Novel Investor

Compounding investing wisdom...

Learning the Wrong Lessons

by Jon

There’s a risk that investors learn the wrong lessons from recent market cycles. One of the biggest wrong lessons is that the market always quickly recovers.

Of course, quick recoveries have defined the stock market since the 2008 financial crisis. The 2009 bottom led to the longest bull market ever and the buy the dip mantra (BTFD) grew from that period. The 2020 crash solidified it.

It would come as no surprise if investors expected recent history to repeat itself. Of course, investors often mistakenly rely on recent history or lived experience to make decisions, as if it’s the only history that matters.

In fact, Seth Klarman noted this specific false lesson in 2010:

Bad things happen, but really bad things do not. Do buy the dips, especially the lowest quality securities when they come under pressure, because declines will quickly be reversed.

Howard Marks shared a similar thought in his book Mastering the Market Cycle: Continue Reading…

Wise Words from Charley Ellis

by Jon

Charley Ellis recognized that there were two different games being played in the stock market. The game the experts play differs from the game the amateurs play.

When the amateurs try to play the experts’ game they frequently make mistakes and lose money. That’s not to say the experts are fantastic at making money. A few are but experts, on average, fail to beat the market too. So the majority of experts fall short of the market and the amateurs, emulating experts, do worse.

Ellis’s solution is to play a different game entirely. The game amateurs should play, and many experts too, is built on a foundation of avoiding errors. Essentially, not losing. Fewer errors lead to better results.

Ellis wrote this in his 1975 classic The Loser’s Game. In it, he used an analogy between tennis and investing. It turns out there are two different games in tennis too. The game the professionals play is not the same game as the one the amateurs play.

The pros can be aggressive. They have the skill, precision, and experience to place shots just outside their opponent’s reach. They play a winner’s game. The match goes to the player who earns the most wins.

Amateurs, however, often lose by trying to play like the pros, because it leads to unforced errors. It’s a loser’s game. Amateurs win in tennis by volleying until their opponent hits it into the net or out of bounds. They win by not losing. Continue Reading…

Phil Fisher: The Art of Holding On

by Jon

Selling is the more difficult part of investing than buying. Holding on is even harder.

Phil Fisher had a philosophy around selling — or rather, not selling — that may be helpful to more than his stock-picking fans. But first, a little background.

Fisher was the original long-term investor. He just did it in a very highly concentrated way, a side effect of his strategy.

He’s the guy that influenced Warren Buffett’s transition from Ben Graham’s buying companies at a wonderful price to Buffett’s wonderful companies at a fair price. The key change was essentially paying a higher multiple (but still undervalued price) in exchange for a longer runway.

That last bit is key.

Fisher’s philosophy is built on finding the handful of companies that can grow at a sustainably high rate over long periods of time. While the typical Graham investment might have a holding period of one to three years, Fisher’s was decades. Continue Reading…

Investing Advice from 1937, Still Relevant Today

by Jon

Fred C. Kelly wrote an almost weekly column for Barron’s from December 1936 to June 1937. It was well-timed.

His column began near the tail end of a four-year bull market. The stock market bottomed in June 1932  — June 8th for the Dow at 41.2. Then it took off. The next four years saw the Dow rise 337% off the bottom.

However, 1937 would end that run with a 33% loss on the Dow. The Dow hit a high for the year on March 10th, proceeded to decline 15% over the next three months, then almost recovered completely. The ’37 crash hit two months after his column ended.

Kelly’s column offered some well-timed behavioral advice that happens to still be relevant today. Continue Reading…

Reflexivity: Explaining Bubbles

by Jon

The lesson from studying market history is how little human nature changes. In fact, the lesson goes beyond that. Human nature plays an important role in driving markets to extremes.

Throughout the years, a number of people have tried to explain the interaction between investors’ behavior and the stock market. John Maynard Keynes likened the stock market to a beauty contest.

Professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view… We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.

In other words, investors have skipped the part of picking the best stock or fund for the long run. And instead, they try to anticipate which stock or fund other investors think will go up the most. Continue Reading…

Wise Words from the Lone Wolf, Bernard Baruch

by Jon

Bernard Baruch was known as the Lone Wolf of Wall Street, but he wore many hats. He was a speculator, an investor, a deal maker, a philanthropist, and an advisor to Presidents.

Baruch was born in Camden, South Carolina in 1870. The family moved to New York when he was 10. He got his first job on Wall Street in 1889 as a runner for $3 a week. It was there he first learned the art of arbitrage, reorganizations, and speculation.

He became a partner at A.A. Housman & Company at age 25, playing speculator and dealmaker for the firm. In one instance, he put arbitrage skills to work after learning of the potential end to the Spanish-American War. It was July 3rd. The New York exchange was closed on the 4th. So he bought stocks on the London exchange, expecting to sell them for a big profit when the exchange opened on the 5th. When the New York exchange opened on the 5th, his stock prices soared.

In another instance, he played dealmaker in a tobacco merger. He convinced Liggett & Myers to merge with Union Tobacco. At the last minute, a third company, Continental Tobacco, joined to create the monopoly known as The American Tobacco Company. Baruch earned a cool $150,000 for his effort.

By 33, he was a millionaire, bought a seat on the exchange, and set out on his own. Continue Reading…

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