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I wrote the following note to subscribers, in context of a specific position. I have made edits and additions to the original note for this post.

I have a different set of expectations from this position. The management of the company is quite conservative (rightfully so) and as a result has always grown at a measured pace without taking on too much debt. As a result, the profit growth has never been too high, but at the same time the company has always been profitable even in the worst of the times.

Due to this cautious approach, we cannot expect this position to be a multi-bagger any time soon.

Although a lot of subscriber still look at individual positions, I prefer to zoom out and look at the aggregate portfolio level. We are not in multi-bagger business where me and kedar will run around touting our wins on social media.

Our focus is to achieve above average returns at the portfolio level with lower risk over the long run, to achieve our financial goals.

Mania of the multi-baggers

The last three years have been all about multi-baggers.

The Media is usually fixated on multi-baggers and short term price changes as that grabs attention (which is their sole focus). Unfortunately, a lot of investment advisories and so called gurus are the in same boat. It is not too difficult to see the reason – you need to make big claims to grab attention and clients.

Touting a low risk, steady compounder which doubles every four years is not going to win too many fans and subscribers/investors. As a result, the focus of the industry is to talk about high returns and multi-baggers in the portfolio, ignoring the risk completely.

On this count, I will not blame the media and financial industry alone for selling dreams to the general public. A vast majority of investors (if you can call them that) are searching for shortcuts to become rich quickly. Media and a lot of professionals are merely satisfying that demand.

One cannot run a business on high principles alone.

Missing the forest for the trees

In selling, what is being demanded, the financial industry ends up ignoring several other key factors which drive returns over the long run.

The key point in investing is how well are you doing at the portfolio level and if the return is commensurate with the risk. The individual wins and losses are a driving factor but not the only criteria. Overall risk driven by position size and diversification plays an equally important role. I find these aspects of investing missing in most discussions.

If you agree with the above point, then you should also consider the lower risk, moderate return ideas. In the past, I have not allocated as much as I should have to these kind of ideas as they do not have the dazzle and fireworks. However, I have slowly changed my thought process on it.

A part of the portfolio should be allocated to such low key, solid performers which act as a ballast to the portfolio and deliver decent returns over the long run (with much lower stress). This is now becoming apparent where some of the past multi-baggers have left investors holding the bag.

Confusing the means (multi-bagger picks) with the end (achieving financial goals via equity investing) had led to investors achieving neither.

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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

A comment made to subscribers when adding to the portfolio:

I am not calling out the bottom of the market or anything of the sort by making the above transactions. As I have repeated often in the past, no one other than liars and self-delusional people can predict what the market will do in the short term.

The best approach always is to look at each individual company closely and evaluate how it will do in the next 3-5 years including under stressful macro conditions.

As we add to the model portfolio, a few positions will not work out – that is a given. The key is to ensure that we do well on an aggregate basis and the returns are above average over time. This approach has worked for me over the last 20 years and I think is still the best approach to follow.

Although we are analyzing as rationally as possible and making a tough decision to start adding to the portfolio, it will be painful to watch the portfolio drop almost on a daily basis. After all these years in the stock market, it is equally painful for me. The key is to focus on the long-term prospects of the companies and their intrinsic value and not react to emotions which will lead you to the wrong decisions.

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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

When I invest in companies, I don’t vouch for or give a character certificate to management. I look at the past and current behavior and then try to arrive at a judgement. In majority of the cases, past behavior is a good indicator, but we do get surprises from time to time.

If new developments make me change my view, I will not try to defend my past decision which was made on a different set of facts. The key is to rationality is to evaluate new facts appropriately and move on from there. As John Maynard Keynes said a long time ago – when facts change, I change my mind. What do you do sir?

Let’s move to the point of how to evaluate management quality in light of poor behavior? For starter, there is no formulae which will give the answer. The best analogy to judge management quality comes from the court system in passing verdict on defendants. A defendant is assumed innocent till proven guilty.

I personally try to look at management with a neutral view when I start analyzing a company. They are neither good nor bad. This is a very important point. I have seen majority of investors start with a presumption of a good or bad management and then collect evidence to prove it. It is very easy to make an assumption and gather enough evidence to prove your point.

The fallacy of obviousness

See this wonderful article which makes the same point. I would highly recommend reading this article. Some excerpts –

So, given the problem of too much evidence – again, think of all the things that are evident in the gorilla clip – humans try to hone in on what might be relevant for answering particular questions. We attend to what might be meaningful and useful

However, computers and algorithms – even the most sophisticated ones – cannot address the fallacy of obviousness. Put differently, they can never know what might be relevant. Some of the early proponents of AI recognised this limitation (for example, the computer scientists John McCarthy and Patrick Hayes in their 1969 paper, which discusses ‘representation’ and the frame problem).

In short, as Albert Einstein put it in 1926: ‘Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.’ The same applies whether we are talking about chest-thumping gorillas or efforts to probe the very nature of reality

Equal priors

The key is to start without an assumption (50-50 probability for both scenarios or equal priors) and look at the meaningful (and not trivial) evidence to come to a conclusion. Once you have done that, your conclusion should not be set in stone, but treated as a hypothesis which can change based on new evidence.

If the management continues to behave well, your confidence is increased. If you start seeing negative behavior, your confidence goes down and at some point (which cannot be mathematically defined), you may lose faith in the management and exit the position.

The above approach is fancifully also called Bayesian reasoning.

One should think probabilistically when evaluating management and not consider these issues as black or white. That’s the essence of Bayesian reasoning.

The central point of this approach is to look at new evidence in light of your prior conclusion and change it in proportion to the evidence. In some case, the new episode may be a small one and will cause you to reduce your level of confidence a bit. In other cases, either the episode or series of episodes will be so awful, that you will be forced to change your mind completely.

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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

This short note went out to subscribers recently

You may have noticed that we have been churning the portfolio – selling down old positions and replacing them with new ones, but have not utilized the cash. This has been on purpose as I want to dispassionately look at all our positions and exit those where I feel that the overall risk reward equation could improve by replacing it with something else.

In some cases, the expected returns of the new position may still be the same, but the company has more avenues of growth and has shown consistent performance in the past. In effect the risk profile is lower for the new company. So, the rotation is not always to improve the returns, but often to reduce the risk of the overall portfolio too.

I have harped on the aspect of risk since last year and we were early on it. This will always be the case. No one can predict when the market will turn. Those who claim to do so, are lying and delusional. The best mindset to adopt is to focus on the performance of your companies and ignore all the chatter in the market.

We now have over 30% cash in the portfolio which is slightly higher than the start of the year. I continue to look for new ideas and that is my focus for now. As a result, I have even delayed the half yearly note, which can wait for now.

As the market continues to fall, several good quality companies have started to become attractive and we will deploy our cash when I am comfortable with these companies. I have no idea when the current downturn will end – though I am sure it will eventually.

In the meantime, we could suffer quotational losses on our portfolio (based on the market price), which should not disturb us if the companies we hold continue to perform well. The stock price will eventually follow the earnings.

As I have said in the past, one needs patience to invest sensibly in the stock market. Add a lot courage and a sense of long term optimism to it now.
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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

I wrote the following note recently to our subscribers. Hope you find it useful too.
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I wrote extensively on risk in the last year’s annual update (read here) and highlighted the fact that cash levels in the model portfolio were at an all-time high. (around 30%).

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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

I wrote the following to my subscribers recently. Hope you find it useful too.

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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

The following note was published recently to my subscribers. Any reference to performance or individual companies has been removed to ensure compliance with SEBI regulations.

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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

I shared the following note with subscribers on how the current trends in solar/wind power and battery technology are likely to cause disruption in the energy markets. The impact of this disruption is already being felt in the capital goods sector, which is an early proxy of the long term trends in an industry. Any management planning to invest with a 20 year horizon will carefully analyze the long trends before committing capital for this duration..

I have kept out the name of the company we hold, for obvious reasons, but the conclusions are valid for any company in the energy sector value chain. In addition, I think these technologies are likely to have a huge impact in the transportation, oil & gas, coal, power storage and other industries too

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I highlighted the following risk in 2016 for our holding.

Solar energy – I wrote extensively about it in the previous year’s update and the solar energy market continues to develop as expected. It is critical to track this sector as solar is a substitute for other forms of energy (such as coal or Oil) and hence its adoption will have some impact on the demand for the products of the company.

The company continues to focus on process co-gen, waste to energy (including biomass based power generation) and the IPP sector. As I wrote in the previous update, the first two sectors continue to do well as they serve as a complementary power generation system. The IPP segment however is under threat as solar can easily displace this at a lower cost and the company’s performance seems to bear this out.

I have been tracking the renewable and battery/ storage space for the last few years. Let me share some data points before discussing the implications

The graph below shows the price trends for the next 5 years. Please keep in mind that the drops in the recent years have been much higher than predicted and there is no reason why the current rate of 15% annual price drop will not continue

This is a comparative cost across countries

As you can see, India has the lowest costs due to lower soft costs (aka labor costs).

The recent solar auctions in India and several parts of the world are now hitting the 1.3-1.5 Re/KWH levels already and this is expected to drop further. In comparison, the cheapest fossil fuel generated power – Coal, is priced at around 3 Rs/KWH and rising due to transport and other costs

At this point, a lot of naysayers, point out the lack of storage and intermittency of solar and wind power. Let’s look at another data point – Cost of lithium ion storage. This has now hit 200 dollars/ Kwh and continues to drop by around 15% per annum. At the current rate, the cost ofs batteries will drop below 100$/ KWH in 3 years. Why is 100$/KWH important?

