Trivikram Consultants

Trivikram Consultants Learn how to invest in the stock market with a long term focus and how to avoid common mistakes.

10/10/2020

Portfolio Turnover is the Price of Progress

Portfolio Turnover – Investopedia describes portfolio turnover as a measure of how frequently assets within a fund are bought and sold by the managers. Portfolio turnover is calculated by taking either the total amount of new securities purchased or the number of securities sold (whichever is less) over a particular period, divided by the total net asset value (NAV) of the fund. The measurement is usually reported for a 12-month time period.

Ian Cassel writes that he believes there is an over-glorification of buy and hold investing among active managers. With the rise of private equity and venture capital, everyone is trying to invest in public markets with the same permanent capital mantra. The lower the turnover, the more cerebral and thoughtful you appear to be with initial investment decisions. Nothing looks better than being right from the very beginning. More often than not, low turnover is shown as a badge of honour. Many investors feel great pride and joy being a loyal shareholder of a company. It feels good to say you’ve held a company for 5-10-20 years. But in reality, what really matters is performance.

A big part of what made many investors great was spotting when they were wrong quicker. Successful stock picking isn’t just picking winners. It also means picking out the losers in your portfolio. The greatest advantage in public markets is “You can sell”. But you have to know when to sell.

We normally sell a position for three main reasons: Sell when the story changes for the worse; Sell when we find something better; Sell when a company gets very overvalued.

Investors aren’t going to be right all the time. Acknowledging this fact isn’t a justification for not doing upfront due diligence. What we do acknowledge is that we are willing to accept a degree of uncertainty for the sake of speed – getting in early. Often times, an opportunity is an opportunity because the conditions aren’t perfect yet. The price of certainty can be expensive as it relates to discovery and valuation. When we find a business that aligns with what we like – speed is more important than certainty.

Our initial due diligence might get us into a position, but it is our maintenance due diligence that will keep us invested and/or save us from big losses. Our future returns are based on our ability to course correct and adapt to new information. We are going to have turnover because turnover is the price of progress.

Sometimes when you sell you have gained and sometimes you have losses. Cassel says he learned a long time ago to not let small losses bother him. A big part of being a successful investor is your ability to admit when you are wrong on a company while not letting it crush your confidence and slow you down.

20/09/2020

Jonathan Clements explains that there are many investors, and indeed financial advisers, who are still playing by the old rules. Are you one of them? You know those timeless financial principles? Sometimes they don’t age so well. Indeed, if you’re still hewing to the financial wisdom of the 1980s, you’re likely hurting yourself today. Here are three examples:

Goodbye, Star fund Manager: Many investors continued to hunt for the next superstar fund manager. Investors would scour past mutual fund performance, confident that it would be a reliable guide to future results. Today, that confidence has largely evaporated — with good reason: Most fund managers lag behind the market and, among those who don’t, there’s no surefire way to identify the winners ahead of time or distinguish the truly skilful from the merely lucky. Indeed, the proliferation of index funds over the past two decades hasn’t just offered investors an alternative to actively managed funds. It’s also given folks a measuring stick against which to compare those active managers—and, year after year, the managers keep coming up short. What’s amazing isn’t that investors have lost confidence in past performance and their belief in exceptional money managers. Rather, what’s amazing is that it took so long.

Broken Yardsticks: Starting in the 1990s, stock market valuations broke out of their historical range and climbed skyward. Old-timers warned that valuations would soon come crashing back to earth. They’re still waiting. To be sure, rising price-earnings ratios and declining dividend yields can be partly explained by falling interest rates, which have made stocks more attractive relative to the main alternative — bonds. But it seems some enduring financial trends are also driving the rise in stock valuations, including falling investment costs, ever more capital available to invest, a rising appetite for risk, corporations’ growing preference for stock buybacks over dividends, and the move to spend less on plant and equipment and more on research and development. This last change has resulted in lower reported earnings and hence higher price-earnings multiples. The upshot: Today’s stock market valuations are undoubtedly rich by historical standards. But it’s hard to know what to do with that information or whether we should even worry—because it doesn’t tell us anything about short-term returns and it may not be that important to long-run results.

