Review – The Intelligent Investor

The Intelligent Investor: A Book Of Practical Counsel; The Definitive Book On Value Investing

by Benjamin Graham, published 1973, 2003, 2006

All you need to know about intelligent investing

Graham’s layman’s manual for thoughtful investing in common stocks and bonds is a long book, chock full of useful theory and wisdom-gained-by-experience as well as numerous “case studies” which serve to illustrate Graham’s points. While it’s all worth considering, the truth is that certain parts of the book shine more brightly than others and, following the 80/20 principle, are clearly more valuable overall.

Starting out

The Intelligent Investor is of course a practical guide to sound investment, but it is also a work of philosophy. Buried throughout the book are invaluable caveats that are easy to overlook yet deserve to get full billing because they can spare an amateur a lot of headaches down the road. In the book’s introduction, there are two such provisos quite nearby one another, the first being,

be prepared to experience significant and perhaps protracted falls as well as rises in the value of [your] holdings

and the second being,

while enthusiasm may be necessary for great accomplishments elsewhere, on Wall Street it almost invariably leads to disaster

Subtle, but profound, these two warnings are Graham’s opening salvo on the subject of investor psychology, or more accurately, the investor’s own psychology. It will be a common thread running throughout TII— your biggest risk in investing is yourself and your psychological reaction to events impacting your portfolio.

Translating the first message, Graham is trying to gird the investor for the inevitabilities of the market, where volatility is constant in both directions. The key, as you will see, is to master volatility by recognizing that the upward variety is not necessarily proof of a good decision and the downward variety is not punishment but an opportunity to buy at bargain prices.

The second message is even more important– successful investing requires an even-keeled temperament and reasonable expectations about long-term success. The game is about expecting little and learning to be pleasantly surprised, rather than expecting a lot and constantly being disappointed. Most of your fellow market participants are excitable folks and their optimistic expectations will work with yours to crowd out any chance at realizing value, while you’ll always have plenty of room to maneuver on your own if you seek out the waters everyone of which everyone else has become bored.

The last warning is to be consistent and disciplined, to never abandon your principles in dire times because that is in fact when they become most valuable:

Through all their vicissitudes and casualties, as earth-shaking as they were unforeseen, it remained true that sound investment principles produced generally sound results

This is again a psychological appeal. When everyone else is losing their shirts, and their minds, forgetting what they’re doing and why, it will pay the long-term investor great dividends to be mindful of who he is and by what principles he invests as his conservatism is always in due time rewarded.

Security analysis 101

While the best treatment of Graham’s principles of security analysis are given in great detail in his treatise of the same name, [amazon text=Security Analysis&asin=0070140650], The Intelligent Investor does come with several basic recommendations on how to perform basic security analysis for issues under consideration for inclusion in one’s portfolio.

Bond analysis

The key to bond investing is interest coverage, as without it a bond is in default and its principal value is imperiled. Therefore, the primary analytical factor is the number of times total interest charges have been covered by available earnings in years past. Typically two values are consulted:

1. average coverage for a period of years (7)
2. minimum coverage in the poorest year

Graham recommends 4x for public utilities, 5x for transportation companies, 7x for industrials and 5x for retail concerns, before income taxes on an average of 7 years basis, and 3x, 4x, 5x and 4x, respectively, measured by the poorest year.

On an after-tax basis, Graham recommends 2.65x for public utilities, 3.2x for transportation companies, 4.3x for industrials, and 3.2x for retail companies on an average of 7 years basis, and 2.1x, 2.65x, 3.2x and 2.65x, respectively, measured by the poorest year.

Additional factors for consideration are:

1. size of the enterprise – something large and robust, so that depletions in revenue do not imperil the business as a whole
2. equity ratio – the market price of equity versus the total debt, which shows the amount of “cushion” for losses standing in front of the debt
3. property value – this is the asset value on the balance sheet, though “experience has shown that in most cases safety resides in the earning power”

Stock analysis

Some basic principles of stock selection and analysis are considered in more detail below, based upon whether one is determined to be a defensive or an enterprising investor. For now, it is sufficient to quote Graham on the subject in the following manner:

The investor can not have it both ways. He can be imaginative and play for the big profits that are the reward for the vision proved sound by the event; but then he must run a substantial risk of major or minor miscalculation. Or he can be conservative, and refuse to pay more than a minor premium for possibilities as yet unproved; but in that case he must be prepared for the later contemplation of golden opportunities for gone

In essence, Graham is outlining the philosophy of “growth” versus “value” investing and stock analysis– attempting to forecast the future, or being content one is not paying too much for what he’s got based on an assessment of the past.

Keeping the shirt you have: the defensive investor

In Graham’s mind, there are two kinds of investors– the defensive investor, who is passive and seeks primarily to protect his capital, and the enterprising investor, who treats his investing like a professional business and expects similarly profitable results for his efforts. First, let’s talk about the defensive investor.

The defensive investor must confine himself to the shares of important companies with a long record of profitable operations and in strong financial condition

Specifically, Graham lists 4 criteria for selecting common stocks for the defensive investor’s portfolio:

1. diversification – minimum of 10, maximum of 30 separate issues
2. standing – companies which are large, prominent and conservatively financed (over $10B mkt cap and in the top third or quarter of their industry by market share or some other competitive metric)
3. dividends – a long record of continuous payments
4. price – no more than 25x avg earnings of past 7 yrs, nor 20x LTM earnings

Additionally, Graham warns against excessive trading or portfolio turnover:

if his list has been competently selected in the first instance, there should be no need for frequent or numerous changes

Graham also defines risk early on, saying,

the risk attached to an ordinary commercial business is measured by the chance of its losing money

and that further, a defensive investor should never compromise their standards of safety and quality in order to “make some extra income.” Safety first, income/returns second, or you’re likely to wind up with neither in the long run.

In terms of selecting individual stocks for the defensive investor’s portfolio, Graham suggests 7 criteria:

1. adequate size of enterprise – generally speaking, small companies are excluded and medium size companies are included if their market/industry position is robust
2. sufficiently strong financial condition – 2:1 current ratio, and LT debt < net current assets (working capital)
3. earnings stability – some earnings for the common stock in each year over the past decade
4. dividend record – uninterrupted payments for the past 20 years
5. earnings growth – minimum of 1/3 increase in per-share earnings in the past ten years using three year average at the beginning and end
6. moderate P/E – no more than 15x avg earnings of past 3 years
7. moderate P/A – price should be < 150% of TBV, though may be higher if earnings multiplier is below 15, never to be greater as a combined ratio than 22.5 ( P/E * P/B <= 22.5)

The purpose is to eliminate companies which are: too small, with a weak financial position, with earnings deficits or with inconsistent dividend histories. In general, these factors should combine to create a stock portfolio which, in the aggregate, has an earnings yield (earnings/price) at least as high as the current high-grade bond rate.

At all times, remember that the defensive investor is

not willing to accept the prospects and promises of the future as compensation for a lack of sufficient value in hand

and that, generally speaking, rather than emphasizing the “best” stocks,

let him emphasize diversification more than individual selection

Making more and better shirts: the enterprising investor

Like the defensive investor, Graham counsels the enterprising investor to think firstly of not losing what they’ve got. But in this sense, the enterprising investor has a new tool in his kit that expands his realm of possible investment options while still maintaining safety of principal– the search for “bargain” priced opportunities, the idea here being that the price being offered for a security is a steep discount (generally 30% or greater) than the indicated “intrinsic” or underlying value of the security itself based upon its asset or earnings power fundamentals (with any luck, both).

About bonds and preferred stocks, Graham suggests that preferreds never be bought without at least a 30% discount, and a similar discount on a high-yield bond. More importantly,

experience clearly shows that it is unwise to buy a bond or preferred which lacks adequate security merely because the yield is attractive […] it is bad business to accept an acknowledged possibility of a loss of principal in exchange for a mere 1 or 2% of additional yearly income

About IPOs, Graham says to never touch them, however, busted IPOs can present interesting opportunities later on down the line:

Some of these issues may prove excellent buys– a few years later, when nobody wants them and they can be had at a small fraction of their true worth

With regards to selecting equity securities, Graham lays out three “recommended fields” for enterprising investors:

1. large cap contrarianism
2. “bargain” issues
3. special situations

Digging in further, let’s take a closer look at large cap contrarianism. The idea here is to focus on companies that are well-known but are currently experiencing an earnings hiccup or some other negative news or general investor boredom that leaves them unpopular and trading at a lower than average multiple. The value in these companies are that,

they have the resources in capital and brain power to carry them through adversity and back to a satisfactory earnings base [and] the market is likely to respond with reasonable speed to any improvement shown

A good example of this principle in practice would be a situation such as buying well-known, large cap companies whose shares had strongly sold off during the financial panic of late 2008, early 2009.