This is the point at which solar + Large scale storage start becoming cost competitive with base load or Coal based power. Again, keep in mind that these trends will not stop in 2020, but will keep continuing beyond that due to economies of scale and new research (in other forms of batteries such flow batteries, Lithium air etc)

Is this all hypothetical?
We may assume that all this is theory and the energy markets are yet to be disrupted. That is not true and we already have a few early signs of disruption

a. Gas based Peaker plants (which take care of sudden spike in demand for electricity) are not being built as it is cheaper to use battery storage to take care of such spikes

b. Companies like GE and Siemens have seen a large drop in demand for gas turbines and announced  re-structuring of their power business.

c. What natural gas did to coal, will be repeated again

In 2012-14, we had a new technology called fracking reach scale in the US. This technology had been in development for almost a decade and hit an inflection point in 2014. The resulting glut in natural gas led to a sharp drop in the price as can be seen in the chart below.

The result of this drop was that, natural gas suddenly became cheaper (and cleaner) than coal and caused a switch in fuel for power generation. This can be seen in the picture below. This in turn led to a drop in the demand and price of coal, leading to large scale bankruptcies in the coal sector in the US

Keep in mind that fracking only works if you already have deposits of gas/ oil in place, but were uneconomical earlier. There is no such limitation for solar or wind energy.

Please ignore the S curve
Lets go back to the first principles in economics – People respond to incentives. Companies, individuals and governments are not going to switch to solar or wind energy because they have suddenly realized that these are green technologies, but the because these technologies are now becoming cheaper than the alternatives (fossil fuel).

We still have a lot of naysayers including some of the think tanks, who keep suggesting that these disruptions are atleast 15-20 years away. If you look at the numbers, for some reason their predictions assume that the price drop in these technologies will change from the current 15%+ to around 3-5% due to which the uptake of these technologies will proceed in a linear fashion.

You can believe these predictions if you are ready to ignore the S-curve model of adoption, which states that these kind of non-linear technologies follow an exponential adoption rate till they hit saturation. 

Look at the example of cell phones, internet, Computers and so on which show the adoption rates are only speeding up, not slowing down !

We cannot predict precisely when the inflection will occur. However, it is not difficult to see the disruption ahead. At the current valuations, the market is not discounting the threat of disruption for companies in the capital goods sector, oil & Gas, automotive, power and coal sector.

We can wait till the threat becomes obvious and then exit our positions. I am however not inclined to wait till the last minute before jumping off the track, even though I can dimly see the train coming towards us.    

Investors hear a constant refrain – be patient, think long term, blah blah blah. Is it similar to the sermons we hear about eating well and exercising more?

Let’s walk through a series of logical arguments

1.     The stock market is usually efficient and generally prices most companies correctly based on their near term prospects. So if a company is growing at 30% per annum, earning 25% return on capital and has great long term growth prospects, then the market will value it accordingly.

2.     One can do better than the market only if you have a view about the performance of a company, which differs materially on the upside. If the company performs as the market expects, there will be no impact to the stock price. Only if the company performs better than market expectations, will the stock price will adjust upwards in response to the positive surprise. This is something most investor miss. They are looking for high quality companies with good management. The trick is find those where the market has yet to recognize the quality or improvement in performance (and price it into the stock)

3.     If you combine point 1 and point 2, it follows that some of the ways to do better than the market is if

• You are able to identify the turning point in a cyclical industry, before the market. As it not usually not possible to time this perfectly, the best option is to be a bit early when there are some green shoots visible and then increase the position as the recovery gathers strength
• The profits of the company are suppressed due to some short term issues in the industry (weather, demonetization etc.) which will be resolved soon. In such cases, one has to create a position when the outlook is still horrible and hold on to it till the external factors change for the better
• Some One-off event such as a demerger causes one of the constituents to be mispriced
• The profit of the company is suppressed as management is investing in the business which is hurting the reported numbers. As the market is still fixated on the reported numbers, one can create a position at an attractive price. However one has to wait for the investment phase to complete and the true profitability surface

If you look at all the above cases, one needs to ignore the near term prospects which are being overly discounted by the market, and focus on the long term. As a result, in such cases you will not see a validation of your thesis as soon as you create a position.

For those of us who started investing in the late 90s and even around mid-2000, the level of competition in the market was much lower. One could find companies earning 30% return on capital, growing at 15%+ CAGR and selling at 5 times earnings (Marico was one such company). All one had to do was to dig around a bit and put in the money.

This has changed completely in the last 10 years. We now have an army of smart investors (professional and part-time) who scour the market looking for opportunities. In such as climate, I can bet that you will not find any obvious mispricing which can filtered on a screen.

It would be foolish to assume that the change of opinion will happen as soon as you are done with your purchase. Some of the near term factors which drive the pricing, need to change before the market accepts your view point.

Patience is of course tied with your style of investing and time horizon. If you are a day trader or momentum investor, then time is not on your side. If you time horizon is days, weeks or month then thinking of a multi-year period makes no sense.

I had earlier written above three kinds of edge in stock market investing. The information edge is now more or less gone with tools for quantitative analysis and wide dissemination of information by management (look at the number of conference calls hosted by companies!). One has to rely on analytical and behavioral edge to make above average returns.

Being patient is therefore not a moral imperative or something you need to do for the good of humanity, but is a logical necessity to do well in the market in the long run as a value investor.
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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

A lot of people are celebrating these days and patting themselves on the back. We have a parade of investors touting their returns and claiming that 100% CAGR is for chumps. Multi-bagger could soon be a new name for kids 🙂

It feels great when your stocks are going up, making you richer by the day. You feel smart, on top of the world and in some moments can even see that retirement on the horizon when you stop working and live on the beach

Let me explain

A typical bull market usually coincides with decent economic numbers when most companies are doing quite well. As a result, most participants become over optimistic and bid up the stocks of these companies. We thus have a confluence of factors – companies performing better than usual and being valued at higher multiples of peak earnings.

–           Social proof: At such times, you see people around you getting rich and more reckless the person, higher the returns. It is not easy on the psyche to watch your friends get rich , whereas you sit around doing nothing.
–           Scarcity: During bear markets, waiting helps. As the numbers are bad or getting worse, stock price for most companies stay stagnant at best. As a result, if you like to dig deep into a company, you have all the time in the world. No such luck during bull market. Any company with a half decent results gets bid up. As a result, you can either forgo an opportunity or buy the stock with lesser due diligence
–           Confirmation bias: A bull market gives a positive signal and makes you feel that you are doing something right. As a result, there is a tendency to ignore risks and not look for disconfirming evidence
–           Authority bias: If you switch on a channel, every other talking head and self-proclaimed guru on  TV is painting the vision of a glorious future where all of us would be rich. This makes you feel as the only idiot who does not get it

A bad hangover

I can recall the emotional roller coaster in the previous cycle, with the only difference that these cycles used to run over a period of 3-5 years. The years 2001-2003 (which is ancient for most investors) was a grinding and slow bear market.

A new investor like me just could not understand why the market was behaving in this fashion.

The market started turning in 2003 and from there it took off for the next 5 years. A lot of my personal holdings went up multiple times (no one used the term multi-baggers as often then) and it was great to feel vindicated/ smart.

A fight against instincts

The natural instinct for any investor is do the opposite of what should rationally be done.  When the markets are dropping due to poor fundamentals and bad sentiments, the tendency of most investors is to withdraw into a shell and wait for the sky to clear up.

The same tendency is also visible during bull markets which leads investors to buy at the wrong price. The right action at such times would be to sell or do nothing, if the company is not overpriced. I personally think that one should go one step beyond – use this period to clean up your portfolio. If you hold some companies, which you are not as confident about, sell them down and increase the cash holding. A bull market is a good time to  swallow the bitter pill when the overall portfolio is doing well.

I wrote this a year back after the market dropped by 15% and this still holds true, except the circumstances have changed to a bull market.  Instead of courage to manage the fear, one needs the same courage to manage greed and euphoria.

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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

I recently received an email and following is my reply

Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

I recently responded to an email Q&A from PJ Pahygiannis. We covered some of the following questions and more

– Describe your investing strategy and portfolio organization. What valuation methods do you use? Where do you get your investing ideas from?
– How long will you hold a stock and why? How long does it take to know if you are right or wrong on a stock?
– What are some of your favorite companies, brands, or even CEOs? What do you think are some of the most well run companies? How do you judge the quality of the management?
– What kind of bargains are you finding in this market? Do you have any favorite sectors or avoid certain areas, and why?
– How do you feel about the market today? Do you see it as overvalued? What concerns you the most?

My response has been published on gurufocus.com. You can read the entire Q&A here. I hope you find the Q&A useful
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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

We had two major events in the last few weeks – The election of Donald Trump as the president of US and the Demonetization of the 500/1000 Re notes

Let me start with the first event, which somehow was in the news for the last few weeks and I felt no need to respond or react. The event was a surprise for many and in a way similar to the Congress win in India in 2004. There was a sense that the market would crash if Donald trump is elected as president. I had no clue about what would happen if this event occurred, but to be frank I could not care less.

In investing, the key is to focus on the few critical factors which may impact your investment thesis and ignore the rest. I find it difficult to see why the election of a particular individual in a foreign company will have an impact on most of the companies in India at a micro level. Will consumers buy less soap or stop buying cars or going to movies just because Donald trump is elected in the US?

