Equities

Value Investor (part 1)

Link Joshua VanDykeLeave a comment

sean-stratton-ObpCE_X3j6U-unsplash.jpg

Value investing sounds really cool. It sounds savvy, it sounds smart, it sounds responsible, it sounds like it makes a lot of money. I mean, Warren Buffet is a value investor!

So what is a value investor? Well, a value investor is someone who invests in value companies. So what’s a value company? I’m glad you asked. Essentially, a value company is one whose stock price is about the same (could be a little higher or lower) than its intrinsic, or book, value. A lot of words there but stick with me. The intrinsic value of a company is what you get when you add up all the company’s assets, its land, warehouses, products (which can include patents), equipment, cash, etc. It might seem a little odd that a company’s stock price wouldn’t always be close to its intrinsic value, but the stock market prices of growth companies (the opposite of value companies) can actually trade multiples of 8 times higher than its intrinsic value. This happens because the market expects the growth company to continue growing. Value companies aren’t typically expected to grow much, they’re often characterized as distressed. So value investors are analyzing these value companies and deciding which ones they think are actually undervalued and which ones could bounce back. Again, it sounds great, they’re the brilliant nerdy guys reading all of the fine print and finding the deals in the stock market, the companies that are underpriced. All you have to do is hitch up to their wagon and ride those value companies up when everyone else figures out how valuable they actually are. Sounds pretty responsible, right?

A semi-famous value investor, Michael Burry, featured in the Big Short (as Christian Bale) crushed the growth stock market from 2001-2005. In the middle of 2005, he was up 242% when the U.S. large growth market (S&P500) was down 6.84%. Michael Burry is the quintessential weird genius that we love to fall in love with, and hand our money over to. He did things differently, he didn’t take normal massive fees, he was incredibly awkward with people in person, he kept to himself, he obsessively studied the interworkings of the companies he invested in, just about everything you would expect from the next market genius. He’s most famous for predicting, and attempting to short, the housing crash in 2007. And now’s he’s rich, and semi-famous, and still investing. He recently stated that passive investing is a bubble, that he’s concentrated on water (you get it), that GameStop is undervalued, and that Asia is where it’s at. While these investment tips might accord with the laws of value investing, they hardly seem prudent.

Michael Burry is definitely smarter than I am, but here’s what I know:

1) Ken French, a professor of finance at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College, who has spent much of his adult life researching and publishing in the sphere of economics and investing, conducted a study of mutual-fund managers (Luck versus Skill in the Cross-Section of Mutual Fund Returns) and found that only the top 2% to 3% had enough skill to even cover their own costs. Eugene Fama, another father of economic and investing academia, who co-wrote the paper with Ken French, summarizes their findings this way: “Looking at funds over their entire lifetimes, only 3% demonstrate skill after accounting for their fees, and that’s what you would expect purely based on chance.” Of the managers who do exhibit enough skill to cover their own costs, it’s hard to determine whether an actual skill is at work or it’s simply a facet of luck; most free-market scholars lean towards luck.

2) Fama continues: “Even the active funds that have generated extraordinary returns are unlikely to do better than a low-cost passive fund in the future.” Some managers do well enough to cover their own costs and beat the market in a given year. Unfortunately, their success languishes quickly and they regress to the same plane that active managers on the whole occupy, which is underperforming the market.

So is Michael Burry, or any value investor, the weird, brilliant savant that we desperately want to attach our life-savings to, or is he one of the 3% of managers who have done well enough to cover their own fees, but who the data says is more likely to regress to market underperformance mean than to do it again? I know which side I’m playing.

Financial Advisors aren’t evil (mostly)​

Link Joshua VanDykeLeave a comment

hunters-race-MYbhN8KaaEc-unsplash.jpg

I met a stranger this morning (the beauty of Facebook marketplace). He had looked me up in advance, not to be creepy (he assured me), just to make sure he wasn’t meeting a crazy person. He saw that I’m a financial advisor and wondered if I had ever met his financial advisor, whom he trusts very much. In fact, he trusts his financial advisor so much he recently handed over full discretion, meaning the advisor no longer needs his permission to make trades and move money. It was becoming cumbersome to give the okay every time the advisor wanted to make a trade. I informed him that I had not met his financial advisor, and he assured me that his advisor is a great guy.
Here’s the thing, I’m sure he is a great guy, I’m sure his intentions are (mostly) pure. Many financial advisors are really great, and they really care. But that little discretionary bit he shared with me is alarming. When it becomes cumbersome to approve every trade your advisor wants to make, that’s a problem. According to the data, financial advisors who actively trade routinely underperform the market, even advisors who are really great guys. Don’t work with an advisor only because he or she is a great person. Find an advisor who is a great person, but who also understands how the market works, how to most efficiently capture returns, how to avoid stock picking and market time and trying to beat the market, and most importantly, how to coach you. Your future depends on more than the integrity of your advisor. He may not be evil, but he may also be submarining your retirement.