According to Graham, a bargain issue is one in which the indicated value is 50% higher than the current price. Bargains can be detected one of two ways, either by estimating future earnings potential and applying an appropriate multiple and comparing this to current trading price for shares, or else by studying the value of the business for a private owner, which involves particular emphasis on the value of the assets (or the tangible book value of the shares).

For an earnings-based bargain, Graham adds some further criteria, such as:

he should require an indication of at least reasonable stability in earnings over the past decade or more — ie, no year of earnings deficit — plus sufficient size and financial strength to meet possible setbacks in the future

with the ideal being a large, prominent company selling below its past average price and P/E multiple.

Special situations encapsulate a range of investment activities, from liquidations (workouts), to hedging and merger arbitrage activities. While Graham sees this area as one offering special rewards to dedicated and knowledgeable investors, he advises that the trend is one towards increasing professionalization and thus even the enterprising investor is best to leave this area alone unless he has special confidence and competence in the area.

Of special emphasis is the idea of focus and dedication, that is to say, one is either an enterprising investor or a defensive one, but not some of both:

The aggressive investor must have a considerable knowledge of security values– enough, in fact, to warrant viewing his security operations as equivalent to a business enterprise. There is no room in this philosophy for a middle ground, or a series of gradations, between passive and aggressive status. Many, perhaps most, investors seek to place themselves in such an intermediate category; in our opinion that is a compromise that is more likely to produce disappointment than achievement

When considering individual stock selections for the enterprising investors portfolio, Graham reminds the reader that

Extremely few companies have been able to show a high rate of uninterrupted growth for long periods of time. Remarkably few, also, of the larger companies suffer ultimate extinction

To the last point, it is fascinating to see in the footnote commentary by Jason Zweig how many of Graham’s various example companies used throughout the book disappeared not due to bankruptcy, but because they were at some point acquired and absorbed wholesale into the operations of another business.

Several categories of equity selection stand out as particularly valuable for the enterprising investor in Graham’s eyes:

1. arbitrages – purchase of one security and simultaneous sale of one or more other securities into which it is to be exchanged under a plan of reorganization, merger or the like
2. liquidations – purchase of shares which are to receive one or more cash payments in liquidation of the companies assets; should present a minimum of 20% annual return w/ 80% probability of working out or higher
3. related hedges – purchase of convertible bonds or convertible preferred shares and simultaneous sale of the common stock into which they are exchangeable
4. NCAV – 2/3 or less of net current asset value (current assets – TOTAL liabilities); portfolios should have wide diversification, often of 100 securities or more, and require patience
5. contrarian cyclical investing – buying important cyclical enterprises when the current situation is unfavorable, near-term prospects are poor and the low price fully reflects the current pessimism

Graham also recommended a special set of 5 criteria for selecting “bargain” issues of small or less well-known enterprises, which can be generated from lists from a stock guide or a stock screen beginning with companies trading for a P/E multiple of 9 or less:

1. financial condition – current ratio of 1.5:1 and debt <= 110% of working capital
2. earnings stability – no deficit in the last five years
3. dividend record – some current dividend
4. earnings growth – last year’s earnings greater than 5 years ago
5. price – less than 120% of TBV

Graham notes that diversity is key to safety in these operations and such companies should be bought on a “group basis”.

A balancing act: the portfolio

As a broad strategic principle, Graham recommended that defensive and enterprising investors alike seek to allocate a minimum of 25% and a maximum of 75% of their portfolio into stocks and the remaining amount into bonds. In most cases, an even 50-50 split is recommended. The rule of thumb used to guide allocations above or below 50% is that, as the investor determines the “general price level” of the market to be higher than is prudent, he should allocate toward 75% bonds and 25% stocks, whereas when he determines this price level to be much lower than is reasonable (say, in the midst of a bear market), he should allocate toward 75% stocks and 25% bonds.

As Graham says on page 197,

the chief advantage, perhaps, is that such a formula will give him something to do

Remember, you are your biggest risk. Graham was concerned that without “something to do”, an investor might “to do” his portfolio to death with over activity, over-thought or over-worry.

This is a useful insight, but is Graham’s portfolio balancing technique still valid in today’s era of higher inflation risks?

Without stepping on the maestro’s toes too much in saying this, my thinking is that it is increasingly less valid. As Graham himself warns throughout the book, bonds provide no protection against inflation and, while inflation is not “good” for stocks in real terms, the ability to participate in increased earnings is at least better than having a fixed coupon payment in an inflationary environment.

In this sense, an allocation toward 100% stocks makes more sense, assuming we are entering a period of protracted inflationary pressures such as we are.

That being said, Graham’s warning about having something to do is still worth considering. Having kicked the legs out from under the “rebalancing act(ivity)”, perhaps a good substitute would be a continual turning over of rocks in the search for new investment ideas for the enterprising investor. For the defensive investor, the best course of action may be to enjoy the benefits of doing something through dollar-cost averaging, that is, making a little bit of his total intended investment each month or quarter rather than all at once. Another idea might be to allocate 10 or 15% of his portfolio into a MMF or equivalent when he feels the market is rising beyond prudent levels. But the thing that has never sat right with me about Graham’s reallocation technique is that, while in principle it makes sense, in practice it comes down to base attempts at market-timing that always end up generating unsatisfactory results.

Better to focus on Graham’s other major portfolio strategy tenet, which is diversification. Graham is a supporter of diversification for defensive and enterprising investors alike, mostly because it can serve to shield them from their own ignorance or over-enthusiasm. More specifically, many of Graham’s favored techniques (such as special situations, net-nets and bargain securities), while bearing overall pleasing risk/reward balances, nevertheless never bring certainty of either one and for this reason he believes developing a diversified portfolio of such opportunities is the best way for an investor to protect themselves from permanently losing a large part of their capital on one idea.

Saving the best for last: Mr. Market and the Margin of Safety concept

Mr. Market-mania

Markets are made up of people, and people are emotionally volatile. As a result, financial markets are volatile as well. While the vast majority of the time prices tend to move slightly above and slightly below an established trend line, at other times they can swing wildly off course in either direction:

the investor may as well resign himself in advance to the probability rather than the mere possibility that most of his holdings will advance, say, 50% or more from their low point and decline the equivalent one third [ X * 1.5 * .66 = ~X] or more from their high point at various periods in the next five years

Graham also warns against what might be termed the Paradox Of Market Goodwill:

The better a company’s record and prospects, the less relationship the price of its shares will have to their book value. But the greater the premium above book value, the less certain the basis of determining its intrinsic value–ie, the more this “value” will depend on the changing moods and measurements of the stock market

In Graham’s mind, the solution is to

concentrate on issues selling at a reasonably close approximation to their tangible-asset value– say, at not more than one-third above that figure [130% of TBV]

as a general principle of careful investing for the defensive investor. But there is more. Graham represents additional criteria based on the consideration of the firm’s earnings power, outlining what value-blogger Nate Tobik of Oddball Stocks likes to call the “two pillar” method:

A stock does not become a sound investment merely because it can be bought at close to its asset value. The investor should demand, in addition, a satisfactory ratio of earnings to price, a sufficiently strong financial position, and the prospect that its earnings will at least be maintained over the years

In terms of mastering an investor’s own psychology when facing the market, asset values reign supreme, however, because

the investor with a stock portfolio having such book values behind it can take a much more independent and detached view of stock-market fluctuations than those who have paid high multipliers of both earnings and tangible assets. As long as the earnings power of his holdings remains satisfactory, he can give as little attention as he pleases to the vagaries of the stock market. More than that, at times he can use these vagaries to play the master game of buying low and selling high

By Graham’s reasoning, buying a stock close to book value puts him in the same position as an individual offered an opportunity to buy into a private business’s book. Because he has paid a fair, businessman’s price, he doesn’t have to worry about what someone else thinks of his ownership stake, only the operating performance and financial strength of his chosen enterprise.

From a psychological standpoint, it is the high ground and much sought after.

But what is this “master game” of which Graham speaks? It is nothing more than the most masterly metaphor of the entire investing world, Mr. Market.

The idea of Mr. Market is that of a manic depressive business partner who on any given day may offer to buy your stake in the joint business for far more than you think it’s worth, or to sell you his stake for far less than you think it’s worth. The key to taking advantage of Mr. Market is to avoid trying to guess and anticipate why his mood ever suits him, instead relying on your own judgment and thinking about the value of the underlying enterprise regardless of Mr. Market’s various mood swings.