The more important event
The more relevant event for us has been the demonization of the high value currency. I personally think this a watershed event for the country. There are a lot of people looking at the interest rate and tax implications for the country, which I agree is quite good. However the bigger impact is from the signaling effect of this decision.

The second impact of this decision is that it sends a message that the government is serious about reducing tax evasion and corruption. A combination of GST, JAM trinity and now demonetization could be effective in reducing tax evasion (but not necessarily eliminate it). This would apply to a lot of unorganized sector companies where there is substantial evasion of taxes. These events are creating a level playing field in terms of taxation and will benefit the organized companies in the long run.

Analyzing the impact on your portfolio
The key point in the analysis of any major event is to evaluate the long term impact to the business model and profitability of the company.

I have no such plans for my portfolio. I made an argument in a prior post that we need to be ready for short term volatility and 15% or more drops from time to time. If one cannot handle these swings, then equities are not an appropriate vehicle. I will not sell any stocks where I think the long term prospects continue to be good, even if the near term appears horrible.

Let’s take the example of NBFCs to see how this event would impact some companies

We should however keep in mind that an NPA is not the same as a loss. An NPA means that the borrower has not made a timely payment and as a result, the lender has to mark the loan as non performing, stop accruing the interest income and add provisions (set aside some part of the profits) to account for the higher risk of non-payment.

Let’s look at a worst case scenario. Let’s say a company has around 1000 crs of assets on its books. Let’s make a very aggressive assumption that 10% of the assets will become NPAs with no hope that the borrower can become current on the loan. We can assume a 50% recovery rate on these NPA. So the eventual loss for the company would be to the tune of 50 crs.

Keep in mind that the above loss scenario is quite high in nature. Most of our poorly managed PSU banks have much lower level of losses inspite of much more illiquid assets and lower recovery rates.

I had written a post on first principles thinking as applied to investing here. As noted in the post, the intrinsic value of a company is the discounted sum of all its future cash flows. If you think of a company in that fashion, then by how much will you reduce the future value of the NBFC?

I think no matter how pessimistic you may be about the whole demonetization episode and the slow response of the government, it would be hard to argue that this issue will cause a permanent drop in demand for credit in the long run..

As an analogy, let’s say you are carrying 5000 Rs (in 100 Re notes J ) and you lose your wallet. It is a loss of 5000 and your net worth went down by that amount. However you future earning power which depends on your skills and other factors did not change due to this event.

The market reaction has been far more severe with some NBFCs losing almost 30% of their value in the last one month (almost 3-4 times our loss estimate).

We need to be prepared for a very ugly Q3. The demonetization event is likely to be quite disruptive to businesses in the short term, especially in the rural areas where banking services are poorly developed.

It will not feel good to keep losing money every day as the market corrects, but I plan to deploy some cash as bargains develop.

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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

I wrote this note to all of my subscribers. Hope you will find it useful too

Let me state this again – My approach is to buy good quality companies at a reasonable price. There is nothing magical or new about this. Every other value investor professes to do this and I am no different. There is no secret sauceand I make it a point to share my thought process and analysis as much as feasible.

I have practiced a value based philosophy for the last 15+ years and it has served me well. I have no plans of changing a sound and logical approach for something else in the future. As long as I continue to do follow it rationally and with discipline, I think the long term results will be good even with occasional spells of under-performance.

One the first comments I get from a new subscriber after joining is this – I had a look at the model portfolio and I cannot buy more than 2-3 positions for now. I have a stock response for that – please be patient and give it some time. I have usually seen that most new subscribers are able match the model portfolio over a span of 2-3 years as some stocks drop below the buy level and new positions are added.

If you look at the price action of our 17 odd positions for the last two years – you will find that at least 14 hit the buy point and even went lower for a few days or more. So in effect, it’s quite possible to be 80% matched to the model portfolio for those who joined the subscription in the middle of 2014. I do not have the statistics of how many have done that, but my point is that over a 1-2 year time frame, one will get enough opportunities to buy and build your portfolio. One needs to have the patience to do that and not get swayed by short term events.

We started the model portfolio in Jan 2011. We have had several actual and imagined events such as Grexit (did not happen), Chinese hard landing (cannot say if that has occurred), Brexit (did happen), oil crash (occurred in 2014) and mismanagement of the Indian economy by the previous government.

Now someone could counter this logic by pointing the risk of 2008/09 collapse when mid and small caps crashed by 60%. What if one of these events had snowballed into a similar crisis?

–           For starters, one cannot invest based on the low probability, high impact macro events. One can diversify against black swan risks at an individual company level, but not at the country level. To give an extreme and silly example – how will you protect yourself from the risk of an asteroid crashing into a major city in India and causing a major economic crisis? Can one really diversify against such an extreme risk?
–           My second argument is that one needs to invest based on the higher probability risks (such as inflation) and insure against the low probability, but extreme ones. In other words, invest to beat inflation or secure your retirement and buy life/ health insurance to hedge the other extreme kind of risks. Finally there are some kind of risks, where one can only hope and pray that they don’t occur and we can do nothing about it.

If a 10-15% drop in the portfolio is going to scare you (as it may have in Feb of this year) and cause you to lose sleep, then equities are not for you. I can share my analysis and thought process, but cannot fix your temperament. You will have to bring a steady and calm mind of your own to the table.

Looking for trends
Some of you may have noticed that the model portfolio generally does not have a specific theme or view. One will often hear from investors that they have positioned their portfolio to benefit from better monsoon or revival in capex or some such factor.

One needs to keep in mind that a good monsoon or lower inflation is not a long term trend, but only specific events which play out for a small period of time. A long term trend would be something like demand for housing/ housing loans which leads to a growth of 2-3X of the average GDP growth rate.

Why am I discussing this point now? I think there is a lot of value in identifying such trends early and investing based on it, provided one does not overpay for it. As a result, I have now started looking at some of the current ideas from a trend point of view. We will however not know if the trend was real or a mirage, till a few years pass.
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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

A commonly used thumb rule in investing is that a company selling below a PE of 10 is likely to be cheap and one above 30 is likely to be expensive. I have been guilty of using this rule, often subconsciously and have paid a heavy price for it.

To see the example of a PE driven investment gone wrong, read the analysis of Facor alloys here. In a year’s time, I realized that I had made a mistake and exited this position with a 12% loss – you can read my analysis here.  If I had held on to the position, I would have lost close to 85% of my investment, even as the stock continued to sell at a very low valuation (current PE being 3)

Reasoning from first principles leads one to understand the fundamentals factors driving the issue in question. So how do we apply this concept to investing?

Quite simply, the one absolute and immutable fact of investing is that the value of an asset is the sum of the discounted free cash flow, it will generate over its life time. The above statement does not mean that an asset cannot sell above or below this value from time to time, but anyone holding an asset over its life time, cannot make more than the cash flows its generates over this period.

Lets break the above point down into its key components
–           Free cash flow
–           Lifetime
–           Discounted

Free cash flow – Can be estimated as follows : Gross rent – taxes – maintenance expense – other overheads

Lifetime –  This is the period an asset can be expected to generate a cash flow. In case of a flat or house one can take as it as 30 years, before one has to permanently replace it with a new construction. In an extreme condition you can stretch it to 50 years, however try letting out a very old house and you may realize that the rentals are much below the market rates.

So how would you value the house or flat now?
The gross rental yields these days are usually around 2-3%. At these yields , one is in effect paying 50 times pre-tax free cash flow. This of course assumes 100% occupancy and no taxes.

If you put all these cash flows together and discount it at around 10%, the final DCF value comes to about 1.5X purchase price. In other words, the asset is generating an IRR of 12%.

The problem with PE ratios
As you can see from the above example, the PE ratio is dependent on several variables which we had to estimate upfront. In the case of some assets such as a rental property, it may be possible to estimate it with a certain level of confidence.

Let say, for the sake of example, that the house turns out to be on an old burial ground where there are ghosts and so one want to rent or buy that land J . What happens then? Well the entire investment goes to zero.

So the initial PE turns out to be cheap or expensive depending on the subsequent cash flows and terminal value of the asset

In the case of companies, the problem we face is that the cash flows are quite difficult to estimate, there is no fixed duration and the terminal value in the real long run for any business is usually 0.

The above assumption turned out to be wrong. The cash flows were at a peak due to a cyclical high in demand from the steel industry. In addition to a crash in the demand, the management diverted the cash flows to another sister firm which demonstrated poor corporate governance.

As a counter example, consider the case of CRISIL(a past holding) which has always appeared expensive based on the usual measures of valuation. However the company has delivered above average returns as it has generated the expected cash flows without much variability in a fairly predictable fashion. The competitive position continues to improve and the company is likely to keep growing with a high return on invested capital for the foreseeable future.

The only way to evaluate if a company is over or underpriced is to be able to predict its cash flow. The higher the valuation, the longer the prediction period.

On the flip side, if you are looking at a company selling for 100 times earnings, one needs to have a high degree of confidence on the expected cash flow for 20+ years and beyond. Anyone claiming such clairvoyance is worth of worship !!

In summary, the best way to approach an investment candidate is to filter out the extreme cases and then dig into the business as much as possible. This should help one make a reasonable estimate of the cash flows and its duration. Once you have a reasonable fix on these key inputs, doing a valuation and comparing it with the market price is the easy part.