Today’s tiny bond yields: The biggest impact is on retirees. Indeed, the core strategy for many retirees — buying bonds and then paying the household bills with the interest — simply doesn’t work anymore. After all, how many retirees are rich enough to live off a portfolio of high-quality bonds, which today would likely kick off less than 6% in India? It’s time to stop thinking about bonds as a standalone investment. Instead, their sole remaining role is as a complement to stocks. They can provide offsetting gains when the stock market nosedives, a rebalancing partner for stocks, and a way to raise cash if it’s a bad time to sell shares. Clements’ advice for retirees: Forget investing for yield and instead aim to earn a healthy total return by allocating at least half your portfolio to stocks. In buoyant years for the stock market, look to harvest gains. In rough years, get your spending money by selling bonds and cash investments.

12/09/2020

Enduring a decline in share price in wonderful companies
In his blog, Jon reminds investors that the stocks of great companies are not immune to a deep decline in the share price. In fact, it’s practically guaranteed to happen more than once. Hendrik Bessembinder followed up on previous research with a deep dive into the greatest companies ever.

His first conclusion shouldn’t be too surprising. The most successful company investments in terms of wealth created for shareholders at the decade horizon also involved a very substantial peak-to-trough decline in the share price. Even those investments that are the most successful at long horizons typically involve painful losses over shorter horizons.

Bessembinder looked at the top 100 companies based on shareholder wealth creation by decade since 1950. He then measured the largest decline in share price shareholders faced in that decade. Investors in the greatest companies faced a decline of 32.5%, on average, despite being one of the greatest decades of performance ever. That was just the largest decline, on average. It says nothing of the second, third, and so on a decline during the same decade. AT&T shareholders got off easy, seeing a decline of only 5.9% (over 7 months) in the 1950s. However, Netflix shareholders suffered the worst — a 79.9% drawdown (over 16 months) in the 2010s.

Bessembinder also looked at the decade, prior to the greatest decade of wealth creation, and found shareholders suffered an average decline of 51.6%. Again, that was just the largest decline for the previous decade. The duration of the decline fell in a wide range. They lasted anywhere from a month to three years in the same decade of the company’s greatest wealth creation. In the prior decade (to the greatest decade), in some cases, the decline exceeded eight years!

There are a few important takeaways from this:

First, sometimes great companies stumble. It can take management years to fix the problem (see Microsoft) or come up with a new product/innovation (see Apple) before the company moves in the right direction again. This can create multiple periods of massive wealth creation by the same company as seen in the table above.

Second, sometimes the market gets way ahead of itself in the short term. It gets the growth story right (see Amazon) but the timing is off by a decade. Expectations send the stock price soaring but once instantaneous growth is off the table, the price corrects, sometimes to the opposite extreme.

Third, and not surprising, long term shareholders must endure multiple, and sometimes painfully long decline to reap great rewards. This would confirm that the hardest part of investing is often just holding on.

Fourth, investors have multiple chances to buy great companies at wonderful prices. They usually have ample time too. Now, the usual caveats apply. Neither the buying opportunity nor the greatness of the company is always obvious at the time. But the fact stands. Declines in share price are buying opportunities for patient investors who have done the work and identified great companies in advance.

The broader point is this. It’s up to investors to separate the company from its stock price because declines are inevitable. But a great company’s stock will not only recover but go on to be extremely rewarding.

16/08/2020

Times that try stock picker’s soul

Drew Dickson points out that there is one way to generate excess stock market returns over the long term, and it isn’t to “own winners at any price.” Sure, in hindsight it was, but that is very convenient. It’s very convenient to now ignore the stocks we thought were winners but weren’t. It’s also very convenient to draw parallels between past winners and newer companies as if it is a foregone conclusion they too will win in a similar fashion. Nor do excess returns come from “owning good companies at any price” or “owning high-quality companies at any price.” The “one way” to outperform is to buy a concentrated portfolio of securities that Mr Market doesn’t own; names which are shunned because Mr Market has become overly pessimistic about the fundamental prospects for businesses that are better than he believes or realizes. That’s it. That’s the formula.

