We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP389: Buffett's Core Principles w/ Dev Kantesaria
Episode Date: October 22, 2021Trey Lockerbie chats with Dev Kantesaria. Dev is the Managing Partner of Valley Forge Capital Management, which currently has $2.7 billion in assets. Dev holds an undergrad from MIT and was top of his... class at Harvard Medical School before pivoting and going into venture instead of medicine 14 years ago. Dev is also a big Buffett and Munger fan and follows their principles closely. IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN: 17:27 - How to invest through recessions. 19:23 - Why Dev no longer invests in Biotech after he spent 18 years in Biotech Ventures. 48:21 - The value of running a highly concentrated portfolio. And a whole lot more! *Disclaimer: Slight timestamp discrepancies may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Valley Forge Capital Management's Website. CNBC Buffett resources' Website. Trey Lockerbie's Twitter. Read the 9 Key Steps to Effective Personal Financial Management. NEW TO THE SHOW? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Bluehost Fintool PrizePicks Vanta Onramp SimpleMining Fundrise TurboTax HELP US OUT! Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! It takes less than 30 seconds, and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it! Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm
Transcript
Discussion (0)
You're listening to TIP.
On today's episode, I sit down with Dev Contasaria.
Dev is the managing partner of Valley Forge Capital Managed, which currently has $2.7 billion
in assets.
Dev holds an undergrad from MIT and was top of his class at Harvard Medical School before
pivoting and going into venture instead of medicine.
14 years ago, he pivoted again and went into equities only with Valley Forge.
In this episode, we talk about the value of running a highly concentrated portfolio,
why Dev no longer invests in biotech after he spent 18 years in biotech ventures,
how to invest through recessions and a whole lot more.
This was a very refreshing discussion because Dev is a big Buffett and Munger fan and follows
their principles closely.
I thoroughly enjoyed it.
So without further ado, here's my conversation with Dev Contasaria.
You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the
books that influence self-made billionaires the most.
We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected.
All right, everybody, as I said in the top, I am here with Dev Contasaria,
and we are so excited to have you, Dev.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
I'm excited to be here.
Well, I am fascinated by people who have made major pivots,
especially early in their career.
And you've done this a handful of times, starting with graduating top of your class
from Harvard Medical School, but then deciding not to pursue medicine.
I've had a few stops along the way. My dream in life when I was growing up was to be a world-renowned surgeon.
So high school, college, medical school, everything was geared towards that dream.
And when I got into my third year of medical school, that's when you start rotating in the hospital.
I realized that although I love the intellectual aspects of medicine, practicing medicine was a lot different than what I thought.
It wasn't like Little House on the Prairie.
It wasn't like a TV show.
I have a lot of respect for physicians, nurses, anyone in the healthcare field.
It is hard work.
It was not something that I could see myself doing for the next 30, 40 years of my life.
And so finance and equities in particular were always a passion of mine since I was eight years old.
And when I decided that medicine might not be for me long term, I decided to apply to McKinsey
for a management consulting position. I thought that would be a great way to transition over to the business
world. And it was the only option I put out there for myself. If McKinsey didn't let me in,
I'd be a surgeon today. So thankfully, they let me in, had two great years at McKinsey,
and then spent about 18 years as a venture capitalist.
And that was an amazing learning ground for what I do today.
It's not the standard path to public equities.
Many people will start an eye banking, maybe with an MBA, and then head over to equities.
But building companies from the ground up with entrepreneurs, being in the trenches,
I've worked with hundreds of CEOs.
I've been on many boards of directors, taking companies public, sold companies.
All of that operational experience has been invaluable.
assessing the risk of public equities. Our job in public equities is to assess future risk.
It's great that Coca-Cola has had a good 100-year run, but is Coca-Cola going to be great for the
next 10 years? And you sometimes have to assess a large number of future risk factors. In the venture
capital world, you might have a company that was pre-revenue, where you may have 20 plus risk
factors. You have patents. You have clinical trial data, chemistry, manufacturing, management team
risk. And you have to assimilate all of those into a single risk reward decision or a pre-money
valuation that you're willing to pay for the company. And so in public equities, today,
information is available to everybody. Back in the 1960s, you'd have to write in the mail to get an
annual report. There was actually informational advantage in many cases. Today, we have to assume that
everybody has the same information. And so the edge comes from interpreting that information,
looking at future risk factors, finding that margin of safety, and distilling it down to a price
you're willing to pay for a company.
Well, you mentioned being interested in equities as early as eight years old.
I happen to also know you're a huge Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger fan, just like me.
I'm wondering if you can recall the first time you discovered them and their investing
philosophy.
I imagine it wasn't an eight years old, but maybe I'm mistaken.
Yeah, so I finance was my hobby.
I used every free minute, every free hour that I had in my life to read about it.
I looked at a lot of playbooks, and I don't remember the exact day or the exact moment.
But when you read Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, it is like you are reading the Bible.
It is a universal truth.
And when you read some of their letters, it just hits you as this has to be the path.
And so for me, early on, their philosophy resonated with me.
It seemed like the only playbook that made sense that I wanted to use to grow wealth for my
family and now for others. And so, again, I look at real estate. I look at bonds. I look at gold.
Cryptocurrencies. There's so many different opportunities out there. But there's really,
even for me today, there's only one universal truth, only one path that makes sense to me.
And that is to buy really high quality businesses, what we call compounding machines.
These are companies that can grow intrinsic value year after year for long periods of time.
