If Ben Graham popularized "value investing", Phil Fisher was the OG of "growth investing". Buffett even characterized his philosophy as "85% Graham and 15% Fisher".
Just read a good piece on Fisher. Some quick notes.
2/8 Here's how Fisher defined "growth company". The last point really stands out:
"the advantage cannot be meaningfully gauged with numbers and mathematical formulas."
3/8 "no investment philosophy, unless it is just a carbon copy of someone else’s approach, develops in its complete form in any day or year. In my own case, it grew over a considerable period of time"
4/8 Fisher started his firm after losing his job during Great Depression. In 1932, he was making $2.99/month, equivalent of newspaper hawker's wages.
Yet Fisher considered those two years "most profitable years" since he was able to build a strong foundation for his business.
5/8 When is a good time to buy?
"virtually any time"
Fisher had a deep aversion to macro forecasts. He didn't mince his words on the futility of such an endeavor.
6/8 When is a good time to sell?
Fisher provides only three reasons to sell (preferably infrequently). See image.
Note that Fisher never had more than 17 companies in his portfolio, usually <10, and top 3 often was 75% of his AUM.
7/8 A good adage to remember:
"there are enough spectacular opportunities among established companies that ordinary individual investors should make it a rule never to buy into a promotional enterprise."
This is Bezos' last letter as CEO of Amazon. I have been saying this for a while: Buffett and Bezos are two best business writers of our time.
It truly is a fitting letter to end Bezos' tenure. Here are my highlights.
2/ "...more than 7/8ths of the shares, representing $1.4 trillion of wealth creation, are owned by others. Who are they? ...they’re Mary and Larry, who sent me this note out of the blue just as I was sitting down to write this shareholder letter"
3/ One of the best arguments in favor of capitalism is this opportunity for Mary and Larry to participate in the wealth creation machine by an inventive, ambitious, and motivated strangers.
It's not just family office and hedge funds. Let's not forget the "Mary and Larry".
1/ Thread: Market-Expected Return on Investment (MEROI)
@mjmauboussin and Dan Callahan published their new piece today on MEROI. Regular followers know I'm a big fan of Mauboussin and a big believer of expectations investing approach.
Let's dig into the new piece.
2/ A company's valuation is just sum of two things:
Steady-State Value (SSV) + Present Value of Growth Opportunities (PVGO)
SSV = NOPAT capitalized by Cost of Capital
PVGO depends on three things...
3/
a. the spread between ROIC and Cost of Capital
b. how much a company can invest
c. how long a company can find value-creating opportunities
Calculating SSV is more straight forward, but PVGO is quite tricky and is riddled with many assumptions/forecasts.
@NeckarValue wrote a very thoughtful piece on the contrasting approach required for building business vs practicing craft. While the piece primarily focused on managing money, I was thinking of “MBI Deep Dives” while reading it.
2/ There is certainly a tension between the two.
One of the most common suggestions I have received from my well wishers is I should put out more free content to increase my subscriber base.
3/ Other notable suggestions include doing consulting for hedge funds/long-only PMs, and prepare educational content for beginner/intermediate investors.
These are all solid advices for building a business. Unfortunately, these also have clear trade-offs.
LULU had a decent Q4. Topline grew ~24% vs guidance of mid-teens.
Overall, FY'21 revenue grew ~11% even though DTC doubled. Mirror also contributed $170 mn last year.
Key highlights from earnings call.
2/8 In Q4, women's segment grew ~20%, still ahead of men's growth reversing the trend seen in the last few years.
Apparently men shop more in stores vs women, and management expects men's sales to pick up as stores start to operate in full capacity this year.
3/8 LULU cited 1% market share gain in broader adult activeware market in 2020.
International revenue grew 31% in 2020 and estimate just 14% penetration in outside NA market. New EVP in International markets will lean into some key markets.
Exactly five decades ago, Bangladesh became an independent nation on this day.
Dubbed as a basket case and despite a famine that followed a few years after the war, Bangladesh mostly surprised the whole world.
2/5 A country with a size of the New York State but the half the population of the US, Bangladesh was supposed to crumble, but it hasn’t.
Bangladesh may have surprised the world, but most Bangladeshis do have a sense of melancholy.
3/5 Many Bangladeshis know someone who they lost during the war. When you pay such a high price to be independent, you want to be compensated with bit of a utopia that makes the sacrifice worth it.
1/9 Thread: The agony and ecstasy of concentrated portfolio
JPM recently updated their famous paper on the concentrated portfolios. Just like the earlier two, it is a very humbling read.
Given the pick up in volatility, perhaps the danger of concentration is more intuitive now.
2/9 "more than 40% of all companies that were ever in the Russell 3000 Index experienced a “catastrophic stock price loss”, which we define as a 70% decline in price from peak levels which is not recovered."
3/9 Take a minute to read this. If you have been told "stocks always go up", I have news for you.
It's a very hard endeavor we all still choose to do, for better or worse.