It is selling for 10 times earnings net of cash for sure. Personally I think the PE ratio here is meaningless. One is making a bet that Coal will continue to be a dominant fuel for us for the next 10-20 years in face of dropping cost of solar and other energy sources such as Natural gas. In addition there is also the headwind of climate change regulations and drop in prices globally. In short I don’t know enough to predict the cash flow and hence the idea is a pass for me. If you plan to buy or hold it, you need to answer the above questions with a high degree of confidence.

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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

The following note was recently sent out to the subscribers. I hope you will find it useful.

A few of you may have noticed the frenzy around the NBFC and especially the MFI (micro finance institutions) space. The buying frenzy is not entirely irrational.

The Indian household debt at around 9-10% of GDP is among the lowest in the world and there is a huge pent up demand in the retail / MSME segment. The introduction of adhaar, regulatory changes and several new technology tools is now allowing the NBFC segment to reach new customers at a much lower cost and achieve rapid growth.

So we have a confluence of factors coming into play here – A new regulatory and technology platform which allows companies to reach out to a large set of under-served customers at a time when the dominant players in the ecosystem, namely banks, are not in a position to take advantage of these opportunities.

Tread with caution
There is however a dark side to this whole opportunity – A growth of 30%+ may lead to poor lending practices and weak credit underwriting in several cases. This may be truer in the case of newer institutions which lack the experience and management bandwidth to manage this growth (and later collect the bad debts).

The time to be cautious is now and not when poor lending practices lead to a blow up in the future. In other words – tread with caution and be sure what you are buying.

What are we doing ?
We are already around 20% of our model portfolio in financials via four companies. These companies operate in different segments of the financial ecosystem and I believe that the management of each of these companies is competent and has seen multiple cycles in their respective businesses. At the same time, if the frenzy continues and our concentration in this business segment continues to grow, I will start reducing the position size.

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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

The following note was sent out to our advisoryclients in February. This was in response to the jitters, some of them were experiencing after a 15% drop in the market. I think this is valid in all kinds of markets including the optimistic one we have now.
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I am not feeling any better knowing that the model portfolio is down less than the overall indices. I increased the cash holding a bit in the last few months and avoided the momentum stocks in the later part of 2015. Inspite of these defensive measures, the portfolio is getting hit and it is not pleasant to see losses every day.

At the end of 2014, after a 100%+ rise, I had written the following

It is easy to feel smug and complacent after a 100%+ rise in the portfolio. However it is precisely at this stage that the risks are the highest. The various companies in our portfolio are performing quite well in terms of business performance (topline and profit growth). In addition, we exited a few companies where I felt that the performance depended more on the macro than the company specific condition such as the management or the target market

If your time horizon is less than 3 years and you cannot bear a 15%+ drop in the portfolio, then you need to take action when the times are good (such as now) and not after the market drops due to some macro factor.

In my case, I consider my equity investments with 3-5 year perspective (or more) and will continue to hold the positions through any future volatility.

I did not know when a drop in the markets will happen, but was sure that it would occur as that is the nature of markets – greed and fear. We had a period of greed in 2014 and 2015, which has now turned to fear.

At times like these, no one is looking at the company and its fundamentals. The selling is often driven by panic and a desire to reduce the pain.

The only difference is that I try to ignore the pain and focus on the individual companies, their business and the intrinsic value. That helps me in maintaining some level of rationality.

How to handle the volatility
Let me share how I am looking at the current situation (as I have done in the past)

I have been doing that for all the positions in the model portfolio and have exited some, where my level of confidence was not high . As the market crashes and causes some level of business risks, it is important to have a decent understanding of the companies in the portfolio.

Position size and diversification
I have often been asked about position size and the level of diversification one should have in the portfolio. I have a much simpler approach – size it to a point where you can sleep well. If the size of a position or the level of diversification causes you lose sleep, then it is too high.

Look at the intrinsic value
I have always emphasized the important of intrinsic value and its growth for a company. One should always focus on that number. As a long as that number is stable or increasing, then one should stop worrying about the stock price.

My approach during such times in the past has been to add to my positions slowly over time as they became cheaper (subject to size limits) and not expect to make a killing in the short term.

My effort is to reduce the level of risk (of permanent loss of capital) in the portfolio. I have not tried to reduce volatility actively. Courage and ability to ignore the volatility comes down to temperament and that cannot be supplied by anyone.

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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

Now this guy is quite similar to all his peers, but different from his hot blooded brethren only on one small point. He believes in saving and investing, but does not want to chase stock market returns. In the last few years, he read a few books on investing by john bogle, and decided that he was going to invest in some decent mutual or index fund and then leave it at that.

He sets up a simple plan:
–           Save 2 lacs per year and invest it in a few index/ mutual funds
–           Increase his savings by 5% every year to match inflation
–           Invest each month via an SIP to put it on autopilot
–           Avoid financial news on TV and use the spare time on other pursuits

Ten years later this guy who is now married, decides to have a look at his investment account. During this period, the overall market has delivered around 15% per annum for the last 10 years. He finds that his account is now around 67 Lacs. Not bad!

Its twenty years now since he started and one day his wife asks him if they have decent savings which can be tapped for their daughter’s education, 10 years from now.

At the age of 55, its time finally to fund their daughter’s education. Our guy, who is no longer as young, decides to look at his account and finds that the account has 16 crores!! This is far more than he ever imagined. Both he and his wife now start thinking of taking an early retirement. They figure that in 5 years’ time, the account would grow to around 29 Crs ** at the current rate if they can fund their daughter’s education from the liquid cash they have been holding on the side. This amount would be sufficient to retire and lead a comfortable life

–           15% consistent returns are good in theory, but the actual returns are more lumpy.
–           Not everyone can save 2 lacs or do that without fail every year

If you save consistently and do not withdraw the capital from the account, a smooth or lump 15% would still amount to the same in the end. It is only when people act smart and try to time in and out of market (and change the amount invested), that the eventual amount depends on the pattern of returns.

On the second point, 2 lac saving per annum may not be possible for everyone, but I am sure a lot of two income professionals can muster this level of savings. In addition, I have assumed that the contribution rises only at 5% per annum. In most cases, earnings and hence savings can rise faster than that.

However, If the reason for chasing returns in the market is to get on TV or twitter to show the world how smart you are, then we are talking of a completely different objective. In such a case, the actual returns have nothing to do with the money or financial goals.

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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

There is a class of companies which enjoy a very strong competitive position in their respective markets. These companies have strong brands with their customers, great return on capital and finally good management.

The market really loves these companies due to all the above mentioned factors. Consequently, these companies enjoy a fairly high valuation.

There is ofcourse one small problem – Some of these companies are not growing rapidly. They are probably growing in the range of 10-15%, which is slightly higher than the GDP, but definitely not at the 20%+ rates of the past (which got them in the present position).

Lets call this the coca-cola effect. Why coca-cola ? let me explain

Coca-cola is one the most admired and high quality company. It has a very strong brand which has thrived for 100+ years. In addition the company has a global distribution network which cannot be matched by any company in the foreseeable future (in beverages for sure).

The company grew rapidly in the late 80s and 90s and was valued at 40+ PE levels by early 2000

On top of this, the company was held by warren buffett. What could be a bigger endorsement?

There was one little problem – the company growth had already slowed, but the price was not reflecting this new reality. So what happened since then?

The company did quite well, but the stock went nowhere.

So lets define the coca-cola effect now
–           High quality company with great brands, strong competitive position and good management
–           Past history of high growth
–           High valuations
–           Slowing growth and lower probability of repeating the high growth of the past (key word – probability)
–           Price stagnates (low returns) as the earnings rise slowly , while the PE multiples contract in face of the new reality

Does this look familiar? I think so. I can think of a few companies in the indian market which will go through a similar phase. I will not give names as these are universally loved names and I will get hate mail and comments for suggesting that.

Let me however give a past example from the indian markets

Infosys ltd: see this chart below. The company has done well (profit grew by 15% CAGR during this period)  but investors have made around 6% CAGR in last five years (excluding dividends)

Why does this happen?
I can think of two reasons

Hindsight bias – investors are looking at the past, whereas returns depend on the future growth ! As they say, you do not get to go to heaven twice for the same reason. So if the future growth slows down, the returns are likely to be sub-par.

Contrast effect / Frog in boiling water syndrome – The slow down or price change is not dramatic. Price does not drop drastically, but kind of bobs around for a while. So after 4-5 years of holding a company, an investor wakes up one day and realizes that they have made a paltry level of return.

How to manage this?
For starters, one should get over the warm and fuzzy feeling of holding such a stock (I am guilty of this too). It is easy to fall in this trap as the company has done well in the past, rewarded you handsomely and is still universally admired.

The second step to take is to look at the future growth prospects and try to arrive at an upper bound for it. If company sells at a high valuation and is unlikely to see a further multiple expansion, then this growth will define the future returns for the stock. If the expected returns do not match your minimum threshold, start exiting the stock slowly over time (few are able to do it in one shot due to the emotions involved).

The caveat around continued growth
Some of you would saying to yourself by now that my previous argument does not square entirely with reality. There are a few companies which do not fall in this bucket. Recall my earlier point about coca-cola : Past history of high growth and slowdown in the future.

The companies which do not stagnate are those which are able to maintain an above average growth in the future. Such companies may appear to be overvalued for sometime, but are able to keep growing and hence justify the valuation. As a matter of fact, some of these companies even appear to be undervalued in hindsight

So what happens when you confuse these kind of companies (with good growth prospects) with my earlier example (coca-cola). Let me call that the marico effect !

A close friend of mine used to work in Marico and based on my understanding of the business (and inputs from my friend), I purchased the stock in around 2002-2003 time frame at around 5 times earnings (no typo there).

