Investment Process, Value Investing

Owners’ Manual

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Our Owners’ Manual represents the collective will of all our partners. As trustees of our collective wealth, firm’s managing partners will always honour the manual in designing the firm’s investing and operating actions. We owe the inspiration to create this manual to Warren Buffett.

Here it goes:

Partners’ trust is our asset, their money our liability

    • We put partners first in our incentives, conduct and communication. This is not a vague marketing catchphrase. Having known the compounding power of trust, it makes an immense business sense to do so. It would be foolish to do otherwise.
    • We operate knowing that partners’ hard earned money is on the line. Our investment presupposes protection of capital. And our operations presuppose frugality.
    • Noble intentions should be matched by concrete actions. The managing partners, therefore, have their major portion of networth invested in this firm. We eat our own cooking.

Our long term goal is to keep increasing “our share in economic earnings and net assets of underlying businesses” as % of our investment cost.

    • We donot treat stocks as screen tickers or lottery tickets. For us a stock represents part ownership in a live business that has an intrinsic value which may be different from its price.
    • By owning a stock we get to own a share in economic earnings and net assets of underlying business. By economic earnings we mean normalised earning power.
    • We will do well if, in long run, we can increase “our share in economic earnings and net assets of underlying businesses” as % of our investment cost.
    • Essential to seeing this happen is that we buy good businesses at or below their intrinsic values and hold them till they remain good and inexpensive (points 3, 4 and 5 below).

First key to our work is conservative assessment of intrinsic values of underlying businesses

    • Stated simply, intrinsic value of any business is the present value of its future cash flows.
    • To make intrinsic values reliable, we try to limit our research to good businesses that have some competitive advantages, are simple to understand and are run by able and honest management.
    • Moreover, our analysis presumes that most things in business– commodity prices, interest rates, and demand – will turn out to be cyclical. We give due credit to this reality while imagining future.

Second key is to buy at or below intrinsic value

    • Key to reduce the risk of permanent loss of capital is not to overpay. Good businesses are rare and situations that make them available below intrinsic values are rarer still. Such situations broadly include:
      • Out of favour business (cyclical downturns, one time difficult but solvable problem)
      • General market downturns (recessions, depressions)
      • Contrary analysis (time arbitrage, different view)
      • Disinterest (small size, index exclusion)
    • Owing to this dual rarity (rare business, rare prices), often we need to sit on cash (or cash equivalents) and wait. When owing to the four factors above (i to iv), opportunities do present themselves, we bet big by limiting our portfolio to 10-12 concentrated positions.

Third key is to hold businesses till they remain good and inexpensive

    • Big money is mostly made, not by frequent buying and selling, but by holding.
    • If the businesses that we buy (after step 3 and 4 above) remain good and inexpensive, holding them for long term renders focus and saves costs– two essentials for benefitting from the power of compounding.

Actions driven by rationality rather than emotions

    • Owing to greed, envy or fear, short term prices sometimes get de-anchored from intrinsic values.
    • Execution of points 3, 4 and 5 above will require us to remember this dichotomy, and keep our focus on intrinsic values.
    • By not chasing hot stocks during bull runs, we like all value investors will see temporary but reversible periods of underperformance. Bear with us during those periods. We would be conserving cash to put to use when the bubble bursts. When bubble does burst, resist selling and if possible invest more. During those periods markets go on SALE and our hard work is rewarded.
    • As a corollary, it would be unwise to gauge our performance from short term price movements. We, therefore, look at changes in fundamentals to review our performance.

Reporting philosophy

    • We will follow the agreed reporting format irrespective of good or bad performance.
    • The spirit of the reporting format is expectations managing partners will themselves have if our roles are reversed.
    • Mention of mistakes will precede mention of accomplishments.
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Investment Psychology, Value Investing

Human Diffuculties in Value Investing

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Charlie Munger, the partner of Warren Buffet and Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, noted “all sensible investing is value investing”. There are volumes of research on the fact that despite richest investors like Buffett and Munger attributing their success and riches to value investing, majority donot follow value philosophy.

Theoretically, value investing involves buying below and selling above intrinsic value. This sounds simple and sensible. However as Yogi Berra quipped “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is”. Value investing, like many disciplines, is easy in theory but difficult in practice.

It is difficult in practice because it is contrary to normal human nature and accepted social norms at each of its four broad steps:

  1. Assessing Intrinsic Value : Assessment of intrinsic value involves future. The uncertain terrain of future needs large doses of skepticism, objectivity and humility over optimism, group-think and overconfidence.
  2. Buying below intrinsic value: Bargains are found amidst fear and disinterest. Owing to biological adaptation over ages, brain is conditioned to prefer flight over rational thought when induced to fright. Similarly homo sapiens have preferred staying in the comfort of popularity over the risky pursuit of contrary solitude.
  3. Waiting: Most money in investing is made by waiting, not frequent trading. In a world where activity is looked as synonymous to progress, the notion of buying and doing nothing for days stimulates guilt glands and consequently needless actions.
  4. Selling above intrinsic value: Price rise intoxicates human mind. It forces it to keep on dancing long after the music has stopped. Greed, hubris and envy are all at play here. It requires an objective, non-greedy mind to stop dancing before the music is going to stop.

Overconfidence, fear, safety in crowd, needless activity, greed and envy are powerful tendencies that have served some utility in human evolution since hunter gatherer days. They are hard to resist and they operate automatically.

Value Investing calls for curbing these tendencies. This is hard to do. This makes value investing anathema to us homo sapiens. Fortunately, being aware and alert to the nature, cause and stimulant of these tendencies has proved to be a working antidote for successful value investors including Charlie Munger.

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