Category: Missives

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?

We are closing in on what we think may be the question of the decade. If a majority of stock market capitalization in the US is passive or indexed, does this cause problems for stock markets? Bloomberg columnist John Authers addressed this conundrum by saying, “Logic dictates that not all assets could be run passively. If that were to happen, the market would stop functioning and cease to have any use in pricing and allocating capital.” We disagree with the ceasing to function. Markets were made by God to clear, but one question remains: at what price? […]

A recession is two consecutive quarters of economic contraction. Historically, highly inverted yield curves like we have now are predictive of recessions. The 10 Year Treasury Bond interest rate has dropped from 4.3% at the peak to 3.5% currently, even as the Federal Reserve Board reinforces the idea that short rates will be taken above 5%. This has created very high short rates relative to longer-term rates reinforcing the recession predictions. […]

[…] In the stock-picking world of the last 40 years, we consider Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Peter Lynch, John Templeton and other long-duration value investors to be the “cool kids.” They took dramatically less risk by investing where others feared to tread and required a high margin of safety. They bought part of a company as if they owned the entire business. […] 

It appears to us at Smead Capital Management that investors are behaving in a way that will damage their capital and cause them to suffer stock market failure. In 2022, as the favorite tech stocks of the last ten years got trounced, individual investors poured $100 billion into mutual funds and ETFs dominated by ownership of the very stocks which have created the most damage to their results. We get asked all the time if we are stepping up to the plate on stocks like Apple and Google, for example. […]

I was reminded in a recent read of Robert Hagstrom’s book, Warren Buffett: Inside the Ultimate Money Mind, how Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger define the economic earnings power of a business. They refer to it as owner earnings. They take net income and add back depreciation, but adjust for the cost of the reinvestment of capital assets of a business to understand the real costs of being an owner. While being similar to free cash flow, it may need more adjustment depending on the capital assets of the business. Most would then use this to come to the natural conclusion that businesses with less capital-intensive business models would be superb companies to own based on owners’ earnings. However, this just exposes the fly in the ointment. […]

[…] History would argue that we have years of higher oil and gas prices ahead of us, especially if the Communist Chinese release their population from its COVID-19 imprisonment and start competing on the world economic stage. Therefore, we are making every effort to over-weight our oil and gas stocks despite their stock market success in 2021 and 2022. […]