John Huber – The MicroCap Conference Philadelphia 2016
John Huber – 3 Paths To Finding Value Stocks
John Huber Brief Bio
- Founder, Portfolio Manager at Saber Capital Management, LLC
- Author of the Blog BaseHitInvesting.com, where I discuss my investing ideas
- Saber is a Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) that manages separate accounts for clients using a value investing approach
- Saber emphasizes aligned incentives (John Huber invests alongside clients)
Saber’s Investment Strategy
Saber’s strategy is to make investments in high-quality, well-managed businesses at attractive prices.
Qualities I Look For:
- Businesses I Understand
- Growing Intrinsic Value (High ROIC)
- Durability (Predictable Cash Flow)
- Shareholder-friendly Management
- Margin of Safety (Value)
A Common Sense Approach to Investing
“Your goal as an investor should simply be to purchase, at a rational price, a part interest in an easily-understandable business whose earnings are virtually certain to be materially higher five, ten and twenty years from now. Over time, you will find only a few companies that meet these standards — so when you see one that qualifies, you should buy a meaningful amount of stock…
“…Put together a portfolio of companies whose aggregate earnings march upward over the years, and so also will the portfolio’s market value.”
-Warren Buffett, 1996 Shareholder Letter
3 Paths to Finding Value
Three ways to locate value in stocks:
- Information Advantage
- Analytical Advantage (Thinking Differently)
- Time Arbitrage
Path #1: Information Advantage
Information Advantage: Finding information that others don’t have
- This was how Buffett made a sizable amount of money in the 1950’s
- Spinoffs/Special Situations (Joel Greenblatt made 50% annual returns in special situations using information he located that others didn’t have)
- Small-caps (“hidden gems”)
- However, it is now much easier to uncover information in today’s world (thus minimizing this advantage)
Buffett’s advantage in the early years was simply looking for bargains that others weren’t:
- Western Insurance – Good Business valued at less than 1 P/E (see pg 185 of Snowball)
- http://basehitinvesting.com/buffetts-early-investments/ (When Buffett found it, it had $16 of earnings and stock price that traded between $12 and $20 per share)
- Buffett was up 75% in 1951, mostly because of GEICO. He put 65% of his small portfolio and the stock roughly doubled. He sold to buy Western Insurance, which also went on to double.
Path #2: Thinking Differently
Taking the same information and interpreting it differently:
- There is no piece of information about Apple that isn’t freely available
- Yet it traded at 90 in January, 110 in March, 90 in May, 110 in September
- Two various potential interpretations of its high margins:
- One view: Apple is commodity hardware manufacturer that will see its margins erode
- Alternate view: Apple is a consumer brand which is the reason it has achieved high margins to begin with
- Market does a poor job at judging long-term probabilities
- Great compounders like WMT, WFC, SBUX, FAST, BRK, HD, GOOG, AMZN, PCLN all remained undervalued for a decade or more (many compounded at 20% annually for decades)
- Even after they were widely accepted to be great companies with outstanding competitive positions, high returns on capital, attractive unit economics, and a long runway, the market still priced them “cheap” (i.e. allowed shareholders to invest at prices that subsequently yielded outstanding results, even as P/E ratios appeared high).
- Why does the market often undervalue great businesses?
Two key reasons:
- Market is better at analyzing short-term data points than it is when it comes to analyzing long-term fundamentals (the focus on the next few quarters deemphasizes what is important about the next 5 years; e.g. all the best engineers want to work at Google or Facebook, not Yahoo)
- People often interpret the same set of information in very different ways
See the full slides below.
