed on in 1996. When he was alive, Minsky was not well-known. It was after the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-09 that his ideas flourished.

That’s because he had a framework for understanding why economies go through inevitable boom-bust cycles. According to Minsky, stability itself is destabilising. When an economy is stable and growing, people feel safe. And when people feel safe, they take on more risk, such as borrowing more. This leads to the system becoming fragile.

Minsky was talking about the economy, but his idea can be extended to stocks. If we assume that stocks are guaranteed to grow by 8% per year, the only logical result would be that people would keep paying up for stocks, until stocks become way too expensive to produce that return. Or people will invest in stocks in a risky manner, such as borrowing to invest. But there are no guarantees in the real world. Bad things happen. And if stocks are priced for perfection in a fragile system, emergence of bad news will lead to falling stock prices.

The world of investing is full of paradoxes. The important idea that risk is at its highest when the perception of risk is at its lowest is one such example.

Disclaimer: The Good Investors is the personal investing blog of two simple guys who are passionate about educating Singaporeans about stock market investing. By using this Site, you specifically agree that none of the information provided constitutes financial, investment, or other professional advice. It is only intended to provide education. Speak with a professional before making important decisions about your money, your professional life, or even your personal life.

Investing Is Hard

Near the start of every year, the President of the United States delivers the State of the Union Address. The speech is essentially a report card on how the US fared in the year that just passed and what lies ahead. It’s also a good gauge of the general sentiment of the US population on the country’s social, political, and economic future.

In one particular year, the then-US President said:

“We are fortunate to be alive at this moment in history. Never before has our nation enjoyed, at once, so much prosperity and social progress with so little internal crisis and so few external threats. Never before have we had such a blessed opportunity — and, therefore, such a profound obligation — to build the more perfect union of our founders’ dreams.

We begin the new century with over 20 million new jobs; the fastest economic growth in more than 30 years; the lowest unemployment rates in 30 years; the lowest poverty rates in 20 years; the lowest African-American and Hispanic unemployment rates on record; the first back-to-back budget surpluses in 42 years. And next month, America will achieve the longest period of economic growth in our entire history.

My fellow Americans, the state of our union is the strongest it has ever been.”

In another particular year, the US President of the time commented:

“One in 10 Americans still cannot find work. Many businesses have shuttered. Home values have declined. Small towns and rural communities have been hit especially hard. And for those who’d already known poverty, life has become that much harder. This recession has also compounded the burdens that America’s families have been dealing with for decades — the burden of working harder and longer for less; of being unable to save enough to retire or help kids with college.”

What do you think happened to the US stock market after the first and second speeches? Take some time to think – and no Googling allowed! If you had to bet on whether US stocks rose or declined after each speech, how would you bet?

…

Ready?

The first speech was delivered in January 2000, by Bill Clinton, near the peak of the dotcom bubble that saw US stocks – represented by the S&P 500 – fall by nearly half just a few years later. By the end of 2010, US stocks were lower than where they were when President Clinton gave his State of the Union Address.

The second speech was from President Barack Obama and was from January 2010. The US stock market bottomed out in March 2009 from the Great Financial Crisis. And from January 2010 to today, US stocks have been on an absolute tear, rising three-fold.

Investing is hard because the best time to invest can actually feel like the worst, while the worst time to invest can feel like the best time to do so. I’ve said before that I think “investing is only 5% finance and 95% everything else.” This 95% includes psychology and control of our emotions. But we humans are highly emotional creatures – and this is why investing is hard. The best antidote I currently have, is to be diversified geographically, and to invest regularly and – crucially – mechanically.

Making Sense Of Japan’s Epic Stock Market Bubble

Japanese stocks were in an epic bubble in late 1989. Understanding the size of the bubble gives us important perspective.

From time to time, Jeremy and myself receive questions from readers that are along this line: “Will the stock market of [insert country] be like Japan’s? Compared to its peak in late 1989, the Nikkei 225 Index – a representation of Japanese stocks – is still 40% lower today.”

It’s a good question, because Japanese stocks have indeed given investors a horrible return since late 1989, a period of more than 30 years. But perspective is needed when you’re thinking if any country’s stock market will go through a similar run as Japan’s stock market did from 1989 to today. Here’s some data for you to better understand what Japanese stocks went through back then:

Japanese stocks grew by 900% in US dollar terms in seven years from 1982 to 1989; that’s an annualised return of 39% per year.
At their peak in late 1989, Japanese stocks carried a CAPE (cyclically-adjusted price-to-earnings) ratio of nearly 100; in comparison, the US stock market’s CAPE ratio was ‘only’ less than 50 during the infamous 1999/2000 dotcom bubble. The CAPE ratio is calculated by dividing a stock’s price with its inflation-adjusted 10-year-average earnings. Near the end of May 2020, Japanese stocks had a CAPE ratio of 19, while US stocks today have a CAPE ratio of 30.

The data above show clearly that Japanese stocks were in an epic bubble in late 1989. It is the bursting of the bubble that has caused the painful loss delivered by Japan’s stock market since then.

If you’re worried about the potential for any country’s stock market to repeat the 1989-present run that Japanese stocks have had, then you should study the valuations of the country’s stock market. But you should note that there are two things that looking at valuations cannot do.

First, valuations cannot tell you the future earnings growth of a country’s stock market. If the earnings of a country’s stocks collapse in the years ahead for whatever reason (natural catastrophe, disease outbreak, war, incompetent leadership etc.), even a low valuation could prove to be expensive.