On REITs

Link Joshua VanDykeLeave a comment

chuttersnap-awL_YCtPGv4-unsplash.jpg

REITs (Real Estate Investment Trust) are a hot topic in 2019. Real estate is popular, it’s tangible, it’s easy to understand the profits and costs involved, and many of us already own some ourselves. REITs offer the allure of owning income-producing real estate without ever having to take a call from a grumpy tenant or running over to fix a leaky toilet in the middle of the night. It’s real estate investing without all the hassle! Well, that’s not exactly true, here a few reasons to look elsewhere for investing returns:

  1. A REIT is not like investing in real estate the way most of us think about real estate investing (owning rental properties). Traditional real estate investing is a great way to make money, but it’s not passive. Ask anyone who owns rental properties and they’ll tell you it’s a job, maybe a part-time job, maybe a worthwhile job, but a job none-the-less. It takes work and time and good business sense. A REIT is like a mutual fund that only owns income-producing real estate (at least 75% of the income within a REIT must come from rental income or something similar), which sounds similar to traditional investing, but a REIT is completely passive. The expected earnings on the two types of investments are very different because they’re very different types of investments.
  2. Investing in REITs is redundant. If you’re invested in the stock market you already own real estate. In fact, you already own the same exact companies and properties that are also in the REIT you’re thinking about purchasing. You could theoretically double down on real estate, own it both in your investment account and in a REIT, but why would you do that? There are three essential market factors that drive returns: stocks (which outperform bonds over time), small companies (which outperform large companies over time), and value companies (which outperform growth companies over time); real estate doesn’t make the cut. There’s no additional benefit to increasing your exposure to real estate, no additional returns, no additional diversification benefits, nothing. You could buy into a REIT if you have a hunch that real estate as a market sector is going to do well in the next few years but that would be market timing, a proven great way to lose money.

REITs sometimes sound exciting, especially when they’re doing well, but keep the big-picture perspective. No one knows when REITs will do well or for how long, we just know that over time they won’t beat a well-diversified portfolio, which already owns a lot of real estate anyways.

Pay attention to asset classes, not returns

Link Joshua VanDykeLeave a comment

When people think about deciding between investment advisors, or mutual funds, or even stocks, the temptation is to look at past performance. That’s the default. And it seems basic, you’re looking for returns, what else would you look at? What else could you even look at?

The problem is the past performance we see is short term. You’ll see three to five year histories on your account statements, Morningstar defaults at a ten year history (if the fund has been around that long), and the news rarely talks about anything further back than the last year. Those are relatively short periods of time, especially when we’re talking about market returns. Instead of comparing past performance in advisors and mutual funds over the past ten years, we should be looking at long-term historical returns of asset classes.

An asset class is a group of similar securities that tend to move together. The main general asset classes are equities (stocks), fixed income (bonds), and cash. Each of these, but especially the equities group, can be broken down further. In equities, we see large vs small, value vs growth, U.S. vs international. For an example, a very popular asset class is U.S. Large Growth, which is basically the S&P 500. We have returns data on these asset classes all the way back to the early 20th century. That information can tell us much more than the past ten years. We can see which asset classes tend to outperform others, we can see how the different asset classes correlate to each other, and we can know what returns and risk a fund or portfolio can expect over long periods of time. A ten-year history of returns is almost irrelevant. Over ten years any asset class could outperform any other, but we don’t know when or which. So to look backward at the performance of a fund is not only unhelpful, it’s more often hurtful. A good ten-year history on a fund, or even an asset class, deceives us into thinking the performance will continue in the future. The short-term history the only information we know to use, and besides that, it seems to make sense. But that’s the opposite of a good investing strategy. Instead, let’s analyze the asset class data going back as far as it goes, understand where returns come from, and diversify our portfolio’s in a way that’s consistent with the data. Then we let the market perform and deliver results. Our balanced diversified portfolio won’t always be the big winner year by year, but over the long haul, it will outperform anyone trying to predict market movements based on ten-year histories, or any other material information.