Dongfeng Motor (489 HK). Value investing in a nutshell. Stock is up 16.1% YTD, + a mid to high single digit yield, and yet 99% of the time over the past 12 months you've looked wrong and long a value trap, and underperformed.
The iron law of value investing is that in order to generate excess returns at below average risk over the long term, you need to be willing to look wrong and underperform for long stretches of time. There is no free lunch. It's always been that way - it's not a new thing.
Value investing outperforms over the long term, but the nature of that outperformance is a combination of (1) long periods of lackluster returns; and (2) short bursts of extreme outperformance. Momentum/growth strategies are the exact opposite.
The nature of this outperformance is psychologically difficult for most investors, who prefer & gravitate to constant positive reinforcement by steadily rising prices, and it's also hard from a business/client perspective, as clients also prefer steady gains. It's why it works.
Why is it so? It sounds trite, but they way stocks usually get cheap is by going down/sideways for a very long time, and it is precisely this long period of poor returns that deters people from buying/holding obviously cheap stocks, thwarting the forces of market efficiency.
However, when the stock starts to go up, you now remove the primary reason why people don't want to own it. Since it's obviously cheap and now going up, market efficiency forces rapidly bid the stock up.
Liquidity flywheels also play a role. Falling stocks yield underperformance, which lead to redemptions and forced sales, perpetuating the cycle. When the stocks start to go up, this flywheel reverses and the stocks rapidly revert to more sensible levels, and do so very quickly.

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More from @LT3000Lyall

1 Sep
The tech bubble is w/in 12-24mths of a major bust IMO. Growth has not structurally accelerated during pandemic- it has been pulled forward. Comps will be tough from 2021; growth will slow; supply & competition is ramping & when supply>demand it will get ugly. Will start in 2021.
In the dot. com bubble, people forgot tech companies are subject to the same prosaic laws of demand & supply and competition as other industries. The pandemic has accelerated growth temporarily, as coys the world over clamour for digital transformation & consumer adoption hastens
Almost every software/tech company you look at is growing very rapidly at present. All the BNPL companies in Ausy are all growing fast. This is not sustainable & is a temporary demand/supply imbalance. Growth will slow from 2021 and supply ramp, and it's going to get competitive.
Read 8 tweets
8 Jul
I think ppl are far too confident in AMZN's future all-encompassing dominance.
*WMT and TGT having significant success with omni, & more profitably than AMZN.
*Shopify providing e-com access for smaller merchants outside AMZN; + social commerce.
*AWS falling behind GOOG & MSFT.
AMZN is a great company with a great future, but people are getting carried away & ignoring the risks. The biggest risk for AMZN is a lack of focus. More focused players are already starting to chip away at edges of many of their businesses. AMZN is also way behind outside US.
AMZN is up against focused players in all areas of its business. Eg. companies like Ocado which can scale and offer specialised outsourced e-com fulfillment capabilities to traditional groceries stores for eg. Other companies partner; AMZN tries to go it alone and dominate.
Read 10 tweets
2 Jul
For AMZN to generate a 10% pre-tax cash-flow return from here (at $2,878), it needs to distribute US$144bn annually into perpetuity, starting from today - almost 3x AAPL's current profits. And that number compounds by 10% a year for every year that goes by without them paying it.
Seven years from now, assuming they haven't paid any dividends during that period, and including 1-1.5% annual stock dilution, that number will exceed US$300bn.
Warren Buffett used similar math in one of his shareholder letters circa 1999 to highlight how unlikely it was Cisco would justify it's valuation. He also pointed out at the time how investors forget investors as a whole cannot take more out of market than what companies earn.
Read 4 tweets
26 Jun
Throughout history, the intelligentsia has often played a large role in inciting racial/inter-group hatred which has sometimes lead to civil war, authoritarian government, and even genocide. It is pretty easy to see how that occurred. We are witnessing it in our own times (cont).
The playbook is always the same. Disparities in economic outcomes between group A and B are used as evidence A is oppressing B for A’s benefit. B is told not to emulate and learn from A, but that A is profiting at B’s expense, and everything bad that happens to B is A’s fault.
This leads to resentment and anger by B towards A, and to greater group consciousness. This creates a belief that implementing policies that dispossess or disadvantage A to the benefit of B are justified and needed, and also creates resentments that can bubble over into violence.
Read 16 tweets
12 Mar
Probably stupid to tweet this, and I do so with suitable humility knowing full well I could be totally wrong (no one really knows), but this really does feel like the bottom (for markets; not the economy/corona spread).

1/n
When prices fall exponentially faster and faster, it is akin to an 'anti-bubble' - the inverse of climactic tops during bubbles, for much the same reasons in reverse. It is very characteristic of market lows.
Now I'll acknowledge many markets are still expensive. I'm still not fairly pessimistic on Australia for e.g. which is not only still expensive, but late cycle. But you can't ignore that bond yields are also at record lows and more CB stimulus is coming.
Read 13 tweets

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