Fast forward to 2006, and after a lot of analysis and mumbo jumbo, I sold the stock as it seemed overvalued at around 30 times earnings. I was right, for a period of 3 years and then spectacularly wrong. Have a look the price action below

If you are comfortable with the long term growth prospects of the company and believe that the company will do well over the next 5-10 years, it would be silly to sell the stock as the earning would slowly catch up to the valuations in time and once that happens, the stock returns would match the earnings growth

There are no short cuts here – you have to decide if you are holding a cocacola (high quality, low growth), a marico (high quality, high growth) or a dog (no quality, just fluff) and act accordingly.

There is one action, which you should take without hesitation if you are holding a dog – Sell before everyone else realizes that it is a dog. A lot of investors in 2015 bought dogs and have only recently realized – too late, they are holding dogs !
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Stocks and dogs ! discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

I recently tweeted the following

Convenience
It is undeniable that the local kirana store offers a lot of convenience and personalized service. My own mother continues to buy grocery from the local guy and he is able to provide personalized service and home delivery at the same price. What can really beat that?

Will the consumer not use a blend of these two options? Buy the bulky staple from the local guy as it cheaper to do so, but buy the higher value (read higher margin) items online where the price could be lower and selection larger.

Credit
That’s true for a large portion of the poor/ unbanked population. But is that also true for the middle class? What happens when newer forms of banking and credit options start proliferating? Does the local kirana store still have an edge?

Personalized relationship
This is a difference no online retailer can meet ..right? Welcome to the world of data analytics. Look at Netflix and Amazon who are now able to look at your purchases and make recommendations. With the improvement in data analytics, mobile and AI, this will only get better

Trend in other markets
There is a consistent trend in several markets towards the following

– Big box stores such as Costco/ Walmart etc which sell high volume staples at very competitive prices which no online retailer can beat (yet)
– Convenience stores such as 711 which are able to provide quick convenience at a much higher price/ margin. These stores usually cater to impulse buying (snacks, coffee etc) and also stock a small assortment of staples for emergency purchases (milk, eggs etc)
– Ongoing pressure on brick and mortar stores to match the pricing of their online counterparts

The retailer’s point of view
Till now we are talking of the landscape from the customer’s point of view. If you turn this around and look at it from the retailers’ point of view, the situation can appear quite bleak.

What happens to the profitability of the physical retailer if the high value/ high margin items continue to migrate online and all that remains are the bulk and low margin items which are more efficiently served by the high volume/ low margins chain stores such as D-mart ?

I have tried to raise highlight some of the points one needs to think about when trying to answer this question. I don’t think that the small store/ kirana will disappear completely, but it is quite likely that they will keep shrinking and their share of the economic pie is surely to go down.

The above speculation is based on the current level of technology. Now combine that with ongoing developments in Artificial intelligence/ Machine learning, advances in drone tech to reduce delivery costs and finally 3D manufacturing.

Does it still mean that retail as we know now, will remain the same? —————-
Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

Beta – This is the term used by academics to represent risk. In other words, for them volatility is equal to risk. This definition of risk makes sense, if one is a short term trader, but is completely useless for an investor.

In my view risk is multifaceted, fuzzy and grey and it cannot be boiled down to a single number. It is not even possible to minimize all forms of risk at the same time – for example you can minimize the risk of a quotational loss on your portfolio by increasing the cash component, but that increases the risk of missing out on the gains if the market moves upwards.

I am going to break down an investor’s risk in two sections – Risks faced by investor independent of the company/ stock and the business related risks of a specific investment. This post will cover the risks faced by all investors, irrespective of the type of investments.

This is a widely understood form of risk – As one grows older and approaches retirement, the capacity to bear risk reduces. As a 25 year old, one can afford to lose a large portion of one’s portfolio and can still recover from it as one has a long working life ahead. I personally managed to lose almost 25% of my portfolio in my 20s and although it hurt emotionally, it did not make much of a dent on my long term networth.

The duration / cash flow needs

This is usually but not always related to the age of an investor. A younger investor can afford to take a very long term view of his or her investments and think in terms of multiple decades. An investor in his or her late 50s however has several cash flow needs on the horizon such as education for children and hence needs to design the portfolio accordingly. As a result, any capital which is needed in the next 5 years, should not be invested in equities. If you do so, you are exposing yourself to the risk that the market would drop at the time when this invested cash is needed, turning a temporary loss to a permanent one.

A majority of such over confident guys (and they are mostly guys) get their back side kicked and blame everyone else for their failure. A few however are sensible enough to realize their stupidity and work to fix it over time.

This is a rarely discussed risk. Let me explain what I mean by this – One can call this temperament or maturity. There are some people who have temperamentally more suited to the stock market as they are calm, humble and eager to learn. In addition these people do not get swept by greed or fear. As a result such people are able to do fairly well over the long term.

This attitude is however not specific to any age or gender, though I have seen it mostly in men. Women either stay away from financial decisions or if they are forced to manage it, are far more sensible as they realize their limitations.

This is a risk a majority of investors in india face due to the huge amount of misinformation and misguidance by the financial services industry.

The only way to manage this risk is to educate yourself on the basics and never to listen blindly to your friendly broker/ agent whose interest is in the commissions and often not your financial well being.

Quite self explanatory, but a very under-appreciated risk. A lot of people assume that if they invest in fixed income options, they have taken care of their investment needs. My own parents were guilty of this mistake in the past.

I see a lot of educated and young people in my own family ignore this risk to their peril.

Leverage risk is commonly understood as the leverage taken by an investor in his portfolio. I prefer to expand this further and consider all forms of non –investing leverage too. For example, if you have a big home loan and other forms of leverage in the form of personal and car loans, then your flexibility as an investor is greatly reduced.

I have personally looked at leverage in the above manner and worked to ensure that my total debt to networth never exceeds 30-40%. This ensures that my debt servicing is within control and any fluctuations in the stock market, will not force me to liquidate my positions to manage this debt.

I have never seen this risk discussed, but I think it influences your investing behavior a lot. If you have a full time profession (job or a business) which will put food on the table irrespective of how the stock market behaves, it is bound to impact your risk appetite.

It may appear that several of the risks I have pointed out are overlapping in nature. I would agree with that and my post is not provide an exhaustive and non overlapping list of risks faced by an investor. The idea is to look at some risks which are faced by an investor, outside of the specific investment itself.

I have tried to cover risks which are independent of the type of instrument chosen for investing. I think these risks play an important role in determining the nature of one’s investments and the kind of returns one can make. In the next post, I will discuss about the various forms business risks one needs to keep in mind when investing in equities.

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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

Let me share some actual data, without sharing the name of the company initially

 

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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

The easiest way to justify a high PE stock is to say that it has a moat or in other words a sustainable competitive advantage. Once these magic words are uttered, no further analysis or thinking is needed. If there is a moat, it does not matter if the stock sells at a PE of 30 or 70. It is all the same.

1. EPS = 10 Rs
2. Return on capital (ROC) = 22%
3. Growth in profits = 15 %
4. Company is able to maintain this return on capital and growth for 10 years. After that the ROC drops to 12% and growth to 8% (leading to a terminal PE of around 12)

I just described the case of several companies such as HDFC bank, Asian paints, Nestle etc. In case of these companies, the markets assumed a certain excess return period, which turned to be too conservative. Anyone who bought the stock at a high looking PE, was actually buying the stock cheap.

Lets look at a few more happy cases. Lets assume that the company actually ends up earning an ROC of 50% with a growth of 20%. If you plug in these numbers, the fair value  turns out to be around 440 (PE=44). I may have just described what has happened to page industries since 2008.

 So what are the key points?

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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

How to reject a stock?

You will generally find ten tips to select the next ten bagger, but not many write on how to reject stocks.

The problem of abundance
A typical well diversified portfolio tends to have 15-20 stocks (anything more does not reduce risk any further).  Let’s assume that the holding period is 2-3 years per stock. So in effect one needs to find and replace 5-7 stocks per year in the portfolio.

We have around 5000+ companies listed in the stock market and a selection of 10-12 stocks means that you will reject 4990 stocks (if you were able to have a look at all the companies each year).  That is around a 99%+ rejection rate. Even if you were to play around with the number of stocks you can analyze each year and the number you end up selecting, I cannot envisage a scenario where you will reject less than 95% of the stocks you review.

Finally a corollary to my point –The main problem is that we are not limited by choice, but by time and effort.

Building the framework

At the risk of oversimplication, I would say a long term investor is looking at high rates of return for a long period of time. Putting it quantitavely, I would say that I am looking at a CAGR of 26% per annum for 3-5 years or longer if possible.

–          The company operates in an industry with above average growth rate which means that the industry is growing atleast at 15%+ rates (higher than the GDP).
–          The company is able to earn a high rate of return on capital (atleast 15% or higher) for a long period of time (sustainable competitive advantage)
–          Company is led by a competent and ethical management
–          The company is selling at reasonable valuations

Easier to reject stocks
You must have noted that I have omitted a lot of factors which go into selecting a winning stock and that’s precisely my point. Selecting a profitable stock is a complicated Endeavour and one can write books on it and still not cover all the points needed to identify a profitable idea.

