Posts By: Geoff Gannon

How Can Long-Term Value Investors Make the Most of This Week’s Short-Term Volatility?

Andrew and I just did a podcast about volatility. And, of course, when we say “volatility” I want to remind everyone that’s a codeword for “downside volatility”. Nobody minds upside volatility. There are basically two topics worth discussing when it comes to volatility and how you as an investor should behave. One is how to “handle” volatility – psychologically and such. The other is how to take advantage of volatility. If we go back and think about Ben Graham’s Mr. Market metaphor – it’s really all about volatility. Mr. Market’s existence really only benefits you if he is giving you wildly different quotes over some period of time. Sure, it doesn’t have to be day-to-day. But, if all stocks are rising by similar, gradual amounts over time – a public quote for your shares doesn’t give you much benefit in selling one thing and buying another. You need either relative moves among stocks – where you own an airline stock down a lot and a healthcare stock that’s rising in price – or you need very different quotes on the same stock depending on the day. There’s an old article (but a good one) up on the Focused Compounding site that talks about the concept of “value trading”. This is where a value investor owns maybe 5 stocks he really likes for the long-run. But, in any given year – one of these stocks will rise a lot closer to his estimate of intrinsic value while others will fall. For example, Warren Buffett’s stock portfolio at Berkshire Hathaway rose something like 40% last year. Obviously, the underlying business’s earnings power barely budged. Maybe it rose 5%. Maybe not even that. You’ll notice that Berkshire’s wholly owned businesses didn’t have any increase in their operating earnings. I think Berkshire’s partially owned businesses did a lot better. But, they didn’t do 40% better. So, in a year like that, you have some of your stocks rising a lot closer to your estimate of intrinsic value while others don’t. The obvious example at Berkshire of a stock that rose far faster than its intrinsic value last year would be Apple (AAPL).

Now, Buffett can’t “value trade”. Or, at least, he shouldn’t try to. Buffett has to put more and more cash to work each month, quarter, and year. If he sells any of his Apple stock – he has to find somewhere else to put it. And, because he owns such big chunks of the public companies he’s in – that’s a problem. This is a problem even for much smaller investors. Andrew and I run a fund where we have allocations to specific stocks that are in part based on how much of the fund we’d like in those stocks – but, also partially based on simply how much of those stocks we can own. This issue mostly crops up when a fund has more assets under management than the market cap – or, at least, the “float” – of the company …

The “Element of Compound Interest”: When Retaining Earnings is the Key to Compounding and When it Isn’t

In my first two articles about Warren Buffett’s letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, I talked about Berkshire’s year-by-year results as a stock and about Warren Buffett’s approach to holding both stocks and businesses. Today, I want to talk about a very interesting section of Buffett’s letter that doesn’t (directly) seem to have all that much to do with either Berkshire or Buffett. This section starts with the name of a man Buffett has mentioned before “Edgar Lawrence Smith”. It also mentions a book review Buffett has mentioned before. In 1924, Smith wrote a book called “Common Stocks as Long Term Investments”. Keynes reviewed that book. He said two very interesting things in that review. The one Buffett quotes from this year goes:

“Well-managed industrial companies, do not, as a rule distribute to the shareholders the whole of their earned profits. In good years, if not in all years, they retain a part of their profits and put them back into the business. Thus there is an element of compound interest operating in favor of the sound industrial investment. Over a period of years, the real value of the property of a sound industrial is increasing at compound interest, quite apart from the dividends paid out to the shareholders.”

This is obviously the most important concept in stock investing. It is the entire reason why stocks outperform bonds over time. Investors – even after this book was published – tend to overvalue bonds and undervalue stocks. Academics call this a “risk premium” for stocks. But, on a diversified basis – it doesn’t make a lot of sense to say it represents long-term risk. It does represent volatility. It also represents uncertainty as to the exact size of performance and the timing of that performance. But, in most years, there really hasn’t been a lot of uncertainty that a 25-50 year old putting his money 100% into stocks will end up with more value when he’s 55-80 than the 25-50 year old putting his money 100% into bonds. The market doesn’t usually undervalue the dividend portion of stocks. Sometimes it does. There have been times – most a very, very long time ago – where you could buy a nice group of high quality stocks yielding more than government bonds (and even less commonly, corporate bonds). To this day, individual stocks sometimes do yield more than bonds. I can think of a few countries (a very few) where you can buy perfectly decent, growing businesses yielding more than the government bonds in those countries (though this is usually due to very low bond yields, not very high dividend yields). And I could think of a few stocks that yield more than some junk bonds right now. But, there’s an important caveat here. The stocks that seem safe and high yielding retain very, very little of their earnings and grow by very, very low amounts. In other words, the element of compound interest is often smallest in the stocks with the highest …

