Quality-Driven Value Investing Prevails
Why purchasing the shares of enduring enterprises at discounted prices remains an ideal approach to alpha-achieving common stock investing
Summary:
Value investing was out of favor on Wall Street during the epic post-Great Recession bull market but reemerged, albeit temporarily, due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic and subsequent inflationary bear market.
Quality-driven value remains an ideal approach to alpha-achieving common stock investing on Main Street.
Value investing is never dead. It’s less popular than short-term growth stories.
Attempts to predict trends, catalysts, momentum, or macro events producing profitable trades with any consistency border on substituting lottery tickets for a retirement plan.
Avoid trend following and other investing misdemeanors.
As widely reported, many in the financial services industry and media consider value investing dead in the water. I believe value investing is alive and well and forever, but what do I know?
Well, I know that many of the premier investors in modern history are value-oriented. William Browne, Warren Buffett, Mario Gabelli, Benjamin Graham, Joel Greenblatt, Seth Klarman, Peter Lynch, Howard Marks, Bill Miller, Charlie Munger, Michael Price, John W. Rogers Jr., Charles Royce, Walter Schloss, Sir John Templeton, Geraldine Weiss, and Martin Whitman are legends.
These value investor household names remind us that the practice of owning the common shares of quality companies with wide margins of safety at the time of purchase is as enduring as rock and roll and electricity and that the Earth is indeed round.
Anything with promise, value investing included — and despite ever evolving and persevering — has its lapses in popularity or delivery methods. Nevertheless, there is no equal to value investing for individuals striving to build and maintain an enduring portfolio financing the indispensable milestones in the lives of loved ones.
On the Death of Value Investing
Value investing is never dead. It’s less popular than short-term growth stories. However, value prevails as long as there are financial markets or farmers’ markets.
Although it is essential to underscore that I remain a die-hard value investor, the investment paradigm was out of favor on Wall Street during the momentum growth post-Great Recession bull market, making it more challenging to attract readers if the word value appeared in the title.
In hindsight, I could, would, and should have bought Amazon (AMZN) shares at about $30 (split-adjusted) when its paid subscription service, Prime, began to take off in 2016. Or Netflix (NFLX) in 2013 for $50 when the company started streaming original content. And Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) in 2004, when its IPO was available to retail investors for about $4.25 a share, split-adjusted.
Toward the end of the epic bull, it became vogue for long-time celebrity-named value investors to bite the bullet and buy the more speculative, non-dividend-paying growth stocks. In other words, this time was different until it wasn’t.
For better or worse, at the time, I passed on each of those trends and other momentum growers as speculation. Instead, I focused on researching and purchasing stocks of boring, out-of-favor, albeit excellent companies outperforming the S&P 500 as a group since the dates I added the representative shares to the portfolio.
Wall Street struggles to generate Hamptons beach house-size bonuses on buy-and-hold value investing. Instead, it promotes speculative investment trading paradigms, producing fees that build those summer cottages.
Whose beach or lake house are we building — ours or our financial advisor's?
Perhaps there are diverging interpretations of traditional value investing or quality compounders purchased at attractive prices.
Trading value stocks is the equivalent of buying cigar butts or shares of lower-quality companies on speculation and then selling based on an expected or hoped-for corporate, industry, or macro-driven event. In contrast, value investors continue to add fresh ideas to their portfolios that offer compelling prospects for compounding capital gains and dividends, protected by adequate safety margins to preserve principal during the inevitable market declines.
Remember, future returns are uncorrelated with past performance. Nonetheless, the objective of quality-driven value investing is to outperform the benchmark over extended periods — seven to ten years or more — knowing monthly, quarterly, and annual performances are at the whim of the market’s voting machine cast from irrational investor behavior or the occasional surprise event. It is better to seek the benefits of Graham’s longer-tail weighing machine of compounding returns and margins of safety.
Before the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, the epic bull market — propelled by non-dividend-paying growth, high-yield forward dividends, cryptocurrency, and other speculative investment strategies — seemed unstoppable. Some market luminaries questioned the enduring legacy of value investing or declared its imminent death. A bull market for the ages precipitated the argument as growth stocks, momentum trading, trend following, and high-yield dividend equities, among other speculative portfolio strategies, outperformed the more risk-averse value approach.
Perhaps value investing is too long-term and too low-cost for a nearsighted, over-sophisticated financial services industry bent on collecting exorbitant fees and bonuses from its legion of followers. Nevertheless, trying to predict trends, catalysts, and macro events that produce profitable trades with consistency befits a game of chance more than a legitimate professional practice. Despite the noise, value investing triumphs because value does matter in everything we buy, hold, or sell.
Investments in quality, predominantly dividend-paying companies at value prices endure well beyond the scrap heap, where perennial bull markets for the ages dump the portfolios of investors chasing fast money in the euphoria of “This time is different.” History argues otherwise.
Value investing is neither dead nor dying and survives as a superior strategy. The post-Great Recession secular bull market was camouflaged, with the die-hard practitioners waiting in the bushes, ready to pounce on the falling stock prices of enduring enterprises.
We are comfortable in acknowledging that value prevails in every market cycle.
The Downside of Value in Bull Markets
The inherent risk to the value investing model is the non-value investors permeating market cycles.
Chasing the dragon named market bubbles has been a cornerstone of investing for Wall Street professionals and Main Street do-it-yourselfers since stock trading began. Human behavior dictates that it’s off to the races once we outsmart the market and predict this swing or that trend or go long or short just right on a company or sector. Convinced of figuring this thing out, we begin the hamster roll of predicting and trading unrestrained.
As validation, there are always reputable assists from outside market influences to our preoccupation with market trends. Of late, there was an assist from the Federal Reserve in keeping interest rates low until they didn’t. Before that, the hand-off came from government deregulation of the housing market, allowing widespread homeownership, fueling opportunistic investment banks to package the mortgages into marketable securities, and creating more risky mortgage dollars to lend to marginal home buyers.
Before the high-rated mortgages — despite no documentation and income — there was an assist from the capital markets of free-flowing investment into dot-com ideas that were just that. Before that, junk bonds contributed by financing impossible mergers and acquisitions. Yes, the greatest threat to an investor is the market itself; however, the market is also a friend to count on for delivering individual company or market-wide value opportunities. Dedicated value investors stay patient and self-disciplined without knowing when or how those opportunities will emerge.
Prepare for the imminent next downturn with dry powder in the form of FDIC-insured cash to ride the ensuing upside in the stocks of quality companies becoming value-priced by the sudden extreme preference for discomfort among the herd of market-timing investors. Rest assured, when market crashes occur, the speculators with blind faith in trend following, momentum trading, high-yield dividend investing, and the next trading fad yet to be determined will be running for the hills.
As value investors, downturns in the market and targeted quality enterprises are our workdays. The ensuing upturns are our paydays.
Financial Markets and Farmers’ Markets
The proverbial day of reckoning is inevitable, although unpredictable.
Thoughtful value investors never stress over failed short positions, diminishing fund assets under management from departing performance chasers, or useless self-doubt fueled by the 20/20 hindsight of missing out on the fast growers, high yielders, and Bitcoins when trending skyward. Several Enrons, Blockbusters, WorldComs, and Lehmann Brothers exist for every speculative winner, such as Amazon.
Take extreme comfort in knowing that value prevails as long as there are financial markets or farmers’ markets.
Disclosure: I/we have beneficial long positions through the direct ownership of AMZN, GOOGL, and MSFT common shares in our family portfolio. I wrote this post myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it other than from Substack paid subscriptions. I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this post.