So let’s look at how we can select stocks to lose money
–          The company operates in an industry which is in a terminal decline (fixed line telephony) or is highly cyclical, commodity in nature and with very poor return on capital (metals, sugar, airlines etc)
–          The industry is subject to a lot of change (regulatory, competitive or technological) which causes several companies to fail or loose money due to sudden change in the competitive scenario (telecom, mining etc)
–          The company is managed by an unethical and incompetent management (do you need examples here?? – just look around )
–          The stock is purchased at high valuations in a cyclical industry right at the peak of the business cycle. To add insult to injury, the company is managed by an unethical and incompetent management. This combination of factors is guaranteed to loose atleast 50-60% of your capital if not more

Is it comprehensive and works 100% of the time?
Of course, this list is not comprehensive. I can come up with a lot of additional points, but I can say that these broad criteria can be used to eliminate a lot of companies at the first glance.

My counter point is – Do you really want to search for a needle in a haystack when there are often gems lying around? If your idea of fun is to find that nugget of gold in a pile of manure, then welcome to my world. I have engaged in it often and the results are not great compared to the effort put in. In addition if you are not a full time investor, then it makes all the more sense to focus your limited time on good opportunities.

The benefit of my mistakes
The list I have shared is not something I have just dreamed up while sipping coffee. I did a small exercise of listing of my failures for the last 15+ years and found a few common threads among all of them.  If I boil it down, it comes down to the four points listed above.

Let me make another bold claim – if you want to lose 90% of your money, buy a highly cyclical and commodity type company at high valuations at the peak of the business cycle and run by an incompetent and crooked management. You will be guaranteed this result. How do I know – I tried it a few times and have never failed to loose my shirt (and other garments!)
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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

Cost is an important, though poorly understood aspect of investing. It is important for the simple reason that costs reduce the overall return one makes from an investment option. It is also poorly managed as people focus too much on explicit costs (cost of brokerage or fees) and ignore the hidden ones (such as opportunity costs).

a.    Fixed deposit : cost 0, likely return : 8-9% (pre-tax)
b.    Index fund ETF: cost 0.6% to 1%. Likely return : 14-15% (pre-tax)
c.    Mutual funds (HDFC equity fund): cost 2%. Likely return : 20-21% (pre-tax)
d.    PMS: usually 2% of asset and % of gains.  Likely returns: Who knows?

Fixed deposit and index funds are zero or low cost options with the FDs having no volatility, but much lower returns. IF you want to build wealth, an FD is not going to get you there. Index funds are a decent alternative, where the risk of active portfolio management is removed. You don’t have to worry if your portfolio manager is an idiot who will underperform or worse lose money over the long term.

The last option is private vehicles such as PMS (portfolio management schemes). These involve high costs, and in some cases deliver good returns. However they have a mixed record and are generally not a good option for most investors due to a high minimum investment.

Let’s take a hypothetical case

At the end of 3.5 years, you will have following sums with you
Fixed deposit (pre-tax): 4.05 Lacs (pre-tax) and 3.84 Post tax
Index fund (pre-tax and post tax): 4.18 Lacs (net 1% as cost)
Mutual fund (pre-tax and post tax): 4.62 lacs (net 2% management fee )

The explicit costs
In order to make the higher returns, an investor had to contend with all the volatility and noise in the market. In addition to the emotional toll, there was an explicit cost of around 3% for the index fund and around 6% for the mutual fund.

Inspite of these costs, if an investor could stomach the volatility, he or she came out ahead during one of the lousy periods in the stock market.

If you think explicit costs are bad, I would say the hidden costs are even worse.

This difference only increases over time and would be even wider once the market performs close its long term average (15-17%) and interest rates drop.

If you bought 3 lacs of gold in Jan 2011, you would have around 3.78 Lacs of gold now (at pre-tax). I don’t want to discuss taxes as paying taxes on gold is different issue altogether. So gold did barely as well as an FD. Keep in mind that gold over a 20 year or longer period has delivered 9-10% per annum despite the recent runup (excluding transaction and holding costs)

The returns on a specific investment – a stock or a property is not same as the return of an entire investment class. If you want to look at the average returns, look at this table by NHB. The returns vary from -15% for a Kochi to 249% returns for Chennai over a 7 year period. So we are talking of -2% to 15% per annum for different locations. This does not even include taxes, brokerage, and maintenance fee (For property).

Congrats – but then you are missing the final point. The final point is the cost of time and effort – if you are a full time or even a part time investor in RE, you are using knowledge/ skill/ time to dig out such deals and investment in them. As you do this, you are not using your time do XYZ (spend time working, with your kids, play – whatever you can think of)

Compare all costs
IF you truly want to compare multiple investment options, compare all the costs – implicit and explicit

It is foolish to look at some costs and declare a particular option as better. Maybe I value peace of mind and time with family more than returns – in that case an FD is better.  My own dad valued these attributes more than returns and spent his spare time with his kids and on his own hobbies (without ever depriving us of anything in life)

In addition to these costs and corresponding returns, I would say there are emotional and bragging benefits to various options which will be the subject of the next post.

I had written a note about Selan exploration here. I will not repeat the analysis as the main thesis laid out earlier, still holds true.

The company is cheap from multiple perspectives – enterprise value per barrel of oil reserves, EV/EBDITA etc. However due to lack of timely clearances for drilling new wells, the production and profits have stagnated for the last few years. As a result, the stock price stagnated for a few years, before the recent run from the 200 levels to around 620 now.

In addition to the above disclosure, there is another very key variable which is showing an upward trend – development of hydrocarbon properties. This is the cost incurred by an oil and gas company to prospect for locations for new wells and then drill the well and complete it. The company has spent close to 80 Crs in the last four years in prospecting for new drilling locations.

We cannot be sure how many of these wells will be successful and when exactly they will come online. At the same time, the typical lead time from start of drilling to production of oil and gas varies between 6-9 months. So we are in effect talking of about 3-6 months of time for the oil production to ramp up.

This is not a core position
This is not a big position as i think it is risky for the reasons already detailed in my earlier post. Let me repeat the key ones

–          The management provides the minimum level of commentary on the performance and outlook for the company. There are no interviews, quarterly conference calls etc. In effect short of speaking to the management directly, there are no publicly available sources of information. One is driving through a foggy windshield and being forced to make inferences based on published data

Please do not consider this to be a stock recommendation and do you own homework. Please read the disclaimer if you still have some doubts

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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

What is worse than losing 100% on a stock ? It’s missing a 10 bagger !

What’s worse than missing a 10 bagger ? It missing a 10 bagger which you identified and decided to take no action inspite of knowing about the company. Now you must be thinking – that’s quite dumb ! In a way it is, but as always the story is more nuanced than just being dumb.

Let me give some more hints J ..I wrote about it in July 2010 when it was selling for around 80 Crs market cap. It now sells at around 1400 crores. That’s a 20 bagger excluding dividends during a period where the market has gone nowhere.

Now I can assign this to bad luck and move on. However I have never operated this way – I want to dissect each failure – failure of losing money or failure missing out on a 10+ bagger.

I wrote about this company in July 2010 when it was a micro cap and started a small position in the company. I was comfortable with the financial performance of the company, but was concerned with a corporate governance issue – issue of warrants to the promoter at below market price, when the company did not really need the extra capital.

As the stock price rose, I lost interest in the company and sold my small position as I was not comfortable with the corporate governance issue. In hindsight, I do not fault myself for this decision – it was the right thing to do based on the facts known to me at that point

So where did I really go wrong? As I look back, I can attribute the failure to a label I attached to the company. I was not comfortable with the management and attached the label of ‘poor corporate governance’ to the company.

First conclusion or confirmation bias

The other name for this locking is called the first conclusion bias (read here). Once I had reached a conclusion I refused to change it, inspite of evidence to the contrary. It is only after the evidence became too obvious to ignore that I have revisited my conclusion and realized the flaw in my thinking

If mayor uniquoters was an isolated example, it would have been comforting to ‘label’ it as an aberration and move on. However there are a few more examples (atleast ones which are obvious to me).

Hawkins cooker: This stock was pointed out to me in 2010 when the company was selling at a PE of around 15. The company was and is easy to understand, has great economics and a wonderful management. So if such a company was presented to me on a platter , why did I ignore it ? The single word for that is valuations – The Company was selling at a PE of 15+ which in my mind was expensive.

The above thought process holds true in isolation, but it is important to consider the PE ratio in context of business quality. A business with weak economics is a bad stock even if it has a low PE and an exceptional business with a moderately high PE can still be a great stock. I have been aware of this fact, but still had to relearn this important concept all over again

It would be safe to assume that if you are presented ‘data’ which contradicts your assumptions, you will change your prior conclusions ? Atleast not in my case !

Ajanta pharma has been a multi-bagger since it was pointed out to me by a very smart investor – Hitesh. I still have the email in which he shared the idea with me in 2011. At that time, I was not comfortable with pharma companies and thought that I could not judge Ajanta’s future prospects accurately.

I personally follow this site and occasionally post on it too. Ajanta pharma and Mayur uniquoters are two such ideas which were posted on this site and analyzed in a lot detail. I have been following these companies over the last few years and inspite of over whelming evidence did not take the plunge

How to change ?

The first step in fixing a blind spot is recognizing one. Now that I have recognized multiple biases in my case, I have started focusing on the following points in my investment process

–          Do not equate a high PE with expensive. Analyze the business in detail and determine if the company can still double in 3 years at current or slightly lower valuations
–          Focus on quality before valuations
–          Constantly question my own conclusions. I have started doing this after each quarterly result – does the company match the original thesis (positive or negative)? Do I have access to some new non-quantitative information which should prompt me to revise my original thesis ?

