Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘Value investing’

Has value investing worked in Japan’s long bear market (1990 to 2011)?

Posted in About, Contrarian investment, Strategy, Value Investment, tagged , on July 23, 2013| 21 Comments »

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Value Partners Center for Investing has examined the performance of value stocks in the Japanese stock market over the period January 1975 to December 2011. They have also broken out the performance of value stocks during Japan’s long-term bear market over the 1990 to 2011 period, when the stock market dropped 62.21 percent.

The white paper Performance of Value Investing Strategies in Japan’s Stock Market examines the performance of equal-weight and market capitalization weighted quintile portfolios of five price ratios–price-to-book value, dividend yield, earning-to-price, cash flow-to-price, and leverage-to-price—excluding the smallest 33 percent of stocks by market capitalization.

The portfolios were rebalanced monthly over the full 37 years.

The authors find the value quintile of equal-weighted portfolios book-to-market, dividend yield, earning-to-price, cash flow-to-price, and leverage-to-price generated monthly returns of 1.48 percent (19.3 percent per year), 1.34 percent (17.3 percent per year), 1.78 percent (23.6 percent per year), 1.66 percent (21.8 percent per year) and 0.78 (9.8 percent per year) percent in the 1975–2011 period.

The returns diminished over the 1990 to 2011 period. The value quintile of equal-weighted portfolios book-to-market, dividend yield, earning-to-price, cash flow-to-price, and leverage-to-price generated monthly returns of  0.84 percent (10.6 percent per year), 0.78 percent (9.8 percent per year), 1.31 percent (16.9 percent per year), 1.13 percent (14.4 percent per year) and 0.0 percent (0.0 percent per year) in the 1990–2011 period, respectively. In contrast, the Japanese stock market lost 62.21 percent.

They find similar results for market capitalization-weighted portfolios sorted by these measures, as well as for three-, six-, nine-, and twelve-month holding periods (excluding the leverage-to-price ratio).

They also investigated the cumulative payoff in dollar terms of investing $1 in the portfolios having the highest values of our value measures with monthly portfolio rebalancing in the 1980–2011 period. Value investing strategies based on stock’s book-to-market, dividend yield, earning-to-price , cash flow-to-price , and leverage-to-price grew $1 into $115.98, $81.88, $433.86, $281.49, and $6.62 respectively, while the aggregate stock market turned $1 into a mere $2.76, in the 1980–2011 period. This implies that these value investing strategies rewarded investors 42.0, 29.6, 157, 102 and 2.40 times what the Japanese stock market did. The effective monthly compound returns of the various investing strategies are 1.25 percent, 1.16 percent, 1.60 percent, 1.48 percent and 0.49 percent, while the aggregate stock market only delivered 0.27 percent in this period.

Japan Value

Four out of five value investing strategies actually rewarded investors with positive returns in the bear market that spanned two decades from 1990 to 2011, turning $1 into $4.77, $4.25, $17.17, and $10.91, implying profits of 377 percent, 325 percent, 1617 percent, and 991 percent respectively, while the stock market plunged 62.21 percent after reaching its peak in January 1990. In addition, every one of these value investing strategies continued to generate positive returns between the pre-global financial crisis peak in 2007 and December 2011.

Order Quantitative Value from Wiley Finance, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.

Click here if you’d like to read more on Quantitative Value, or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Advertisement

Read Full Post »

An hour with Mr. Graham: “Imagine – there seems to be practically a foolproof way of getting good results out of common stock investment…”

Posted in About, Quantitative investment, Strategy, tagged , on February 19, 2013| 7 Comments »

In March 1976 a Mr. Hartman L. Butler, Jr., C.F.A. sat down for an hour long interview with Benjamin Graham in his home in La Jolla, California. Hartman recorded the discussion on his cassette tape recorder, and transcribed it into the following document. There are many great insights from Graham. Here are several of the best parts:

On the GEICO disaster unfolding at the time: 

It makes me shudder to think of the amounts of money they were able to lose in one year. Incredible! It is surprising how many of the large companies have managed to turn in losses of $50 million or $100 million in one year, in these last few years. Something unheard of in the old days. You have to be a genius to lose that much money.