This often isn’t sexy, it often isn’t fashionable, and it often isn’t fun. However, a successful investor outperforming Mr Market over the long term owns companies that, by definition, Mr Market believes are pretty stupid to own.

Instead, Mr Market often thinks growing, glamorous, names are much smarter to own. They definitely are smarter looking. And it is surely more entertaining to own these stocks. It’s also easier to sleep at night. They are obviously more dynamic companies and, in many cases, they indeed are better companies. And there are periods where these growing, good and glamorous names do tremendously, well. During these episodes, it downright sucks to be a fundamentally-driven value investor. Equity markets had one of those periods in 1998-1999, and – in Dickson’s view – they may be having another one of them now. Paraphrasing Thomas Paine, these are the times that try stock-pickers’ souls.

The stock market, at least at the moment, seems most sensitive to whether or not a company is classified as a “good” or “bad” business. And “good” means your stock has already appreciated, is already expensive, and is showing even the slightest degree of business momentum. And no price is high enough for “good”. Because good is good, so why wouldn’t you own it? “Bad” is the opposite. Bad is an already-inexpensive stock that has already sold off, and one that has already exhibited fundamental weakness, even if it’s likely a short-term phenomenon. And no price is low enough for “bad”. Because bad is bad, so why would you own it? As maddening as this behaviour is, it is typical of investor psychology at peaks and troughs; and consequently, the “price” of growth is higher than it has ever been.

Dickson asserts that there is no new era. Stocks are still worth the present value of their future cash flows. While narratives can dominate in the short term, and while the short term is sometimes longer than we like, the fundamentals eventually matter. They have to. We are buying fractions of the equity value of large, liquid, listed, enterprises. The fundamentals “have to matter” because these fractions of equity, these shares, are worth the present value of all future cash flows to that fraction of ownership. We have no idea when “eventually” is going to arrive. Whether or not we are three days or three years away from this growth bubble popping, he doesn’t know. But he is tremendously confident that it isn’t “different this time.”

08/08/2020

As an individual investor, what’s the key to success? It’s a question Adam Grossman hears a lot, especially in volatile times like this. The answer, he thinks, is that there isn’t just one key, but rather five. The most successful investors seem to be equal parts optimist, pessimist, analyst, economist and psychologist. Together, he calls these the five minds of the investor. If you can develop and balance all five, that—Grossman believes—is the key to investment success.

Optimist. When Grossman thinks of financial optimists, he immediately thinks of Warren Buffett. Now, you might imagine that it’s easy to be an optimist when you’re a billionaire. But he thinks it’s because Buffett is an optimist that he’s a billionaire. His secret—which really isn’t such a secret—is to bet on the long-term growth of the stock market. When the economy is in a recession, as it is today, with millions out of work, it’s easy to feel dispirited. It is scary, and I don’t want to diminish everything that’s going on. But as Buffett wrote in that 2008 article, “Fears regarding the long-term prosperity of the nation’s many sound companies make no sense. These businesses will indeed suffer earnings hiccups, as they always have. But most major companies will be setting new profit records 5, 10 and 20 years from now.” Of course, you can’t have 100% of your money in stocks. That brings us to the role of the pessimist.

Pessimist. Many people view themselves as either a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty kind of person. But for investment success, he thinks you want to be a little of each. You’ll notice that Buffett referred to the stock market’s long-term potential. That’s an important qualification. As we’ve seen this year, things can—and do—happen that interrupt the market’s growth. That’s why it’s important to pay as much attention to your inner pessimist as to the optimist. What’s the best way to accomplish that? It isn’t complicated: You just want to keep enough of your assets outside of stocks to help you weather these interruptions. That will give you both the financial ability and the mental fortitude to get through tough times.

Analyst. If the optimist believes that stocks will grow over time, and the pessimist knows that they can’t grow all the time, how do you balance the two? That’s where the analyst comes in. The role of the analyst is that of a mediator—to consider the needs of both the optimist and the pessimist. Your inner analyst should be dispassionate, focusing on the facts of your individual situation. This includes your income, expenses, assets, liabilities and goals. In short, the analyst’s job is to strike the right balance between optimism and pessimism to develop an investment strategy that’s the best fit for you.