When you have something that's a monopoly or a doopoly in its respective industry, it has
pricing power. It's capital efficient. Its margins go up over time so these companies have operating
leverage. Holding these companies for many years. It's tax efficient. It's absolutely worked for us over
the last 14 years. It's obviously worked for Buffett for over 50 years. And as we look at in the industry,
the managers that have outperformed consistently over long periods of time, it is investors that fall
within this camp of value investing. I would say that 98% of our peers in value investing
focus on cigar butt stocks. Those are stocks that look cheap. Maybe they make washing machines
and you know, you want to buy it at a P.E. of 12. It's tempting. But what you find out quickly is
that it's a cyclical. So when the economy is doing great, it's making money, but three years later,
it may be losing money or it may have no earnings. And so as you look at energy, financials,
heavy industrials, chemicals, materials, those companies are for the most part value traps. And
the great contribution munger to that relationship with Buffett was that buying one of these
compounding machines, even if you have to pay a higher multiple for it, even if you're paying a fair
price in the long run, it turns out to be a much better way of making it.
You know, something you just said about value traps makes me think of how misleading metrics can
often be. I'm curious if you use something like a stock screener to take your universe and distill
it down to a select few companies to dig in more on, or if there's some other way that you go
about distilling down the universe of stocks?
For us, we have found that stock screens just don't work.
I wish they did.
It would make our jobs a lot easier.
But there are certain commonalities within our portfolio.
We have high return on tangible asset, which is a good measure of efficiency for a
company.
We have companies that have very low in capital expenditures.
Our companies have demonstrated pricing power over long periods of time.
But a standard stock screen does not find the companies that we want to invest in.
The advantages that some of our companies have are subtle.
They can't necessarily be gleaned directly from a stock screen.
But, you know, if you screen for companies that have high operating margins, high return
on tangible assets, you know, that will reduce the universe that you need to study.
But it's not a great way for us to find company.
So unfortunately, what we're doing is reading a lot.
We trade very rarely 95% of the time we are reading 10Ks, 10 Qs, anything we can get our
hands on.
being mentally prepared to take action when something shows itself in the marketplace.
You know, tomorrow morning, a stock that we have been following for seven or 10 years could suddenly
drop 40% in price. And we need to act quickly because a lot of those inefficiencies don't last
very long. It might last a few days, a few weeks, and then it's gone. So we're spending a lot of
our time figuring out where we want to invest and then waiting for that catalyst. And it doesn't
always have to be a drop in share price. Sometimes market neglect will cause a stock price to
trail the general market, for example, and present a great opportunity. A good example is monster
beverage that we bought five, six years ago. There was a scare. There was a health scare with a
company. It was a beverage company. We consider it one of the top five beverage companies in the
world. The stock price dropped 40% over a few days, and it gave us a great entry point. And we did
very well with the investment. We don't own it today. But that's a good example of an opportunity
that is short lived, that you need. If you have committees and memos and 10 decision makers, you're going to
lose those opportunities. You need to be prepared and act quickly. And that's one thing I love about
the Buffettmonger model. I don't believe in having an army of analysts that meet every Monday to
discuss ideas. I like to do the primary work myself. And I don't want it colored by somebody else
feeding me that information. These opportunities don't come along very often. We're looking for one to three
great ideas a year, which means that we need to look at a lot of things, hundreds of companies,
to get at those few ideas. Just going to that example with Monster, is it something that, you
you had done a lot of research on, maybe established an intrinsic value of. And so when you saw
it have that big dip, you said, okay, and you were teed up ready to go. I mean, how much, I guess,
legwork had been done on a pick like that before you ultimately decided to enter?
We essentially had completed our work. And we renewed that work. So coming like Monster,
we would look at every quarterly earnings. We would update our intrinsic values. And to be clear,
intrinsic values are not precise numbers. They have some variance to them, plus or minus five
dollars in share price, something of that sort. But no, we know at any given moment what price we want
to buy our favorite companies at. When that opportunity shows up, and it could be a down draft
in the general market, it could be specific company news. We need to be ready to jump on it
because those opportunities are very short-lived, as I mentioned. Great businesses don't go on sale
very often. You mentioned one to three good ideas a year, and I noticed that you're currently
running a hedge fund structure. And if we go back to Warren Buffett, you know, he's running a publicly
traded company, which has advantages because it's not like people are ultimately just pulling their
capital out when things aren't going their way. And Buffett likes to say that he's always waiting
for that fat, juicy pitch, right? And so even if it takes years and the crowd is yelling,
swing, you bum, you know, you can still take his sweet time. I'm curious how the hedge fund structure
that you've set up affords you that same kind of opportunity to be as patient as you mentioned.
Sure. Well, I wish I had insurance float to invest. That is a very strong position.
to be in when you know you have capital to put to work when there's a down draft. And unfortunately,
investors add to their accounts on the upswing, not the down swing. But today we manage approximately
$2.7 billion. In our 14-year history, we have been very fortunate to have virtually no redemptions
relative to that number. And so we've had very stable capital. We want to be aligned with our
investors. We want them to understand what the partnership is about. And so by making sure that they
understand what we're doing, how we're doing it, it leads to very longstanding relationships and
stable relationships. So we have been fortunate in that regard, unlike many of our peers that may have
huge redemptions. We have not experienced that even across severe volatility. So going back to
March of last year, during the COVID scare, we have 100 investors, 100 capital accounts
across roughly 90 investors, and we had only one phone call. Now, when the market drops 30 or 40 percent,
and it feels like the end of the world is coming, that's pretty amazing to get only one call out of 90.
