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Notes – A Compilation Of Ideas On Investing

How To Think About Retained Earnings

  • Grab 15 years of data from EDGAR and compare receivables, inventory, PP&E, accounts payable and accrued expenses to sales, EBITDA, etc.; E.g., if receivables rise faster than sales, this is where “reinvestment” is going
  • For a quick comparison, look at:
    • Net income
    • FCF
    • Buybacks + dividends
  • Compare debt (total liabilities) between the start of the period and the end and subtract the difference to get growth in debt
  • Then, sum all dividends and buybacks over the period, and all net income over the period
  • Then, subtract the change in debt from dividends/buybacks; what is left is dividends/buybacks generated by the business, rather than growth in debt
  • Then, compare this to net income to see the ratio of earnings paid out to shareholders
  • You can compare the growth in net income to retained earnings to get your average return on retained earnings
  • Look at the change in net income and sales over 10 years and then the ratio of cumulative buybacks and dividends to cumulative reported earnings
  • You’re looking for the central tendency of return on retained earnings, whether it is approx:
    • 5%, bad business
    • 15%, good business
    • 30%, great business
  • Companies with single products easily generate high returns on retained earnings, but struggle to expand indefinitely

One Ratio to Rule Them All: EV/EBITDA

  • EV/EBITDA is the best ratio for understanding a business versus a corporate structure
  • Net income is not useful; FCF is complicated, telling you everything about a mature business but nothing about a growing one
  • General rule of thumb: a run of the mill business should trade around 8x EBITDA; a great business never should
  • Low P/E and low P/B can be misleading as it often results in companies with high leverage
  • P/E ratio punishes companies that don’t use leverage; they’re often worth more to a strategic buyer who could lever them up
  • The “DA” part of a financial statement is most likely to disguise interesting, odd situations; if you’re using P/E screens you miss out on companies with interesting notes on amortization
  • Control buyers read notes; why use screens that force you to ignore them?
  • FCF is safer than GAAP earnings or EBITDA because it’s more conservative and favors mature businesses
  • EBITDA misses the real expense in the “DA”, but FCF treats the portion of cap-ex that is an investment as expense, so they’re both flawed; investment is not expense
  • No single ratio works for all businesses in all industries; but to get started, EV/EBITDA is the best for screening
  • Example: cruise companies have huge “DA”, but no “T” as they pay no taxes
  • “Only you can calculate the one ratio that matters: price-to-value; there is no substitute for reading the 10-K”
  • Empirical evidence on ratios:

Blind Stock Valuation #2: Wal-Mart (WMT) – 1981

  • There is something wrong with believing a stock is never worth more than 15 times earnings
  • “Growth is best viewed as a qualitative rather than a quantitative factor.”
  • Buffett’s margin of safety in Coca-Cola was customer habit– repeatability
  • Buffett looks for:
    • Repeatable formula for success
    • Focus
    • Buybacks
  • “The first thing to do when you’re given a growth rate is not geometry. It’s biology. How is this happening? How can a company grow 43% a year over 10 years?”
  • Stable growth over a long period of time tells you a business has a reliable formula; look for businesses that behave like bacteria
  • Recognizing the value of changes after they happen is important, not predicting them ahead of time
  • You can’t post the kind of returns Wal-Mart did through the 1970s without a competitive advantage
  • Buffett gleans most of his info from SEC reports, things like 10-year records of gross margins, key industry performance metric comparisons, etc.

GTSI: Why Net-Net Investing Is So Hard

  • The challenge of net-nets is you often have no catalyst in sight and no wonderful future to visualize as you hold a bad business indefinitely
  • Graham’s MoS is integral– you can be off in your calculation of value by quite a bit but Mr. Market will often be off by even more
  • Focusing too much on time could be a problem in net-net investing
  • Two pieces of advice for net-net investing:
    • Put 100% of focus on buying and 0% on selling
    • Put 100% of focus on downside and 0% on upside
  • Money is made in net-nets not by the valuing but by the buying and holding
  • “You want to be there for the buyout.”
  • The hardest part of net-net investing: waiting
  • Graham and Schloss were successful likely because they built a basket, so they were always getting to buy something new that was cheap instead of worrying about selling
  • Focus on a process that keeps you finding new net-nets and minimizes your temptation to sell what you own

Can You Screen For Shareholder Composition? 30 Strange Stocks

  • Shareholder composition can help explain why a stock is cheap
  • A company’s shareholder base changes as the business itself changes; for example, a bankruptcy turns creditors into shareholders
  • Shareholders often become “lost” over the years, forgetting they own a company and therefore forgetting to trade it
  • Some companies go public as a PR ploy, so investors may be sleepy and inactive
  • Buffett understood this and understood that a stock could be a bargain even at 300% of its last trade price– National American Fire Insurance (NAFI) example
  • Buying a spin-off makes sense because many of the shareholders are stuck with a stock they never wanted
  • An interesting screen: oldest public companies with the lowest floats (in terms of shares outstanding); a lack of stock splits combined with high insider ownership is a recipe for disinterest in pleasing Wall St

How My Investing Philosophy Has Changed Over Time

  • Info about Geoff Gannon
    • high school dropout
    • bought first stock at 14
    • read [amazon text=Security Analysis (1940 Edition)&asin=007141228X] and [amazon text=The Intelligent Investor (1949 Edition)&asin=0060555661] at 14
    • over time, became more Buffett and less Graham
    • made most money buying and holding companies with strong competitive positions trading temporarily at 6, 10 or 12 times earnings
  • I like a reliable business with almost no history of losses and a market leading position in its niche
  • Geoff’s favorite book is Hidden Champions of the Twenty-First Century, which is part of a set of 3 he recommends to all investors:
    • You Can Be a Stock Market Genius (by Joel Greenblatt)
    • The Intelligent Investor (1949 Edition)
    • Hidden Champions of the Twenty-First Century
  • Everything you need to know to make money snowball in the stock market:
    • The Berkshire/Teledyne stories
    • Ben Graham’s Mr. Market metaphor
    • Ben Graham’s margin of safety principle
    • “Hidden Champions of the 21st Century”
  • Once you know this, if you just try to buy one stock a year, the best you can find, and then forget you own it for the next 3 years, you’ll do fine; over-activity is a major problem for most investors
  • Bubble thinking requires higher math, emotional intelligence, etc.; that’s why a young child with basic arithmetic would make a great value investor because they’d only understand a stock as a piece of a business and only be able to do the math from the SEC filings
  • There are always so many things that everyone is trying to figure out; in reality, there are so few things that matter to any one specific company
  • One key to successful investing: minimizing buy and sell decisions; it’s hard to screw up by holding something too long
  • Look for the most obvious opportunities: it’s hard to pass on a profitable business selling for less than its cash
  • Extreme concentration works, you can make a lot of money:
    • waiting for the buyout
    • having more than 25% of your portfolio in a stock when the buyout comes
  • I own 4-5 Buffett-type stocks (competitive position) bought at Graham-type P/E ratios
  • “There is a higher extinction rate in public companies than we are willing to admit.”
  • Most of my experience came through learning from actual investing; I wish I had been a little better at learning from other people’s mistakes
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