Thus, the concept of “risk parity.”  Lever every asset class up until it has the same volatility as common stocks. Under theoretical conditions, one could make extra money doing this, and with less risk than just a common stock portfolio.

That makes sense when few are doing it, but not when many are doing it.  When I worked for Hovde Capital Advisors, I highlighted to the group how hedge funds were forcing every asset class to the same level of riskiness.  A Grants Interest Rate Observer article on Leveraged Non-prime Commercial Paper is etched on my mind as emblematic of that era.

Risk parity can work so long as the total riskiness of the system does not get too high, as it did in 2007-8.  But if it does get too high, the assets that are levered face disadvantages versus volatile unlevered assets.  Failures of leverage feed on themselves, and lead to a real washout.  Failures of growth stocks don’t do that to the economy.

Risk parity turns managers into bankers, or worse yet, asset managers that specialize in non-AAA investment grade portions of structured securities deals.  Most asset managers are not used to thinking like bankers, largely because they think in terms of total return, and because they don’t have a balance sheet.  Their capital can run at will, unlike banks that have deposit stickiness, savings accounts, CDs, ability to borrow from the FHLBs, etc.  The banks can hold the assets to maturity, they have a buffer against losses in their capital, and don’t have to mark to market in an assiduous manner (though they *should* have to do so).

Think of the mortgage REITs in the most recent crisis — the ones that did the best were the least levered and had the longest terms for their repo lines.  In the short run, that costs more than the vain idea that one can roll over their repo lines every night, and that repo haircuts won’t rise.  Crises lead to a failure of both ideas, together with a set of forced sellers driving down the price of assets being repo-ed, which sometimes leads to a cascade where repo terms get progressively tighter, and only those that were the most conservative at the start of the crisis survive.

There is a Wall Street aphorism, “The fool does at the end of a bull market what the wise man does at its beginning.”  Risk parity falls into that bucket.  Early adopters of new asset classes and liability structures typically do well, but when they become mainstream, the dynamics can be ugly, as we learned in 2007-present.

So ignore the idea of risk parity.  Risk managers are not bankers, they don’t have the capacity to play leveraged spread games to maturity.  Risk parity if practiced on a large scale will produce wipeouts akin to the recent crisis.

How bad are individual investors  at investing?  Bad, very bad.  But what if we limit it to a passive vehicle like the Grandaddy of all ETFs, the S&P 500 Spider [SPY]?  Should be better, right?

I remember a study done by Morningstar, where the difference between Time and Dollar-weighted returns was 3%/year on the S&P 500 open end fund for Vanguard, 1996-2006.

But here’s the result for the S&P 500 Spider, January 1993- September 2011.  Time-weighted return: 7.09%/year.  Dollar-weighted: 0.01%/yr.  Gap: 7%/yr+

Why so much worse than the open-end fund?  Easy.  Unlike the professional managers at Vanguard, and the relatively long term investors they attract, the retail short term traders of SPY trade badly; they arrive late, and leave late on average.

There is far more analysis to be done here, but to me, this confirms that Jack Bogle was right, and ETFs would be a net harm to retail investors.  The freedom to trade harms average investors, and maybe a lot of professionals as well.  It may also indicate that short-term trading as practiced by technicians may underperform in aggregate.  Not sure about that, but the conclusion is tempting.

One thing I will say: I am certain that profitable trading is not easy.  If you are tempted to trade for a living, the answer is probably don’t.

Anyway, here’s my spreadsheet on the topic:

Full disclosure: I have a few clients short SPY, hedged against my long positions.

In the recent run-up, there was talk of the infallibility of equities.  This led to a higher level of variable compensation in the economy through option and share issuance and low pressure to raise fixed wages.  This was yet another form of hidden leverage, which hid the unprofitability of enterprises through share dilution.

That was written in 2001, after the flop of the Nasdaq.  I have sometimes said that bubbles are financing phenomena.  That’s true, but we can phrase it more generally: bubbles occur because of an asset-liability mismatch.  People go long a long-duration asset with short-duration funding.  The short duration funding can be borrowing, or vendor finance, or it can be a labor commitment in order to get equity or option awards.

People chase the long-term asset that seems so valuable, and give up time and interest (money’s version of time) to get it.  They give up more than they imagine for something of uncertain value.  In other words, a mania.  Give up something relatively certain in the short run for something with uncertain long run potential.