It’s worth quoting Graham at length on this subject:

The true investor scarcely ever is forced to sell his shares, and at all other times he is free to disregard the current price quotation. He need pay attention to it and act upon it only to the extent that it suits his book, and no more. Thus the investor who permits himself to be stampeded or unduly worried by unjustified market declines in his holdings is perversely transforming his basic advantage into a basic disadvantage. That man would be better off if his stocks had no market quotation at all, for he would then be spared the mental anguish caused him by other persons’ mistakes of judgement

Further:

the existence of a quoted market gives the investor certain options that he does not have if his security is unquoted. But it does not impose the current quotation on an investor who prefers to take his idea of value from some other source [such as his own study of the fundamentals]

[…]

price fluctuations have only one significant meaning for the true investor. They provide him with an opportunity to buy wisely when prices fall sharply and to sell wisely when they advance a great deal. At other times he will do better if he forgets about the stock market and pays attention to his dividend returns and to the operating results of his companies

In other words, once you have made your investment, the only value of further quotations is to be appraised of another opportunity to buy (if prices decline sharply from that point) or of an opportunity to sell at a profit (if prices rise sharply from that point).

The rest of the time, you can judge the soundness of your decision by studying whether the operating performance of the business plays out according to your expectations. If the underlying business performs as you anticipated over a long period of time, you only need wait for the market to recognize your good judgment. However, if the business steadily deteriorates in a surprising fashion, you may have a basis upon which to second-guess your original judgment. But a falling stock market price would not be the primary indicator in such a situation, nor would a rising one signal you have done well.

Margin of Safety, the central concept of investment

The intellectual principle of the margin of safety involves “inverting” a stock and thinking about it like a bond.

The margin of safety for bonds may be calculated, alternatively, by comparing the total value of the enterprise with the amount of debt

For example, if a business owes $X, but is valued at $3X, the business could shrink by 2/3rds before imperiling the position of the debt holders.

Similarly,

when a company has outstanding only common stock that under depression conditions is selling for less than the amount of bonds that could safely be issued against its property and earning power

the common stock can be considered to enjoy a margin of safety as large as that of a good bond.

Broadly, margin of safety can be thought of as the consistent earnings power of the equity, wherein

the margin of safety lies in an expected earning power considerably above the going rate for bonds

A proxy measure here would be to look at the earnings rate, or earnings yield (earnings/price) and compare this to the going rate on a similar bond.

Another, more general way to think about Margin of Safety is that it is the difference between how much you pay for something versus the calculated intrinsic value you determine that thing to have. In this sense, the Margin of Safety is always price dependent and will be higher at lower prices and lower at higher prices, relatively speaking.

And the Margin of Safety works in tandem with the principle of diversification:

Even with a margin in the investor’s favor, an individual security may work out badly. For the margin guarantees only that he has a better chance for a profit than for a loss– not that loss is impossible. But as the number of such commitments is increased the more certain does it become that the aggregate of the profits will exceed the aggregate of the losses. That is the simple basis of the insurance-underwriting business

The emphasis is always on finding an adequate margin of safety in order to protect your principal because if you do that, the returns will tend to take care of themselves:

To achieve satisfactory investment results is easier than most people realize; to achieve superior results is harder than it looks.

Special note on market-timing

There isn’t much more to it than this:

if he places his emphasis on timing, in the sense of forecasting, [the investor] will end up as a speculator and with a speculator’s financial results

In case you’re wondering, that’s a bad thing in Graham’s mind because he is convinced that all but the most talented and luckiest speculators lose out in the end because they do not pay attention to safety of principal.

Review – Nintendo Magic

Nintendo Magic: Winning the Videogame Wars

by Osamu Inoue, published 2009, 2010 (translated from Japanese)

Two Nintendo legends no one seems to know about

The original Nintendo started out as a manufacturer of playing cards and other toys, games and trinkets near the end of the Shogunate era in Japan, but the modern company we know today which gave the world the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Game Boy, the Wii and characters like Mario & Luigi and Pokemon, was primarily shaped by four men: former president Hiroshi Yamauchi, lead designer Gunpei Yokoi, the firm’s first software designer Shigeru Miyamoto and the first “outside hire” executive and former software developer, Satoru Iwata.

A family member of the then privately-held Nintendo, Yamauchi took the presidency in 1949 when his grandfather passed away. He tried adding a number of different businesses (taxis, foodstuffs, copiers) to Nintendo in true conglomerate fashion, managing in one 12 year period to grow sales by a factor of 27 and operating profits by a factor of 37.

But his most influential mark on Nintendo’s business came with his fortuitous hiring of Gunpei Yokoi, an engineer, who would head up hardware development for Nintendo’s game division. It was this strategic decision to concentrate Nintendo’s efforts on game development that would lead to the modern purveyor of hardware and software known around the world today.

Hardware engineer Gunpei Yokoi is not a well-known name outside the world of hardcore Nintendo fandom, which is not altogether surprising because most Nintendo fans alive today were not users of some of his first toy gadgets such as the “Love Detector” and the “Game & Watch” handheld mini-game consoles. On the other hand, it’s a shock that the man’s reputation is not larger than it is because he essentially single-handedly created the company’s hardware development philosophy in the 1960s which has remained with it today and continues to influence Nintendo’s strategic vision within the video game industry.

That hardware philosophy was summed up by Nintendo’s first head of its hardware development section as “Lateral thinking with seasoned technology”. In concrete terms, it is the idea of using widely available, off-the-shelf technology that is unrelated to gaming in new and exciting ways of play, for example:

• Yokoi’s “Love Detector” game, which used simple circuitry and electrical sensors to create an instrument that could supposedly detect romantic chemistry between two users when they held hands and held the machine
• A blaster rifle toy that used common light-sensing equipment to deliver accuracy readings of the users target shots to the rifle, registering hits and points
• More recently, the Nintendo “Wiimote” concept, which was simply the idea of repurposing the common household TV remote into a tool for play

Yokoi’s lasting impact on the hardware (and software) philosophy at Nintendo is best captured by current president Satoru Iwata who once said,

It’s not a matter of whether or not the tech is cutting egde, but whether or not people think it’s fun

Similarly, this focus on repurposing existing technology for fun rather than investing in brand new technology helps to explain why many of Nintendo’s systems have been knocked for their not-so-hardcore hardware (think non-HD Wii vs. HD-enabled Sony PS3 and Microsoft Xbox 360) but nonetheless became massive consumer hits– the focus was on fun, not flash.

The Wii particularly was the response to the failure of two systems which preceded it (Gamecube and N64), which were extremely technologically advanced for their era and which departed as swiftly from Yokoi’s philosophy as they posed monumental development challenges for software developers due to their complex, proprietary nature. Instead of creating yet another whizbang console, Nintendo decided that if Wii’s costs were kept down and developers were free to focus on things like a new, intuitive controller and built-in connectivity functions, fun and market success would follow.

Essentially, the game hardware is a commodity with zero barriers to entry. Anyone can have the latest, greatest technology if they’re willing to pay for it. There is no way to establish a competitive advantage on the basis for hardware sophistication alone. It must come from design, or, as Yokoi put it,

In videogames, these is always an easy way out if you don’t have any good ideas. That’s what the CPU competition and color competition are about

Nintendo’s two leading lights: Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto

Rounding out the Fantastic Four are Satoru Iwata, the company’s current president, and Shigeru Miyamoto, the star software developer.

Iwata came from relative privilege and studied computer programming in school. He had a passion for making and playing games from an early age. He joined a software developer, HAL Laboratory, early on. He successfully turned around the flagging HAL Lab before it was acquired by Nintendo.

Meanwhile, Miyamoto first came to fame through development of his Donkey Kong arcade game, which introduced the characters Donkey Kong and Mario and which was originally based off of Popeye until the IP could not be acquired for licensing. As a small boy he spent hours running around the hills, forests and mountains outside his home, which inspired many of his later game creations such as Pikmin, Animal Crossing, The Legend of Zelda, etc. He was the first designer Nintendo had ever hired. Miyamoto often utilizes his “Wife-o-meter” to help him understand how to make games that are more broadly appealing.

Miyamoto’s design ethic is best synthesized as populist-perfectionist:

When creating a game, Miyamoto will occasionally find employees from, say, general affairs who aren’t gamers and put a controller in their hands, looking over their shoulder and watching them play without saying anything

He creates game characters, game designs and immersive environments that appeal to everyone, not just the archetypical “hardcore gamer.” But this desire to serve a mass, unsophisticated audience does not mean that Miyamoto considers quality as an afterthought. Miyamoto will “polish [an idea] for years, if he has to, until it satisfies him” and “shelving an idea does not mean throwing it away. Those huge storehouses are full of precious treasure that will someday see the light of day.”

