So what exactly is this value investing that led Warren Buffett to be so rich?
In Value Investing, you are essentially buying stocks — which essentially is a part ownership in a business — that is worth $1 for 50 cents (this is just an analogy). There are many reasons why you can buy a stock that is worth $1 for 50 cents.
One of the reason is that many stock investors do not understand what they are buying or selling — they simply buy and sell stocks based on hot tips or based on chart patterns.
That forces them (at times) to sell a good stock at a cheap price.
In which, the practitioners of value investing will take advantage of that by buying the stock they sold.
“Value investing in fundamentally different from stocks trading.While the latter focuses more on price movements and other technical indicators, the former focuses on analysing the business behind the stocks and buying the stocks at a cheap price relative to the business value. This is done by first determining the rough intrinsic value of the business.” – Chris Lee Susanto
Value investing works because simply put, the stock market is not efficient.
That means that the stock market at points in time does not accurately reflect the true value of the business behind the stock.
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Here’s a great article published at Forbes recently regarding one of our favorite value investors, Joel Greenblatt. The article is written by Jack Schwager, author of the Market Wizards series, in which he recounts his interview with Joel Greenblatt for one of his books. Schwager recalls some of the insightful parts of the interview included Greenblatt’s successful investing strategy and his three golden rules of value investing.
Here is an excerpt from the Forbes article:
Is “value investing” correct? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
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Mention value investing and the phrase brings up different connotations for different people.
Some investors see value as a style as a dead regime, something stuffy old investors like Warren Buffett (Trades, Portfolio) live by, and their devout following of the strategy has cost them big time as they have missed out on some of the market’s best opportunities.
On the other hand, you have the devout value investors, those who remain fully committed to the strategy initially set out by Benjamin Graham and his partner David Dodd, all those years ago, even though this strategy has generated relatively lackluster returns over the past decade.
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One of our readers shared the transcript of a roundtable talk among Seth Klarman, David Abrams, and Howard Marks almost 10 years ago. It is a very long read (22 pages) but if you’d like to learn about these great value investors and their investment approaches, it is a great read. I will share some excerpts from each of these investors and share the link at the bottom of this article. Here is how Seth Klarman summarized what Baupost does:
“In terms of investing I would say that there is no exact formula for what we do. We try to use all the value investing principles we know. The world is imperfect. The world doesn’t just dish up net, nets all the time. The world doesn’t dish up stocks trading below cash all the time, doesn’t deliver fine businesses at eight times earnings all the time. So we look very hard for mis-pricings, for information asymmetries. for supply/demand imbalances, and we find ourselves at various times heavily in distress debt or no position in distress debt, significantly involved in equities and uninvolved in equities, very focused on private markets or uninvolved because you can create the same assets cheaper in the public market. So in a nutshell that’s our approach. Very opportunistic. We try to be not siloed the way many people are. We don’t have industry analysts we have generalists who can move quickly from working one day on a drug stock to another day on the distress debt of a bank, and another day even potentially on a mortgage security or real estate investment. That’s not easy but it does provide constant stimulation, a lot of cross-training, which people enjoy, and it also means that our resources will always be deployed in the most interesting areas all the time. So that’s Baupost in a nutshell.”
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If you question how ‘boring’ can be beautiful, you have been following the wrong investment strategy.
Too many people have the misconception that investing is glamorous. The reality is that glamour is the last thing you will find in the stock market, most especially if you plan on being successful.
Hedge fund guru, George Soros sums it up brilliantly: “If investing is entertaining, if you’re having fun, you’re probably not making any money. Good investing is boring.”
Sure, we have all heard of a stock market success story or two. You probably have an acquaintance who made a decent return from investing in a tech stock that tripled in price before selling. Maybe even someone who inadvertently timed the 2008-09 crash correctly. In most cases, these successes are short-lived and can be attributed to pure luck. Although these ‘successful investing’ stories make for good dinner-party conversation, they are by far the exception among prosperous independent investors.
The fact is investors who produce the flashiest returns, time and time again, usually do so in the most unglamorous manner. A great example is Warren Buffett, who built an empire investing in so-called ‘boring’ stocks.
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Some years ago Seth Klarman gave a fantastic speech at the MIT Sloan Investment Management Club. During his speech Klarman suggested that the mainstream approach to investing has is backwards saying:
“Right at the core, the mainstream has it backwards. Warren Buffett often quips that the first rule of investing is to not lose money, and the second rule is to not forget the first rule. Yet few investors approach the world with such a strict standard of risk avoidance. For 25 years, my firm has strived to not lose money—successfully for 24 of those 25 years—and, by investing cautiously and not losing, ample returns have been generated. Had we strived to generate high returns, I am certain that we would have allowed excessive risk into the portfolio—and with risk comes losses.”
He went on to discuss how you can successfully exploit opportunities by remaining calm, cautious and focused in the manic world of investing. Here is an excerpt from that speech:
As the father of value investing, Benjamin Graham, advised in 1934, smart investors look to the market not as a guide for what to do but as a creator of opportunity. The excessive exuberance and panic of others generate mispricings that can be exploited by those who are able to keep their wits about them.
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12In nine posts, stretched out over almost two months, I have tried to describe how companies around the world make investments, finance them and decide how much cash to return to shareholders. Along the way, I have argued that a preponderance of publicly traded companies, across all regions, have trouble generating returns on the capital invested in them that exceeds the cost of capital. I have also presented evidence that there are entire sectors and regions that are characterized by financing and dividend policies that can be best described as dysfunctional, reflecting management inertia or ineptitude. The bottom line is that there are a lot more bad companies with bad managers than good companies with good ones in the public market place. In this, the last of my posts, I want to draw a distinction between good companies and good investments, arguing that a good company can often be a bad investment and a bad company can just as easily be a good investment. I am also going argue that not all good companies are well managed and that many bad companies have competent management.
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This article appears on valuewalk.com and can be found here.
Who Is Benjamin Graham?
History has designated Benjamin Graham as the Father of Value Investing. He not only developed the concept but also lived it, both as a practitioner with a remarkable track record and as a professor who profoundly impacted his students.
Among his many accolades, Father of Value Investing is Benjamin Graham’s greatest title. Some of his other designations are Dean of Wall Street
and Dean of Security Analysis
.
Father of Value Investing
His research paved the way for today’s stock market analysts by introducing the concept of fundamental analysis and raising awareness of the correlation between stock prices and a company’s intrinsic value.
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