On changes in his investment methodology, a subject we cover in detail in Quantitative Value:

I have lost most of the interest I had in the details of security analysis which I devoted myself to so strenuously for many years. I feel that they are relatively unimportant, which, in a sense, has put me opposed to developments in the whole profession. I think we can do it successfully with a few techniques and simple principles. The main point is to have the right general principles and the character to stick to them.

…

I have a considerable amount of doubt on the question of how successful analysts can be overall when applying these selectivity approaches. The thing that I have been emphasizing in my own work for the last few years has been the group approach. To try to buy groups of stocks that meet some simple criterion for being undervalued-regardless of the industry and with very little attention to the individual company. My recent article on three simple methods applied to common stocks was published in one of your Seminar Proceedings.

I am just finishing a 50-year study-the application of these simple methods to groups of stocks, actually, to all the stocks in the Moody’s Industrial Stock Group. I found the results were very good for 50 years. They certainly did twice as well as the Dow Jones. And so my enthusiasm has been transferred from the selective to the group approach. What I want is an earnings ratio twice as good as the bond interest ratio typically for most years. One can also apply a dividend criterion or an asset value criterion and get good results. My  research indicates the best results come from simple earnings criterions.

We looked at the performance of Graham’s simple strategy in Quantitative Value. For more see my overview piece, Examining Benjamin Graham’s Record: Skill Or Luck?

Hat tip to Tim Melvin @timmelvin

Buy my book The Acquirer’s Multiple: How the Billionaire Contrarians of Deep Value Beat the Market from on Kindle, paperback, and Audible.

Here’s your book for the fall if you’re on global Wall Street. Tobias Carlisle has hit a home run deep over left field. It’s an incredibly smart, dense, 213 pages on how to not lose money in the market. It’s your Autumn smart read. –Tom Keene, Bloomberg’s Editor-At-Large, Bloomberg Surveillance, September 9, 2014.

Click here if you’d like to read more on The Acquirer’s Multiple, or connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. Check out the best deep value stocks in the largest 1000 names for free on the deep value stock screener at The Acquirer’s Multiple®.

Read Full Post »

Do confidential hedge fund portfolio holdings generate superior performance?

Posted in About, Activist Investors, Catalysts, Stocks, Strategy, Value Investment, tagged , , on November 27, 2012| Leave a Comment »

What do requests for confidentiality reveal about hedge fund portfolio holdings? In Uncovering Hedge Fund Skill from the Portfolio Holdings They Hide, a paper to be published in the upcoming Journal of Finance (or see a February 2012 version on the SSRN), authors Vikas Agarwal, Wei Jiang, Yuehua Tang, and Baozhong Yang ask whether confidential holdings exhibit superior performance to holdings disclosed on a 13F in the ordinary course.

Institutional investment managers must disclose their quarterly portfolio holdings in a Form 13F. The 13(f) rule allows the SEC to delay disclosure that is “necessary or appropriate in the public interest or for the protection of investors.” When filers request confidential treatment for certain holdings, they may omit those holdings off their Form 13F. After the confidentiality period expires, the filer must reveal the holdings by filing an amendment to the original Form 13F.

Confidential treatment allows hedge funds to accumulate larger positions in stocks, and to spread the trades over a longer period of time. Funds request confidentiality where timely disclosure of portfolio holdings may reveal information about proprietary investment strategies that other investors can free-ride on without incurring the costs of research. The Form 13F filings of investors with the best track records are followed by many investors. Warren Buffett’s new holdings are so closely followed that he regularly requests confidential treatment on his larger investments.

Hedge funds seek confidentiality more frequently than other institutional investors. They constitute about 30 percent of all institutions, but account for 56 percent of all the confidential filings. Hedge funds on average relegate about one-third of their total portfolio values into confidentiality, while the same figure is one-fifth for investment companies/advisors and one-tenth for banks and insurance companies.