And so I think that goes to the trust that we place in each other.
We trust that they're going to be there for us and they trust that we're making the right
decisions when it feels like the world is ending.
And when the market does drop 30 to 40 percent, I imagine you are sitting on some cash
to take advantage of that.
So what's your typical cash allocation look like?
What's your strategy around that?
Historically, our cash levels have been higher.
We've been as high as 20, 20 percent. In more recent years, it's been in the low single digits.
And one of the learning lessons I've had in Running Valley Forge is that there really is no bad time to buy a compounding machine.
And we know that market timing doesn't work. If you're trying to enter the market based on where you think interest rates will be or where an election result is going to be or Fed policy decisions or a variety of macroeconomic or geopolitical factors, we know that that's not a way to win the game.
The way to win the game is to buy compounding machines and hold them for many years.
And so the learning lesson has been that there has been almost no bad time to buy a compounding
machine.
Even if you were to buy, you may know the famous story of the Coca-Cola IPO.
If you had bought the Coca-Cola IPO, it initially went down 40%.
And you might have been lamenting your life or your situation if you had gotten into the Coca-Cola
IPO, but if you held it for the next 50 years, you would have been pretty happy.
So, you know, we are very prudent on entry, our margin of safety.
We have a very low loss ratio across our 14 years.
So our winners to losers ratio is we think one of the best in the industry.
So we do believe in a strong margin of safety.
We are being careful at the price we get in.
But I think the general learning lesson is that when you buy a high quality company
with a strong organic growth rate, there really is almost no bad time to be in.
Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
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I want to go back to that March 2020 a little bit more because I have a lot of questions,
especially for you around this time.
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So you did quite well.
Did you make any changes as COVID-19 began spreading throughout the world in early Q1,
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Just kind of walk us through the playbook that unfolded last year.
So there were absolutely no new names in the portfolio in 2020 across that very volatile
period.
We didn't sell anything.
We didn't buy a new name.
And I think that is actually a testament to the decisions we made three or four years
before that.
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those names, that means.
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there's something that you loved 18 months ago and you don't love it today, and that happens
often enough, then there might be a problem. So there were no changes in our portfolio. And it was a
great test for our companies prior to the volatility last year. We had certain downtraft, Brexit,
the taper tantrum, small downdrafts. But it was the first real test for our companies. It was the first real test for
our companies. And what it showed to us was the staying power of our businesses, the pricing power
they had. A number of our companies actually reported record margins during the worst GDP
down drafts since the Great Depression. So the business quality of many of our companies actually
increased during COVID, which was an amazing thing to see. And so we were very happy with our
portfolio. We were obviously opportunistic, bought more of our companies at really fantastic
crisis for the long term. But we tested our companies during that period and they passed with flying
colors. Well, I mentioned some of your pivots early on and one that really stood out to me is the fact
that you have this medical degree. You didn't become a doctor, but you did go into biotech ventures
for quite a while. And early on in the recession, there was a lot of this talk about investing in
the companies making the COVID vaccine like Pfizer, Moderna, et cetera. Given your background,
I'm just curious, were you watching that pretty closely? Did you have a horse in that
race? We definitely had heard through sources about the timing of results. I would say that there was an
upside surprise as to how well the vaccines worked and how quickly they were approved. And you saw that
reflect in the market rally that occurred, you know, once those vaccines were introduced to the
marketplace. Where we did have an informational advantage around COVID, so in early 2020,
my doctor friends were feeding me information about how things were playing out with COVID. And so we saw
a major informational advantage there. We don't short very often in our fund. We've shorted, I think,
five times in 14 years, and we need to have a huge margin of safety. So the risk reward has to be
tremendously in our favor. Shorting is almost always a bad idea. But in this case, we actually
layered on a large short position onto the fund in March of last year, which was highly profitable
for the fund. It turns out that that represented only 6% of the 27% performance for 2020. But any time that
we have a large informational advantage versus the general marketplace, we're going to take
advantage of it. And I think it shows a flexibility of our thinking. There's many diehard value
investors who just continue to do things a certain way. You have to learn to be flexible,
depending on the circumstances that are thrown at you. If you have a situation playing out,
that's once in 70 years, you know, or something that hasn't happened since 1919, since the last
flu epidemic, and you have an informational advantage versus the rest of the marketplace, which we thought
we had. We did something different that was out of the ordinary, we're willing to deviate from our
playbook if circumstances weren't it. And we're going to do it very carefully and we're going to do it
with a large amount, a large margin of safety. So that was an interesting thing for us. It's probably
never going to happen again in my career, hopefully, but it just, it was something that we took
advantage of and that was a direct use of my medical knowledge. People assume that Valley Forge is
full of health care names. It turns out that Valley Forge has no health care. There's no pharmaceutical
There's no biotech, there's no medical devices, there's no hospitals, there's no healthcare IT.
And the reason for that is those businesses are just not predictable enough for us.
We want to see businesses that over a five to 10 year period have a very predictable path to
organic growth and higher free cash flow.
And you just don't have that in the healthcare sector.
So although we know a lot about it and we could be somebody's consultant on those companies,
we don't think they're a very reliable way to make money.
And that's one of the reasons I transitioned from venture capital to public equities.
That's how we've ended up in public equities.
But I don't use a lot of my medical knowledge day to day just because our fishing pond
doesn't include a lot of those health care businesses.
That's what's really intriguing to me because, you know, if you talk about the Warren
Buffett circle of competence, it's one thing to go into public equities.
