Category: Missives

Since the stock market has done extremely well from its “abyss-like” low in March of 2009, many investors are worried about the risks associated with owning U.S. large-cap stocks. A cacophony of articles have been written which not only look for the stock market to correct, but also have an expectation of the kind of bear market decline which would set investors back for five years, like the declines in 2000-02 and 2007-09. Those declines each hit the S&P 500 Index for a loss of 40% or more.

Recently we heard a market prognosticator declare that we could have a 30 percent decline in stock prices in the next 12 months. Presumably because investors fear starting over again, like many did at the market bottom in 2009, the talking head had ample emotion on which to make such a grandiose assertion. This fear of starting over reminded me of the recent Tom Cruise movie, “Edge of Tomorrow,” where Tom Cruise plays Lt. Col. Bill Cage, a soldier forced to live the same day again and again in efforts to develop answers on how to defeat a force which would end the world. Hence, living on the “Edge of Tomorrow.”

At Smead Capital Management we are conscious of the few, but significant pitfalls which we believe exist for the long-duration common stock investor. One of the main pitfalls we want to avoid is the over-capitalization curse. This is a situation where investor enthusiasm gets very high, prices get historically high and investors drown the company, industry or sector with capital. In our experience, it pays to avoid the over-capitalized areas for as long as five to ten years as they work their way back to being hated and contentious.

Howard Gold is an inquisitive writer for Marketwatch.com and we think has done us all a great favor in his latest column titled, “Not even a bull market can interest people in stocks.” He points out via the chart below that—despite a huge rebound the last five years in US common stocks—equity holdings as a percentage of global investable assets just climbed to levels only seen at major stock market low points. Relative to the past 50 years, this stock market has been abandoned and orphaned even as it had made participants wealthy.

We at Smead Capital Management have been discussing some of the follies common to human nature and what we see as some pervasive trends in the investing world. These conversations got us imagining what C.S. Lewis’s, The Screwtape Letters, might sound like if they were applied to today’s investment environment. The satirical letters are written by an advice-giving bureaucrat in Hell named Screwtape, to his nephew Wormwood, a young demon who is learning how to lead humans astray. Taking some liberty with Lewis’s work, we present what we believe Screwtape might say if he were trying to advise Wormwood on how to lead investors astray.

At Smead Capital Management, we have our own Efficient Market Theory. Ben Graham observed and Warren Buffett repeated, “The stock market has a very efficient way of transferring wealth from the impatient to the patient.” We would add that over ten to twenty years the stock market moves money “efficiently from the those who over-think the stock market to those who don’t.” In this missive we will explain why we believe the patient benefit at the expense of the impatient and why those who over-think the stock market are incredibly inefficient and move their money to those with less complicated views on finance.