The authors make three important findings:

  1. Hedge funds with characteristics associated with more active portfolio management, such as those managing large and concentrated portfolios, and adopting non-standard investment strategies (i.e., higher idiosyncratic risk), are more likely to request confidentiality.
  2. The confidential holdings are more likely to consist of stocks associated with information-sensitive events such as mergers and acquisitions, and stocks subject to greater information asymmetry, i.e., those with smaller market capitalization and fewer analysts following.
  3. Confidential holdings of hedge funds exhibit significantly higher abnormal performance compared to their original holdings for different horizons ranging from 2 months to 12 months. For example, the difference over the 12-month horizon ranges from 5.2% to 7.5% on an annualized basis.

Read a February 2012 version on the SSRN.

Read Full Post »

Carl Icahn and Oshkosh Corporation (NYSE:OSK) sum-of-the-parts plus control premium value

Posted in Activist Investors, Carl Icahn, Shareholder Activism, tagged , , on October 15, 2012| 2 Comments »

Forbes has a great article on Carl Icahn’s activist campaign at Oshkosh Corporation(NYSE:OSK) called Is Icahn Trying To Nickel And Dime Oshkosh? Sum Of The Parts Worth Way More, BofA Says. Icahn, who, according to the article, holds 9.5 percent of the outstanding stock, is pushing to takeover the company and possible split it up. Icahn has offered $32.50 per share for the stock he doesn’t own. Bank of America’s analysts argue that the value of OSK is between $35 and $38 per share:

Their view, they noted, is supported by the average price target analysts have on the stock, which is approximately $32. Data from Thomson One shows that out of the 14 analysts that cover Oshkosh, 8 have a “buy” or “strong buy” for the stock, with a mean price target of $32.91 and a median of $34.

That valuation excludes a change of control premium, which Bank of America estimates should be between 20% and 30% over their estimate. That would take their sum of the parts valuation to between $42 to $49 per share. “While we believe that it would be very hard to get a bidder without significant synergies at levels greater than $42/share, the current offer of $32.50 while representing a 21% premium to closing price on October 11, 2012 [sic] seems indeed too low,” they added.

Read the article.

Read Full Post »

Hunting Endangered Species: Investing in the Market for Corporate Control (Fall 2012 Strategy Paper)

Posted in Catalysts, Contrarian investment, Strategy, tagged , , , , on October 9, 2012| 3 Comments »

Embedded below is my Fall 2012 strategy paper, “Hunting Endangered Species: Investing in the Market for Corporate Control.”

From the executive summary:

The market for corporate control acts to catalyze the stock prices of underperforming and undervalued corporations. An opportunity exists to front run participants in the market for corporate control—strategic acquirers, private equity firms, and activist hedge funds—and capture the control premium paid for acquired corporations. Eyquem Fund LP systematically targets stocks at the largest discount from their full change‐of‐control value with the highest probability of undergoing a near‐term catalytic change‐of‐control event. This document analyzes in detail the factors driving returns in the market for corporate control and the immense size of the opportunity.


Hunting Endangered Species: Investing in the Market for Corporate Control Fall 2012 Strategy Paper

This is the investment strategy I apply in the Eyquem Fund. It is obviously son-of-Greenbackd (deep value, contrarian and activist follow-on) and, although it deviates in several crucial aspects, it is influenced by the 1999 Piper Jaffray research report series, Wall Street’s Endangered Species.

For more of my research, see my white paper “Simple But Not Easy: The Case For Quantitative Value” and the accompanying presentation to the UC Davis MBA value investing class.

As always, I welcome any comments, criticisms, or questions.

Read Full Post »

Presentation to UC Davis MBA Value Investing Class on Quantitative Value Investing

Posted in Behavioral economics, Quantitative investment, Strategy, Value Investment, tagged , on August 31, 2012| 9 Comments »

On Monday I presented an expanded version of my white paper “Simple But Not Easy: The Case For Quantitative Value” to the UC Davis MBA value investing class.

Click the link to be taken to the UC Davis video:

Presentation to UC Davis Value Investing Class

A special thank you to the instructors Jacob Taylor, and Lonnie Rush, and UCD value investing class. Go Aggies!