It's another thing to shy away from this knowledge base that you've grown for decades.
And when you're looking at other companies, it just kind of raised.
raises the question, what do you consider to be within your circle of competence? Do you have
lanes that you stay in and stay out of? And just walk us through your framework around that.
Yeah. So, you know, if you look at the types of businesses that we like, we avoid things
that have high R&D risk. So that's biotech pharma medical devices, but that's also
hardware technology. It could be minerals. Someone may open up a $10 billion potash mine without
knowing what the price of potash is going to be when a project is done five years from now.
So we avoid things that require large upfront investment without knowing what the return is going
to be. We avoid things, companies whose prospects are tied to commodity prices, for example.
We avoid companies whose fortunes are tied to where interest rates will be. We avoid things
that are highly capital intensive. So, you know, our fishing pond gets smaller when we avoid
businesses that have those types of unpredictable factors. But we are fairly open-minded about
market capitalization, geography, sector, industry. And we are looking for companies that provide
essential products and services that have a long history of pricing power, that have a dominant
market position that we think is not subject to significant disruption. We'd like to see
a company operate in an industry whose volumes are going up significantly over time.
The companies that we invest in often have many different levers to win. And when their business
quality does decline for whatever reason. We don't have tragic accidents. We don't have companies that
go down 90% in price because of some event, industry event, or new regulation or a legal issue
or some competitive threat. Our companies often take many years to get off the rails. And it allows
us to stay ahead of our, you know, of other investors and to switch out lower quality
businesses for higher quality businesses. Now that R&D risk, as you put it, is this
the reason you don't have something like a Google in your portfolio because they're constantly
trying to diversify away from their ad spend revenue, even though there's still, I mean,
85% or so of it is still ad revenue, or ad revenue, I should say, is that something that
keeps you shying away from the fang stocks in general? Well, it's unfortunate that the fang stocks have
developed at a time when I was at the scene of the crime. You know, there's many things at play.
I wasn't around when Coca-Cola had its glory days, but I was certainly here when the Fang
stocks were going public and developing their great business models. We have generally shied away
from Fang stocks because of a lot of poor behavior. That includes poor capital allocation decision.
That includes excessive compensation, things that were purists. And so we want to see, once the free
cash flow is made, we want to see that it's invested properly. We don't like a lot, you know,
CEOs to have many pet projects. We don't like dual class structures where the CEO is
anointed for life. And so that was one of the reasons that has kept us from these companies.
More recently, the capital intensity of these companies have gone up as they're fighting
these wars with each other. But the business models are so good that their organic growth
has more than covered for these sins. And so it's been a mistake not to own these companies.
We do own Amazon in a portfolio. We think that some of the services businesses that Amazon
has are going to be fantastic, you know, over the next few years and really be competitive
threats, you know, the advertising business, for example, for Facebook and Google. But it's been,
I think, an error for us to be such purists about some of these other characteristics of these
companies when the business models have been so good. And although it's easy to say that
the fangs are too big or they can't last forever, as I see them today, they're highly
dominant. They have great organic growth profiles. And as you look at the general S&P 500 company,
they're far superior businesses. And I couldn't argue with anyone that wanted to own a basket of
fang stocks today. I think on a risk reward basis, they will outperform. We think there's
slightly better places to put money, but we are of the camp that the fang stocks are appropriately
valued today for the opportunity that they represent on a risk reward basis and their fantastic
business models. So when you say that, what comes to my mind is properly valued based on the
opportunity cost at hand, meaning the interest free rate or the 10-year treasury. And with the 10-year
treasury being so low, it kind of raises the question for me as to what kind of discount rate
you're using when you're looking at your picks. I imagine if you're running such a concentrated
portfolio as you are, I think I've read 8 to 12 picks, if that's correct, you must have some kind
of hurdle rate that you are using. And so I'm curious as to what that is.
Yeah. So I think one of the mistakes that many investors make is that they look at historical
PE multiples to justify what is appropriate today. So they'll look at the historical S&P 500
multiple, 16, and they'll see the S&P trading at 20 today, and they'll say that the S&P is
overvalued and stay away from equities. I don't think that is the right way to think about equity
multiples. Equity multiples are dynamic. They're related to where interest rates are or where they're
going to be over the next five to 10 years. And today, we're in a very low interest rate environment.
There aren't many curves that I follow in finance, but the one curve that I think people should
follow is the S&P 500 earnings yield relative to the 10-year treasury, which is the best proxy we have
for the risk-free rate. Today, the 10-year treasury is 1.4 to 1.5%. You have the S&P trading
at roughly a 5% earnings yield for next year. That is a significant gap. In our view, the S&P 500 is
is a fine place to put your money for the next 10 years, to grow your buying power.
We, in our portfolio, obviously, believe that we can significantly outperform the S&P 500.
And so our collection of companies should grow at a significantly higher rate than the S&P 500.
We expect the S&P 500 to grow organically in the low single digits, top line.
For our companies, we think about it more as free cash flow per share growth.
And we're looking at companies that in an overall portfolio that can grow in high teens,
in some of our companies may even be able to grow in the low 20s.
And what's interesting about our companies is that we'll buy them up front at a significant
discount, generally 30 to 60 percent below what we think they're worth.
But we continue to buy into our companies over time.
And so we have some companies in our portfolio today that we owned 10 years ago,
but we might have bought into them 10 different times over the last decade.
