Author: Cole Smead, CFA

The news of the shocking OPEC+ announcement of a supply cut is saturating the minds of investors and market prognosticators. We would like to remind our investors of the longer-term implications of what we are seeing around the economy and markets pertaining to the energy business. We normally understand this from purely looking at the energy business, but also want to look at it from a technology lens. […]

The events that began with Thursday’s tumult in financial stocks and precipitated the FDIC takeover of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank were swift. The only thing that ran through my mind was the regime change that we are continuing to see. This didn’t remind me of something I’ve seen personally before, but instead one of the best movies of the last 20 years, Argo. […]

On February 5, 2023, Charlie Munger sat down as the Chairman Emeritus of the Daily Journal Corporation (DJCO) to answer questions from shareholders and the public. We think of it as the question-and-answer session of the Berkshire Hathaway meeting with an extra serving of pithiness and wit. We at Smead Capital Management believe Mr. Charles T. Munger is one of the wisest people to walk the earth today, particularly in the category of worldly wisdom. We stand at attention anytime he decides to opine on subjects. I wanted to write on a few of the subjects he touched on as we believe they are helpful for our investors. […]

We are closing in on what we think may be the question of the decade. If a majority of stock market capitalization in the US is passive or indexed, does this cause problems for stock markets? Bloomberg columnist John Authers addressed this conundrum by saying, “Logic dictates that not all assets could be run passively. If that were to happen, the market would stop functioning and cease to have any use in pricing and allocating capital.” We disagree with the ceasing to function. Markets were made by God to clear, but one question remains: at what price? […]

I was reminded in a recent read of Robert Hagstrom’s book, Warren Buffett: Inside the Ultimate Money Mind, how Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger define the economic earnings power of a business. They refer to it as owner earnings. They take net income and add back depreciation, but adjust for the cost of the reinvestment of capital assets of a business to understand the real costs of being an owner. While being similar to free cash flow, it may need more adjustment depending on the capital assets of the business. Most would then use this to come to the natural conclusion that businesses with less capital-intensive business models would be superb companies to own based on owners’ earnings. However, this just exposes the fly in the ointment. […]

[…] As Buffet said in the 1998 Berkshire Hathaway meeting: The secret to life is weak competition. We shouldn’t complain about how tough it is and how few people are willing to do this. We should celebrate the wealth (alpha) we can capture from this backdrop. We should intensify our work not on which stocks can rerate the quickest, but which businesses that we own can compound our capital inside their business without needing outside investors. It would be great, too, if other minority investors alongside us don’t understand the value we see and are more than willing to sell their shares during the next buyback activities. This market is requiring investors to play for keeps. […]

If you were walking down the street and saw a $100 bill just sitting near the curb, would you pick it up? Academia would argue that the $100 bill isn’t there. If it were real, it would have already been picked up by someone else. It remains to be asked that should you be standing there over the crisp bill, would you take it? […]

The investors of Smead Capital Management have been hearing us talk about ‘First World Problems’ recently. These are undoubtedly problems, but (in a manner of progress) are vastly different problems than we had before. Therefore, we feel we’ve solved the problems of the past and have opened ourselves up to new problems. This is like moving forward from pre-algebra to algebra in math. Our parents would be proud. […]

What has taken place in 2022 is nothing short of a man-made problem. The question is if you looked upriver, could this have been avoided? While it could be argued that Putin invading Ukraine was unexpected, the policy decisions and structure of the global energy markets have been shaped for years. It reads like the lamp in the movie A Christmas Story: Fragile. Besides structural issues, there have been pressures imposed on these structures that were unforeseen when they were built. These were exactly the pressures that caused what we now know as Chernobyl. […]