This is part of the value of Nintendo– they have many unrealized ideas waiting to be turned into hardware and games and the only thing preventing them from seeing the light of day is someone like Miyamoto who wants to make sure that when they eventually emerge into the light, they don’t just shine but sparkle.

And this thinking carries over to the company’s hardware efforts, as well. According to a lead engineer, the DS

had to work consistently after being dropped ten times from a height of 1.5 meters, higher than an adult’s breast pocket

Nintendo is “obsessed about the durability of their systems due to an overriding fear that a customer who gets upset over a broken system might never give them another chance.”

“Nintendo-ness”: how Nintendo competes by not competing

In 1999, then-president Yamauchi saw a crisis brewing for video game developers:

If we continue to pursue this kind of large-scale software development, costs will pile up and it will no longer be a viable business. The true nature of the videogame business is developing new kinds of fun and constantly working to achieve perfection

The solution was to adhere ever more closely to “Nintendo-ness”. Nintendo picks people with a “software orientation.”

“Nintendo-ness” is the company’s DNA, once someone has grasped Nintendo-ness, it is rare for them to leave the company. That tendency protects and strengthens the company’s lineage and makes employees feel at home

Manufacturing companies create hardware which are daily necessities, which compete based on being better, cheaper products. Nintendo is in an industry of fun and games, software, where polished content is the goal. Compare this to rival Sony, where hardware specs are key and the software is to follow.

According to Iwata,

Do something different from the other guy is deeply engrained in our DNA

Similarly, Nintendo-ness means delighting customers through creation of new experiences because

if you’re always following a mission statement, your customers are going to get bored with you

This way of thinking goes back to Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo for 50 years, according to Iwata:

He couldn’t stand making the same kind of toy the other guy was making, so whatever you showed him, you knew he was going to ask, ‘How is this different from what everybody else is doing?’

For some reason, Nintendo observers and critics don’t get this– why isn’t the company doing what everyone else is doing? Why are they making a console with a TV remote instead of HD graphics (the Wii)?

To Nintendo, the risk is in not trying these things and trying to do what everyone else does. Iwata sums it up nicely:

Creators only improve themselves by taking risks

Of course, not all risks are worth taking. Iwata as a representative of Nintendo’s strategic mind makes it clear that the company is keenly aware of its strategic and financial risks:

The things Nintendo does should be limited to the areas where we can display our greatest strengths. It’s because we’re good at throwing things away that we can fight these large battles using so few people. We can’t afford to diversify. We have overwhelmingly more ideas than we have people to implement them

For example, Nintendo considers the manufacturing of game consoles to be outside its purview, a “fabless” company.

Then there’s the reason for the huge amount of cash on the balance sheet:

The game platform business runs on momentum. When you fail, you can take serious damage. The risks are very high. And in that domain, Nintendo is making products that are totally unprecedented. Nobody can guarantee they won’t fail. One big failure and boom– you’re out two hundred, three hundred billion yen. In a business where a single flop can bankrupt you, you don’t want to be set up like that… To be completely honest, I don’t think that even now we have enough [savings]… That’s why IBM, or NEC, or any number of other companies are willing to go along with us. We’d never be able to do what we do without being cash-rich

That being said, Iwata has not been shy about his policy toward dividends and acquisitions. He has stated that assuming Nintendo’s savings continue to accumulate, passing 1.5T or 2T yen, a large merger or acquisition may become a possibility. Otherwise, excess capital will be distributed as dividends.

The next level

Nintendo’s philosophy is to avoid competition. It sees the hardware arms race as an irrelevant dead-end. The key is to create new ways to interact with game consoles and software that keeps game players on their toes and brings smiles to their faces. According to Iwata,

We’d like to avoid having players think they’ve gotten a game completely figured out

Thus, for Nintendo the next level logically is integration of  User-Generated Content into their software environments, which would have inexhaustible longevity. First they sought to increase the gaming population, now they’re looking at how to increase the game-creating population.

The company’s true enemy is boredom. Whatever surprise you create today becomes your enemy tomorrow.

In the end, Iwata says,

Our goal is always to make our customers glad. We’re a manufacturer of smiles

This is what the company calls “amusement fundamentalism” and it’s what sets them apart from their perceived competition, especially comparisons or criticisms aimed at the company in terms of how it stacks up against a company like Apple. To Iwata, this just doesn’t make sense:

We’re an amusement company and Apple’s a tech company

The Free Capital Blog Digest

The following is a digest of posts from Guy Thomas’s Free Capital blog from Feb 2011 through Jan 2012.  Each post provides a link to the parent article with bullet-pointed lists of key-takeaways from each. For the complete discussion by the original author, please click the link to the parent article.

How important is analytical intelligence in investing?

• Equity trading is not as reliant on raw mental strength (IQ, analytical ability) as fixed-income trading; instead, equity trading is more dependent upon mental characteristics such as:
  • Actively seeking information from dis-confirming sources
  • Adjusting for one’s biases
  • Accepting uncertainty for long periods
  • Deferring decisions for as long as possible
  • Calibrating your certainty to the weight of evidence
  • Responding unemotionally to new information
  • Indifference to group affiliation
• The mental characteristics which are helpful in investing are not universal positives and may be useless or negative characteristics in other endeavors

Max, min and average payoffs

• Most activities can be categorized as max payoff, min payoff or average payoff
• Max payoff means the activity is “positive scoring”, your payoff is your highest or best result and failure carries no lasting consequences
• Optimal traits for max payoff are:
  • high energy
  • irrational optimism
  • persistence
• Examples of max payoff activities include:
  • selling
  • leadership
  • most sports
• Min payoff means the activity is negative scoring, your payoff is your lowest result and even a single failure may have lasting consequences
• Optimal traits for min payoff are:
  • meticulous care
  • good judgment
  • respecting your limitations
• Examples of min payoff activities include:
  • flying a plane
  • driving a car
  • performing brain surgery
• Average payoff activities combine elements of both max and min; investing is an average payoff activity, with particular emphasis on the min aspects
• A lot of success in investing comes from simply avoiding mistakes (min payoff)

Discussion of diversification (posts 1, 2, 3 & 4)

• Diamonds and flower bulbs
  • Diamonds are companies with exceptional economics and long-term competitive advantages that you’d be happy to hold if the stock exchange closed tomorrow for the next five years
  • Flower bulbs are companies which are cheap at the moment but which have no exceptional business qualities (they often make a good quantitative showing but not a strong qualitative one); they can usually be counted on to bloom but should be bought in modest size because they require liquidity to get back out of the position and realize the value
  • Which should you buy? Diamonds are exceptionally rare and require outstanding foresight of long-term durability; flower bulbs are more common, simpler to spot and merely require patience and a strong stomach
  • “Investing is a field where knowing your limitations is more important than stretching to surpass them”
• How many shares should an investor hold? Some theory…
  • The optimal number of stocks to hold, N, is a function of…
    • quality of knowledge about return dispersions (decreasing)
    • $ size of portfolio (increasing)
    • volatility of shares (increasing)
    • capital gains tax rate (decreasing)
  • Exceptional investors with exceptional quality of knowledge should hold a concentrated portfolio; Buffett from 1977-2000 appears to have held approx. 1/3 of his portfolio in his best idea and changed it annually
  • With a small portfolio, liquidity is not a concern but as your portfolio scales a large number of holdings becomes optimal to maintain your liquidity which enhances your optionality by giving you the opportunity to change your mind without being trapped in a position
  • If the companies you target have highly volatile share prices, it becomes attractive to switch frequently so that you can “buy low and sell high”, thus you want to restrict your position sizing (higher number of positions) and maintain liquidity
  • If the capital gains rate is high you are penalized for turnover so you want to keep your total number of positions low and hold them for longer
• How many shares should an investor hold? Some practicalities
  • There is clearly a trade-off between the number of positions you have and your quality of knowledge
  • A portfolio which is higher in diversification may hold many lower quality businesses (flower bulbs) but the certainty of the analysis of each might be significantly higher than a concentrated portfolio of several high quality businesses (diamonds) whose analysis is extremely sensitive to long-term forecasting accuracy
• Concentrated investors often “come a cropper”
  • Many investors eventually disappoint because they have concentrated their bets on companies the world turns against
  • This has happened even to great investors like Warren Buffett (ex., WaPo, which now looks like a horse-and-buggy investment)
  • The danger of concentration is that nothing grows forever, and concentration + illiquidity often make it hard to escape mistakes

Meeting management

• Opportunity cost of time: is it better spent speaking to management or investigating other ideas?
• Getting an edge: sometimes speaking with management helps to understand the picture in a way that gives you an edge
• Buffett: if you need to talk to management, you shouldn’t own the stock
• Don’t be schmoozed

Analytics versus heuristics; why I don’t use DCF models

• Time is precious and DCF models take too long
• A good buying opportunity shouts at you from the market; if you need a calculator, let alone a spreadsheet, it’s probably too close
• Robustness is more important than refinement; it’s easy to find apparent discrepancies in valuation, but most are false– it’s more important to seek out independent insights which confirm or deny the discrepancy than to calculate its size; when info quality is good, focus on quantifying and ranking options, but when it is poor, focus on raising it
• Non-financial heuristics are often quicker and sufficiently accurate to lead to correct decisions; you may make more errors than the rigorous analyst but you can work much faster and evaluate many more opportunities which is usually a good trade-off

Thoughts On Diversification & Ideal Portfolio Management: Why Are You Diversified?