Economist. Economics isn’t exactly a scientific field and anyone’s ability to forecast the future is necessarily limited. But successful investing does incorporate certain economic concepts. At a high level, these include fiscal policy (the government’s ability to set tax rates and spending levels) and monetary policy (the Central Bank’s ability to set interest rates). And finally, it includes a sense of economic history and financial cycles. None of this means you’ll be able to predict where the economy is going. None of us can. But it does mean you’ll be better equipped to respond to events as they occur.

Psychologist. Colourful commentary and dramatic predictions are all around us. That’s why the fifth, and maybe most important, ingredient for investment success is to channel your inner psychologist. Among other things, this will help you to understand the motivations—both conscious and unconscious—of others, and to see the subtext of what they’re saying and not saying. This will help you to tune them out, as needed, so you can stick to your plan.

Is investing easy? No, he doesn’t think anyone would (truthfully) claim that. But if you successfully balance these five ideas in your mind, Grossman believes you’ll tilt the odds in your favour.

26/07/2020

Good things taken too far are dangerous

Morgan Housel reminds investors that good things can be taken too far – helpful at one level and destructive at another. They can be more dangerous than bad things because the fact that they’re good at one level makes them easier to rationalize at a dangerous level. A lot of things work like that, don’t they? Good things – praise-worthy things – that in a high enough dosage backfire and become anchors?

A few Housel sees in investing:
1. Contrarianism is great because the masses can get it wrong. But constant contrarianism is dangerous because the masses are usually right. Identifying and avoiding times when millions of people have been derailed by bad incentives and a viral narrative is a wonderful thing. Most investment fortunes come from a bout of contrarianism. But a larger group of investors has turned contrarianism into something closer to cynicism. Their contrarianism is constant – at all times, for all things. The quirk is that if you survey the list of extraordinarily successful investors, entrepreneurs, and business owners, virtually everyone has been a contrarian. But none – not a single one – is always a contrarian. There’s a time to bet against mass delusion, and (more frequent) times to ride the progress that comes from billions of people collectively searching for the truth.

2. Optimism is great because things get better for most people over time. But it’s dangerous when twisted into the belief that things will never be bad, which is never the case. A lot of people pick optimism because they rightly, correctly, get excited about the long history of progress mixed with confidence in their own skills. But when optimism is taken so seriously that it assumes things will never be bad – that every period long or short will work out in your favour – it turns into complacency. It encourages leverage and promotes denial. It leaves you without backup plans. Worst, it causes you to wrongly second-guess your long-term optimism when faced with an inevitable setback. You can be right about optimism in the long run but fail to ever see it because you overdosed on it in the short run.
3. Being open-minded is great because the truth is complicated. But being too open-minded backfires because objective and immutable truth exist. Every smart attempt to be open-minded has to be accompanied by a strong nonsense detector. The detector should go off when any of a handful of laws are violated when the author’s incentives favour an outcome, and when a complex answer is given if a simple one would suffice. You have to be firm enough in your views to make confident decisions while being open to new views in a way that lets you occasionally update and change those decisions. “Strong beliefs, weakly held” as they say.

05/07/2020

When should you sell your stocks?

Ben Carlson reminds us that there is always going to be a good reason to sell out of the stock market. When stocks were getting slaughtered in March, investors wondered if they should sell because it felt obvious stocks would fall further. Now that stocks have rallied, investors are wondering if they should sell because it feels obvious stocks have risen too far, too fast.

