An Investor’s Guide to Value Investing Miami FL

 

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No doubt, if you’re reading Value Investing For Dummies, somewhere during your investing career you heard something about value investing. You heard about it from your retired next-door neighbor. You heard about it as “what Warren Buffett does.” You saw a mutual fund describe itself as a “value-oriented” fund. You have a pretty good idea what the word “value” means in ordinary English. It’s not an altogether precise concept; the Random House Dictionary of the English Language defines it as the “relative worth, merit, or importance” of something. Okay, fine. But how does that apply to investing? What is value investing, anyway? This section answers that question. The rest gives you the background, tools, and thought processes to do it.

Definitions? No Two Are Alike
Perhaps you’ve asked around — to friends, experienced investors, investing professionals — for definitions of “value investing.” You probably got a lot of different answers. Those answers perhaps included phrases like “conservative,” “long-term oriented,” “the opposite of growth,” “the Buffett approach,” “buying stocks with a low P/E,” “buying stuff that’s cheap,” or “buying stocks that nobody wants.” None of these is “it” entirely, but it turns out they are all part of it. All, except the “opposite of growth,” that is — and we’ll get to that. Value investing is an investing approach and style blending many principles of business and financial analysis to arrive at good investing decisions. This, too, is an imprecise definition, but it lays the groundwork for the more precise principles and style points that follow.

What Is Value Investing?
Toward a definition, here’s one you may have read in the first edition of Value Investing For Dummies. It still works: Value investing is buying shares of a business as though you were buying the business itself. Value investors emphasize the intrinsic value of assets and current and future profits, and pay a price equal to or less than that value. You’ll quickly note key phrases: “buying a business,” “intrinsic value,” and “pay a price equal to or less than that value.” These are explicit tenets of the value investing approach, and underlying them all is the notion of conscious appraisal — that is, the idea of a rigorous and deliberate attempt to measure business value. You’ll also notice that “price” enters the appraisal, but not until the end. Value investors only go to the stock market to buy their shares of the business. Value investors don’t look at the market as an indicator of whether to invest. With this definition of value investing as an appetizer, here’s a “main course” of value investing principles.

Buying a business
If you take nothing else away from reading this book, take away the thought process that investing in stocks is really (or should be) like buying a business. That concept shouldn’t really be that hard to grasp — after all, when you buy shares, you are buying a portion of a business, albeit in most cases a small one. This isn’t to say you have to buy a larger share of the business to think of your investment as buying a business — this principle applies even if you’re buying a single share. Put differently, whether it’s an espresso cart or 1,000 shares of Starbucks you want to buy, the purchase is analyzed the same way. Treat the investment as if you were buying the business — the whole business. By buying shares, you’re committing capital to that enterprise in exchange for an eventual healthy and appropriate return on that investment. Now, some of you who got caught in the tech boom and bust may think you did exactly that. You followed a company and its story. The products were “killer apps” and everything the company did made headlines. Everybody wanted to own its products or work for the company. So you bought shares. But did you look at business fundamentals? Intrinsic value of assets and future profit prospects? Did you understand their strategy and competitive advantages? Did you do your homework to assess whether the stock price was at or below your appraisal? Likely not. That’s the difference between value investing and most other forms of investing.

Making a conscious appraisal
If you were interested in buying a business for yourself and thought the corner hardware store looked attractive, how much would you be willing to pay for it? You would likely be influenced by the sale price of other hardware stores and by opinions shared by neighbors and other customers. But you would still center your attention on the intrinsic economic value — the worth and profit-generation potential — of that business, and a determination of whether that worth and profit justified the price, before you committed your hard-earned dough. Value investors like to refer to this as an appraisal of the business. The business would be appraised just as one would appraise a piece of property or a prized antique. In fact, a business appraisal is deeper and more systematic than either of those two examples, as value is assigned to property or antiques mainly by looking at the market and seeing what other houses or vases of similar quality sold for. In the investing arena, there’s so much more to go on. There are real facts and figures, all publicly available, upon which the investor can base a true numbers appraisal, an appraisal of intrinsic value, not just the market price. Appraising the value, relating the value to the price, and looking for good bargains captures the essence of the value approach.

Beyond investment analysis
You may be inclined to ask, “Isn’t value investing merely ‘souped up’ investment analysis?” The kind of analysis done by professional Wall Street analysts? It’s a good question, and becoming a better one as the tech boom and its excesses fade into history. Analysts in those days were too focused on stock prices and the general “buzz” about an industry, and were often too influenced by their peers. Witness the hype about Amazon.com, which turned out to be far too optimistic (and indeed at the time of this writing, still is). Basic investment analysis should start with an analysis of business fundamentals — the metrics and measures that define business performance, like profitability, productivity, and capital structure. But it needs to go further to be blended with the “story” to determine whether the fundamentals will hold up, or better yet, improve. The “boom years” investment analysis tended to overlook the fundamentals altogether, marching straight into the story. Some analysts today tend to focus too much on fundamentals, like return on equity (ROE) or “free cash flow,” without understanding the story. The value investor gets good at understanding and blending both — the fundamentals, the story, and how the two work together to define a really great business. At the end of the day, your appraisal will touch all of these bases. Get used to this idea: Adopting the value investing approach means becoming your own investment analyst. You may read the work of others, but you’ll incorporate it into your own analysis and investing decision. As your own analyst, the pay can be good, but isn’t guaranteed — it’s clearly a “pay-forperformance” proposition. One thing for certain: You’ll never have to buy or dry clean a Brooks Brothers suit!

