buy and hold

The News About Discomfort
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The best clients in the whole world don’t always enjoy the smoothest ride. Clients, I’m not trying to speak for your experience or tell you how you feel… but the ride has been a ride, right?

A core of the households we serve has been with us 17 or more years! The story of our time together can be captured pretty simply, and you’ve heard this before.

“Buy low, sell high” and other classics have become some of our favorite principles: seek the best bargains in the investment universe, own the orchard for the fruit crop, and avoid the stampede.

Our formulations are a little contrarian, but they also aren’t that complicated. So what makes this commentary even worth making? Clients, you know the ride is a ride, and we’ve hung on together. The secret, then, is people hate being uncomfortable.

Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön explains, “As a species, we should never underestimate our low tolerance for discomfort.” Strengths deepen and develop. Strength begets strength, success compounds. Those forces help us weather the tough times and keep perspective.

We’ll leave you with Chödrön’s take: “To be encouraged to stay with our vulnerability is news that we can use.”

Clients, need a check of perspective? Call or write, anytime.

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Play the audio version of this post below:

The News About Discomfort – 228Main.com Presents: The Best of Leibman Financial Services

Portfolio Themes: December 2020
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Our investment research process is bottom-up: we look first at individual companies, screening for bargains and dividends, checking out ideas, reading SEC filings and news reports.

But certain themes do tend to emerge, as favorable opportunities often cluster in one industry or sector.

Thinking about the big picture, it seems to us that inflation may surprise on the upside in the months and years ahead. The COVID-19 pandemic—suppressing activity on a global basis—may give way to a synchronized global recovery. With not enough production capacity attempting to supply material and goods through a transportation network constrained by the crisis, shortages may lead to higher prices.

Record tides of debt and monetary stimulus may create more purchasing power than there are goods and services to purchase. Therefore, we are striving to avoid low-interest bonds and other investments that expose us to the risk of loss from inflation.

Our most recent additions to the “buy list” reflect favorable valuations in companies we believe to be durable—and fundamental to our lives. We will still require food and shelter and medicine in the future; finding bargain prices in profitable, dividend-paying providers is a joy.

We have revised an older theme—airlines and related companies—to focus on those with the most durable balance sheets. The airline industry has faced new challenges in the pandemic, and an industry under stress presents an opportunity… but we need the companies to survive in order to live through the current difficulties. (Hence the focus on only the strongest.)

Certain natural resource holdings have become market darlings. We began investing in them years ago, sometimes adding at lower prices as we waited for the turn to come. Our patience is being rewarded, and we believe this theme has years to run.

This is not a comprehensive list, of course, but covers some of the dominant themes we are seeing today.

Clients, if you would like to discuss these or offer additional ideas, please email us or call.

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More Lessons from Moneyball

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Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball turned 16 over the summer. In 2015, we wrote about the contrarian lessons we noticed in the Moneyball movement. The Oakland A’s won by using data to make roster decisions, favoring things like on-base percentage over batting average. Then, after the rest of the league adopted the A’s process, the 2015 World Series champion Royals won by bucking the trend and not following along.

We’ve found another lesson within Moneyball that applies to us—and you. Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane rarely watched the product he helped put on the field to see how it performed. This may seem unusual (who wouldn’t want to watch baseball as part of their job?), but Beane had his reasons.

In a 2014 interview for the Men in Blazers podcast, Beane explained that he didn’t watch games because he did not want to do something about it in the heat of the moment. “When I watch a game, I get a visceral reaction to something that happens—which is probably not a good idea when you’re the boss, when you can actually pick up the phone and do something.”

Beane continued by saying doing something “probably isn’t logical and rational based on some temporary experience you just felt in a game.” This has meaning to us.

We all know that the market goes up and down, and we don’t find watching the ticker each second of the day to be helpful. Like Beane, we’ve strategically built our portfolios for performance over the long term (no guarantees), and we’re willing to ignore a hiccup from a star on occasion.

Like Beane, we can remove ourselves and our initial emotions from the equation. Then we can focus on only the moves to better our “team” and its goals in the big picture.

Clients, if you’d like to talk about this, or anything else, please email us or call.

Content in this material is for general information only and not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.

All investing involves risk including loss of principal. No strategy assures success or protects against loss.

The Rip Van Winkle Effect

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Rip Van Winkle is a character in a Washington Irving short story written nearly two centuries ago. You might know the story: Rip sleeps for twenty years up in the mountains, eventually returning home to find that much had changed.

One of the most dynamic companies in the world emerged on the scene a little over twenty years ago. An investor who purchased it on its first day of trading would have made several hundred times his original investment, had they held all the way through.