So when should you sell some or all of your stocks?
1. When you need to rebalance: The simplest form of selling comes when you have a target asset allocation in mind and religiously rebalance back to your target weights on a set schedule or pre-determined threshold. The timing of a rebalance will never be perfect but setting up a specific asset allocation that takes into account your willingness, ability and needs to take risk removes the temptation to go all-in or all-out based on your gut instincts and sell based on a set plan.
2. When you’ve been proven wrong about an investment thesis: This one is more relevant for those who hold more concentrated positions in a single stock. Every investor should perform a premortem that signals when it’s time to pull the plug and bail on an investment idea that simply didn’t pan out. This can be harder than it seems because What if I just wait until it breaks even?! or What if it rallies right after I sell?! are both rather compelling arguments in a loser position.
3. When you’ve won the game: If you’re lucky enough to amass something in the neighbourhood of 20-25x your expected living expenses in retirement and have a decent handle on your spending habits, at a certain point you may ask yourself—What’s the point of playing anymore?
4. When you’ve determined your risk profile, time horizon or circumstances have changed: Every portfolio decision doesn’t have to come down to market fundamentals. You must also consider how your current circumstances impact your risk profile. Sometimes you need to dial down the risk because you’re in a better place financially than you expected. Maybe you received an unexpected windfall or aren't spending as much as you budgeted for.

Carlson concludes that it is impossible to create a portfolio if you don’t have a handle on your goals and a reason to invest in the first place. Markets matter but you should always begin the investment decision-making process by thinking about where you are—and where you’d like to be.

28/06/2020

THINKING ABOUT LOSSES?

With huge volatility in shares markets in the last few months, many investors are sitting on large notional losses on their investments made over the past few years. In many cases, these losses led investors to sell out at the wrong time and lose out on sharp rally seen since March 2020. How investors should look at the losses during their investing careers. We turn to some of the respected investors to get clarity.

"Even the most conservative investors can be paralysed by large losses, whether due to mistakes, premature judgements, or the effects of leverage. If losses impair your future decision making, then the cost of a mistake is not just the loss from that investment alone, but the impact that loss may have on the future chain of events. If a loss freezes you from taking full advantage of a great opportunity, or pressures you to make it a smaller position than it should or would otherwise be, then the cost may be far greater than the initial loss itself" Seth Klarman

“It is easy to underestimate what a 30% decline does to your psyche. Your confidence may become shot at the very moment opportunity is at its highest. You – or your spouse – may decide it’s time for a new plan or new career. I know several investors who quit after losses because they were exhausted. Physically exhausted. Spreadsheets can model the historic frequency of big declines. But they cannot model the feeling of coming home, looking at your kids, and wondering if you’ve made a huge mistake that will impact their lives.” Morgan Housel

"I learned early in my career to be sceptical and flexible, not stubborn about a stock. I also learned to take quick, small losses rather than get emotionally involved in a stock that was dragging me down. When I am wrong about security, I try to take my loss at the 10% level" Roy Neuberger

"There is no shame in losing money on a stock. Everybody does it. What is shameful is to hold on to a stock, or, worse, to buy more of it, when the fundamentals are deteriorating. That's what I tried to avoid doing." Peter Lynch

“A person who has not made peace with his losses is likely to accept gambles that would be unacceptable to him otherwise.” Daniel Kahneman

“Profits always take care of themselves, but losses never do. The speculator has to insure himself against considerable loss by taking the first small loss.” Jesse Livermore

"I like to repeat to myself a rule of Philip Carret, written some 86 years ago: 'Be quick to take losses and reluctant to take profits'." Francois Rochon

Source: masterinvest.com

21/06/2020

Some Things about the Markets That Will Never Change

Ben Carlson accepts that this is the craziest market he has ever seen. The pandemic somehow turned a bunch of people into day traders. At first, in the US, they were buying beaten-down airline and cruise stocks. Now they’ve moved on to buying shares of companies that have filed for bankruptcy. Many companies that have filed for bankruptcy recently but have seen massive price swings over the past week. It’s easy to “tsk, tsk” these types of speculative moves in the markets but this type of behaviour is nothing new.

This year is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before in terms of market and economic dynamics but there is plenty of investor behaviour that has been around since the dawn of markets.

Here are some things that will never change about the markets:
Lottery ticket stocks will always find a buyer. Our brains are wired such that expecting to make money feels even better than the act of making money itself. It’s the anticipation that puts your brain on high alert. This is why investors and gamblers alike are rarely satisfied with a single win. Your brain always needs another shot of dopamine to get that high again. It’s not enough for speculators to simply accept the market’s return during a massive recovery from a bear market. This is why we’ve seen a move from sector ETFs to beaten-down companies to bankrupt companies. And the temptation to speculate increases when we watch others around us getting rich.