I’d like to talk today about diversification as a strategy within the theory of portfolio management.

What is portfolio management?

In portfolio management, you have two possible extremes between which most actual portfolios lie– own one thing, or own everything.

The classic example of a person who owns one thing is the owner of a small business, of which the proprietorship makes up his entire personal equity capital in relation to the total investment universe. Most people wouldn’t even consider this person to have a portfolio because he holds nothing else. His business is his portfolio.

Consequently, portfolios imply diversification, and vice versa. The moment you take equity in more than one venture, you have created a portfolio and you are simultaneously diversified. This is the mild hypocrisy of people who warn against diversification (calling it “deworsification”) and counsel investors to maintain a concentrated portfolio. A portfolio may be concentrated to a small number of holdings (let’s say, five or less to pick an arbitrary point of distinction), but this is not a non-diversified portfolio– the very fact that it is a portfolio implies it is diversified.

The standard argument for diversification

Proponents of diversification (or, what we might term “portfolioization” to come up with an even more complicated and hard to speak/spell nomenclature for the phenomenon) argue that diversification is a way to limit risk in equity ownership. It is the “multiple egg baskets” theory, the idea being that if you drop one basket you only lose the eggs inside of the dropped basket, whereas if you carry all your eggs in one basket and drop it, there goes dinner.

But it’s a bit of trickery, because risk can’t be eliminated, only exchanged. In effect, as you diversify (portfolioize), you exchange business risk for market, or economic, risk. The larger your portfolio becomes in terms of total positions, the more it comes to resemble the total universe of equity opportunities in its performance.

With diversification, you are not limiting risk, you are exchanging it. You’re determining how much of your equity will be exposed to each kind of risk in existence, not how much risk you will be exposed to in total (that question is settled by what particular risks you do put into your portfolio).

To summarize, two risk equations:

• business risk vs. market risk
• which business risk?

Standard counter-arguments to diversification (or, why it’s really deworsification)

The case for diversification isn’t complicated and neither is the case against it. There are two main points to consider:

• diversification limits exposure to particular risks, but also limits potential rewards (no free lunch)
• diversification may introduce an altogether separate risk– lack of focus

The first point is fairly self-explanatory. If you only invest X% of your portfolio in a particular risk, you ensure that your maximum loss is never greater than X%, but you also ensure that your maximum gain is never greater than X% * Y, Y being the return of the underlying investment.

So, if you invest 20% of your portfolio in ABC Company and the stock falls by half, thanks to the magic of diversification, you actually only lose 10% of your portfolio (-50% * 20% = -10%). On the other hand, if the stock rises by half, thanks to the magic of diversification you actually only make a return equal to 10% of your portfolio (50% * 20% = 10%).

There’s no free lunch. You only would get to capture the full 50% rise if you had the full 100% of your portfolio exposed. You essentially provide yourself downside insurance because, while your overall gain is capped, your overall loss is capped as well as it can never be higher than the 20% you exposed (provided you aren’t using leverage or shorting).

Perhaps more nefarious, some investment thinkers point out that by diversifying your portfolio, you spread your attention thin and could end up not understanding the individual risks your various positions hold as well as you might if you had one position (or two, or five…) and so, in a quest to limit business risk you actually enhance it because the quality of your analysis falls. Similarly, if you do poor analysis, you might be more prone to rationalize it because, “Oh well, ABC didn’t work out, but I’ve still got bets on DEF and XYZ, I’m sure they’ll turn out okay and make up for the loss– I’m diversified!”

The scarcest thing most investors have is attention they can devote to their investing, not capital.

Is one ever justified in diversifying?

Diversification by itself is not a terrible thing. As discussed above, it really doesn’t confer any advantages beyond the psychological– diversification by itself can’t improve the absolute returns of your portfolio, on net.

It also doesn’t have to be a purposeful strategy. Diversification can happen “by accident” in the following scenarios:

• it would be inappropriate to invest 100% of your capital in a position due to market cap constraints
• you have received new capital inflows following commitment of 100% of your previous capital
• the market moves against you in the middle of taking a position

In the first case, imagine an investment opportunity in a company with a market cap of $100M, in which case the maximum appropriate position one could take without “bidding against oneself” is $5M, but one’s full capital represents the amount of $10M. In this situation, you would only invest half your capital in the idea because investing any more than this might destroy some of the value available. Diversification would be a natural consequence of a situation like this, whether diversification itself was desired or not.

In the second case, imagine you have $10M of total capital in period 0, which you fully invest in X. However, some time later, in period 1, you receive additional inflows of capital of $1M (perhaps you have earned a 10% dividend on your earlier investment in X). Unfortunately, the price of X has risen in the interim and no longer represents the value proposition it once did, although you’re still happy to have your earlier capital invested at the price available in period 0. In this case, you might invest the $1M in opportunity Y and, again, diversification would occur as a natural consequence of these developments whether it itself was desired or not.

In the final case, imagine you have total capital of $10M and have found an investment opportunity which could utilize your entire capital. However, you plan to accumulate in blocks because the investment is not liquid enough to take the $10M at once, and you do not want to make it obvious what you’re doing. You begin by investing $2M. Unfortunately, shortly after you do so a big-mouth blogger lets the whole world know about this great opportunity and the price of the investment opportunity rises to the stratosphere, pricing you out of any meaningful additional accumulation. You’re stuck with 80% of your capital uninvested and must look elsewhere. Again, diversification has occurred as a natural consequence even if it has not been actively sought after.

Ideal portfolio management implies no intended diversification

We’ve seen that diversification can result of two different catalysts– an investor can purposefully seek diversification in order to make a tradeoff between business risk and market risk (to self-insure his own decision-making process by giving up total return potential), or diversification can occur as the natural, unintended consequence of the general investment process.

Ideally speaking, the best situation for any investor to find themselves in is having one idea that has so much return potential relative to risk, that they are so confident about, that they are able to invest 100% of their capital in the idea, thereby avoiding diversification, or portfolioization, entirely. Ideally, one would have all their money at any given time in one idea and only one idea, and when that idea had either fruited, or a more profitable opportunity had arisen elsewhere, the investor would then sell the entire position and look to his next opportunity.

Outside of this ideal, portfolioization may occur inadvertently in pursuit of these very circumstances, in which case there is nothing to be upset over or critical about.

However, if diversification is pursued as a purposeful strategy outside the context of an individual contending with liquidity constraints (ie, perhaps investing 100% of capital in his best idea would put him in a bad position if outside demands for this capital, which are unpredictable, would require him to liquidate at an inopportune time), it stands to reason that an investor might ask himself, or be asked by another, “Why are you investing in something you’re not completely confident about in the first place?”

In other words, perfect confidence is unachievable (although it is the ideal), but it is hard to imagine why an investor would be justified in spreading his bets out across things he was less than as-confident-as-he-could-be about and consoling himself that he was doing well to mind risk thanks to diversification, when he could instead wait for an opportunity where his confidence about the risk-reward picture was as-confident-as-he-could-be and then invest all his capital in that one idea.

And of course, as almost always, I’d be wise to consider and hopefully even heed my own advice!

Notes – The Intelligent Investor Commentary By Jason Zweig

The Intelligent Investor: A Book of Practical Counsel

by Benjamin Graham, Jason Zweig, published 1949, 2003

The Modern Day Intelligent Investor

The following note outline was rescued from my personal document archive. The outline consists of a summary of the end-chapter commentary written by Jason Zweig. Zweig did such a good job of reviewing Graham’s lessons in each chapter and practically applying them that I find you can get most of the major principles of The Intelligent Investor by reading the combined commentary chapters as if they were a standalone investment book.

Of course, Graham’s original work is a classic in the value investing tradition and it should be read and savored on its own, as well.