The attitude could be summed up with a conversation I heard in early 1998 between my boss and his best salesman, where the salesman said, “It’s a no-brainer, have the market pay your employees.”  His idea was that a constantly rising stock market would provide compensation to employees through stock awards, options, 401(k)s, etc., even as the market was straining at valuation limits.  It is probably a sign that the market is overheated, when market-based rewards become common.

Startups by their nature require that employees be flexible, and give up a lot of fixed guarantees.  What payments they receive at the beginning are small, and less than their work might deserve in most established contexts.  But there is the possibility of the big payoff, and the possibility of total loss.  The asset in question has a lot of variability, but the liability, the work that must be put in, is big, and may not vary much for success or failure.

In the tech bubble, many parties extended vendor credit because there were big profits to be made in the future.  Alas, but they lent to those with very uncertain prospects, and in March of 2000, the chain of leverage started to collapse, both for vendors, and for those that worked in the industries.  Just as hedge funds have a hard time holding onto good employees when performance goes bad, so it is for tech companies when financing dries up, and the stock price craters.  Rats desert the sinking ship.

“Free money” brings out the worst in people.  Do something small in the present and reap a huge future.  Sadly, it rarely works that way, except at the very beginning of a boom.  At the end of the boom, it is a maelstrom, with many people demanding to throw their money away in search of riches that will never be.

From a dated piece:

Crowd-following is common to humanity.  It takes a lot to stand apart from highly correlated behavior.  I’ve told this story before, but in late 1999, I was talking with my mother (a very good self-taught investor), she told me about many of my cousins who were speculating in tech stocks.  I said to her, “They don’t know anything about investing!”  My mom replied, “Oh, David.  You’re such a fuddy-duddy.  I just bought some Inktomi!”

Now, to set the record straight, that was just 1% (or less) of my mom’s assets, so an occasional flyer is acceptable.  Call it “Mad Money.”    For my cousins, it was most of their investable assets.  My mom is fine, and the fuddy-duddy did all right also, but the cousins swore off stock investing.

I am close to concluding that it is impossible to teach the average person how to do well in investing.  They don’t have the patience or the willingness to learn. (Few want to be called “fuddy-duddy” by their mothers.)

Getting rich quick is very rare, but it entrances some people several times in their lives, and rarely does it end well.  It is far better for most people to work hard in areas of the economy that are being rewarded, and invest excess cash in a mix of  stocks, long-dated investment grade bonds, money markets, and a little gold.

After all, it’s not what you make, it’s what you keep.

The market takes action against firms that carry positions bigger than their funding base can handle.  Temporarily, things may look good as the position is established, because the price rises as the position shifts from being a marginal part of the market to a structural part of the market.  After that happens, valuation-motivated sellers appear to offer more at those prices.  The price falls, leading to one of two actions: selling into a falling market (recognizing a true loss), or buying more at the “cheap” prices, exacerbating the illiquidity of the position.

When an asset management firm is growing, it has the wind at its back.  As assets flow in, they buy more of their favored ideas, pushing their prices up, sometimes above where the equilibrium prices should be.

As Ben Graham said, “In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine.”  The short-term proclivities of investors usually have no effect on the long run value of companies.  Rather, their productivity drives their long-term value.

There have been two issues with asset managers following a “value” discipline that have “flamed out” during the current crisis.  One, they attracted hot money from those who chase trends during the times where lending policies were easier, and the markets were booming.  And often, they invested in financials that looked cheap, but took too much credit risk.  Second, they invested in companies that were seemingly cheap, rather than those with a margin of safety.

My poster child this time is Fairholme Fund.  Now, I’ve never talked with Bruce Berkowitz; don’t know the guy at all.  Every time I read something by him or see a video with him, I think, “Bright guy.”  But when I look at what he owns, I often think, “Huh. These are the stocks you own if you are really bullish on financial conditions.”

Yesterday, I saw a statistic that said that his fund was 76% invested in financial stocks as of 8/31.  Now I believe in concentrated portfolios, and even concentrated by sector and industry, but this is way beyond my willingness to take risk.  From Fairholme’s 5/31/2011 semi-annual report to shareholders, here are the top 10 holdings and industries:

Aside from Sears, all of the top 10 holdings are financials.  And, of those financials that I have some knowledge of, they are all what I would call “complex financials.”