Second, valuations cannot protect you from short-term declines. What it can only do is to put the odds of success in your favour. In an earlier article, 21 Facts About The Wild World Of Finance and Investing, I shared the two charts below:

*Source: Robert Shiller’s* *data; my calculation*

They show the returns of the S&P 500 from 1871 to 2013 against its starting valuation for holding periods of 1 year (the first chart) and 10 years (the second chart). You can see that the relationship between valuation and eventual return – the higher the valuation, the lower the return – becomes much tighter when the holding period lengthens.

To end, I have another important takeaway from Japan’s experience: It’s important to diversify geographically. Global stocks have grown by around 5% per year in US dollar terms from 1989 to 2019, despite (1) the terrible performance of Japanese stocks in that period, and (2) Japan accounting for 45% of the global stock market by market capitalisation in early 1989.

Disclaimer: The Good Investors is the personal investing blog of two simple guys who are passionate about educating Singaporeans about stock market investing. By using this Site, you specifically agree that none of the information provided constitutes financial, investment, or other professional advice. It is only intended to provide education. Speak with a professional before making important decisions about your money, your professional life, or even your personal life.

3 Great Investing Lessons From My Favourite Warren Buffett Speech

Warren Buffett is one of my investing heroes.

He’s well known for producing incredible long-term returns at Berkshire Hathaway since assuming leadership of the company in 1965. What is less well-known is that he ran his own investment fund from 1957 to 1969 and achieved a stunning annualised return of 29.5%; the US stock market, in comparison, had gained just 7.4% per year over the same period.

Buffett has given numerous speeches and interviews throughout his long career. My favourite is a 1984 speech he gave titled The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville. I want to share three great lessons I have from the speech.

On what works in investing

Buffett profiled nine investors (including himself) in the speech. These investors invested very differently. For example, some were widely diversified while others were highly concentrated, and their holdings had no significant overlap.

There were only two common things among the group. First, they all had phenomenal long-term track records of investment success. Second, they all believed in buying businesses, not tickers. Here’re Buffett’s words:

“The common intellectual theme of the investors from Graham-and-Doddsville is this: they search for discrepancies between the value of a business and the price of small pieces of that business in the market.”

I firmly believe that there are many roads to Rome when it comes to investing in stocks. A great way is to – as Buffett pointed out – look at stocks as part-ownership of a real business. This is what I do too.

On risk and rewards

I commonly hear that earning high returns in stocks must entail taking on high risks. This is not always true. Buffett commented:

“It’s very important to understand that this group had assumed far less risk than average; note their record in years when the general market was weak.”

A stock becomes risky when its valuation is high. In such an instance, the potential return of the stock is also low because there’s no exploitable gap between the stock’s price and its intrinsic value. On the other hand, a stock becomes less risky when it’s priced low in relation to its intrinsic value; this is also when its potential return is high since there’s a wide exploitable-gap. So instead of “high risk / high return,” I think a better description of how investing works is “low risk / high return.”

It’s worth noting that a stock’s valuation is not high just because it carries a high price-to-earnings (P/E) or price-to-sales (P/S) ratio. What is more important here is the stock’s future business growth in relation to the ratios. A stock with a high P/E ratio can still be considered to have a low valuation if its business is able to grow significantly faster than average.

On why sound investing principles will always work

Will sharing the ‘secrets’ to investing cause them to fail? Maybe not. This is what Buffett said (emphasis is mine):

“In conclusion, some of the more commercially minded among you may wonder why I am writing this article. Adding many converts to the value approach will perforce narrow the spreads between price and value. I can only tell you that the secret has been out for 50 years, ever since Ben Graham and David Dodd wrote “Security Analysis”, yet I have seen no trend toward value investing in the 35 years I’ve practiced it. There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.”

Surprisingly, it seems that human nature itself is what allows sound investing principles to continue working even after they’re widely known. Investing, at its core, is not something difficult – you buy small pieces of businesses at a price lower than their value, and be patient. So let’s not overcomplicate things, for there’s power in simplicity.

A Quick Thought On “Expensive” Software Stocks

Are young software companies expensive?

A few days ago, I was mucking around with historical data on Alphabet, the parent company of the internet search engine of our time, Google. I found some interesting data on this company that led to me writing this short but hopefully thought-provoking article.

Alphabet was listed in August 2004 and closed its first trading day at a share price of US$50. By 31 January 2005, Alphabet’s share price had risen to US$98, and it carried an astronomical price-to-earnings ratio of 250. On 31 January 2005, Alphabet’s revenue and profit were respectively US$2.67 billion and US$222 milion, giving rise to a profit margin of 8.3%.

Today, Alphabet’s share price is US$1,418, which represents an annualised return of 19% from 31 January 2005. Its P/E ratio has shrunk to 29, and the company’s revenue and profit are US$166.7 billion and US$34.5 billion, respectively, which equate to a profit margin of 21%.

Today, many software companies – especially the young ones categorised as software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies – carry really high price-to-sales ratios of 30 or more (let’s call it, 35). Those seem like extreme valuations, especially when we consider that the SaaS companies are mostly loss-making and/or generating negative or meagre free cash flow. If we apply a 10% net profit margin to the SaaS companies, they are trading at an adjusted P/E ratio of 350 (35 / 0.10).

But many of the SaaS companies today – the younger ones especially – have revenues of less than US$2.7 billion, with huge markets to conquer. The mature SaaS companies have even fatter profit margins, relative to Alphabet, of 30% or more today. So, compared to Alphabet’s valuation back then on 31 January 2005, things don’t seem that out-of-whack now for SaaS companies, does it? Of course, the key assumptions here are:

The young SaaS companies of today can go on to grow at high rates for a long period of time;
The young SaaS companies can indeed become profitable in the future, with a solid profit margin.

Nobody can guarantee these assumptions to be true. But for me, looking at Alphabet’s history and where young SaaS companies are today provides interesting food for thought.