Author: Smead Capital Management

My recent reads have been stuck in the 1960’s, including Adam Smith’s The Money Game and Andrew Knowton’s Shaking the Money Tree. Both are fascinating reads into the psychology of the 1960’s. They are not looking back like John Brooks’s The Go-Go Years (a good read as well), but instead share with the readers exactly what investors were thinking at the time. The 1960’s didn’t set up investors for the decade they thought they would get. Instead, it gave them the 1970’s. The success ahead was an illusion in stock returns, not corporate growth. I’d like to use this piece to look at some of the illusions that will stalk investors and produce stock market failure in the next decade.

On May the 17th of 2021, Discovery announced a merger with the media assets of AT&T. After an initial burst of enthusiasm, investors have turned sour on the deal. We have been through a very similar experience with Discovery (DISCA) back in November of 2017 and believe that these circumstances “rhyme.”

To say that we were surprised by some of the discussion at the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting would be an understatement. The conversation Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger leaned into on inflation was possibly the most interesting. Warren and Charlie gave large credit to Larry Summers for his willingness to stand alone on the effects of today’s fiscal and monetary policy on prices. We thought this was an ideal time review Buffett and Munger’s discussion and see what conclusions we could draw.

Now that the leaders of the most popular tech companies are going into outer space, we thought it appropriate to consider the return implications of this urge to “explore strange new worlds.” We believe the investor’s enemy is stock market failure. Stock market failure is a function of financial euphoria. Financial euphoria can be tracked historically. […]

As we have been holding calls with prospective and current investors of our firm, we have been arguing that the stock market is underwhelming the success of the economy. The lift off in economic activity could be far more troubling to stock market investors than their giddiness merits. The song that continues to come to my mind is David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” as we believe that today, unlike the past 10 years, is an economic oddity.

[…] Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger emphasize that the key to investment success is weak competition. Recently, two sets of investors, newbie investors through Reddit (and other chatrooms) and hedge fund managers running non-transparent portfolios of immense size, were both blessed and cursed by unusual success at the same time. One of the worst things a market can do to you is reward you for bad behavior and that has happened way more than normal. A quick review is necessary. […]