And so we find it could be a specific market down draft like Brexit that gives us the
general opportunity. It could be something specific to the company, you know, in a particular earnings
release that gives us the opportunity. But we have the opportunity to bind to these companies
at many different intervals because of the nature of the compounding, you know, the compounding
intrinsic value, you know, pattern that they have. Very interesting. So as we're kind of moving
out of this recession period, hopefully, and it'll be bumps along the way, I know, but what is your
outlook for, say, the next 10 years coming out of this recession we just came out of? I would say that
The most likely scenario is that by the end of next year, GDP growth here in the U.S.
looks very similar to where we were pre-COVID, 1%, 2% GDP growth.
I see a future that very much similar to what's happened in Japan and Europe, stale growth,
low interest rates.
We're not prognosticators on those macroeconomic factors.
No one can predict exactly where they're going to be.
But the most likely scenario would be low GDP growth in that interest rates stay in a low range.
generally, let's say one to three percent on the 10-year treasury. And we have some secular factors playing
up. We have automation, artificial intelligence, cloud services, which will significantly pressure
employment. And it's hard to think about that today, you know, where it's so hard to find labor
and companies are raising wages and desperately trying to find workers. But after this period here,
this reopening and this large increase in demand that we're seeing currently, things will normalize.
And when they do normalize, we think there's going to be significant pressure on employment.
And so in that setting, central banks will have to keep interest rates low to spur growth.
When you have an environment like that, it's exceedingly hard to grow buying power.
And we think the absolute best way to grow buying power for the next decade is going to be equities.
In particular, high quality equities, if you can find companies that have strong organic growth combined with predictability,
those are going to be prized assets in a low growth, low interest rate environment.
And we think that our portfolio is specifically focused on exactly that type of company.
So we expect a really great decade for our companies.
You mentioned pressure on employment.
Could you clarify what you mean by that?
So I think today, if you're a retail business and you are having trouble finding labor
or your labor is expensive, you are already implementing efficiencies.
That could be different types of automation.
It could be QR codes.
You may go out to a restaurant today and see that you can order using a QR code.
You can pay using a QR code.
That requires less staff.
And you'll see that in factories.
You'll see that across retail outlets.
It could take the form of autonomous driving.
There's just a lot of technologies that will play out over the next 10, 20 years that will
replace human labor.
And that human labor needs to become more skilled in order to be competitive in the future
marketplace.
And so there will be a continuous loss of jobs.
In every recent recession, there has been a permanent loss of jobs.
And you see that in the current recession as well, where we've gotten back to old productivity
levels, but with less hours worked.
And so that is a trend that we think will continue to accelerate over the next 10, 20, 30 years.
So this next question is sort of a three and one.
You can take one and answer which one you want to take.
But here it is basically, what is the largest holding in your portfolio or the one you've held
on to the longest or simply the one you have the most conviction on?
Sure.
So the companies that we have held the longest that we still love today in terms of business
quality are the rating agencies.
Moody's an S&P Global.
We had them in our portfolio 10 years ago.
We've held them every step along the way.
I've tried to give away those companies at dinner parties for as long as I can remember.
And they're just not exciting for people.
They're not the hot technology company.
They're not the hot SPAC or the hot IPO.
They bore most people to tears.
But these companies are a natural duopoly.
90% of all the debt in the world has a moody's and an S&P rating.
During 10, 12 years ago, they ran into trouble.
They were front page headlines regarding their ratings, particularly around housing.
They were sued by many market constituents.
And so it gave us a great entry point for these businesses.
Both companies have gone from are up about.
20 to 25X in the last 12 years from their low points. We think they have a lot more to go.
But these are companies that today have learned from some of the past mistakes. So, for example,
they've really separated themselves from the underwriting process. So they're not formally part
of the debt prospectus. And so they're really well protected from being accused of being part
of the underwriting process, which was one of the main thrusts of much of the litigation against
them. The increased regulation, which has been added to the industry, has actually helped serve to
solidify their doopoly because needy regulation is costly. You know, if you have lawyers around
the world in every country, filing paperwork and dealing with regulators, that's very expensive.
But the types of businesses we like in terms of monopolies or duopolis or oligopolis are
natural ones. And what I mean by natural is that you don't need to twist someone's arm in
order to use their products or services. And the reason that people continue to use Moody's and
S&P is that if you decide to use one of their competitors, Kroll or Morningstar Egan Jones,
you end up having a higher interest rate on the debt issue, generally 30 to 50 basis points.
And so if you're IBM and you have a $5 billion debt offering and you have to pay 30 basis points
or 50 basis points more a year on $5 billion, there's no way for these smaller competitors
to undercut Moody's in S&PN price. You could go to IBM and offer your services for free and you
still want to use Moody's in essence. And so it's a natural duopoly. They have inflation plus
pricing. So regardless of what inflation is, they'll layer on several percent on top of inflation.
They're exceedingly capital efficient. And they're good at their work. People assume that they've made
a lot of mistakes or that their ratings are not predictive. But I think that's absolutely not correct.
Actually, their ratings have been highly predictive. And they're being asked to look at the future
and what housing is going to be in the future,
or what a company is going to be like in the future or an industry,
that's a hard task.
But if you look overall at their ratings,
they're highly predictive,
the great business models,
there's some very nice trends happening in the world.
For example, China and India,
there's a lot more debt reaching the mark in those countries.
There's disintermediation happening in Europe.
Large banks are, you know,
because they have to hold more capital on their balance sheets,
are not able to give out as many loans.
So companies are not going directly to the marketplace to raise debt.