Chapter 1, JZ commentary

1. What is investing?
   1. You must thoroughly analyze a company, and the soundness of its underlying businesses, before you buy its stock
   2. You must deliberately protect yourself against serious losses
   3. You must aspire to “adequate”, not extraordinary, performance
2. How to invest
   1. An investor calculates what a stock is worth, based on the value of the underlying business
   2. A speculator gambles that a stock will go up in price because somebody will pay even more for it
   3. You should be comfortable owning the underlying business even if you couldn’t get timely, regular quotes of its market price
   4. Price is what the business is selling for, not what it’s worth. Value is what the business is worth. Money is sometimes made in the arbitraging of the two, but price does not dictate value; in the long-term, value dictates price
3. Limit your risk
   1. Never mingle speculative accounts and investment accounts
   2. Never allow your speculative thinking to spill over into your investing activities
   3. Never put more than 10% of your assets into your “mad money” account

Chapter 2, JZ commentary

1. Stocks have not had a perfect record of keeping up with inflation, as measured by the CPI
2. 20% of the 5year periods from 50s today in which inflation dominated saw falling stocks
3. Two strategies for branching out beyond stocks during inflation:
   1. REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts)
   2. TIPS (Treasury Inflation Protected Securities)
      1. IRS considers an increase in TIPS value to be taxable income

Chapter 3, JZ commentary

1. “By the rule of opposites, the more enthusiastic investors become about the stock market in the long run, the more certain they are to be proved wrong in the short run.”
2. The stock market’s performance depends on three factors:
   1. real growth in earnings and dividends
   2. inflation(-expectations) within the general economy
   3. speculative appetite for stocks/risk (increase/decrease)
3. In the long run, you can reasonably expect stocks to average a 6% nominal return, 4% real return (with inflation calculated at 2% historical rate)
4. Be humble about your ability to forecast future stock returns– don’t risk too much on a forecast that could turn out to be wrong.

Chapter 4, JZ commentary

1. Two kinds of intelligent investors:
   1. active/enterprising – continual research, selection and monitoring of a dynamic mix of stocks, bonds or mutual funds (intellectually/physically demanding)
   2. passive/defensive – create a permanent portfolio that runs on autopilot and requires no further effort but generates very little excitement (emotionally demanding)
2. How to allocate amongst stocks and bonds for defensive investors?
   1. “Age” is arbitrary and pointless
   2. Instead, consider the fundamental circumstances of your life and the financial needs you’ll have for the foreseeable future
   3. For the aggressive investor, 25% in bonds and cash, 75% in stocks
   4. For the defensive investor, 25% in stocks and 75% in bonds and cash
   5. Rebalancing should be done on a predictable, disciplined basis– not when the market dictates, but when the “calendar” or schedule does
3. Income investing (bond choices)
   1. Taxable or tax free? Choose tax free (municipal) unless you are in the lowest income bracket
   2. Short-term or long-term? Intermediate term bonds of 5-10yrs allow you to avoid the guessing game and see-saw risks of short and long-term bonds
   3. Bonds or bond funds? Unless you have a lot of capital to make minimum purchases, probably more cost effective to buy a bond fund
   4. Watch out for preferred stock, the worst of both worlds
      1. Secondary claim on assets in bankruptcies (junior to bonds)
      2. Offer less potential profit than common equity because they are often forcibly called by businesses when interest rates drop or credit ratings improve
      3. Companies can not deduct the interest payments like they can with bond issuance, ask yourself, “Why would a company that is healthy issue preferred rather than bonds?” Answer is, probably because they aren’t healthy
   5. Sometimes, stocks can offer competitive yields with Treasuries, which can increase income yield while raising potential return (as well as increasing potential risk of loss)

Chapter 5, JZ commentary

1. Markets are least risky after a crash, most risky at the top
2. Should you buy what you know? Psychological studies say that we tend to discount risk inappropriately when we feel we are experts on something due to familiarity
3. Dollar-cost averaging can be a disciplined way to force oneself to invest through bear and bull markets

Chapter 6, JZ commentary

1. Junk bonds
   1. Graham warned against them because they were difficult to diversify away the risks of default; today, many junk bond funds exist which allow an investor to diversify
   2. While junk bonds have outperformed 10yr UST even with historical default rates factored in, many junk bond funds charge high fees which reduces their appeal
2. Emerging market bonds
   1. Typically not correlated with US equity markets
   2. Restrict holdings in bond portfolio to 10% (published 2003)
3. Day trading
   1. The increased transaction costs of day trading is a surefire way to bomb a portfolio
   2. Day trading raises transaction costs to the point where returns must be beyond what one could reasonably expect to make with a conservative estimation of returns, just to break even
4. IPOs
   1. Most people who have bought-and-held IPOs have been decimated over time
   2. Hard to find value in the mania buying of an IPO
   3. The public excitement of an IPO often leads investors to forget about valuing the underlying business; many investors have paid ridiculous sums for businesses that were not profitable and never had a chance of being profitable
   4. “It’s Probably Overpriced”

Chapter 7, JZ commentary

1. Market timing is essentially a fools errand: Life can only be understood looking backwards, but it is lived forwards.
2. Growth stocks– the faster the companies grow, the higher goes their stock multiples
   1. A $1B company can double its business fairly easily, but how will a $50B company double itself?
   2. A great company is not a great investment if you pay too much for it
   3. When growth companies expand beyond 25-30 times earnings, they’re expensive and should not be bought
   4. One way growth companies could become temporarily attractive is when they suffer a setback or disclosure of upsetting information, creating “the relatively unpopular large company.”
3. Most great fortunes in the world are made through concentration into one industry or business idea; similarly, most great fortunes are lost this way as well
   1. Because markets are sometimes cyclical, people who got rich in one industry as it boomed will likely lose their fortunes in that same industry when it busts
4. Bargain hunting for stocks can be a winning strategy; consider stocks that are selling at or for less than their net working capital (Current Assets – Total Liabilities, including preferred stock and long-term debt)
   1. One way to quickly find these stocks can be to search for companies that have recently hit new lows for the past 52 weeks
5. Diversifying outside the US (or home market) is adviseable because national economies suffer booms and busts as well as specific industries do
   1. If you had been Japanese in 1989, you would probably think it foolish to invest in America; however, you would lose 2/3 of your equity value over the ensuing decade as a result
   2. The country that you live and work in is already a multilayered bet on the economic prospects of that country’s economy; buying foreign stocks (including emerging markets) provides insurance against the possibility that your home market might be a laggard

Chapter 8, JZ commentary

1. Do not let the movement of Mr. Market, up or down, affect your decision on whether to buy or sell a particular company or stock at a particular time
   1. Don’t buy just because the market is going up
   2. Don’t sell just because the market is going down
2. Graham: “The primary cause of failure is that they pay too much attention to what the stock market is doing currently.”
3. Investing intelligently is about controlling the uncontrollable
   1. your brokerage costs
   2. your ownership costs (mutual fund fees)
   3. your expectations (keep them reasonable)
   4. your risk (how much of your total assets do you put into each investment)
   5. your tax bills (short vs. long term cap gains)
   6. your own behavior
4. “To be an intelligent investor, you must also refuse to judge your financial success by how a bunch of total strangers are doing”
   1. You haven’t lost if everyone else has won
   2. You haven’t won if everyone else has lost
   3. Focus on your own absolute performance
5. Remember: market quotations are what other people think the value of a stock is– not what the true value of the stock is in relation to underlying intrinsic value
6. Selling into a bear market can occasionally make sense in relation to taking a realized loss for tax purposes; consult a tax professional before doing so

Chapter 9, JZ commentary

1. The pitfalls of mutual funds:
   1. avg fund does not pick stocks well enough to overcome the costs of researching and trading them
   2. the higher a fund’s expenses, the lower its returns
   3. the more frequently a fund trades, the less it tends to earn
   4. highly volatile funds tends to stay volatile
   5. funds with high past returns are unlikely to remain winners for long
2. Why don’t more winning funds stay winners?
   1. migrating managers; top mgrs get picked off by higher paying companies or go on to start their own funds
   2. asset elephantitis; when a fund is too large, it reduces the types and size of investments it can possibly make, reducing its nimbleness
   3. no more fancy footwork; many fund “incubate” before going public and whatever advantages they had during incubation are generally lost afterward, yet they use the incubation period performance to promote the fund
   4. rising expenses; it often costs more to trade in size than to trade smaller because markets become illiquid when trading in size
   5. sheepishness/herding; fund mgrs who have been successful and attract higher fees grow accustomed to these fees and their reputation and don’t want to take any risks that might jeopardize either one, so they trade like other fund mgrs
3. The solution for the individual investor is boring, low cost index funds– they won’t beat the market, but they won’t get beaten by it either
4. How to pick good mutual funds?
   1. managers should be the biggest shareholders
   2. they should be cheap/low fee; high returns are temporary, high fees are permanent
   3. they should be run creatively and “dare to be different”
   4. they shut the door before they get too big
   5. they don’t advertise much if at all
5. Expense fee guidelines:
   1. taxable and muni bonds, .75%
   2. US equities, 1%
   3. high-yield bonds, 1%
   4. US equities (small stocks), 1.25%
   5. foreign equities, 1.5%
6. When to sell a mutual fund?
   1. a sharp and unexpected change in strategy
   2. an increase in expenses
   3. large and frequent tax bills (caused by excessive trading)
   4. suddenly erratic returns (big gains or big losses)

