Category: Missives

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.

Many years ago, United Airlines had the slogan, “Fly the Friendly Skies.” At Smead Capital Management, we like to own companies for a long time which are “friendly” to their public shareholders. In this missive, we will define what it means in our eyes to be shareholder friendly and give a company specific example of this friendliness.

At Smead Capital Management, our fourth criterion for stock selection is the generation of high levels of free cash flow. To us, long duration common stock ownership is very similar to owning an entire business. In our opinion, the free cash flow represents the money the owner receives which does not have to be plowed back into the business to perpetuate its success. In effect, it is the “real” and measurable wealth creation of the business.

In his 1980 book, Contrarian Investment Strategy, David Dreman opens with an analogy comparing the stock market to a casino with two distinct sides. The “red” room has lots of action and an occasional player striking it rich quickly. In effect, you become royal. Unfortunately, most of the players leave without the money with which they entered, because the house has the odds stacked heavily in its favor. The other side, the “green” room, was very quiet with numerous players slowly stacking up a large pile of chips and most of the players winning. The odds were stacked in their favor against the house, but nobody ever ordained them to get rich quickly.