So these are fantastic businesses,
and we continue to love them.
Well, that's been a great pick and has performed outrageously well recently in the last
couple of years.
I have to kind of ask around some of the other periods if you did own it, like say, for
example, in 2015 to 2017 or so because it was relatively flat.
And so if you're having such a massive part of your portfolio in something like Moody's
and it stays flat for two years, how does that wane on you as an investor and how do you
maintain that conviction through periods like that?
Yeah, I think temperament is hugely important in investing. We don't get happy when the stock price goes up. We don't get sad when it goes down. We are completely focused on bottom-up fundamentals. And so the fact that their share prices were flat for a year or two didn't bother us in the least. We're all about what these companies look like five years out from now, 10 years out from now. And you'll see that in our portfolio. You'll see periods where there's a year or two, where there's a pause, where returns don't look very exciting. And then we have
have massive spurts. And that's just the nature of investing. And we don't determine whether we've
had a good year or bad year based on our portfolio's appreciation. We decide whether we've had a
good year or bad year by the underlying earnings and whether the businesses have increased their
business quality, their margins, how they've allocated capital. And so that ability to avoid being
influenced by share prices in terms of your thinking, being patient, disciplined across those
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All right.
Back to the show.
You mentioned earlier that your win loss ratio was very good, but there are still some losses inevitably.
Which losses have been the most impactful for your portfolio?
What was the biggest learning from that?
So if you look at gainers or losers since inception, 14 years, over $10,000 just to remove some of the noise,
we've had 39 winners and six losers.
But the six losers have been very modest in terms of their impact to the portfolio.
So we're strong believers in margin of safety.
where even if the thesis doesn't go exactly as you've planned, you can at least get your money back
or walk away with a small profit. So if you look at our six losers, three of them have been
very close to break even, essentially flat to our initial investment in those companies.
The worst loser that we've ever had was back in 2010. It was only about a 4% drag to our gross
performance of the fund. And I think that's a pretty remarkable statement to say across 14 years
where you had, you know, sort of volatility of 2008, 2009, the more recent volatility of COVID.
We've had some pretty tough market conditions over the last 14 years. We're very proud of that
the ability to protect investor capital. But the company that we've had the largest loss in was a
company called American Dairy. And this was a company that sold infant formula in China.
It traded here in the U.S. as an ADR. And if you're a parent, you know about infant formula
and what a racket it is. It's an oligopoly. It's a soloply. It's sort of,
expensive here in the U.S. that sometimes supermarkets will actually lock up the infant formula behind a glass
case. And so it's an industry that has really interesting characteristics. A few companies dominate
shelf space because they participate in the WIC program, which allows them, they run, the WIC program is
infant formula for babies that are born into poverty. And their state contracts. And if you win the state
contract, you get all the shelf space in that state. You're getting your profits from the other 50% of the
babies and parents. But the interesting dynamic that plays out in infant formula is the higher your
infant formula is priced, the greater the quality the parents believe they're getting. In fact,
the ingredients in infant formula are regulated and they're essentially the same. But if there's infant
formula on the shelf and one costs $10 and the other one costs $5, the parents are going to buy the
$10 one because they think there's something better about it. I sidetracked on just discussing
why that whole industry dynamic is so attractive to us. But in China, which today is the
largest infant formula market in the world. At the time, back in 2010, it was the second largest in
the world. It was early innings. And we invested in a company that that was had dominant market share
in second and third tier of cities. The stock price had dropped significantly because there was a
scandal that broke out where companies were using a chemical called melamine to thicken the powder.
It was a cheap way for these companies to thicken the powder rather than using milk powder,
which was more costly. And it was a big scandal. Executives were thrown in jail in China. But
This company, it did not participate in that scandal, but its stock price nevertheless fell significantly.
We bought into the company at a single digit multiple. We felt like we were being compensated for a lot of
different risks. A lot of the management team members were from the U.S. Sequoia had made a pipe
investment. There were a lot of positive characteristics that we liked about the business.
Unfortunately, it was a loss for us. And if we had held onto it longer, it ended up ultimately being
highly successful. So it's good to know that when even our losers, if we look out at some point,
they end up being quite successful. It happens with many of our companies. When we sold out of
Monster Beverage or Nike, some of our more recent sales, they've gone on to be quite successful
even after we've sold them. So for us, it's confirmation that we're still fishing in the right pond.
But it was a company that just didn't execute well. They had issues with their inventory. They
used up a lot of cash on their balance sheet. And the learning lesson for us there was really that
in the same way that there used to be 500 car companies in the OS and we ended up with three,
we got involved in that battle too early.
And it's really tough to pick the winners when you're involved in an early battle like that.
Ultimately, as I mentioned, the company was quite successful.
And the impact on our portfolio was minimal.
But, you know, there were some interesting learning lessons in there, of course.
Have you had any experience where you've had to enact some kind of activism style or approach
with any of the holdings that you have in the portfolio?
I've wanted to.
We've never have.
And we don't believe in buying a low-quality business and fixing it up.
The businesses that we buy, you don't need Warren Buffett or Steve Jobs running them.
The areas that have really angered us the most have been around capital allocation.
It could be a wasteful R&D project or a pet project.
It could be acquisitions that, you know, where companies overpaying for companies, we don't
see the strategic fit.
Maybe the management is trying to smooth out earnings or appease Wall Street.
And we certainly have private conversations with management, and we're very vocal about it.
But, you know, as we've grown in size here, I think our voice is getting stronger and being heard.