Read Full Post »

Simple But Not Easy: The Case For Quantitative Value (White Paper)

Posted in Behavioral economics, Quantitative investment, Strategy, tagged , , on June 13, 2012| 22 Comments »

Greenbackd has been quiet over the last few days while I finished “Simple But Not Easy,” my latest white paper for Eyquem (embedded below). If you want to receive similar future missives, shoot me an email at greenbackd at gmail dot com. Thoughts, criticisms, and questions are all welcome too.

Read Full Post »

The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville Revisited: Value Trounces Growth in Mutual Funds

Posted in About, Stocks, Strategy, Value Investment, Warren Buffett, tagged , on May 24, 2012| 1 Comment »

The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville is a well-known article (see the original Hermes article here.pdf) by Warren Buffett defending value investing against the efficient market hypothesis. The article is an edited transcript of a talk Buffett gave at Columbia University in 1984 commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Security Analysis, written by Benjamin Graham and David L. Dodd.

In a 2006 talk, “Journey Into the Whirlwind: Graham-and-Doddsville Revisited,” Louis Lowenstein*, then a professor at the Columbia Law School, compared the performance of a group of “true-blue, walk-the-walk value investors” (the “Goldfarb Ten”) and “a group of large cap growth funds” (the “Group of Fifteen”).

Here are Lowenstein’s findings:

For the five years ended this past August 31, the Group of Fifteen experienced on average negative returns of 8.89% per year, vs. a negative 2.71% for the S&P 500.4 The group of ten value funds I had studied in the “Searching for Rational Investors” article had been suggested by Bob Goldfarb of the Sequoia Fund.5 Over those same five years, the Goldfarb Ten enjoyed positive average annual returns of 9.83%. This audience is no doubt quick with numbers, but let me help. Those fifteen large growth funds underperformed the Goldfarb Ten during those five years by an average of over 18 percentage points per year. Hey, pretty soon you have real money. Only one of the fifteen had even modestly positive returns. Now if you go back ten years, a period that includes the bubble, the Group of Fifteen did better, averaging a positive 8.13% per year.Even for that ten year period, however, they underperformed the value group, on average, by more than 5% per year.6 With a good tailwind, those large cap funds were not great – underperforming the index by almost 2% per year – and in stormy weather their boats leaked badly.

Lowenstein takes a close look at one of the Group of Fifteen (a growth fund):

The first was the Massachusetts Investors Growth Stock Fund, chosen because of its long history. Founded in 1932, as the Massachusetts Investors Second Fund, it was, like its older sibling, Massachusetts Investors Trust, truly a mutual fund, in the sense that it was managed internally, supplemented by an advisory board of six prominent Boston businessmen.7 In 1969, when management was shifted to an external company, now known as MFS Investment Management, the total expense ratio was a modest 0.32%.

I am confident that the founders of the Massachusetts Investors Trust would no longer recognize their second fund, which has become a caricature of the “do something” culture. The expense ratio, though still below its peer group, has tripled. But it’s the turbulent pace of trading that would have puzzled and distressed them. At year-end 1999, having turned the portfolio over 174%, the manager said they had moved away from “stable growth companies” such as supermarket and financial companies, and into tech and leisure stocks, singling out in the year- end report Cisco and Sun Microsystems – each selling at the time at about 100 X earnings – for their “reasonable stock valuation.” The following year, while citing a bottom-up, “value sensitive approach,” the fund’s turnover soared to 261%. And in 2001, with the fund continuing to remark on its “fundamental . . .bottom-up investment process,” turnover reached the stratospheric level of 305%. It is difficult to conceive how, even in 2003, well after the market as a whole had stabilized, the managers of this $10 billion portfolio had sold $28 billion of stock and then reinvested that $28 billion in other stocks.

