Category: Missives

Relying on the kindness of strangers has never been a good business or investment strategy, but it doesn’t mean that people don’t wish that it worked. The main issue with this hope is that it’s foolish to believe that other people’s grace and money will always be there. […]

There are two sides to the current stock market. One side, ignorance avoidance, requires us to know where the money is. The other side, stock selection, is to know where the money is going. Since Willie Sutton knew where the money was, he robbed banks. We will discuss where the money is now and where we think it will go. […]

[…] In psychology, there are two main forms of rejection (duration and magnitude). For those of us who know history and appreciate the rhymes that Twain taught us, this mania has already lasted longer (duration) and been more all-encompassing than the DotCom bubble (magnitude). It has taken the S&P 500 Index to a more expensive position relative to most of the respected valuation metrics (Schiller CAPE, Buffett’s stock market indicator, US household equities as a percentage of US financial assets), to name a few. And anyone who stays late at this party could run the risk that Cinderella took at the ball. Warren Buffett said, “At midnight, everything is going to turn to pumpkins and mice! But the trouble is, there are no clocks on the wall.” […]

For over eighteen years, we have maintained the same investment discipline and the same eight criteria for stock selection. We have deliberately sought opportunity in the sectors and structures the market has decided are too complicated, too cyclical, or simply no longer fashionable. This philosophy has rarely felt more necessary or more lonely than today. […]

My first experience with a major economic/stock market bubble was the dot-com bubble of 1998-2000. Many investors forget that the Nasdaq and S&P 500 Index bubble that ended March 10, 2000, was the first bubble in a series of three bubbles. In this missive, with the help of the band Foreigner, we will walk through the three bubbles that cursed investors from early 2000 through 2015. […]

One of the things we have in common with Warren Buffett is that we started our risk-taking career handicapping at racetracks. Buffett handicapped the horse races in Omaha, and I handicapped greyhound races near Portland at Multnomah Kennel Club in Gresham, Oregon. Buffett was too young to bet, so he created a tip sheet which he sold at the track. I was in college and most of the time was sending bets with my relatives while working swing shift at the Crown Zellerbach paper mill in Camas, Washington. […]

[…] The combination of increasing returns at scale, with a secular tailwind of new household formation working with an aging housing stock, leads us to believe we have entered a new era of the supermajor in US homebuilding. Like the emergence of Exxon and Chevron as supermajors, first coined by Morgan Stanley analyst Doug Terreson in 1998, we believe that D.R. Horton and Lennar will be at the forefront of homebuilding consolidation in the United States – an industry which we believe today more closely resembles a manufacturing business, as opposed to a real estate business.

While there has been a lot of controversy around the Trump administration’s policy toward the Federal Reserve recently. What is less obvious to most investors is what they’re aiming to accomplish. Trump continues to talk about getting rates lower, and this has been echoed in other parts of the administration as well. He has also talked about rates affecting housing. Let’s unpack the Administration’s reasoning and goal. […]

[…] Like the current era, the late nineteenth-century American investment landscape offered tantalizing new technologies – from mechanical typesetters to the light bulb – but lacked the safeguards and information networks today’s investors take for granted. Examining Mark Twain’s forays in investing highlights a fact of life that we often discuss at Smead Capital Management: excellence in one field does not necessarily translate into another. […]

As summer comes to a close and life adjusts back to normal for most of us, we thought it was a great time to get back to basics and take a look at the current U.S. stock market. Our basics include owning strong companies that fit our eight criteria for stock selection, primarily in industries that are out of favor, as well as multi-year winners that we allow to compound for years. As we have echoed Warren Buffett for years, sins of commission hurt (buying losers 30% of the time), but sins of omission can hurt long-term results and affect long-term returns immensely more than losing duds. […]