Ignoring the market
How can you spot the value investor at a cocktail party? Easy. He’s the only one talking about an actual company while all others stand around discussing the stock market. The bird of a value-investing feather is easily spotted. Focusing on the company itself, not on the market is a consistent value investing attribute. As a general rule, value investors ignore the market and couldn’t care less what the Dow or NASDAQ do on a particular day. They tune out the brokers, advisers, commentators, chat-roomers, and friends (insofar as investment advice is concerned, anyway). They may, however, listen to folks in the industry, customers, or people who know a lot about competitors. Value investors have a long-term focus. And if a value investor has done his or her homework right, what the market does to his stocks on a daily basis is irrelevant. If the company has value but the stock went down on Tuesday, a value investor feels that it’s probably a result of the market misreading the company’s value. Now, to be sure, external factors can affect stock prices. Interest rates, in particular, can affect not only stock prices but also the true intrinsic value of companies, as the cost of capital rises and falls and the value of alternative investments increases (there’s more in Chapters 3 and 12). So while it makes sense to pay some attention to the markets, especially in the long term, daily fluctuations, particularly when they are just that, should be ignored. The value investor can wait anywhere from a few years to forever for her investments to mature. The value investor looks for a good price with respect to value, but doesn’t try to time the market. If the value is there and the price is right, it will probably be right tomorrow, too. Some sage advice from Warren Buffett: “For some reason, people take their cues from price action rather than from values. What doesn’t work is when you start doing things that you don’t understand or because they worked last week for somebody else. The dumbest reason in the world to buy a stock is because it’s going up.”

Value Investing Is Not...
Following the same thread of logic that holds that “we all learn best from our mistakes,” sometimes the best way to define what something is is to define what it isn’t. Or at least, to show why it isn’t constrained to a limiting attribute like “value investing is long-term investing.” One at a time...

Not just conservative
Most people equate the concept of “value” investing with “conservative” investing. Conservative investors focus on minimizing risk, and in many cases, maximizing short-term cash returns from investments. Fixed income investments — such as bonds and money market funds and stocks in placid sectors like utilities and insurance companies — meet the “conservative” criteria, and there is nothing wrong with these investments. Indeed, most, but not all fit “value” criteria as well — strong intrinsic value, steady, predictable returns — at a reasonable price. But while most conservative investments are value investments, not all value investments are conservative. It is possible to view a company like Starbucks, with incredibly strong brand features, strategic position, and growth potential, especially ten years ago, as a value investment. A conservative investment, no, but a value investment, quite possibly yes.

Not just long term
Most value investments are long term. In fact, the Buffettonian view is to “hold forever” and look for businesses that you would want to hold forever. That’s part of what makes them a good value. But not all long-term investments are good values, and not all value investments are long term. Indeed, as business cycles shorten today, what is excellent today may look like a flash in the pan as technologies used in business and marketplace acceptance change. Buffett deals with this problem by simply avoiding technology makers and heavily technology driven companies, for example, because (1) technology changes and (2) he doesn’t understand technology in the first place. But even stable businesses see their products change and change ever more quickly. You once could buy only one “flavor” of Tide detergent, but now there are dozens, and they change all the time. And it isn’t just all powder — there are liquids, concentrated liquids — you get the idea. So when buying a business, it’s good to look long term, but you must also realize that businesses and their markets change, and you should always be prepared to sell a business if assumptions change. That said, most value investments — if they are truly value investments — should be good to hold onto for more than a year, which is the IRS definition of “long term.”

Not just low P/E
Oil companies, banks, food producers, and steel companies all have had P/E
ratios (price-to-earnings) below market averages. But does that mean they
are good values? Sometimes, but not always. Bethlehem Steel or — ahem —
Enron all traded at one time or another with low P/Es. But the earnings, and
the business itself, turned out not to be sustainable.
So while low P/E can be part of the investing equation, especially when
deciding when the stock price is right, it is far from the whole story.

Not the “opposite of growth”
“Stock ABC is a growth stock, and stock XYZ is a value stock.” You hear that all the time, and you’ll also hear it about mutual funds, which have been neatly divvied up by stock and fund information portal Morningstar (www.morningstar.com) into neat little boxes tagged as “growth,” “value,” and “blend.” So value stocks aren’t supposed to grow? Well, some, like your local electric utility, may prosper just fine on the business they have, and may pay you handsome returns in the form of dividends. But for most companies, growth is an integral part of the value of the business — it creates the return you desire as an investor. So this treatment of value investing places growth in the center of the “value” stage. It is the potential for growth that defines Starbucks and its brethren as good values — the current assets and perhaps even current business levels alone don’t justify the price. Indeed, this is what separates early value investing, as practiced and preached by patriarch Ben Graham, from the more recent views practiced by Buffett and many of his current disciples: Growth creates value.

Cheap is a relative term
Above all, value investors seek to buy businesses at or below their appraised value. Why? Not just because they like to get a good deal — it’s to provide a margin of safety. Because any business appraisal is imprecise at best, the value investor likes to give a cushion for error, a cushion just in case things don’t turn out exactly as assessed. So does that mean that a value investor always buys a stock below its highest price? Usually, but not always. Does a value investor “bottom fish” for the lowest 52-week price? Usually not. Why? Because it’s all about price relative to value. A stock at a 52-week low may have serious flaws in its business or marketplace acceptance. And value investors have been known to buy stocks at 52-week highs — if (and only if) even that price understated their value appraisal. Doesn’t happen often, but knowing that it does happens reinforces the true value concept.

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For Dummies is a registered trademark of Wiley Publishing, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Used here by license.

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