In general, unless you are a heavy hitter, I discourage investment in complex financials because it is hard to tell what you are getting.  Are the assets and liabilities properly stated?  Financial companies are just a gaggle of accruals, and the certainty of having the accounting right on an accrual entry decreases with:

• Company size (the ability of management to make sure values are accurate or conservative declines with size)
• Rapidity of the company’s growth
• Length of the asset or liability
• Uncertainty over when the asset will pay out, or when the liability will require cash
• Uncertainty over how much the asset will pay out, or when how much cash the liability will require

It’s not just a question of whether the assets will eventually be “money good.”  It is also a question of whether the company will have adequate financing to hold those assets in all environments.  For financials, that’s a large part of “margin of safety,” and the main aspect of what failed for many financials in the last five years.

Another aspect of “margin of safety” for financials is whether you are truly “buying it cheap.”  All financial asset values are relative to the financing environment that they are in.  Imagine not only what the assets will be worth if things “normalize,” or conditions continue as at present, but also what they would be worth if liquidity dries up, a la mid-2002, or worse yet, late 2008.

Also remember that financials are regulated, and the regulators tend to react to crises, often making a marginal financial institution do something to clean up at exactly the wrong time, which puts in the bottom for some set of asset classes.  Now, I’m not blaming the regulators (or rating agencies) too much; no one forced the financial company to play near the cliff.  Occasionally, for the protection of the system as a whole, the regulator shoves a financial off the cliff.  (or, a rating agency downgrades them, creating a demand for liquidity because of lending agreements that accelerate on downgrades.)

Finally, think about management quality.  Do they try to grow rapidly?  That’s a danger sign.  There is always the tradeoff between quality, quantity, and price.  In a good environment, you can get 2 out of 3, and in a bad environment, 1 out of 3.  Managements that sacrifice asset quality for growth are not good long run investments, they may occasionally be interesting speculations at the beginning of a new boom phase.

Do they use odd accounting metrics to demonstrate performance?  How much do they explain away one-time events?  Are they raising leverage to boost ROE, or are they trying to improve operations?  Do they try to grow through scale acquisitions?

Are they willing to let bad results show or not?  Even with good financial companies there are disappointments.  With bad ones, the disappointments are papered over until they have to take a “big bath,” which temporarily sets the accounting conservative again.

The above is margin of safety for financials — not just seeming cheapness, but management quality and financing/accounting quality.  They often go together.

Fairholme’s annual report should come out somewhere around the end of January 2012.  What I am interested in seeing is how much of his shareholder base has left given his recent disappointments with AIG, Sears Holdings, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Brookfield, and Regions Financial.  Even the others of his top 10 have not done well, and the fund as  a whole has suffered.  Mutual fund shareholders can be patient, but a mutual fund balance sheet is inherently weak for holding assets when underperformance is pronounced.

(the above are estimates, I may have made some errors, but the data derives from their SEC filings)

Now, we eat dollar-weighted returns. Only the happy few that bought and held get time-weighted returns.  And, give Fairholme credit on two points (though I suspect it will look worse when the annual report comes out):

• A 9.9% return from inception to 5/31/2011 is hot stuff, and,
• A 6.0% dollar-weighted return is very good as well.  Only losing 3.9% to mutual fund shareholder behavior is not great, but I’ve seen worse.

This is the problem of buying the “hot fund.”  Once a fund becomes the “Ya gotta own this fund” fund, future returns on capital employed get worse because:

• It gets harder to deploy increasingly large amounts of capital, and certainly not as well as in the past.
• Management attention gets divided, because of the desire to start new funds, and the complexity of running a larger organization.
• When relative underperformance does come, it is really hard to right the ship, because assets leave when you can least handle them doing so.  The manager has to think: “Which of my positions that I think are cheap will I liquidate, and what will happen to market prices when it is discovered that I, one of the major holders, is selling?”

That is a tough box to be in, and I sympathize with any manager that finds himself stuck there.  It can be a negative self-reinforcing cycle for some time.  My one bit of advice would be: focus on margin of safety.  If you do, eventually the withdrawals will moderate, and then you can work to rebuild.