How Buffett Holds: The Incredible Importance of the “Contrasting Trajectories” of Long-Term Winners and Losers

In my first article about Warren Buffett’s annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, I talked about how difficult it would’ve been to hold Berkshire stock during all the years when it rose so much so fast. That’s one underappreciated part of how successful Berkshire has been as an investment. Buy and hold often sounds like a simple strategy to follow. Berkshire has returned 20% a year compounded over more than 50 years. It would’ve been easy to hold the stock if it rose 20% a year every year. But, sometimes it got far ahead of itself – jumping 100% or more in price in a single year. And then, other times, the stock price lagged the intrinsic value gain for several years in a row. But, the long-term trend in Berkshire Hathaway’s results was one of compounding at about a ten percentage point a year advantage over the S&P 500. Today, I want to talk about a different underappreciated aspect of Berkshire’s compounding. Yesterday, we talked about how uneven the compounding was over time. Today, we’re going to talk about how uneven the compounding is in terms of sources.

Berkshire’s results are fueled a lot by its insurance operations. As an insurer, Berkshire tends to turn an underwriting profit. This gives Buffett a cost free form of money called float. Berkshire uses some of this float to invest in stocks and to buy entire businesses. The company uses its retained earnings to finance the rest of these two portfolios – one made up of private businesses 100% owned and the other made up of minority stakes in publicly traded companies. The underappreciated part of what Buffett does that we’ll be talking about today is exactly how he buys these businesses and these stocks. How he buys businesses is pretty normal. Most acquisitions done by big U.S. companies are done the same way. You buy basically 100% of a company using a combination of debt you raise, cash you have on hand, and maybe (Berkshire does this only occasionally) shares of your own stock. You make the purchase at one single point in time. Sometimes you might draft some kind of earn-out agreement where the former owners (who often stay on to manage the business you now own) make more money if the business they sold to you hits certain targets over the first few years you own it. But, that’s a very small part of the overall purchase price. We can simplify this by assuming you pay “x dollars” for the stock upfront in cash and then hold the business forever. That’s how most acquisitions work.

What a lot of investors don’t appreciate is that Buffett runs his stock portfolio a lot like he runs his stable of 100% owned businesses. Buffett buys and holds his shares in a company in a totally different way from almost any other investors out there. And this has some pretty big implications when it comes to just how the compounding of his …

Ask Yourself: In What Year Would You Have Hopped Off the Warren Buffett Compounding Train?

Warren Buffett’s annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders was released today. It starts – as always – with the table comparing the annual percentage change in Berkshire Hathaway with the annual percentage change in the S&P 500 with dividends included. Long time readers of the Buffett letter will remember when the change in book value of Berkshire Hathaway was included. That’s been removed. We are left with the change in per-share market value of Berkshire Hathaway.

Today, I’m just going to focus on this table. Over the next few days, I’ll talk about a few different parts of Buffett’s letter I found interesting. But, one of the most interesting pages in the letter is the very first one. The one with the table showing Berkshire’s performance vs. the S&P 500.

What’s notable about this table? One, Berkshire has outperformed the S&P 500 by about 10% a year over more than 50 years (1965-2019). Berkshire has compounded its market value at about 20% a year while the S&P 500 has done 10% a year. What’s also notable is the many very big years for Berkshire as a stock. On my print out of the letter, I circled some years that stood out to me. Basically, I just assumed that it’s incredibly rare for the S&P 500 to ever have a return of around 50% a year. Generally, an amazing year for the S&P 50 would be one like what we saw last year (up something over 30%). If you are completely in the S&P 500 index, your portfolio is not going to have up years of 40%, 60%, or 120%. Berkshire’s stock price sometimes does go up that much. Or, rather – it sometimes did. It hasn’t lately.

Berkshire had amazing up years – as a stock, these don’t necessarily match up with business results – two times in the 1960s, three times in the 1970s, three times in the 1980s, twice in the 1990s and then never again since the late 1990s. Berkshire’s stock has gone over 20 years with no what I’d call amazing up years. Any good year Berkshire has had as a stock in the last 20 years has been the kind of up year an index like the S&P 500 is also capable of. This obviously tamps down on Berkshire’s long-term performance potential. Most stocks that have amazing long-term compounding records will achieve those records with a bunch of short-term upward spurts in their stock price like Berkshire had in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. In the last 20 years, Berkshire has had several years where returns were in the 22-33% range. Those are great years. But, they are years the S&P 500 is also capable of having (it was up 32% last year). The disappearance of these very big up years – the “lumpy” outperformance – in Berkshire as a stock explains a lot of why the stock performed so well versus the S&P 500 for its first 30 years under Buffett and so much …