After talking about the important concept of economic moats in the first part of his interview, in this second and concluding part, Prof. Sanjay Bakshi talks about his thoughts on valuations, mental models, diversification, checklists, and why you must buy great businesses for the long term.
Safal Niveshak: One of the problems that new or small investors have is that they can’t really get their heads around valuation. It seems so complex. A lot of the terminology is complex, the concepts are, and there is a lot of contrary thinking needed to effectively value businesses.
How can valuations be made easier? How have you made it easier? Or can it not be made easier?
Prof. Sanjay Bakshi: Vishal, that particular problem is equally applicable to large investors!
Anyway, over the years I have dealt with the problem in many ways. As a disciple of Ben Graham, when working on any business and not necessarily moats, I developed my own ways of thinking about valuation.
Graham used to talk about protection vs prediction. He used to say that investors should seek protection in the form of margin of safety either through conservatively calculated intrinsic value (usually based on asset value) over market price or superior rate of sustainable earnings on price paid for a business vs a passive rate of return on that money.
That approach works well in many businesses as even though their future fundamental performance is largely unpredictable because one is, in effect, underwriting insurance.
Graham’s methods helped investors deal with the unpredictability problem in security analysis. For example, when you bought the stock of a company selling below net cash and the operating business was not losing money, then you were effectively getting the business for free. Even if the business may have been mediocre, it was free. And the typical Graham-and-Dodd investor absolutely loves freebies.
See full article here.