But there are certainly situations where we've wanted to be a lot more forceful, mainly around capital allocation.
And hopefully as we get larger, that voice will grow stronger and we'll be able to have more impact in that area.
But there is a lot of bad behavior that happens with capital allocation.
And I would put executive compensation in that category.
When you're giving out a large amount of restricted stock and then claiming that you have a
large buyback, you're essentially running in place.
You know, if you give out one or two percent of your company's stock and then you buy back
one or two percent of your stock and brag about having a great buyback program, you know,
you're just running in place.
And so capital allocation is something that we focus on intensely.
We actually calculate our free cash flow yields for our company after the cost of
buying back stock that is issued in terms of compensation. We think very few managers think about
free cash flow that way. So it's something that when we see bad behavior, we want to have a voice
there. But no, we prefer private conversations for now. Meaning you're doing your free cash flow
to share, meaning the denominator of the share is actually the fully diluted market or capital basis of
equity. So it's excluding all the options that may or may not come to fruition. Yes. Or will,
Well, if they're, let's suppose they're buying back a billion dollars of stock this year,
we'll factor that into, you know, we'll subtract that from the free cash flow.
There's on an after-tax basis.
So they'll get a tax deduction for some of that buyback or the restricted stock
that they're issuing.
But so on an after-tax basis, well, we could also subtract that from the numerator.
But in one way or another, we factor that cost as an actual cost.
And so we look at free cash flow yields adjusted after the cost of compensation.
Interesting.
So going back to your growth, and there has been a considerable amount of growth at your firm over the last few years, you've been running this concentrated portfolio.
And I've heard this saying that, you know, you should be concentrated to grow wealth and then diversify to maintain wealth, so to speak.
So as you're scaling and getting bigger and bigger, are you finding that it's harder and harder to maintain such a concentrated portfolio?
No. And the reason for that is it is a happy circumstance that when we look for really high quality business model.
companies that are very entrenched in their respective industries. They generally have larger market
caps. So at least mid-cap, but usually large-cap. And so we have a very liquid portfolio.
We can be highly nimble. We can sell out of a position entirely in a couple of days or a few days
and switch into another position. So that nimbleness that we have had over the last 14 years,
we still have today and we think we'll have for the foreseeable future. And so we've not experienced any
style drift. What you often see with growth in AUM is that you might have started investing in
small caps in Brazil. And you know, you've had to morph into something else. We've had the,
because of the types of companies we look at, we've had absolutely no issues. Our portfolio are
the types of businesses that we invested in 14 years ago look exactly like the businesses that we
want to invest in today. And so that's been fortunate for, you know, how we view the investment
opportunity. You've touched on selling and having the stocks continue to run after the fact. So it begs
a question around selling and when you decide to sell something and how you decide to sell something.
So walk us through your approach and when you come to that decision to sell something.
Yeah. So every day we're taking in new risk factors. We may learn something today, but generally
with the types of businesses that we hold, we might learn something every few months or every
every few years, that adds to our view of risk or future risk to cash flows. And that'll be a
determinant of intrinsic value. So we have a general view of what intrinsic value is every day for every
company in our portfolio and the companies that are on a short list. But when something reaches
100% of our intrinsic value, we have to justify, you know, why they are still in the portfolio.
We have to have them compete against the other short ideas that we like. But the things that could
cause us to sell a position are, you know, as I mentioned, a change in business quality or risk
based on something new that we learn or a competitive dynamic that we see. It could be related to,
as we've talked about, misuse of free cash flow by management or capital allocation decisions.
It could also be that the company takes on excessive leverage. So we don't use leverage at our
at the fund level, although we have the ability to do so. We don't like leverage at our
underlying company levels. So our companies all have some debt, but it's not excessive. So if our company
were to take on an excessive amount of debt, that could be another reason that we exit a position.
I would say for us, the easiest decision is for exiting company is when we find something that we
like better. And so that is usually how most things leave the portfolio. As I mentioned, when we
sell something, it often continues to do well even after we sell it. I thought of creating a second
fund. It just takes all the things that we've sold and see how that goes, because I think that
actually would do very well also, but we don't sell very often, but when we do, those are some
of the reasons why we get out of the position. It's so interesting because it does seem that winners
continue to win, but you have to set some kind of boundary, right? Otherwise, how are you ever going
to sell out of anything? One thing that occurred to me, you were talking about leverage and it's,
it's just adjacent in my mind for whatever reason, but even Buffett is known to utilize using options
on a position. Given you have a concentrated position, I'm wondering if you're selling off-covered
calls or anything like that on the current holdings that you have.
In my early investment career, I looked at things like selling covered calls.
And it was a lot of work and risk for not much gain.
And so if we want to get out of something, we will just sell it completely.
And so buying and selling common stock positions has, in our view, been the most prudent way
to get the exposure we need.
Occasionally, Leaps will trade at a very attractive valuation where the embedded cost
of buying those leaps makes the leaps more attractive than buying the common stock. And these are
leaps that are severely in the money. So we look at all of the equity instruments that are available to
us. We will generally default to common stock positions. But we look at leaps. We look at selling
covered calls. And very rarely, you'll find anomalies. So many years ago, we held leap positions
in eBay and Nike that did amazingly well for us. But we've only found two of those situations in 14 years.
But I think it's good for investors to know that we're open-minded and we're willing to look at those possibilities.
What would be the reason to go into a leap other than just going along the common stock?
Again, it goes to what the embedded cost is, a cost of capital that's embedded in the price of the leap.
