Author: Cole Smead, CFA

Markets Adapt to Your Style

[…] We believe the market has adapted to quality. Even the value players have adapted and most of them have attached quality to their marketing materials. The style has been adapted and we believe the next era won’t reward quality as it has over the recent past. In markets, we believe the winning hand moves around the table just as it does in poker. Luckily Buffett continues to adapt his play lately by selling Apple and buying OXY. The way we see it, the future winning hands look cheaper and more cyclical, but provide attractive returns on capital for the business in his view and in ours.

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Dear Chairman

As the investors of Smead Capital Management know, we focus on the shareholder friendliness of the businesses we analyze because we believe it can differentiate their long-term returns. Warren Buffett has said, “Own a business a five-year-old can run. Just in case one does!” In today’s piece, we would like to share our framework of thinking about capital allocation and shareholder friendliness through an example that we have lost money on so far. […]

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The P.A. Conflict

[…] We should want customers of the investment industry to get good outcomes. Good outcomes come from good processes and aligned incentives. With US markets being the rage of the investment world, we believe that the professionals in our industry own a different portfolio than they recommend to their customers. In other words, they may get a different outcome than their customers. Regulation will never fix ethical issues. […]

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DXYZ: An Old Form of Ignorance

Many investors are bullish, or not fearful, of the future of stock returns. At Smead Capital Management, we continue to explain to our investors how poor the outcomes will be. Some ask when this view will change. To quote Keynes, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” The facts are not changing. Instead, we continue to find mountain evidence of the danger present. In this piece, we will explain an analogous instance from the past. […]

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Looking for the Outsiders

William Thorndike’s book “The Outsiders” has been considered a classic for some time now. His story teaches readers about the business performance of Henry Singleton, Katherine Graham, John Malone and Daniel Burke. These are people who weren’t household names like Jack Welch, but produced results that would make any investors feel jealous of the success they had. At a moment like today where the world seems vastly different than where we have been for much of the last decade, we would like to use this piece as a way to remind ourselves where “The Outsiders” may sit and provide an example of ones that we’ve witnessed, but others don’t recognize. […]

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The Great Conflagration

We consider Ben Bernanke to be the father of 21st-century central bank policy. His work in dealing with the credit crisis in 2008-2009 was just the right policy at that time. The problem for economists is that they tend to fight the last war. The Great Financial Crisis was an economic problem where demand was dropping off from credit evaporating. The government tried to spend money to replace this destruction, but couldn’t politically equal the loss of economic output. The central banks could only pray that the most accommodative monetary policy would ease the fiscal belt that wasn’t loosening at that time. This was the last war for economists and has dominated economic research. Like anchoring or recency bias would tell us, this may have little to do with the problems in our future. […]

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Chronological Snobbery

C.S. Lewis coined the term ‘chronological snobbery’. According to Lewis, the definition of chronological snobbery is “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.” In our minds, it is how humans undercut the wisdom of a prior time by assuming that we are so much more advanced in our current day. […]

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Grantham’s Contradictions

[…] Let me also start this missive by saying that we at Smead Capital Management believe Jeremy Grantham is doing a great job of telling people how high the likelihood of stock market failure is. He’s trying to scare people and that is prudent advice. We tip our cap to him. We want to go into a second-level thinking discussion of how to take advantage of Mr. Market right now using Jeremy’s comments as a benchmark. […]

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Stock Investors in Barbieland

[…] Investors should fear death like Barbie did. We call it stock market failure. These valuations won’t go up like a six-inch heel. Flats may be more fitting for thinking about stock returns going forward. The only way to fight this for stock investors is to be scrutinous about the businesses you own and what you are paying for those stocks. In the Barbie movie, Ken wandered the real world trying to make sense of things. He only came to bad conclusions and never ended up with Barbie. Stock investors could be no different in their own fantasy land.

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Energy Investors are Jaded

[…] Mr. Market knows that low ROE produces low multiples and high ROE produces high multiples. He’s just very manic when he is jaded. We are seeking high-return businesses that are mispriced. By God’s grace, there are a lot of jaded investors and a lot of mispricing in this space. We’re sorry that Mr. Market is jaded. The right business managers can take us places. These companies are lonely now and (in comparison) we love it. We are sorry that investors are jaded.

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