People with no skill or knowledge about the markets can still make money. Some of the smartest, most sophisticated investors on the planet have been caught off guard by the market surge in recent months. Not only have these titans of the investment industry watched as the market has passed them by, but the biggest beneficiaries of the rise seem to be tiny retail traders. The market doesn’t discriminate between professional and amateur and there’s no IQ test required to buy a share of stock. The market cashes checks from anyone who plays, regardless of where they have an account or how much capital they have at stake. This is not to say this will continue indefinitely but to paraphrase Keynes, “The market can keep the irrational investor solvent as long as you remain bearish.”

The “dumb” retail money will occasionally beat the “smart” professional money. Legendary investors like Druckenmiller, Tepper and Buffett have all admitted to being positioned too defensively during this rally. This doesn’t make these legends idiots just like it doesn’t make day trading investors geniuses. This is just the way things work sometimes. No one bats a thousand.

No one is right all the time. Renaissance Technologies, likely the greatest hedge fund machine ever created, has claimed to be right on just 51% of their trades. No one is going to nail every top and bottom, especially in a market environment like this where things are happening at ludicrous speed.

Cycles tend to feel like they will never end. When stocks were getting thrashed on a regular basis in March it felt like the selling pressure would never let up. Lately, it’s felt as if stock gains happen every day. Markets are always and forever cyclical and no trend lasts forever.

Hindsight capital remains undefeated. It’s easy to look back at what’s transpired this year and come up with perfectly logical reasons for the market’s manic behaviour. And there are plenty of logical reasons for a market crash that immediately turned into a roaring bull market in the span of 3-4 months. But there are no counterfactuals. Things didn’t have to happen this way. Markets have shown this year how they can be equal parts resilient and fragile.

Certain investors will always worry more about being right than making money. Markets would be a whole lot easier if hard work translated into better results; if intelligence guaranteed alpha; if fundamentals always carried the day; and if the markets always made sense. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

Carlson concludes that simplicity often beats complexity. Temperament matters more than intelligence. And sometimes markets just don’t make sense.

23/05/2020

The Uncomfortable Truth

Jon wonders on his blog as to what’s the biggest determinant of investing success? Smarts, information, strategy, or skill are all worthy possibilities.

The market naturally triggers emotional responses that lead to mistakes. Those best equipped to handle those triggers are more likely to succeed. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Most things in life worth achieving require mental toughness to get through the obstacles that are certain to arise. And investing is full of obstacles. For example, markets can trick people into thinking that investing is ridiculously easy. Raging bull markets, especially, create the illusion that you can earn returns without risk and get rich quick. But once the bull market ends, as they all do, the bear market that follows presents investing as a certain money loser. And to add insult to injury, the market spreads bull and bear markets out far enough for investors to forget how the last one ended.

It’s at these opposite extremes, the major turning points in the market, where the right temperament is in short supply but needed most. Successfully navigating major market turns requires a willingness to think and act against the crowd. Stock prices reflect the obvious, not the obscure.

If the crowd believes a bull market will continue, then it’s obviously already priced in. Which means anything that might disrupt that trend is not. It’s not even an afterthought in the most enthusiastic bull markets. But you can’t wait for the disruption to surface because once the trend breaks, once the crowd realizes it, then the selling begins, and it’s too late. So you have to be willing to be early. You have to be able to sell when prices are rising while the bull market seems endless. But you also must be willing to buy when prices are falling, while the bear market appears to only get worse. Both are difficult. (If it were easy everyone would do it. And if everyone did, the market turns would just happen sooner.)

The final twist in this saga is that betting against the crowd usually fails. It’s only at the turning points where it succeeds. Except, bull markets and bear markets don’t come prepackaged with expiration dates. Being invested during the length of a bull market is very profitable. Getting out early, while profits look good, is hard. Because betting against it, will certainly look wrong, but being wrong is costly. And few investors are willing to stomach that.

Jon concludes that to be successful you have to be independent and decisive, with the courage to appear wrong but ultimately proved right. That’s why the greats stand out. That’s the uncomfortable truth.

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