Category: Missives

Watching Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger Saturday in Omaha caused us to think about a very popular 1960s TV show called, “The Dating Game.” Hosted by Jim Lange, the game was played with the host on one side of a wall with a male or female contestant. On the other side were three people of the opposite sex and they were attempting to answer questions and get a date. The political pressure against oil drilling and exploration makes “dating” look very attractive to us in the oil industry! […]

[…] In many respects, there is a three-point line that has arisen in the stock market, whether investors or money management firms recognize it. The higher percentage, two-point shots have come in the form of owning the S&P 500 Index or blue-chip quality American companies. However, the investors shooting these highly successful shots haven’t won in the stock market recently, particularly over the last 15 months. Instead, it has been more cyclical, capital-intensive businesses, or as we think about it, higher risk, like the three-point line. Energy companies, commodity-oriented businesses and other lesser-known industries have been putting the most points up on the board. […]

[…] Charlie Munger said, “This is the biggest financial euphoria episode of my career [75 years] because of the totality of it.” It would only make sense that this episode would die harder than any other prior euphoria episode. And, for that reason, fear stock market failure.

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. […]

We have been reminding everyone that we believe we are unwinding a financial euphoria episode that Charlie Munger called “the biggest of his career, because of the totality of it.” In the process of its unwinding, the sins committed during the euphoria episode will have a price to pay. Many investments got over-capitalized by nearly free money. […]

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. […]

There were many good things to think about from Warren Buffett’s letter to shareholders which came out recently. In this piece, we’d like to drill down on two subjects that Buffett highlighted. […]

As a young stockbroker in the 1980s, I was very enamored with T. Boone Pickens. Pickens recognized the huge value that built up in common stocks in the inflationary 1970s and began to use the financial backing of the Junk Bond King, Michael Milken, to become an activist on Wall Street. His little company, Mesa Petroleum, started investing in undervalued large cap oil stocks and threatened to do large leveraged buyouts (LBOs) with the assistance of Milken’s firm, Drexel Burnham Lambert (my employer). […]

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. […]

[…] Stock market history argues that the next bull market in stocks will emerge when all the sinful behaviors of the last financial euphoria have been cleansed from the system. It will be marked by stock market failure and there will be no urge to recreate the woogie-like euphoria of the prior period. We believe success in common stock investments will come from companies which benefit from persistent inflation and a relatively strong economy led by 92 million Americans aged 25-45 years old. Is it different this time?