Chapter 11, JZ commentary

1. Five decisive elements for determining price multiples
   1. the company’s “general long-term prospects”
      1. Warning flags
         1. the company is a serial acquirer, gaining revenues and profit growth through the acquisition of other businesses
         2. the company is addicted to OPM and is continually floating debt or issuing new stock
            1. cash from operating activities negative, while cash from financing activities positive, on a general or recurring basis, means the company is not profitable in its own line of industry
         3. the company relies on one or only a handful of important customers to generate a significant share of its revenues and profits
      2. Positives in company analysis
         1. the company has a wide “moat” to competition
            1. brand identity
            2. monopoly or near-monopoly
            3. economies of scale
            4. unique intangible asset
            5. resistance to substitution
         2. the company is a marathoner, not sprinter
            1. revenues and income should grow steadily, not in spurts
            2. less likely to attract and then offend “hot stock” money
         3. the company sows and reaps
            1. the company should be spending on R&D to develop new lines of growth in the future
            2. 3-6% of revenues by industry is a typical measure
   2. the quality of its management
      1. is it looking out for #1?
         1. executives should not be paid too much
         2. company should not be reissuing or repricing stock options constantly
         3. use fully-diluted share totals when calculating EPS
         4. insiders should not be selling the company
      2. are they managers or promoters?
         1. mgrs should spend most of their time managing, not being in the media promoting the company’s stock
         2. watch out for accounting opaqueness, recurring non-recurring charges, ordinary extraordinary items and the focus on EBITDA rather than net income, etc.
   3. the financial strength and capital structure
      1. it should generate more cash than it consumes
      2. cash from operations should grow steadily over time
         1. use “owner earnings” (Net Income + Amortization + Depreciation – Cost of Stock Options – Unusual/Nonrecurring Charges – Company Pension Fund “Income”)
      3. capital structure considerations
         1. total debt ( + preferred stock) should be under 50% of total capital
         2. is debt fixed-rate or variable, exposing the company to interest rate risk (check footnotes)?
         3. check annual reports for “ratio of earnings to fixed costs” which can demonstrate if the company is able to make interest payments
   4. its dividend record
      1. the burden of proof is on the company to prove they shouldn’t issue you a dividend because they can grow the company better with the retained earnings
      2. the stock should not be split constantly
      3. stock buybacks should occur when the company’s shares are cheap, not at record highs
   5. its current dividend rate

Chapter 12, JZ commentary

1. Accounting gimmickery
   1. make sure capitalized expenses really ought to be capitalized
   2. watch out for firms realizing revenues on their accounting statements that they have not actually earned
   3. inventory write-downs should not be occurring regularly if the company is using proper inventory accounting methods
   4. “net pension benefit” should not be more than 5% of the company’s net income
2. How to avoid accounting fraud
   1. read backwards; the dirty secrets are buried at the end
   2. read the notes; never buy a stock without reading the footnotes in the annual report
      1. look for terms like “capitalized”, “deferred” and “restructuring”
   3. read more; check out Financial Statement Analysis (Fridson and Alvarez), The Financial Number’s Game (Comiskey), Financial Shenanigans (Schilit)

Chapter 14, JZ commentary

1. Investing for the defensive investor
   1. Substantially all of ones stock picks should be limited to a total stock market index fund; or, 90% total stock market index fund and 10% individual stock picks
2. Graham’s criteria for stock selection:
   1. adequate size; market cap > $2B, unless owned through a “small cap mutual fund” that allows for diversification
   2. strong financial condition; 2:1 current assets:current liabilities ratio
   3. earnings stability; some earnings for the common stock in each of the past ten years
   4. dividend record; the company should pay a dividend, even better if it increases over time
   5. earnings growth; 33% cumulative EPS growth over ten years, or essentially, 3% annual EPS growth
   6. moderate p/e ratio; current price should be no more than 15x avg earnings over past 3 yrs
   7. moderate price-to-book ratio; price-to-assets/price-to-book-value ratio of no more than 1.5
   8. alternatively, multiply p/e ratio by price-to-book and the number should be below 22.5
3. Do the due diligence
   1. do your homework; read at least 5 yrs worth of annual and qtrly reports and proxy statements disclosing managers’ compensation, ownership, and potential conflicts of interest
   2. check out the neighborhood; check for institutional ownership ratios, over 60% probably means the company is overowned and overpriced
      1. if one sells, they’ll all sell; could be a time to find bargains in that stock
      2. check who the biggest holders are, if they’re money mgrs that invest like you, you could be in good hands

Chapter 15, JZ commentary

1. You can practice stock-picking for a year, without investing any real money, and see how you do
   1. if you beat the S&P500, maybe you are good enough to pick stocks
   2. if you don’t, stick to index funds
2. How to pick stocks for the enterprising investor
   1. Start with stocks that have recently hit 52 week lows
   2. use the ROIC method of analysis; ROIC = Owner Earnings / Invested Capital, where Owner Earnings is:
      1. Operating Profit + Depreciation + Amortization of Goodwill – Federal Income Tax – Cost of Stock Options – Maintenance (Essential CapEx) – Income Generated By Pension Funds
      2. Invested Capital = Total Assets – Cash and ST Investments + Past Accounting Charges That Reduced Invested Capital
      3. ROIC can demonstrate, after legitimate expenses, what the company earns from its operating businesses and how efficiently it has used shareholders’ money to generate that return
      4. ROIC of 10% is attractive, 6-7% in special occasions with strong brand name, focused management or the company being temporarily unpopular
   3. you can also look for comparable companies that have been acquired recently for valuations for the company you are looking at
      1. check the “Business Segments” (or “Management Discussion and Analysis”) section of the company’s annual report for industrial sector, revenues and earnings of each subsidiary
      2. then, check Factiva, ProQuest or LexisNexis for examples of other firms in the same industry that have been acquired
      3. then, look at past ARs for these companies for information about purchase price to earnings for those companies before acquisition
      4. this might reveal a “60-cent dollar”, a company whose assets and earnings are selling for 60% or less than the businesses might be worth to an acquirer

Chapter 20, JZ commentary

1. The first objective of investing: “Don’t lose.”; this is Graham’s “margin of safety” concept in a nutshell
2. Consider a market that is returning 5% a year, while you have found a stock that you think can grow at 10%; if you overpay for it and suffer a capital loss of 50% in the first year, it will take you 16 years to overtake the market, and nearly 10 years just to break even again
3. The biggest financial risk we face is ourselves; ask yourself the following questions:
   1. How much experience do I have? What is my track record with similar decisions in the past?
   2. What is the typical track record of other people who have tried this in the past?
   3. If I am buying, someone is selling. How likely is it that I know something they don’t know?
   4. If I am selling, someone else is buying. How likely is it that I know something they don’t know?
   5. Have I calculated how much this investment needs to go up to cover my taxes and trading expenses?
4. Then, make sure you have considered the consequences of being wrong by asking yourself:
   1. How much could I lose if I am wrong?
   2. Do I have other investments that will tide me over if this decision turns out to be wrong? Am I putting too much capital at risk?
   3. Have I demonstrated a high tolerance for risk by continuing to invest after large losses in the past?
   4. Am I relying on willpower alone to prevent me from panicking or have I made preparations in advance by diversifying and dollar-cost averaging?
5. “In making decisions under conditions of uncertainty, the consequences must dominate the probabilities. We never know the future.”
6. Never make the mistake of following investment crazes or putting all your eggs in one basket; if you make one error, you will have wiped yourself out
7. Instead, diversify, and always protect yourself from the consequences of being wrong just as much as you hope and plan to enjoy the benefits of being right

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Quotes – Getting Comfortable With Risk

All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible) but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.