So the leap is making some assumption about the hidden sort of value, the cost of the money,
because you're not putting up as much capital as you would if you're buying a straight common stock.
So when we run those calculations, there are times when we are being able to buy a leap that's
severely in the money for very little additional embedded interest cost, if you will.
So it occasionally makes sense to buy the leap.
We will generally buy the leap and the common stock because day to day, there'll be days
when it's better for us to buy the common stock and other days when it may be better to
buy the leaps depending on what pricing is being given to us.
Very interesting.
All right.
So you've mentioned a few things that are all concerned.
coming together for me around valuation, one of which is not being so much bias with the geography
of a company, the market cap of the company, and that for me ties in with this bottom up approach
that you touched on as well. So when I think about all that, there's just so much to distill down.
So just walk us through how you approach valuation, maybe once you've narrowed it down to a certain
pick. Yeah, just walk us through a little bit about your framework, finalizing your valuation on
something. Ultimately, it's what we learn in business school, right? It's all about discounted cash flow.
I think it's fairly easy to create a five or 10 year free cash flow model, and that's generally
not where you get your edge. Someone may factor in an additional two or three percent growth rate
on top line revenue. I think the real edge comes from determining the discount rate,
and you're factoring in a large set of future risk factors. We've associated in our business
risk and volatility. We think that the volatility of the stock translates into risk, and that is the
best mathematical relationship we have around risk, but we don't think that's a great way to think
about future discount rate. So we're trying to assimilate a large set of risk factors into the fair
price we'd be willing to pay for a company. We are essentially running a discounted cash flow model,
but in terms of day-to-day ease with our work, we really try to look at what is the free cash flow
yield we're willing to pay for business for 2021, 2021, 2022, 2023. And we rank order businesses
buy the free cash flow yield that we think those companies should be trading at for their
future quality and growth. And then we compare that rank-ordered set of companies against the
risk-free rate, which is the 10-year-true treasure, which is our proxy for the risk-free rate.
So we want to see a large gap with the risk-free rate. And we also want to find the
companies that, you know, have the most promising gap between the free cash flow yield at which
they're trading it today and what we free cash flow yield, we think they should be trading it.
So, for example, Moody's, there's been times when Moody's has traded at a five or six percent
free cash flow yield. If you go back 10 or 12 years, they might have even traded at a 10 percent
free cash flow yield. And we may have determined based on business quality that in fact,
they really should have been traded at a 3 percent free cashful yield relative to the risk-free rate.
And so it's not a precise set of numbers and spreadsheets.
And anyone that tries to bring that level of preciseness to stock investing is fooling themselves.
You know, Warren Buffett has talked often about how his calculations are really generally
back of the envelope.
And when you invest in a compounding machine that has a lot of different ways to win, pricing power,
industry volumes, flexible cost structures so they can increase their margins or increase their
margin steady during a recession. There's a lot of different ways that these companies can get to their
free cash flow targets. That gives us the margin of safety we need with some of these great,
great businesses. So hopefully that gives you a flavor for how we, you know, how we try to
think about valuation. Yeah, that's fantastic. So we have a lot of listeners that are honestly
similar to your background. A lot of them are doctors or lawyers that have now made some money and
maybe investing hasn't become their full-time profession as it has for you. But they,
certainly have an interest in it and are wanting to learn more. What books or any other resources
would you recommend for folks like that trying to get their head around how to do something like
an intrinsic value? I still haven't found anyone better than Buffettmonger. There's a number of
other investors out there that are famous and you'll see them talking and then suddenly out of
nowhere they'll talk about what a great idea it is to buy gold or dabble in cryptocurrency
or you may look at their 13F and you'll see that the own biotech companies.
And you quickly realize that there's only one Buffett and only one munger.
And so I have not found a third or fourth or fifth investor on the list that I admire and that I
follow.
I think the best place to go is to look at their letters, to watch every interview.
I often watch their interviews on YouTube while I'm brushing my teeth at night.
It's a little bit like going to church.
It just reminds you of some of some of the,
The principles when there's chaos or a lot of silly things happening like they are today in the
marketplace with SPACs and IPOs and cryptocurrencies and NFTs.
And it's always good to remind yourself about the longer term picture.
So CNBC has put out a wonderful website that aggregates all of their interviews, all of their
writings.
And so it's the place where it would take you, I don't know, 100 hours, 200 hours.
I don't know how long it would take you.
It's a long time to go through it.
and then you should probably go through it again. But for any person looking to really understand
investing in how it should be done right, there is no better place to go than Buffett Munger.
And I hope that in some way that I can try to carry their mantle on a going forward basis.
I think there's a small group of us in the current generation that tries to practice their
philosophy well. And again, I don't think there's any value in being a purist. You know, for example,
if you were a purist and you avoided technology stocks, you might have missed some of the great
business models and fangs, for example. But most of their core principles are timeless. And really,
it really resonates with me today as much as it did when I was 10 years old. Well, this has been a
really refreshing conversation for me for that exact reason. We've been studying a lot of different topics
on the show, a lot of macro, a lot of cryptocurrencies, web three. There's so many things coming out today
that I feel like it's hard to even keep track of.
It's always nice to go back to basics a little bit
and talk about these core principles, as you mentioned,
with Warren Buffett, with a like-minded individual such as yourself.
And so I'd love to do this again sometime soon.
This has been really fantastic. Thank you so much.
That would be great. Thank you so much for having me.
All right, everybody, that's all we had for you this week.
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