Investing Strategy Articles

Investing in net nets was my bread and butter back in 2008-2010.

I call it the glory days.

Everything was so darn cheap, it was like taking candy from a baby. Not that I would know.

The glory days are long gone and I eagerly wait for the next.

I love net nets because they are easy to invest. It’s an objective approach to investing. You don’t have to think about a narrative or future earnings power. Barely have to do any complex valuation or what if analysis like what we do with EBIT multiples valuation.

Sometimes I’ll go to YouTube and look up a past episode of American Idol or something similar for a good laugh or inspiration.

On this day, I come across a video it happened to be a young lad coming in for an audition.

He has a great voice, bellows out a fantastic tune and nails it.

Or so I thought.

If you invest, you have one goal in mind.

For your investments to be profitable.

What you and I can also agree on is that we don’t like being fooled by ourselves or others. We certainly don’t want to make bad decisions.

But we do it all the time.

Over and over again.

And many people refuse to do anything about it.

In 1932, Ben Graham became a freelance writer for Forbes during the bottom of the Great Depression.

Talk about timing.

With the economy sinking, it would have been tough to write about stocks will go back up. But true to form, in the middle of crashes and people’s accounts getting wiped out, Graham wrote about why the market was cheap with a healthy dose of common sense and objectivity.

The crowd of companies in this section [Manufacturing, Service and Retailing Operations] sells products ranging from lollipops to jet airplanes. Some of these businesses, measured by earnings on unleveraged net tangible assets, enjoy terrific economics, producing profits that run from 25% after-tax to far more than 100%. Others generate good returns in the area of 12% to 20%. A few, however, have very poor returns, a result of some serious mistakes I made in my job of capital allocation. I was not misled: I simply was wrong in my evaluation of the economic dynamics of the company or the industry in which it operated.
—Warren Buffett, Letter to Shareholders 2013

As I continue to make my way through The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, there’s an extraordinary amount of details into how Buffett’s early partnership started, the original investments and the outcomes.

Following Ben Graham’s deep value background, Buffett spent most of this early days as an active investor.

Before Munger was able to convince him that buying compounding businesses at a reasonable price was the way to go, Buffett ran a special situation segment of his portfolio.
During his partnership years, this is what his allocation looked like.

A few years ago I went on a company due diligence trip with a friend of mine who manages a microcap fund. We spent the morning with management and the afternoon visiting a few of their customers.

At dinner that evening we replayed the day’s events. Towards the end of the discussion my friend says, “You know the thing I like most about this company is their customers would really be screwed without their product.”

an interview with Bruce Greenwald who’s being interviewed by Michael Ricciardi, the CEO and Managing Partner of Mercury Capital Advisors. In this interview Bruce talks about why he doesn’t think that corporate profit margins will be reversing to the historical mean.

When I see Joel Greenblatt, for some reason, he reminds me of Benjamin Graham. I don’t really know why, but I guess it’s something in the way he behaves and talks and the wisdom he shares. And I don’t really know how Graham himself much and what he looked like and the way he talked. I associate Greenblatt with Graham, let’s just leave it at that since it doesn’t really matter a lot.

What are the attributes required to succeed as an investor? We go through ten attirbutes based on Michael J. Mauboussin’s paper which you can apply yourself. Learn what traits you need to become an investing superstar.