Ps: if you guys have some stock tips, do send it my way. I will have a more open mind on it now J
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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

I wrote earlier about a Darwinian approach to portfolio construction. This approach involves the ranking all the stocks in a descending order and replacing the last position with a better stock/ idea. The key concept behind this idea is to replace the weakest position with a stronger one and thus improve the portfolio quality.

A 2X in 3 years
As the title suggests, I have now started asking a question for each position (at the time of quarterly and annual results) – Does this position have the potential to double in 3 years ?

How does one look at the potential ? There are two variable driving the stock price – earnings growth and valuation. Lets say the stock is selling at intrinsic value and the earnings are growing at around 24% per annum. At the risk of over simplifying (and not stating some additional factors), we can expect the stock to increase at roughly the same rate and thus double in 2 years.

Not a scientific exercise
One can easily find a lot of flaws in the above thought process. You can argue that, no one knows the market situation three years from now. In addition, the company performance may turn out to be much lower than expected, thus negating the entire exercise.

What do to with such cases
Lets say you identify a stock where the potential return is unlikely to be 2X in 3 years. What now ? do you sell and buy another stock ? What if you don’t have another idea ?

I don’t think so. I would say the opportunity cost is the average returns you have made over the long term. Lets assume that your portfolio has returned  15% per annum on average in the last 10 years. I would say that this is your opportunity cost and the existing position has to be above this threshold to remain in the portfolio

So the question to ask is – does this position meet my opportunity cost threshold? If yes, hold on to it till you can find a better idea – preferably a 2X or 3X in the next few years.
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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

I ran a few ‘experiments’ during the year, some of which I wrote about on the blog. As the year draws to a close, I am preparing the report card and as always it’s a mixed one – Lots of D and F and not a single A J

Let’s look at some of these experiments, learnings and plans for next year.

Buying dirt cheap stocks
The main ‘idea’ behind these positions was that the stock was dirt cheap and hence once the pessimism cleared, the price would bounce back

Business cycle related
The capital goods sector has been hit very hard in the last few years and the news worsened during the year. As I wrote in this post – ‘How I think about macro’, I personally thought the pessimism around this sector was overdone and one could look for some quality firms in the industry to take a position at rock bottom valuations.

You can see the price action below

So what’s the grade ? It’s a B at best for the following reasons

Learnings
– I don’t have timing skills and this episode proved it again. I care about buying at the right price rather than at the right time. However in the above example, it is important to get the timing right too, otherwise one will have to wait for a long time. A number of fellow investors I know are experts at this – but I am not. As a result, this type of investing has rarely worked for me.
– Due to the lack of timing skills (and being aware of it), I have been hesitant to create a large position in such opportunities. The result of a small position is that a 33% return, does not move the needle on the portfolio. As a result, buying such kind of stocks, which I do not plan to hold for the long term are just a waste of time (for me)
– These kinds of timing opportunities in the end may just be good to keep me entertained, but will not add to my returns in the long run.

I wrote about zylog here. I  laid out the argument for this position in the post and the reason for the eventual exit.

It is easy to look at this episode with hindsight bias (management was suspect and hence one should not touch the stock).  Around the same time last year, I was looking at some high profile cases of failure (read here) and wanted to test the following hypothesis – is it possible to figure out management fraud from publicly available documents such as annual reports (market grapevine does not count).

The above trade turned out to be a disaster as it soon became known that the management was indulging in insider trading.

Value trade
I wrote about this short term opportunity here. As I noted in the post, this is a stock which had become cheap for  short term reasons (quarterly earnings miss), though there was no long term issue or any management concerns.

This type of investing is more suited to my personal temperament. I am able to analyze that the market is being too pessimistic due to short term factors. If the business is doing fine and there are no management issues, I am able to take a mid size position and make reasonable returns over a one year time frame.

Not all trading
If you have started reading my blog recently, you may feel that I am into short term trading. That is miles from the actual reality. The above cases, are just experiments on the side, representing not more than 1% of my personal portfolio.

The long term changes
The key change I have been focusing on my core portfolio, is moving towards higher focus or concentration. I have kept a fairly diversified portfolio in the past with majority of positions under 10% of the total portfolio. I have now started increasing the size of some positions where I have a higher level of confidence in them.

Chicken that I am, the move is likely to be very slow and measured.

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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

I think behavorial finance is a very important topic for an investor (and in other walks of life too) and one should spend some time learning about and trying to avoid the common psychological pitfalls. I discussed some of these pitfalls in the previous posts (hereand here).

Poor charlie’s almanac
Thinking fast and slow
The psychology of influence
The art of thinking clearly
Seeing what others don’t : The remarkable ways we gain insight

Lets explore a few more baises and how one can avoid them

Sunk cost fallacy
This is a tendency of investors to throw good money after bad. Once you make an investment in a stock and the price starts to drop, the general tendency is to average down. If one analyses the company based on current facts and arrive at an objective conclusion that the price drop is unwarranted,  then buying/ averaging down is a good approach. However most investors (including me) remain anchored to the previous conclusions and are also influenced by the sunk cost – money already invested in the stock. As a result, majority of the investors refuse to change their mind and incur heavier losses in the future.

I have been guilty of this fallacy a lot of times and find it difficult to change my mind quickly. At present, the best antidote I have is to acknowledge my weakness, look for disconfirming evidence and act on it, inspite of looking like a fool at that time.

Story bias
Humans are suckers for stories. We understand the world in the form of stories. Our epics and mythology are stories and so are films and other forms of entertainment.

How does one avoid getting sucked in? There is one word for it – valuations. Never overpay for stocks, no matter what the story. If something is obvious to everyone, then the price reflects it and it is ‘overconfidence and hubris’ on part of most investors to assume that they are smarter than the market.

Almost everyone tends to neglect the base rate – statistical probability of an event. Investors tend to do the same. Let’s consider some examples – 90% + options expire worthless and various studies have shown that IPOs tend to underperform market over the long run. Inspite of these statistics, investors believe they can do better, mostly because they are not even aware of the low success rates.

In summary, know where you have an advantage and work on exploiting it. For example – I know for a fact that I cannot beat a full time trader in the short term and hence I will never invest in a stock or option where the odds are stacked against me.

One needs a level of optimism or confidence to do well in life. At the same time, there is fine line between confidence and over confidence. How do you know you have crossed it?

What about me? I have had the reverse problem – I have always been underconfident and that has been harmful too. I have underallocated to equities in the past and created smaller positions in my top ideas. As a result, my opportunity loss has been far higher than my actual losses.

No silver bullets
We have reviewed several biases in a series of posts. As you can see, it is easy to understand these biases and even recognize them in yourself. It is however far more difficult to overcome them – I am often aware that I am irrationally committed to an old idea, but still struggle to exit/ sell the stock.

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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

I personally think that being rational is extremely important in becoming an above average investor. So how does one become more rational?

The first step in reducing the irrationality is to name and classify the various behaviors which impact us negatively as investors. I started exploring the various biases which affect us in the previous post and will continue with a few more in this post.

I have personally avoided this bias in the above form by having a simple thumb rule – TV presenters are actors and should be watched for entertainment alone. As far as brokers and sales people are concerned, I refuse to listen to them.
The above comments may imply that I am immune to this bias – but I am not. I follow a few other bloggers and top investors. In the past, if one of them was invested in a stock, I would develop a much more positive view of the stock and even went ahead and invested in the same.

Case in point – Warren buffett talks of the buy and hold philosophy. A lot of people miss out that they he does not imply buy and forget and certainly not buy and hold bad companies. The pre-requisite condition is that one should buy a good company at an attractive price and then hold it for a long time. I have bought duds and then held it for some time, thus compounding my mistake.

First conclusion bias
This is a very common bias and we know it by another name – First impressions. We tend to form opinions of other people in the first few seconds of meeting them and then any interaction tends to re-inforce the impression. This bias has a lot of implication in job interviews, but that is a separate topic.

How does one avoid it ? For starters, I look at a company and form a view (even if subconscious) and then just drop further analysis. I make a note of the company and then move on to something else – allowing for a cooling period. I will usually come back to it after a few days and then read up on it further – making notes as I go along.

The next post will the final one on this topic and I will explore a few more biases and discuss how it is important to build routines in your investment process to reduce their impact.

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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

I have been reading a few behavioral finance books on the various biases which impact us as investors (and in other walks of life too). I have picked up this topic of study for a very specific reason.

The above statement would imply that I was an expert by year 5 and poised to be a good investor. Unfortunately the reality was far from that – you can read my journey till 2008 here. Knowing what to do is different from doing it.

Social proof

Although I was new to investing (around 3-4 years), I understood the importance of valuation and of not overpaying for stocks. Inspite of being cautious for the majority of my portfolio, I still went ahead and committed 25% of it to IT related stocks. As I look back, I recall that the main reason was that a few of my friends were investing heavily in this sector (and getting rich). In addition to this, a nice and pretty broker also recommended a few hot mutual funds (such as ICICI technology fund) which were sure to make me rich in a few years.

I managed to lose 80% of my capital in a short period of six months. This was unmistakable evidence that I had made a spectacularly wrong decision. Ever since then, I have followed a few simple rules to avoid getting influenced by the crowd
– Do not buy hot stocks. If the media is talking a lot about some hot sector or all my friends are getting into it, I will just avoid it. As a result I did not touch the real estate and infrastructure stocks during the 2007-2008 period and spared myself of a lot of agony
– Do not take stock tips from anyone, especially pretty girls J

Anchoring bias

This is a bias wherein one gets fixated on a variable in the decision making process and uses that to make all subsequent decision. This is a difficult bias to recognize and overcome.