If you can’t pay cash, it doesn’t matter what your assets are worth in “normal” times.  Banks should have planned in advance to make sure liquidity was always adequate, rather than doing the usual borrow short, lend long, that they usually do.

But after reading through the Fed ‘s proposal on bank solvency, I conclude that they may not get the picture.  They spend time on liquidity and other issues.  With liquidity, it is uncertain how they will view repo markets.  To me, those should be view as short-term finance of long dated assets.

During times of crisis, repo markets seize up, with rising repo haircuts.  Maybe I’ve read the Fed’s proposal wrong, but it seems that it neglects repo funding, which had a large effect on the recent crisis.

If banks had to be able to size their activity to survive a rise in repo haircuts equal to half of the highest that we have seen, it would probably be enough to make the issue go away, because the haircuts would be less likely to rise as a result of that restraint.

Now, I appreciate the perspective of this article from Dealbreaker on the topic.  All of the assets of the bank support all of the liabilities. In one sense, there are no assets that are tagged “equity” and others tagged “liability.”

P&C Insurance works a little different.  In that, premium reserves are invested in high quality short-term debt.  Claim reserves are invested in high quality debt similar to the period that claims are expected to be paid out over.  The remainder (the equity) can be invested in risk assets in order to earn a decent return for shareholders.  The idea is this: match liabilities with high quality assets of the same length, and take risk with the remainder of assets, realizing that they might might needed for liquidity in the worst case scenarios.

But really, banks should not be viewed differently.  They should invest like P&C or life insurers.  Invest in high quality assets equal to the terms of their liabilities — deposits (estimate stickiness), savings accounts (same), CDs (the term is known).  After that, take risks with the remaining assets in ways that reflect their comparative advantage, realizing that they might might needed for liquidity in the worst case scenarios.  Illiquid investments (e.g. private equity)  should not be allowed for a majority of of those investments.

If banks don’t engage in asset/liability mismatches aka maturity transformation, most of the risks of bank runs will go away.  And that is what I propose.  Note that if that happens, average people will have to pay some fee each year to have a checking account.  Banks would be liquidity utilities.

This fits under my rubric that the insurance industry is much better regulated than the banking industry.  Were it in my power to do so, I would turn banking regulation over to the states, and leave to the Fed control of monetary policy only.  You would soon see intolerant banking regulation, much like we see in insurance, and defaults would decline.

What could be better?

Some weeks ago, I was traveling, and heard an ad for a “financial seminar.”  This one sounded better than most, and featured the teachings of a well-known writer.  For fun, I signed up for the free seminar, just to see what would happen.

In reading what little I had before the seminar, I concluded that the only way of doing what they claimed was private ownership of high cash flow properties or businesses.  When I went to the seminar, I was not disappointed — that was the main idea.  Secondarily, they said you could get non-recourse financing easily, or equity limited partnerships to finance you.  (Money grows on trees…)

The first problem is this: mispriced properties are few and far between, and there is competition to buy them, generally.  Second, financing for property investment is scarce, especially for anything where the lender has no recourse to the borrower.

Passive Income

Passive income is an idol in these shows.  It seems like free money, but in practice it is difficult for investors to buy properties cheaply, finance them, and get rents that are far higher.

If it were that easy, they would create a REIT and do it themselves.  I asked the presenter at the end of the presentation: “If there are that many high cash flow properties available, why doesn’t a REIT buy them?  After all, they can finance more cheaply than you.”  Response: “What’s a REIT?”

That’s more than the wrong answer; it means you don’t know what you are doing.

Tactics

There was a lot of framing going on.  The package was worth $5000, but we have a special offer for $600.  Today for you?  $200.  After some people leave — “Yes, $200, but your spouse can some too.”  Oh and if you buy today, we’ll throw in these extras…

I suspect there were shills in the audience, who went back to buy.  I looked back several times, and estimated that 50-60 out of 200 went back to buy.  At the end, only 30 remained to hear the ending advice.

Regardless, the gross revenue of the day was around $6000, which supposedly covered only the cost of the presenter and the hotel room.  I have my doubts.