In spite of the incredible long-term result, it would have been very difficult to achieve even if one had bought in early. If you carefully looked every day to see how it was doing, as of November 12th this is what you would have experienced:

• On 1,346 of the days of ownership, the value would have been less than 50% of its previous peak. This is nearly one day in four, out of the 5,410 trading days in question1.
• On 494 of the days, the value would have been down 80% from the prior peak.
• The worst drop from a prior peak would have been 94%.

It isn’t always easy to hold an investment that has declined in value. We strive to own bargains, even when they become better bargains. (Once upon a time, a client asked me “What kind of moron would watch a stock go down from $11 to $7, dropping day after day, and do nothing?” Of course, I am that kind of moron.)

We have noticed that a certain few of our clients use the Rip Van Winkle effect, to their benefit. In the example above, they would have accepted in advance they would be under water at times, and just held for the long term. They enjoy the long-term result, without the day to day anguish of fluctuating values—they did not need to look every day.

We work diligently to understand what we should own, and why. Sometimes we change our opinion and sell at a loss. But often the Rip Van Winkle effect would help us. Clients, if you would like to talk about this or anything else, please call.

Notes & References

1. Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, S&P Dow Jones Indices. Retrieved November 12th, 2018.

The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. All performance referenced is historical and is no guarantee of future results.

This is a hypothetical example and is not representative of any specific situation. Your results will vary. The hypothetical rates of return used do not reflect the deduction of fees and charges inherent to investing.

Stock investing involves risk including loss of principal.

Sell in May and Go Away?

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One popular piece of market lore revolves around the idea that virtually all of the stock market’s cumulative gains over large chunks of the past have come between November and May. The other half of the year, from May to November, has produced little in the way of gains, on average. Hence the saying, “sell in May and go away.”

There are three challenges facing anyone who seeks to act on this supposed wisdom. The first one is, any widely expected event gets discounted by the market as it gains currency with the public. If the saying works, it will get overexposed until it stops working.

The second challenge is, the statistics on which the lore rests are averages—they say nothing about what happens in any particular year, much less about what will happen this year.

The third challenge is the most interesting of all. When one examines the results of not selling in May and never going away, one wonders what more could be desired. I (Mark Leibman) was born in May 1956, when the S&P 500 Index stood at 44. As I write this, the index is 54 times higher. This calculation of a 5,300% profit excludes dividends, which would have added considerably. This tells us how not selling in May would have worked over the past nearly sixty years.

Our purpose in writing is to help you avoid being tricked by the “Sell in May” idea into a short-sighted investment decision. There are always reasons to worry about the future, developments which alarm people, and fear mongers peddling pessimism for profit. Against the dynamism and ingenuity inherent in human endeavors, these fears and worries have yet to produce a permanent downturn in the economy or the market.

The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. No strategy assures success or protects against loss.

Indices are unmanaged and cannot be invested into directly. Unmanaged index returns do not reflect fees, expenses, or sales charges. Index performance is not indicative of the performance of any investment. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Things Warren Buffett Never Said

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Warren Buffett may be the most famous investor in the world. The annual meeting of his company is known as ‘Woodstock for Capitalists,’ and is attended by 40,000 people. Countless articles, essays, and books have been written (including by us) about the things he has said.

As far as we know, nobody has ever written anything about things Buffett NEVER said. But here are our top three things Buffett never said:

1. “The stock went down, so I sold it.” Buffett knows the market goes up and down. He studies companies, not stock ticker symbols. When the fundamentals are in place, he buys. Then he holds. Then he holds some more. If the price declines, he typically buys more. This is what ‘buy low, sell high’ is all about.

2. “I’m waiting to invest until we get more economic data to clear up the uncertainty.” In his seven decades of investing, Buffett has noticed that uncertainty is always with us. He reads and studies ceaselessly, and when he finds something to buy, he buys it. Frequently, this turns out to be when the price is depressed because of temporary factors. Others are paralyzed by uncertainty when Buffett is taking action.

3. “A lot depends on what the Federal Reserve does next month.” Buffett has run his company for more than five decades, while seven different people held the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve Board, through innumerable cycles of Federal Reserve tightening and loosening. He can tell you what he paid for his stake in Coca Cola and when it was purchased. He probably cannot say what the Federal Reserve did at the meeting before, or the meeting after, the transaction. Why? Because it doesn’t matter in the long run.

Warren Buffett does not wear a halo. He is a human being and that means he makes mistakes. But he has made more money investing than any other human being on the planet. We think it pays to listen to the things that he has said. But there may be even more value in understanding the things he never said.

If you would like to discuss these concepts or your specific circumstances at greater length, please write or call.

The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. To determine which investment(s) may be appropriate for you, consult your financial advisor prior to investing. All performance referenced is historical and is no guarantee of future results. Stock investing involves risk including loss of principal.