I had been following Crompton greaves limited for some time and decided to buy the stock in 2011 after the company reported poor results in the first quarter. The stock dropped quite a bit after that and I started purchasing the stock as it ‘appeared’ cheaper compared to the past results.

In the case of stocks, investor returns are dependent on future performance, but the data to evaluate that comes from past performance. It is an art, more than science, to evaluate the past results and arrive at an appropriate conclusion. In the case of Crompton, I got anchored to the price and the past fundamentals and did not weigh the state of the industry and management issues more heavily.

How should one avoid this bias? Once you have purchased the stock, it is very difficult to avoid the anchor of the purchase price and past performance. The best approach I know of is to be aware of this bias and constantly question your reason for holding a stock.

This is a tendency to be consistent with one’s behavior in the past. It is a good way to behave in life – if you have been a decent and honest person once, you want to continue and be committed to that behavior.

Look at any stock boards – majority of the investors are talking about the positives of the company. If you are already invested in the company, does it make sense to find any additional information which just confirms your belief? How will that benefit your decision?

The approach I take now is to rank all the companies in my portfolio in a descending order of attractiveness. This forces me evaluate more idea more objectively. Once I have my rank, I compare any new idea with the last idea in the list. If the new idea is better than the last one on the list, it gets replaced.

I plan to cover additional biases such as the authority bias, availability bias and more in the subsequent posts.

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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

‘Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked ‘– Warren Buffett.

Now the tide (liquidity and enthusiasm) has gone out and the visible symptom of years of mis-management is the crash of the rupee. I am extremely pessimistic about the macro picture and the ability of our political system to fix it.

No, I am not blind to the risks and as depressed about the country as any other Indian. Let me explain my reasoning behind this apparently contradictory stance.

So if you have some capital (equity, real estate, cash  or FD) with you, what are the options for it ?

The second option is real estate. I have been pessimistic about real estate for a long time and with low gross yields of 2-3%, think it is overvalued. However if one has the skill to find some undervalued property and can hold on to an illiquid investment for some time, then this could be a possible option. At the same time, if you are thinking of using a loan  to finance it – forget about it. If the currency rate continues to depreciate, we may see a further rise in interest rates (which has already started) and the loan which you are planning (or already have), may become even more expensive.

I know that readers of this blog already know where I am going with this logic – equities. But before I get there, let me digress a bit.

The last option, which seems to be the most risky is equities. The reason it appears to be risky is due to the vividness of the risk. If you own a stock and inflation rises, the impact is visible immediately. On the other hand, options such as cash or real estate seem to be safe as we do not get a quote on it daily. However that is just a false sense of safety as the real value is eroding silently. A fixed deposit or debt instrument in the last five years has lost value due to inflation and so has real estate (if it has not appreciated by more than 12% per annum).

One can easily point out that equities are no better as the index has dropped in the last five years and hence the loss is even higher in real terms. That is true if you have been invested in the index for the last few years. At the same time, there are several companies such cera sanitaryware or crisil which have done quite well during the same period.

Let’s look at the same point mathematically – If you are able to buy a company, which is earning around 20% return on capital (and can do so for the next 3-4 years), one is likely to double his money in this period (unless the economy implodes completely) if the valuation remains the same. Finding such a company is not easy, but if the market keeps dropping, one is likely to find good companies at attractive prices

– You have some amount of skill in finding good companies. Investing blindly worked only from 2003-2008.

– You don’t need the money in the next five years. If you are retired or need money in the near term, please don’t think of putting it in the stock market.

I keep a wish list of stocks – these are companies which I would like to buy, but the price was never attractive in the past. One such company was crisil, which I bought in 2008 and have held on to it since then. There are a few other companies such as ITC , Marico (and more) in the list which I am watching. If the market keeps dropping, my wish may come true.

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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

Bear markets are a good time to reflect !

In a bull market, any pick – good or bad, goes up and everyone feels like a genius. However at times like now, where any kind of mistake is brutally punished, it is easier to uncover flaws in one’s investing process.

So, I have been thinking about my investing process and have realized that one part of my process is exceedingly weak – The selling process

Why should one worry about the process ? If you are interested in understanding it in more detail – read this noteon ‘process versus outcome’. In a nut shell, if you get the investing process right, the outcome (investment returns) will take care of itself.  It is the equivalent of getting your batting technique right, if you want to be a good batsmen and get high scores consistently.

As most of you are aware, I am heavily influenced by warren buffett and his investment philosophy. My introduction to investing was through his ‘shareholder letters’ and as a result, I have taken his teachings to the heart.

One of the key tenets of buffett’s philosophy is buy and hold, where one looks for companies with sustainable competitive advantage and buys them  at a reasonable price. Once you make the purchase, buffett advises the investor to hold for long periods of time (provided the business maintains its competitive position)

The above is a very sensible approach and would work for majority of the investors. At the same time, the key point in the ‘Buy and hold’ philosophy is to buy a high quality company where the intrinsic value is growing and let time do its magic (via compounding).

A differentiated approach
It has become slowly dawned on me (I am slow learner J), that one needs a more nuanced approach to sell, depending on the nature of the investment. In the rest of this post and the next, I will try to  categorize the various types and look at the sell approach one needs to adopt for each of them – This is ofcourse a work in progress and by no means any kind of rule set for me.

Such companies look cheap when the economy is doing well and expensive when things are bad, such as now.  If you were to buy and hold such companies over the course of the entire economic cycle (from bottom to top to bottom), the overall returns would be very average. The key in such type of investments is to be able to buy when the company is at or near the bottom of the cycle (difficult to identify usually) and sell as the business recovers – without waiting for the cycle to top.

I wrote about the company herein 2008 and kept buying it as the stock crashed during the lehman crisis. My average cost basis was around 11 / share (post split).  I was out of the stock by mid 2010. You can see the price action below

The commercial vehicle business turned in 2010 and has been going downhill since then. The stock price has followed suit

So the key point with cyclicals is this – Buy and hold does not work (usually) and timing is critical for above average returns

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Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Let’s see what all has gone wrong and may get even worse

No, this is the market drop from Feb 2000 to May 2003. The market dropped 38% during this period, with IT stocks dropping even more.

 My point is that market drops happen from time to time and is the risk of earning high returns. The mistake most investors commit is to extrapolate recent events into the future. An investor looking at the market in 2003 would have missed one of the biggest rallies from 2003 to 2008.

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 Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

I wrote about hinduja global solutions (Now HGS) in jan 2009 (see here). The company was selling for below cash and thus the operating business was available for free.

As we know, the stock markets recovered by May 2009 and HGS was up 200% in a short span of 4 months.

In case you are wondering, this post is not about how I smartly exited in July and make 200% of capital.

The company performed extremely well in 2010. Net profits were up by 100%, Net margins hit 14% and this was inspite of the company carrying a large amount of cash on the balance sheet. I was feeling pretty smart about it.

The slow slide
 

The price action from the peak in 2009 shows only part of the story. The company has increased its sales from around 900 Crs in 2010 to around 1550 Cr in 2012 at a CAGR of 30%+. The net profit  however dropped from 130 Crs to around 106 Crs in 2012 and may drop further to around 80 Crs in the current year.

I kept buying the stock during this period, anchored to the earlier levels of profitability.
The company has thus been able to grow through a combination of organic initiatives and acquisitions, but saw a drop in profitability due to lower margins and lower capital turns. In effect, the growth came through, but the economics of the industry has deteroriated during the same period. The company has gone from above average profitability (20%+ROE) to below average levels in the current year (single digit ROE)

The lessons
There are two key takeaways from the above loss.

The first lesson is that if the initial expectations on the economics of an industry do not play out, one should accept the reality as soon as possible and act on it. The second lesson for me is that I should give a higher weightage to the qualitative aspects of the business and not focus too much on the valuation. In case of HGS, the large amount of cash on the balance sheet (and corresponding low valuation) distracted me from the deteriorating economics of the business – A value trap.

The blind spot problem
I have looked at the various companies in the past and have wondered why others keep buying/ recommending it when it is obvious that the company does not have above average profitability and cannot be a good long term investment.

The thing with blind spot is that the same issues are not visible to yourself, where one may keep rationalizing your own decision for a long time.

It is not easy to accept a mistake, especially a slow one , resulting in the boiling frog problem. Hopefully this lesson will stay with me for a long time and prevent me from making the same mistake again (new ones will however happen)

update: 23-12
A lot of readers have responded to the survey. My personal thanks to all of you, who have responded.

The topic which got the maximum vote is – How to search for and analyse investment ideas ?

The balance questions were ordered in the following manner with the second and third place a close tie
How to read and analyse an annual report – second place 
Discounted cash flow analysis – third place
My goofups and learnings of 2012 – fourth place
Portfolio management for professionals – fifth place

I will be putting together a post over next month, for the topic which got the highest ranking  I will take up the next two topics too in due course of time.

The topic which was my favorite – about my magnetic personality 🙂 got 15% votes. atleast 15% of you like my magnetic personality !!! 🙂

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I get emails from a lot of readers to write about various topics. The topics requested are important for most investors and I think a majority of the readers of the blog would benefit from them. 

I have put a poll on the list of topics which have been requested in the past (except point 6) and would write on the topic which gets the most votes. If you want a different topic to be written about and is not on the list, please leave a comment and i will take it up in a future poll. 

I am sure you can guess, which topic will get my vote 🙂