Category: Quarterly Newsletters

Someone recently asked a group of us which band we saw at our first rock concert. My answer was the Canadian band, The Guess Who, in 1975. With hits like “No Time,” “Undun” and “These Eyes,” The Guess Who hit the perfect balance between my 17-year old testosterone driven aggressiveness and my urge to romance the woman of my dreams. The key members of the band in the 1960’s and 1970’s were Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman.

Since our thinking is always dominated by owning businesses which meet our eight investment criteria in a long-duration time frame, we continue to remain vigilant of the circumstances around us. To that end, we thought it would be helpful to review a similar historical situation and glean a feel for what was wise behavior back then and what might be wise behavior as we look forward to the year 2014.

The US stock market gained 452 points from 1229 at the start of 1999 to now. This gain of slightly more than 39% is less than a 3% annualized average gain and combined with dividend payments gave investors an average annual return of 4.09%. The stock market in the US has historically returned closer to 10% with dividends reinvested and for this reason, we contend, these recent returns have been very unattractive to both institutional and individual investors. What have we learned in these last 15 years which can help us to succeed going forward?

Printable Version A journalist from Fortune magazine once asked Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, for the best business advice he’d ever been given. Grove provided a simple quote from a former professor at City College of New York: “When everybody knows that something

Downton Abbey is a Masterpiece Theatre show on PBS which has taken US television viewers by storm. It is the story of an aristocratic family in England which perpetuates a dynasty in a small town through the operation of a huge estate. Devotion to this estate and huge family home are accomplished by employing a small army of servants, who maintain the home and the aristocrats. We believe there are strong parallels between what goes on at Downton and what has been going on in the US stock market since 2009. We also see this as a recurring theme for the next 5 to 7 years.

Late in 2008 and in early 2009, a group of what we like to call “brilliant pessimists” hit the airwaves with their economic theories. The prognosticators’ vision of the future was and is predicated on the history of similar situations and the mathematical realities of the huge debt overhang from the prior ten years of profligate economic behavior. They put very effective names on their visions like “new normal” and “seven lean years”. They marketed their visions incredibly well to the point of shaming anyone who might disagree with their theories. Their beliefs quickly became accepted as “well known facts” and filtered into the asset allocation of almost every well researched asset allocation portfolio.