~Niccolo Machiavelli

Doing The Hugh Hendry

Below is some commentary from Hugh Hendry I found in an FT.com editorial I since can not access as I don’t have a login. But I thought it was interesting when I first read it awhile back and I still think it’s interesting now. I meant to post it earlier. Rectifying my mistake:

For the moment, let us forget the chances of a hard landing in China. Forget the drama of Europe’s circus of politically inspired economic incompetency. Forget that the good news of the US economy’s succession of positive economic surprises is really bad news as fixed income managers have sold copious amounts of too cheap volatility and because it has made equity investors turn bullish, sending stock market volatility back to 2007 levels. This is dangerous. Improved US data may represent a classic short-term cyclical upturn amid a profound global deleveraging cycle.

Such moves have been commonplace for the past three years and have yet to prove a harbinger of any structural upswing. I worry that the pathological course of the last several years will see volatility rise sharply once again. Even so, there exists, in terms of my parochial world of hedge fund investing, a bigger issue.

I fear that my no longer small community has been compromised. Last year was generally very tough for long/short strategies and I commiserate with all concerned. But last year world class funds lost more than 15 per cent in just two months. Today they are celebrated again for making double digit returns in the last quarter even though they still languish below high water marks and their reputation for risk management, at least to those clients who have poured over their copious due diligence statements, has been sorely compromised.

You can probably live with that if you are a pension scheme or a large, sophisticated fund-of-fund because you have a global macro sub-sector that can benefit from short-term shifts in volatility. But the unfortunate thing is that this group exercised its stop losses somewhere between the great stock market rallies of 2009 and 2010. That is to say, they honoured the pact they had with clients. They adhered to the terms of their risk budget: they lost money and they reduced their positions. I fear that owing to this nasty experience the financial world is in danger of harvesting a monoculture of fund returns that could prove less than robust should the global economy suffer another deflationary reversal.

To my mind the situation has parallels with the plight of the banana. Today the world eats predominately just one type of banana, the Cavendish, but it is being wiped out by a blight known as Tropical Race 4, which encourages the plant to kill itself. Scientists refer to it as programmed death cell destruction. In stressful situations bananas fortify themselves by dropping leaves, killing off weaker cells so that stronger ones may live to fight anew. They operate a stop-loss system.

But modern mass production of single type bananas has replaced jungle diversity with commercial monocultural fields that provide more hosts to harbour the blight. The economy keeps producing stressful volatility events. Good managers keep shedding risk and monetising losses and are duly fired, leaving us with a monoculture of brazen managers who will never stop loss because they are convinced central banks will print more money.

Diversification has proven the most robust survival mechanism against failures of judgment by any one society, hedge fund manager or style. But what if we are now a single global hedge fund community afraid to take stop losses and convinced of an inflationary outcome to be all short US Treasuries and long real assets?

This is pertinent as I have always been fascinated by that second rout in US Treasuries in 1984, long after the inflation of the 1970s was met head on by Paul Volcker’s monetary vice and a deep recession. How could 10-year Treasury yields have soared back to 14 per cent and how could so many investment veterans have been convinced that a second even more virulent inflation wave was to hit the global economy?

Psychologists tell us the explanation is embedded deep in the mind. They refer to the “availability heuristic”. Goaded by the proximity to the last dramatic event, investors overreacted to the news that the US economy was pulling out of recession in 1984. They saw high inflation where there was none.

With this in mind, I would contend that it may take several more years before the threat of debt and deflation can be successfully exorcised from investors’ minds, even if the global economy were not set on such a perilous course. Such is the potency and memory of 2008’s crash that anything remotely challenging to the economic consensus could be met by a sudden and severe reappraisal to the downside.

Should such an event send 30-year Treasury yields back to their 2008 low of 2.5 per cent, we believe enlightened investors might better be served by thinking the opposite. Only then might it prove rewarding to short the government bond market and embrace what may turn out to be a much promised once in a lifetime buying opportunity for risk assets.

 

Video – Mohnish Pabrai On Forbes

 

Intelligent Investing with Steve Forbes presents Mohnish Pabrai, managing partner, Pabrai Funds

Major take-aways from the interview:

• Attitude is the most important attribute of any investor
• The value investor’s attitude advantage is the ability to wait for the right opportunity
• “All man’s miseries stem from his inability to sit in a room alone and do nothing” channeling Pascal into an investor appropriate format: “All investment managers’ miseries stem from an inability to sit alone in a room and do nothing”
• Ideal investment industry: gentlemen of leisure who go about their leisurely tasks and when the world is severely fearful is when they put their leisurely tasks aside and go to work
• People think entrepreneurs take risk; in reality, they do everything they can to minimize risk– low risk, high return bets
• Pabrai Funds has a “moat” by mirroring Buffett’s 25% performance after 6% hurdle because it aligns his interests with his clients; total fund expenses are 10-15 basis points, with Pabrai’s salary and staff paid for out of performance fees
• Shorting makes no sense because maximum upside is a double and maximum downside is bankruptcy
• Do not talk to company management because they are high charisma sales people and will pitch you on optimism, not realism
• Big fan of the Checklist Manifesto, has a checklist of 80 items he looks over before making an investment
• Pioneers are the people who get filled with arrows

Geoff Gannon Digest #5 – A Compilation Of Ideas On Investing

Why I Concentrate On Clear Favorites And Soggy Cigar Butts

• Graham and Schloss had >50 stocks in their portfolio for much of their career
• They turned over their portfolios infrequently; probably added one position a month
• To avoid running a portfolio that requires constant good ideas:
  • increase concentration
  • increase hold time
  • buy entire groups of stocks at once
• With his JNets, Gannon purchased a “basket” because he could not easily discriminate between Japanese firms which were both:
  • profitable
  • selling for less than their net cash
• Portfolio concentration when investing abroad is based upon:
  • which countries do I invest in?
  • how many cheap companies can I find in industries I understand?
  • how many family controlled companies can I find?
• Interesting businesses are often unique

How Today’s Profits Fuel Tomorrow’s Growth

• To elements to consider with any business’s returns:
  • How much can you make per dollar of sales?
  • How much can you sell per dollar of capital you tie up?
• Quantitative check: Gross Profit/ ((Receivables + Inventory + PP&E) – (Payables + Accrued Expenses))
• Once an industry matures, self-funding through retained earnings becomes a critical part of future growth; it’s the fuel that drives growth
• A company with high ROIC isn’t just more profitable, it can more reliably grow its own business
• Maintaining market share usually means increasing capital at the same rate at which the overall market is growing
• Higher ROIC allows for the charting of a more reliable growth path
• Industries where ROIC increases with market share present dangers to companies with low market share or low ROIC
• The easiest place to get capital is from your own successful operations; tomorrow’s capital comes from today’s profits

Why Capital Turns Matter — And What Warren Buffett Means When He Talks About Them

• Capital turns = Sales/Net Tangible Assets
• Buffett nets tangible assets against A/P and accrued expenses; gives companies credit for these zero-interest liabilities, rather than assuming shareholders pay for all of a company’s assets
• Buffett’s businesses tend to have higher sales per dollar of assets
• Companies with higher sales per dollar of assets have higher ROIC than competitors even if they have the same margins
• There’s more safety in a business in an industry with:
  • adequate gross margins
  • adequate capital turns
• Industries dependent upon margins or turns open themselves to devastating attacks from the player who can maximize key variables you control:
  • price
  • cost
  • working capital management
  • etc.
• Companies often compete on a specific trait; it has to be a trait that is variable and can be targeted for change

How to Lose Money in Stocks: Look Where Everyone Else Looks — Ignore Stocks Like These 15

• It’s risky to act like everyone else, looking at the same stocks everyone else looks at, or by entering and exiting with the crowd
• Don’t worry about which diet is best, worry about which diet you can stick to; find an adequate approach you can see through forever
• Having Buffett-like success requires every day commitment
• You should aim to earn 7% to 15% a year for the rest of your investing life if you aren’t going to fully commit like Buffett did
• A good investment:
  • reliable history of past profitability
  • cheap in terms of EV/EBITDA
  • less analyst coverage
• A list of such stocks:
  • The Eastern Company (EML)
  • Arden (ARDNA)
  • Weis Markets (WMK)
  • Oil-Dri (ODC)
  • Sauer-Danfoss (SHS)
  • Village Supermarket (VLGEA)
  • U.S. Lime (USLM)    
  • Daily Journal (DJCO)
  • Seaboard (SEB)
  • American Greetings (AM)
  • Ampco-Pittsburgh (AP)
  • International Wire (ITWG)
  • Terra Nitrogen (TNH)
  • Performed Line Products (PLPC)
  • GT Advanced Technologies (GTAT)

Interview With Jim Chanos On Shortseller Psychology, China

Jim Chanos interviewed by Opalesque TV, discussing the differences between long and short investor psychology, and the economic dynamics in China: