Author: Smead Capital Management

As long-duration common stock pickers we seek to buy meritorious companies which fit our eight criteria for stock selection. However, as investors with a ten-year time frame and 36-years of observational experience in investing, we invoke Bernard Baruch who said, “The activity which made me the most money in common stocks was sitting on my hands.” For this reason, we have an interesting perch to watch the investors around us who are turning their portfolios over with regularity. How does an investor get a feel for shorter duration tops in the one-to-two year time range?

During our discussions with clients in October we were asked repeatedly what the outcome of the Presidential election would do to our investments. Regardless of the outcome, our answer was always the same. In our opinion, whoever was elected in 2016 was going to be the luckiest person to hold the seat since Ronald Reagan. Our belief comes from the emergence of the largest population group forming households like boomers did in the 1980’s.

As an observer of ten presidential election cycles while working in the investment business, we thought it would be a good thing to give the current stock market environment some historical context. Revenue growth stories in tech are making what some would call “maniacal new highs.” Perceived losers in the 2016 cycle, like healthcare, have been purged by the stock market. Betting sites and many of the polls have had Hillary Clinton running ahead (before the reopening of the FBI investigation) and favor among the S&P 500 sectors is seemingly representative of her perceived industry likes and dislikes. Could this discounting prior to the election be symptomatic of a contrary indicator?

John Maynard Keynes introduced the concept of “animal spirits” as it relates to economic activity in his 1936 book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. The term “animal spirits” is a way to describe what drives human behavior to consume, take risk and engage the instinctual proclivities that are natural to economic living. This important piece of Keynes’s work came seven years after the Great Depression and we think the concept is critical to understanding the economy and markets of today, eight years after the biggest recession since the period he was addressing.

As a young stockbroker in the 1980’s, I was hungry for disciplines which could help me make money for clients. One of the most sensible things I came across was a theory by an investor that we refer to as the 70-20-10 rule.  Human nature dictates an urge to make money in stocks quickly and for me that was proving to be difficult and problematic. Hence, the hunger to learn from theories like this rule.