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Boredom Is a Good Friend of Long-term Investors

Geoff said in the last post that: “simply learning to love illiquidity, boredom, and a lack of headlines in your portfolio might be enough to improve your returns.” The key word is boredom. I think 3 main reasons for a stock to be boring are low growth, lack of catalyst, and a so-so price. A stock with these characteristics is not attractive to growth investors, value investors, and momentum investors. But sometimes these characteristics hide qualities that can generate great long-term returns.

Quality of Growth

I once made a bold statement that Frost promises the best growth investors can find. I think that Frost can have 7-8% growth for the next 20-30 years and I don’t normally find a stock with such high growth potential. My friend was surprised at my claim and he said “you can’t say that because 20% growth is a certainty for companies like Valeant!” What he said represents the attitude towards growth of most people. To them, a single-digit growth isn’t stellar. To me, 7-8% growth is a treasure. That doesn’t mean I’m less demanding. I’m just focused more on quality of growth.

Low growth can be valuable if ROIC is high. Let’s compare Bristow, Frost, and Omnicom.

Over the last 10 years, Bristow’s revenue almost tripled from $674 million in 2004 to $1,859 million in 2014, which translates into an 11% annual growth rate. Annual sales growth was always higher than 10% except for the “bad” years between 2009 and 2011. The problem is that pre-tax ROIC is just about 9%. So, Bristow had to use debt and equity to finance growth. Over the period, net debt increased by $650 million. Share count increased by more than 50% from 23 million to 36 million mostly as a result of the issuance of $223 million in convertible preferred stock in 2007.

Frost is a better business. Frost grew deposits from $7,767 million in 2004 to $22,053 million in 2014. That means intrinsic value has compounded annually by 11% over the last 10 years. Unlike Bristow, Frost can make 18-20% ROE. So, Frost was able to return 40% of total earnings over the last 10 years.

Omnicom is even better. Omnicom grew sales by 5% over the last 10 year while returning 110% of earnings to shareholders. Omnicom doesn’t need to retain earnings to grow. It actually received about $1 billion from the decrease in its negative working capital over the period.

Omnicom’s 5% growth can be as valuable as Frost’s 8% growth.  If we pay 20 times after-tax earnings for both stocks, we can get similar returns. Omnicom can give us 5% growth and 5% yield, adding up to 10% total return. Frost can grow 8% while paying out 50% of earnings. So, it can give us 8% growth and 2.5% yield, adding up to 10.5% total return. A similar calculation shows that we can get 11.67% total return from Omnicom and 11.34% return from Frost if we pay 15 times after-tax …

Should We Care Why the Stocks We Buy are Cheap?

One of my favorite blogs, Value and Opportunity, recently did a post about how the best value stocks are often those that are not cheap by the most obvious numbers (P/E, P/B, etc.).

The post is entitled “Value Investing Strategy: Cheap for a Reason”. The basic argument of the post is that:

“…Especially in a market environment like now, cheap stocks are cheap for a reason. It is very unlikely that ‘you’ are the first and only one who knows how to run a screener and by chance you are the only one who can buy this great company at 3 times earnings which will quadruple within 6 months…The most important thing is to be really aware what the real problem is. If you don’t find the problem, then the chance is very high that you are missing something.”

This is not at all how I look at stocks.

I usually don’t know why a stock I’m buying is cheap. And I’m not sure I spend much time trying to figure out why someone else would or would not like the stock. I tend to just focus on whether I like the business and how much I’d “appraise” that business for.

I can sometimes come up with possible reasons for why a stock I like is cheap. But, I’m never sure those are the real reasons other people aren’t willing to buy the stock.

I don’t think Quan sees himself – and I know I don’t see myself – as a contrarian investor.

So, I assumed looking to see if a stock was “cheap for a reason” is something I simply don’t do.

At least that’s what I thought before looking through the textual record of what I actually said about each stock I picked.

In my last post, I mentioned 6 stocks that Quan and I picked for Singular Diligence which are now trading at a discount of 34% or greater to our original appraisal value. So, these are the 6 cheapest stocks we know of in intrinsic value – rather than traditional value metric – terms.

I decided to go through the record and check for two things.

One, how cheap are these stocks on the traditional value metrics. I will use Morningstar’s measures of P/E, P/B, and Dividend Yield for this.

Two, what reason did I give (in the issue where I picked the stock) for why that stock might be cheap.

Here are the 6 stocks.

Hunter Douglas

Discount to Appraisal Value: 58%

Forward P/E: 9.6x

P/B: 1.4x

Dividend Yield: 3.6%

Why I Said it Might Be Cheap:

“Hunter Douglas is an obscure stock. The Hunter Douglas brand is American. So, the company’s name is American. However, the stock trades in Europe. The company reports its results in U.S. dollars. But, the stock trades in Euros. The stock is 81% owned by the Sonnenberg family.”

(Note: Quan and I appraised this company – which sells shades and blinds mostly …