For the five years ended in 2003, turnover in the fund averaged 250%. All that senseless trading took a toll. For the five years ended this past August, average annual returns were a negative 9-1/2%. Over the past ten years, which included the glory days of the New Economy, the fund did better, almost matching the index, though still trailing our value funds by 4% a year. Net assets which had been a modest $1.9 billion at Don Phillips’ kickoff date in 1997, and had risen to $17 billion in 2000, are now about $8 billion.

If you’re feeling some sympathy for the passengers in this financial vehicle, hold on. Investors – and I’m using the term loosely – in the Mass. Inv. Growth Stock Fund were for several years running spinning their holdings in and out of the fund at rates approximating the total assets of the fund. In 2001, for example, investors cashed out of $17-1/2 billion in Class A shares, and bought $16 billion in new shares, leaving the fund at year end with net assets of about $14 billion. Having attracted, not investors, but speculators trying to catch the next new thing, management got the shareholders they deserved.

And the value investors?

Having updated my data through August of this year, I am happy to report that the Goldfarb Ten still look true blue – actually better than at year-end 2003. The portfolio turnover rates have dropped on average to 16% – translation, an average holding period of six years. Honey, what did you do today? Nothing, dear.The average cash holding is 14% of the portfolio, and five of the funds are closed to new investors.f Currently, however, two of the still open funds, Mutual Beacon and Clipper, are losing their managers. The company managing the Clipper Fund has been sold twice over and Jim Gipson and two colleagues recently announced they’re moving on. At Mutual Beacon, which is part of the Franklin Templeton family, David Winters has left to create a mutual fund, ah yes, the Wintergreen Fund. It will be interesting to see whether Mutual Beacon and Clipper will maintain their discipline.

Speaking of discipline, you may remember that after Buffett published “The Superinvestors,” someone calculated that while they were indeed superinvestors, on average they had trailed the market one year in three.20 Tom Russo, of the Semper Vic Partners fund, took a similar look at the Goldfarb Ten and found, for example, that four of them had each underperformed the S&P 500 for four consecutive years, 1996-1999, and in some cases by huge amounts. For the full ten years, of course, that underperformance was sharply reversed, and then some. Value investing thus requires not just patient managers but also patient investors, those with the temperament as well as intelligence to feel comfortable even when sorely out of step with the crowd. If you’re fretting that the CBOE Market Volatility Index may be signaling fear this week, value investing is not for you.

* Louis was father to Roger Lowenstein of Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist.

Read Full Post »

Dividend Yield Doesn’t Work, What Does? Three Key Conclusions

Posted in About, Stocks, Strategy, tagged on May 23, 2012| 1 Comment »

A recent study by Wes Gray and Jack Vogel, Dissecting Shareholder Yield, makes the stunning claim that dividend yield doesn’t predict future returns, but more complete measures of shareholder yield might hold some promise. Gray and Vogel say that, “regardless of the yield metric chosen, the predictive power of separating stocks into high and low yield portfolios has lost considerable power in the last twenty years.”

This seems to be part of a trend away from dividends and towards share repurchases, presumably for tax reasons:

Our work is related to previous research on payout yield as a predictor of future returns. Grullen and Michaely [2002] find that firms have substituted away from dividends towards share repurchases. Boudoukh et al (2007) construct two measures of payout yields (Dividends plus repurchases, as well as Dividends plus net repurchases). They find that these payout measures have more predictive ability than the dividend yield. We contribute to the literature by examining an additional variable to our payout yield, namely net debt pay down. Net debt pay down was first proposed by Priest and McClelland (2007), but is not rigorously analyzed. As a preview of our results, we find that the addition of net debt pay down helps performance, but is not a panacea. Similar to all yield metrics, results in the latter half of the sample (1992-2011) are not as strong as those in the first half of the sample (1972-1991).