Other  Notes

Twice the presenter mentioned that the company that the author worked with was publicly traded.  Well, sort of, it deregistered in Spring 2011, and the company is worth less than $10 million today as it trades on the pinks.  What can you say for a company with a negative net worth, normally negative income, and very low trading volume?  (Leave aside the lawsuits…)

The presenter appealed to Buffett on not diversifying, but Buffett tells average investor that they are best invested in mutual funds.  Being undiversified carries with it the idea hat one is incredibly smart, and able to do far better then the averages.

The reason that they put forth a private market strategy is that it can’t be falsified.  That is the great thing about selling people on investing in real estate.  There is no way to put forth an audited track record.  You can tell anecdotes, and people buy your educational materials.

Summary

Be skeptical.  Nothing good is easy.  Anything advertised in investing can’t be that good.  I knew this, and my experience proved it as I reviewed the charlatans.

This is the first book that I have reviewed twice.  I reviewed the third edition of the book previously, but I am reviewing the sixth edition now.

Kindleberger places the manias, panics, and crashes on a common grid, to see their similarities,  In it he draws on a number of common factors:

• Loose monetary policy
• People chase the performance of the speculative asset
• Speculators make fixed commitments buying the speculative asset
• The speculative asset’s price gets bid up to the point where it costs money to hold the positions
• A shock hits the system, a default occurs, or monetary policy starts contracting
• The system unwinds, and the price of the speculative asset falls leading to
• Insolvencies with those that borrowed to finance the assets
• A lender of last resort appears to end the cycle

The advantage over the third edition is that you get to hear about the Asian crisis LTCM, the tech bubble, Madoff, and the present crisis (banking & housing, soon to be sovereigns).

The main point for readers is to beware when monetary policy is easy, banking regulation is lax, and many seem to favor buying the asset du jour, often with leverage.  What is self-reinforcing on the way up will be self-reinforcing on the way down, but with greater speed and ferocity, as bad debts have to be liquidated.

Quibbles

Hindsight is 20-20.  If the US Government had rescued Lehman, something else might have proven to be “too big to rescue,” that the government might allow to fail, but miss the connectedness of the institution.  I do think the US Government should have been a DIP lender to troubled firms, but not a buyer of equity.

Who would benefit from this book: Most investors would benefit from this book.  It will make you more skeptical of assets that seems to be doing unnaturally well; it will also make you more skeptical about catching falling knives in the market.  If you want to, you can buy it here: Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises.

Full disclosure: The publisher asked if I wanted the book.  I said “yes” and he sent it to me.

If you enter Amazon through my site, and you buy anything, I get a small commission.  This is my main source of blog revenue.  I prefer this to a “tip jar” because I want you to get something you want, rather than merely giving me a tip.  Book reviews take time, particularly with the reading, which most book reviewers don’t do in full, and I typically do. (When I don’t, I mention that I scanned the book.  Also, I never use the data that the PR flacks send out.)

Most people buying at Amazon do not enter via a referring website.  Thus Amazon builds an extra 1-3% into the prices to all buyers to compensate for the commissions given to the minority that come through referring sites.  Whether you buy at Amazon directly or enter via my site, your prices don’t change.

I’ll say that again: bubbles are easy to spot.  Why?  People have the wrong theory on bubbles.  They listen to those that don’t understand the efficient markets hypothesis, and think, “Prices are always fair predictors of the future.  I don’t have to think about the future as a result.” (It would be better to say that current prices are the short-term neutral line against which bets are placed.)

Don’t listen to academics on bubbles.  There have been booms and busts as far back as we can see.  If markets tend toward equilibrium, that is very well hidden — please require economists to take courses in history.  I mean this; I am not joking.  Neoclassical economics is not  a science; it is a religion, and with much less historical evidence to support it than Christianity has to support the historicity of the resurrection.

Why do I write on this? Partly because of Jason Zweig’s piece in the WSJ.  I ordinarily like what Jason writes; this is a rare exception.

Spotting bubbles gets easier when you don’t simply look at rising prices.  It is better to look at what is driving the rising prices.  How are players financing the purchase of assets is more important to view than even price trends.

It is hard to get a bubble without having an increase in debt-finance.  Financing with debt is cheaper, and riskier than financing with equity.  Financing long-term assets with short-term debt is even cheaper and riskier than financing with debt that matches the term of the asset.  Most bubbles end with some sort of financing time-mismatch, where the inability to renew short-term indebtedness in order to hold the asset leads to a panic, which leads some to say, “This is a liquidity crisis, not a solvency crisis.”  When you hear that leaden phrase, ordinarily, it is a solvency crisis, with long-dated assets of uncertain worth, and near-term liabilities requiring cash.