Gray and Vogel examine four yield measures:

  • Dividends (DIV)
  • Dividends plus repurchases (PAY1)
  • Dividends plus net repurchases (repurchases minus equity issuance) (PAY2)
  • Dividends plus net repurchases plus net debt paydown (SH_YD)

Here’s their table of returns:

They find as follows:

We perform a similar study as Patel et al. on all our yield metrics, but focus on the dividend yield (DIV) and our complete shareholder yield metric (SH_YD) to assess the “high yield, low payout” outperformance hypothesis. We confirm the basic conclusion from Patel et al. that low payout firms outperform high payout firms across all yield quintiles. For example, in the top DIV quintile, high DIV firms earn 12.16% CAGR from 1972-2011, however, low payout firms earn 13.43%, and high payout firms earn 12.15%. After risk adjusting the results with the 3-factor model we find no evidence of outperformance for any DIV portfolio. In Table V we assess a variety of additional risk/reward characteristics. There is no clear evidence that splitting high DIV yield firms into low and high payout adds risk-adjusted value relative to the standard high DIV yield strategy. For example, max drawdowns suggest that high DIV, low payout strategies are actually riskier than high DIV, high payout strategies (64.35% drawdown compared to 58.27%). However, Sharpe and Sortino ratios are marginally higher for high DIV, low payout strategies relative to high DIV, high payout strategies.

When we examine high SH_YD stocks, we come to a similar conclusion: there is no conclusive evidence that separating stocks on payout percentage within a given yield category can systematically add value to an investment strategy.

…

In summary, we confirm that separating yield quintiles into low and high payout bins has worked historically on a raw returns basis for DIV. Nonetheless, an investigation of the strategy on a risk-adjusted basis and across different yield metrics and samples suggest there is no evidence that a high yield low payout strategy can help an investor predict stocks. If anything, the evidence suggests that investors should potentially investigate strategies that focus on low SH_YD low payout strategies. The alphas for these stocks are -6.30% for the Top 2000 sample and -5.33% for the S&P 500 sample; the additional risk/reward ratios in Table V also show terrible performance for the low SH_YD low payout strategies.

And the table showing the reduction in performance over time:

Gray and Vogel make three key points in their conclusion:

1. More complete yield measures improve performance.

2. All yield measures are becoming less effective over time.

3. Attempting to improve yield measures by separating on payout percentages is not a reliable tool to enhance investment returns.

Read Full Post »

Equal Weight and Fundamental Indexing Beats The Market

Posted in About, Behavioral economics, Quantitative investment, Stocks, Strategy, Value Investment, tagged , , , on May 16, 2012| 4 Comments »

Joel Greenblatt’s rationale for a value-weighted index can be paraphrased as follows:

  • Most investors, pro’s included, can’t beat the index. Therefore, buying an index fund is better than messing it up yourself or getting an active manager to mess it up for you.
  • If you’re going to buy an index, you might as well buy the best one. An index based on the market capitalization-weighted S&P500 will be handily beaten by an equal-weighted index, which will be handily beaten by a fundamentally weighted index, which is in turn handily beaten by a “value-weighted index,” which is what Greenblatt calls his “Magic Formula-weighted index.”

Yesterday we examined the first point. Today let’s examine the second.

Market Capitalization Weight < Equal Weight < Fundamental Weight < “Value Weight” (Greenblatt’s Magic Formula Weight)

I think this chart is compelling:

It shows the CAGRs for a variety of indices over the 20 years to December 31, 2010. The first thing to note is that the equal weight index – represented by the &P500 Equal Weight TR – has a huge advantage over the market capitalization weighted S&P500 TR. Greenblatt says:

Over time, traditional market-cap weighted indexes such as the S&P 500 and the Russell 1000 have been shown to outperform most active managers. However, market cap weighted indexes suffer from a systematic flaw. The problem is that market-cap weighted indexes increase the amount they own of a particular company as that company’s stock price increases. As a company’s stock falls, its market capitalization falls and a market cap-weighted index will automatically own less of that company. However, over the short term, stock prices can often be affected by emotion. A market index that bases its investment weights solely on market capitalization (and therefore market price) will systematically invest too much in stocks when they are overpriced and too little in stocks when they are priced at bargain levels. (In the internet bubble, for example, as internet stocks went up in price, market cap-weighted indexes became too heavily concentrated in this overpriced sector and too underweighted in the stocks of established companies in less exciting industries.) This systematic flaw appears to cost market-cap weighted indexes approximately 2% per year in return over long periods.