This is why the simplest way of looking for bubbles is to look for where debt is increasing most rapidily, and where the terms and conditions of lending have deteriorated.

But where do we have these issues today?  Let me offer a few areas:

• We have a chain of financing arrangements in the Eurozone where many banks might have a hard time surviving the failure of Greece, Italy, Portugal, and perhaps some other nations as well.  Failure of those banks might lead to bailouts by national governments and/or a significant recession.  Anytime financial firms as a group would have a hard time with the failure of a company, industry, government, etc., that is a sign of a lending bubble.
• There is a major imbalance in the world.  China trades goods to the US in exchange for promises to pay later.  Creditor-debtor relationships are meant to be temporary, not permanent as far as governments are concerned.  There may never be a panic here, but so long as the US retains control of its own currency, it is safe to say that they will never get paid back in equivalent purchasing power terms as when they exported the goods.
• China itself, though opaque, has a great deal of lending going on internally through its banks, pseudo-banks, and municipalities, a decent amount of which seems to be for dubious purpose at the behest of party members.  The government of China has always been able in the past to socialize those credit losses.  The question is whether covering those losses could be so large that the government follows an inflationary policy to eliminate the debts amid public discomfort.
• AAA and near-AAA government debt has been the most rapidly growing class of debt of late.  Maybe AAA governments that are unwilling to cut spending or raise taxes are a bubble all their own.  Remember, when you are AAA, the rating agencies let you make tons of financial promises — think of MBIA, Ambac, FGIC, AIG, etc.  Only when its is dreadfully obvious do the rating agencies cut a AAA rating, but once they do, it is often followed by many more cuts as the leverage collapses.

Now, my view here is both qualitative and quantitative.  To find bubbles there are indicators to watch, such as:

• Low credit spreads and equity volatility
• Low TED spreads
• High explicit/implicit leverage at the banks
• High levels of short term lending/borrowing (asset/liability term mismatches)
• Credit complexity and interconnectedness
• Poor Credit Underwriting
• Carry trades are common (many seek free money through seemingly riskless abritrages)
• Accommodative monetary/credit policy

All manner of things showing that caution has been thrown to the winds and lending is done on an expedited/casual basis is a sign that a bubble may be present.  Kick the tires, look around, analyze the psychology to see if you can find a self-reinforcing cycle of debt  that is forcing the prices of a group of assets above where they would normally be priced without such favorable terms.

Not that this analysis is perfect, but it follows the broad outlines of Kindleberger and Chancellor.  Speculative manias are normal to capitalism; don’t be surprised that they show up.  Rather, be of sane mind, and learn to avoid participating in manias, long before they become panics or crashes.

This book grew on me. Think of it as “How I hit a home run in investing.”  Who are the sluggers that earned outsized returns?

But, there is a problem here, and the book would have been better if it had recognized the problem.  In a few cases, the “greatest” made one (or a few) good decisions.  In more cases, they made many good decisions that compounded over time.

Was the first group lucky? Maybe, but when things work out for the reasons that you specify in advance, I think not.  The problem of the first group is repeatability, which for John Paulson, is proving to be an issue for his asset management shop at present.

The investment markets are cruel.  No matter what you have done in the past, the question comes, “What have you done for me lately?” The pressure is high, so no wonder that one of the investors that the book mentioned has gone into hiding.

There are two more dimensions here.  Imagine an investor that made some amazing gains , but then craters.  There are some brilliant investors for which that has been true: Livermore, Niederhoffer, Keynes, and more… how much credit should we give to the gains, if the price is flameouts?

Second, imagine someone who is the best in class at a low-return area of the asset markets, like Jim Chanos in short-selling, or Bill Gross at Pimco.  They may not earn that much, but the skill level is really high.  But is the skill level so high when they chose areas of the market to work in that are low -return?

Maybe the book should have featured private equity players, or real estate investors, or those that have managed university endowments well… there are other investors that would be comparable or better to the returns of some in this book.

Or ask, where is Buffett?  He would deserve a spot here, not for any one trade, but for the multitude of clever trades and mergers he has done over the years.

Quibbles

The book needed a better editor.  Information on Templeton is repeated.  Beyond that, most of the ideas on how an average investor could try to replicate the strategies of the great investors are akin to drinking near-beer.  They are too weak, but on the other hand, without the brilliance of the investors, an average person would not know when to but and sell.

With those caveats, I recommend the book highly.  It is well-written, and it will fill out knowledge gaps in amateur investors.

Who would benefit from this book: Most investors would benefit from this book.  If you want to, you can buy it here: The Greatest Trades of All Time: Top Traders Making Big Profits from the Crash of 1929 to Today (Wiley Trading).

Full disclosure: The publisher asked if I wanted the book.  I said “yes” and he sent it to me.

If you enter Amazon through my site, and you buy anything, I get a small commission.  This is my main source of blog revenue.  I prefer this to a “tip jar” because I want you to get something you want, rather than merely giving me a tip.  Book reviews take time, particularly with the reading, which most book reviewers don’t do in full, and I typically do. (When I don’t, I mention that I scanned the book.  Also, I never use the data that the PR flacks send out.)

Most people buying at Amazon do not enter via a referring website.  Thus Amazon builds an extra 1-3% into the prices to all buyers to compensate for the commissions given to the minority that come through referring sites.  Whether you buy at Amazon directly or enter via my site, your prices don’t change.

I continue to struggle with the Growth vs Value designation (never mind where to invest). According to Buffet’s letter, they are joined at the hip (growth being an important part of value), whereas you indicate that there is a real difference between Value and Growth.

Does “Value” as a category of stock arise from the way it is priced or is it solely dependent upon the condition of the company? Is the “Growth” designation simply a function of the rate of change of earnings (or some other financial measure) or is it related to the eagerness of buyers?

If I am reading you right, you are saying that value applies to a stock (not a company), and that value investing does not require (earnings) growth to be successful, whereas growth investing is paying a premium, and thus requires sustained, substantial earnings growth to be successful (because you are paying so much for the shares).

It always seems like “value” stocks are the one’s investors don’t want (if people are paying a premium, it is not a “value” stock). If few people are interested in buying the stock right now, when the underlying business is fine (or at least unimpaired), why would they be willing to pay more in the future? It seems like that would only happen if earnings grow (so it is a “growth” company?) or if people decide they would like to pay more for the same earnings. Are future buyers going to pay more because they see that earnings simply aren’t falling? Or is most of the return going to come through dividends and/or share buybacks?

This seems like something very fundamental, but the amount of confusing comments (around the internet) about these terms seems second only to confusion related to the term “risk”.

Imagine for a moment that you had the influence over a company such that you forced them to liquidate it.  Going out of business.  Selling everything.  With a company characterized as a value stock, you would make money off of such a venture.  With a growth stock, you would certainly lose.  Growth stocks are going concerns, and need to continue in operations in order to increase their value.  Even a value stock does not generally want to liquidate, but they don’t need to grow much to maintain the value of the enterprise.

With value stocks, most surprises are positive, because expectations are low.  With growth stocks, most surprises are negative, because expectations are high.

Buffett is right.  Value and Growth are joined at the hip.  What he means by that is that a company with predictable growth deserves a higher valuation, with which I totally agree.  The stereotyping of growth and value stocks stems from human prejudices where people segment the market into two or three areas:

• Buy the fastest growing companies, at any price.
• Buy growth at a reasonable price.
• Buy companies that will do okay even if they don’t grow.

Value is a question of price only.  There is no such thing as a bad asset, only a bad price.  I like buying growth companies, and I do so when they are offered to me at bargain prices.  I will pay up a little for a growth company, in the same way that I would pay up for bonds of higher credit quality, while losing a little yield, but not a lot of yield.

This is not to say that all value investing will succeed.  I have my share of failures.  The idea is to tip the odds into your favor by buying things that are out of favor relative to their current assets, or likely future earnings (or free cash flow, for the advanced).

Risk is a question of permanently losing capital.  That is the downside on which all investors should focus.  Though I do lose money on some stocks that I buy, my goal is to lose money on none of the stocks.  If I cover the downside, the upside will take care of the rest, because the goal of a value investor is to not lose money over the long haul.