The equal weight index corrects this systematic flaw to a degree (the small correction is still worth 2.7 percent per year in additional performance). Greenblatt describes it as randomizing the errors made by the market capitalization weighted index:

One way to avoid the problem of buying too much of overpriced stocks and too little of bargain stocks in a market-cap weighted index is to create an index that weights each stock in the index equally. An equally-weighted index will still own too much of overpriced stocks and too little of bargain-priced stocks, but in other cases, it will own more of bargain stocks and less of overpriced stocks. Since stocks in the index aren’t affected by price, errors will be random and average out over time. For this reason, equally weighted indexes should add back the approximately 2% per year lost to the inefficiencies of market-cap weighting.

While the errors are randomized in the equal weight index, they are still systematic – it still owns too much of the expensive stocks and too little of the cheap ones. Fundamental weighting corrects this error (again to a small degree). Fundamentally-weighted indexes weight companies based on their economic size using price ratios such as sales, book value, cash flow and dividends. The surprising thing is that this change is worth only 0.4 percent per year over equal weighting (still 3.1 percent per year over market capitalization weighting).

Similar to equally-weighted indexes, company weights are not affected by market price and therefore pricing errors are also random. By correcting for the systematic errors caused by weighting solely by market-cap, as tested over the last 40+ years, fundamentally-weighted indexes can also add back the approximately 2% lost each year due to the inefficiencies of market-cap weighting (with the last 20 years adding back even more!).

The Magic Formula / “value” weighted index has a huge advantage over fundamental weighting (+3.9 percent per year), and is a massive improvement over the market capitalization index (+7 percent per year). Greenblatt describes it as follows:

On the other hand, value-weighted indexes seek not only to avoid the losses due to the inefficiencies of market-cap weighting, but to add performance by buying more of stocks when they are available at bargain prices. Value-weighted indexes are continually rebalanced to weight most heavily those stocks that are priced at the largest discount to various measures of value. Over time, these indexes can significantly outperform active managers, market cap-weighted indexes, equally-weighted indexes, and fundamentally-weighted indexes.

I like Greenblatt’s approach. I’ve got two small criticisms:

1. I’m not sure that his Magic Formula weighting is genuine “value” weighting. Contrast Greenblatt’s approach with Dylan Grice’s “Intrinsic Value to Price” or “IVP” approach, which is a modified residual income approach, the details of which I’ll discuss in a later post. Grice’s IVP is a true intrinsic value calculation. He explains his approach in a way reminiscent of Buffett’s approach:

[How] is intrinsic value estimated? To answer, think first about how much you should pay for a going concern. The simplest such example would be that of a bank account containing $100, earning 5% per year interest. This asset is highly liquid. It also provides a stable income. And if I reinvest that income forever, it provides stable growth too. What’s it worth?

Let’s assume my desired return is 5%. The bank account is worth only its book value of $100 (the annual interest payment of $5 divided by my desired return of 5%). It may be liquid, stable and even growing, but since it’s not generating any value over and above my required return, it deserves no premium to book value.

This focus on an asset’s earnings power and, in particular, the ability of assets to earn returns in excess of desired returns is the essence of my intrinsic valuation, which is based on Steven Penman’s residual income model.1 The basic idea is that if a company is not earning a return in excess of our desired return, that company, like the bank account example above, deserves no premium to book value.

And it seems to work:

Grice actually calculates IVP while Greenblatt does not. Does that actually matter? Probably not. Even if it’s not what I think the average person understands real “value” weighting to be, Greenblatt’s approach seems to work. Why quibble over semantics?

2. As I’ve discussed before, Greenblatt’s Magic Formula return owes a great deal to his selection of EBIT/TEV as the price limb of his model. EBIT/TEV has been very well performed historically. If we were to substitute EBIT/TEV for the P/B, P/E, price-to-dividends, P/S, P/whatever, we’d have seen slightly better performance than the Magic Formula provided, but you might have been out of the game somewhere between 1997 to 2001.

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »

%d bloggers like this: