We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey everyone, welcome to the Investors Podcast. I'm your host today, Clay Fink, and on today's episode, I'm going to be covering a book by Thomas Phelps called 100 to 1 in the stock market. As someone who's on the front end of their investing journey, I want to take full advantage of the many years of compounding ahead for me, so I've been reading books to help equip me to discover companies with relatively low risk, but a long runway to grow and compound. Along with Chris Mayer's book 100 Baggers, this book by Thomas Phelps is another

Starting point is 00:00:33 great one to help me continue to internalize these concepts related to buying and holding long-term compounders. Towards the end of this episode, I chat about some of the things I've been revisiting recently from Ackri Capital Management's blog, and that's had some really great pieces as you'll find later on in this episode. And at the very end of this episode, I also mentioned the TIP Mastermind Community that we've recently launched in April, so be sure to stick around until the end to hear more about that. Without further delay, I hope you enjoy today's episode covering Thomas Phelps' book 101 in the stock market. 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

Starting point is 00:01:20 and prepared for the unexpected. All right, so to give some background on the this book. The book was published back in 1972. Every once in a while, I enjoy reading books that are a bit older. I get this feeling that people just think and write differently during these time periods, and I like how it sort of mixes up the type of content I'm consuming. Thomas Phelps lived from 1902 through 1992, so he was around 70 years old when this book was published. He spent over 40 years in the investing world working as a private investor, a columnist, analyst and a financial advisor. So he held a number of different jobs and obviously was deeply fascinated with investing overall. Phelps studied 365 different companies in his book that had the

Starting point is 00:02:12 price of their stock increased by over 100 times and he started from the year 1932 and then ended this study in 1971. So that's a time period of 40 years and then throughout the book, he shares many of his takeaways from studying these companies and how they increased their share price by 100 times. Phelps starts out the book with a parable of five Arabs where each Arab is given one wish. The first Arab wishes for one donkey. The second Arab called him a fool and asked for 10 donkeys. Then the third Arab wished for a bunch of different things.

Starting point is 00:02:46 He wished for camels, donkeys, tents, food, wine, and a bunch of other stuff. And everyone had their wish fulfilled and come to reality. And then the fourth Arab then wished to become a king and then a creme. crown appeared on his head, so his wish came true. And then Phelps writes, having seen his companions in misery asking too little, the fifth Arab resolved to make no such mistake, and he wished to become Allah. Then, quote, in a flash, he found himself naked on the sand, covered with leprous sores, end quote. In the moral of this story is that those who ask of little in life are those who end up with little, and those who ask much in life receive much, and then those

Starting point is 00:03:27 to ask too much, get nothing. Most people in life ask very little and oftentimes don't make much out of themselves, and very few people are asking too much. And Phelps relates this idea to investing, saying that most people are content with making a quick profit on their holdings, or they're content with making a small percentage of interest on their savings in a bank, for example. The takeaway is that most people don't think big enough as investors. Most people don't believe that they truly have a chance at owning a big winner in the stock market and making a ton of money off of picking individual stocks. Those who realize that it is actually possible, you know, see other people doing well with it,

Starting point is 00:04:06 or they have seen others in the past do well, and they want to learn how it's actually done. Then Phelps says this line that I believe he's quite well known for, quote, "'Fortions are made by buying right and holding on,' end quote. And this quote is just the recurring theme you'll find throughout this book. Fortunes are made by buying right and holding on. Especially with how short-term most investors think today, investors that apply this strategy is just so rare, and despite evidence of the past showing how well investors can do by buying right and holding on, it seems that people still today think way too short-term.

Starting point is 00:04:42 When I talk with individual investors, one of the most common questions I get is what I think the stock market is going to do over the next year or so. I frankly have no idea what stocks will do in the near term, and to think that I do have any idea says more about what I don't know than what I do know. And I almost never have someone ask me what stock I believe is a high-quality long-term compounder. To me, that's a much more interesting question than what do I think the stock market's going to do over the next year or so. And when I look 10 or 20 years out, what the stock market does in 2023, really, in my mind, is largely irrelevant. And Phelps makes the case that since over 360 companies have increased by over 100-fold,

Starting point is 00:05:26 finding winners in the stock market is anything but impossible. It's most definitely difficult, but not impossible. It reminds me of the saying that the best investors are those that turn over the most rocks. He argues that one could have invested $10,000 in just one of these 100-baggers, and then eventually become a millionaire. And say if you had invested in 10 different companies, having just one of those being a big long-term winner should more than make up for all the ones that don't do nearly as well.

Starting point is 00:05:56 One amazing attribute of the stock market is that when you buy a stock, your upside is unlimited, but your downside is limited to what you invest, assuming you don't use any leverage at all. Then Phelps goes on to tell the story of a regular everyday person that built a massive investment portfolio over his life by buying right and holding on, and he shared four of the things the individual looked for when investing his money. He figured that the fastest way to increase his wealth was to invest in a company that could

Starting point is 00:06:24 sustainably grow their earnings at a fast pace for a really long time. So the first thing he wanted was for the company to be small because large companies by nature tend to not really have long growth runways ahead. The second thing he wanted was for the business to be relatively, unknown. Phelps writes, quote, popular growth stocks may keep on growing, but too often, one has to pay for expected growth too many years in advance, end quote. So first, the company must be small. Second, it has to be relatively unknown, so it isn't trading at too expensive of a price. And then third, it must have a unique product that can do a job better, faster, or cheaper

Starting point is 00:07:03 than their competitors, or provide a new service with prospects of great and long-continued sales increases in the future. And then finally, fourth is that it must have a strong, progressive, research-minded management team, which is something we talk a lot about here on the show. The interesting one I wanted to highlight here is look for a business that's relatively unknown. It can be easy for us to look for companies that a lot of other people have invested in, and one of the reasons is because that company has been through a thorough research process by some really smart people like super investors, but choosing not to rely on the research, of others really forces you to do your own research, and it becomes so much more rewarding

Starting point is 00:07:43 for us if the pick actually plays out. Companies that are small and not owned by institutions likely offer the biggest upside potential, because it becomes a game of turning over a lot of rocks, and looking where no one else is looking. And today, this oftentimes leads people to microcaps, because these are businesses that are really small, they're relatively unknown, and their values are between $50 million and $300 million, so it's not an area that a lot of people look. And speaking of microcaps, I'm actually scheduled to interview Ian Castle on the show, who I would consider our microcap guy, as he runs a service called MicroCap Club. If you have any questions you'd like me to ask Ian, feel free to shoot me an email,

Starting point is 00:08:24 Clay at the Investorspodcast.com. We're scheduled to record here in mid-June, 2023, and I'm really excited to have the opportunity to chat with Ian. I'd encourage you to go back and check out our past two interviews we did with Ian. Those are episodes 431 and 480 if you're interested in checking those out. One of Phelps' biggest takeaways from studying this investor that did really well was that he bought right and he held on. He wasn't trying to trade in and out of different things and he wasn't incurring unnecessary friction in his portfolio, such as capital gains taxes and trading costs and commissions and the spreads you have to pay on buying and selling.

Starting point is 00:09:01 there are two other lessons he shared related to buying right and holding on. And the first is that you should stay with your most successful stock investments as long as the companies are continuing to increase their earnings. It reminds me of Stig's recent episode with Monish Pabrii, where Monish said that if you buy a high-quality compounder, you should hang on to it when it becomes fully priced and still hang on to it when it becomes overpriced. The reason for this is because there are very few companies that are able to compound

Starting point is 00:09:30 at high rates for a really long time. So if you were to sell a really big winner, you're taking the chance that wherever you reallocate that money will be put into something that will do even better than the high quality company you already owned. And then you have to take into consideration capital gains taxes, which is a really high bar. The second lesson Phelps had is to be weary of people who tell you to take money off the table because oftentimes their interests are counter to your interests. For example, a stockbroker makes money when you continually trade in and out of positions. Phelps says, who is talking often means more than what is said.

Starting point is 00:10:08 And again, this points to the incentives of the individual. Always look at the incentives. To round out the first chapter, Phelps has this quote in there that I absolutely love from George Baker. To make money in stocks, you have to have the vision to see them, the courage to buy them, and the patience to hold them. patience is the rarest of the three, end quote. He has another excerpt here later in the book that I thought fit really well in here.

Starting point is 00:10:33 I quote, I don't know which is harder, buying right or knowing enough to hold on. Mathematically, if you just stick pens into the quotation page, you have not one chance in a hundred of hitting a stock that will give you a hundredfold appreciation, even if the future is as good as the past, which is no certainty. And after you have bought your stock, some of the best brains in Wall Street will be trying to persuade you to sell it and buy something else. Lots of times, they'll be right, at least for the short term. Every time they're right, it will make it harder for you to heed their advice the next time. And the next time, they may be advising you to sell your 100 to 1 stock after it has gone

Starting point is 00:11:12 from 1 to 2, end quote. In Chapter 2, he has this good bit on market timing. He writes, there's another reason why professional investors should de-emphasize market timing. That is because even if the market forecaster is right, he seldom can persuade others to act on his opinion. No one intends to buy stocks at the top of the market or sell them at the lows. On the contrary, bull market highs are made when the outlook for still higher prices is most broadly convincing. Conversely, bare market lows are made when the likelihood of still lower prices seems overwhelming to the preponderance of reasonable, well-informed investors. Since bull and bear markets are to a considerable extent manifestations of changes in mass psychology,

Starting point is 00:11:57 it is fatuous for anyone to believe that he can persuade a representative group of investors to sell stocks when that mass psychology is bullish or to buy stocks when it's bearish. The wise professional who understands this concentrates on stock selection. Most investors are far less emotionally involved in deciding whether the market is going up or down. To clinch the argument, it is readily demonstrable that far more money can be made by good stock selection than by good stock market timing, end quote. There's one more quote a little bit later about market timing that I wanted to share here as well because I just think it's such a good point. Some will argue that good market timing plus good selection is better than either alone. Bear market smoke gets into one's eyes and blinds him to buying opportunities if he's too intent on market timing.

Starting point is 00:12:47 And the more successful one is at market timing, the greater the temptation to rely on it and thus miss the much greater opportunities in buying right and holding on, end quote. Now, when you're buying a company that's increasing their earnings year after year and thus increasing their intrinsic value year after year, oftentimes these great companies will be continuing to hit new all-time highs. So even if the multiple contracts from, say, a multiple of 30 to a multiple of 25, you still may be purchasing a stock at a higher price because the earnings of the company have increased to make up for the difference. In Chapter 3, Phelps discusses mistakes that are made by professional

Starting point is 00:13:26 investors that prevent them from buying and holding big winners. He argues that the answer in why professional investors don't succeed in this strategy is found in investor psychology and statistics. He says few investors, private or professional, seek the big game. They focus on chances to make five points here and ten points there. Then he later writes, For the individual or institution really out to make a fortune in the stock market, it can be argued that every sale is a confession of error. Let this not be construed as advocating hanging on to everything willy-nilly. The only thing worse than making an investment mistake is refusing to admit it and correct it. Usually the faster in error

Starting point is 00:14:09 is rectified, the less it costs. But it's still an error. A lost opportunity compared with the buying right and holding on. In a bull market, correcting mistakes often means taking profits, but when we do so, let us not kid ourselves when we're making money. The truth is we are acknowledging missing vastly bigger opportunities and incurring a capital gains tax liability along the way, end quote. He then explains the difficulty investors have with rising and falling stock prices. People naturally assume that a rising stock price correlates with a good investment and a falling stock price correlates with a bad investment. But sometimes great companies see their stocks fall and bad companies see their stocks rise.

Starting point is 00:14:51 The second fallacy he highlights is that investors tend to overemphasize the risks of being in stocks and underestimate the cost of not buying in or sitting on the sidelines or selling a stock too early. Even today, after the incredible bull market we've seen, there are countless examples of people who sold a great company too soon, only to watch the stock price continue to increase after they sold. Phelps says that selling too soon can be frightfully expensive. He points out that if a stock manages to compound at 20% per year, then it takes 25 years to take $1 and turn it into $100 or reach 100-bagger status.

Starting point is 00:15:27 During this 25-year period, if you happen to sell in year 20, then you get less than 40 to 1 on your money. In the remaining $60 that you missed out on happens in the last five years. He then expands on that and says that you shouldn't sell an investment for a non-investment reason. A few examples he shows of this being the case is selling just because you believe the stock price is high, selling just because you have a profit, the stock price is no longer moving like other stocks are, or something that is going on in the news headlines. Now, one of the biggest troubles with finding high-quality compounders is that they're often

Starting point is 00:16:03 trading at pretty high valuations, and this is what keeps people from getting into them. Of course, you don't want to completely ignore valuation as paying a ridiculously high price can definitely get investors in trouble, but Phelps recommends when you find a company that offers a really attractive prospects and is at a fair valuation to enter a position, and be ready to buy more if it happens to trade at a lower price in the future. His reasoning is that you want to focus on the long-term business fundamentals, and whether the stock is at a P.E. of 15, 25, or 35, it really doesn't matter too much when you look out 10 or 20 plus years, because over the long run, the returns of the stock tend to approach

Starting point is 00:16:42 the returns of the underlying business as long as you aren't paying a ridiculously high PE, like say a PE of 100. Another common error that Phelps warns against is doing substantial research on a company and not allocating enough capital for it to really make a difference if it does play out as you'd expect. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right, I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the somber. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo

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Starting point is 00:21:05 slash WSB. All right. Back to the show. Moving along to Chapter 6 is where Phelps shows the entire list of 365 companies that increased by 100-fold. There are many familiar names here,

Starting point is 00:21:20 and many of which have withered away over time. Some names I recognize include Etna Life and Casualty, John Deere, Kodak, Sears, Lockheed, Allegheny, Warner Brothers, many of these names are staples of the economy, such as utilities,

Starting point is 00:21:33 railroads, energy. And after looking at this list, I'm reminded of how Chris Mayer also curated an updated list in his book, 100 Baggers, and it reminds me of how we shouldn't look back at past winters and think that we've missed the boat, because there are always companies in industries that are growing at a pretty rapid clip. And new 100 baggers are currently in the making as we speak, and they're opportunities that can be seized by anyone. Oftentimes I'll hear from investors that the stock market is just totally manipulated and rigged and is totally driven by the Fed, but then I see other investors who did quite well in 2022 while the overall market was down.

Starting point is 00:22:12 And these companies aren't like a one-off event that happened to do well in 2022. These are companies that have continued to increase their earnings over the past decade, and they continue to do really well despite all the macro headwinds and high interest rates, high inflation. In my personal opinion, it's best to just ignore the people that say the stock market is totally rigged because if you look hard enough, you'll always find companies that are continuing to grow quite well through any difficult environment. And that shouldn't be any surprise because there are thousands of different companies we can

Starting point is 00:22:43 invest in, and there are many tools online we can use to find them. Then in Chapter 7, Phelps starts to dive into the characteristics he found in the Hunter Baggers in his research. He writes, The only way to make more than the going rate of return on your capital is to buy values not apparent to most people at the time you buy. Because every stock buyer wants to make money, it's almost the truism that nothing kills a money-making opportunity faster than its widespread popularity.

Starting point is 00:23:11 It is true that time is on the side of the growth stock buyer if the growth and the expectation of growth continue. This is simple arithmetic. The price of a growth stock will increase year by year at whatever rate the earnings grow if the stock's PE ratio remains constant, end quote. So, for example, if we have a stock that has a PE of 25 and the company's earnings grow by 15%, then if the PE ratio remains constant, then it must be true that the stock price has also increased by 15% as well.

Starting point is 00:23:42 And then to his point that nothing kills a money-making opportunity faster than widespread popularity, this is what keeps me from buying into a lot of. of the market's most popular companies because so many investors have already piled into them, and a lot of the growth is already priced into these really popular companies. A highly valued growth stock can do really well as an investment. It just needs a lot of things to go right for it. It needs to continue growing at a high rate of return or have accelerated growth. It needs to have the market expect for that growth to continue, or in other words, the market needs to keep it at a high PE, and then it can't have a really big multiple contraction, and you need to

Starting point is 00:24:19 to ensure that the discount rate in the market doesn't increase substantially because if the market uses a higher discount rate, then this can significantly bring down the value of gross stocks because a lot of their big cash flows are priced far out into the future, say five or 10 years from now. And that's a lot of what happened in 2022 with a lot of the no-profit companies just getting absolutely obliterated. Related to Phelps's point on finding something that the market doesn't find a parent, you have to have a different forecast than the market. If the market expects a company to grow earnings by four times over the next five years, then you agree with the market, then there probably isn't much money to be made because the market has already priced it in.

Starting point is 00:25:01 And that's why we should always try to come up with a conservative intrinsic value estimate of what we believe a company is worth and only purchase if the market price is well below our conservative estimate of value. Phelps writes, to win in the stock market, as in check one must think at least one move further ahead than the other fellow, end quote. In a perfect world, you would ideally have what Chris Mayer referenced in his book, The Twin Engines of Growth, a stock that increases its earnings by 40 times and its PE multiple increase by two and a half times, then that gives you a hundred bagger. For example, say the earnings per share go from $1 per share to $40 per share, and then you have a PE multiple that starts at 15, and then it goes to around

Starting point is 00:25:44 37.5. So definitely a low multiple is preferred when purchasing these compounders, but it certainly isn't a requirement. Multples can also give you a good sense of the sentiment around a company. Low multiples are typically associated with poor sentiment, so you should be mindful that if you pay a higher multiple, the business's earnings can continue to increase, but the multiple might fall or might normalize. And also if you're paying a higher multiple, you can't purchase it speculating that the multiple will continue to expand. So buying something on the cheaper end definitely can give you a larger margin of safety because you're not only benefiting from the earnings going up,

Starting point is 00:26:23 but you're also potentially benefiting from multiple expansion. In Chapter 9, Phelps covers figuring out the odds. He states, The point is that in the stock market, as in poker, the wise investor tries to make bets when the odds are heavily in his favor, end quote. This is very similar to what Charlie Munger talks about when he says the stock market is like a parley betting system. Phelps outlines a few rules we can keep in mind to help figure out the odds when purchasing a

Starting point is 00:26:49 company. The first is that the value of any security is the discounted present value of all future payments, which is also Buffett and Munger's definition of the intrinsic value. The second rule is that a dollar of income from one source is worth as much as a dollar from another source, which essentially means that when you value two assets and discount the risk associated with them, you can compare these two assets on an apples to apples basis, and this allows you to judge all of your opportunity costs against each other. Then for the third rule, he writes, hints it follows that when investors pay more for a dollar of income from one source, then they

Starting point is 00:27:24 need to pay for an equivalent dollar of income from another source, they're expressing explicitly the opinion that the income stream from the first source will rise faster or dry up more slowly than the income stream from the second source. Otherwise, what they do makes no sense, end quote. Then he has this quote from Robert Wise that says, investors don't pay different prices for the same thing. When they seem to be doing so, they're paying like prices for different anticipations, end quote.

Starting point is 00:27:54 Two commonly used gauges of differing expectations are the relative yields on stocks versus bonds and the relative PE ratios on different stocks. People oftentimes compare the S&P 500 earnings yield versus something like the 10-year treasury yield because it can give a general gauge for the market sentiment. Historically, these have been pretty correlated, but ever since the great financial crisis, interest rates have been artificially low, offering a low yield on bonds relative to the earnings yield on the S&P 500.

Starting point is 00:28:23 As of late 2023, the S&P 500 earnings yield is 4.2%, and the 10-year treasury yield is 3.7%, so relatively comparable. Another consideration between the two, of course, is inflation. On a relative basis, it's preferable to own stocks if there's high inflation because stocks in general offer much better inflation protection than bonds. Remember that Phelps quote of Buying Right and Holding On. Both are essential parts of the equation of owning a hundred bagger. It's a lot harder if you pay an extraordinarily high multiple, he writes, Buying Right will do you little good unless you hold on. But holding on will do you little good and may do you great harm unless you have bought right, end quote. A simple measure to ensure you're not paying a ridiculous multiple or paying too much is simply comparing a company's PE to the overall market.

Starting point is 00:29:16 So if you're looking at a company in the United States, then it may be appropriate to compare it to something like the S&P 500, which as a recording is around a PE of 23. So if you have a high quality company with a normalized PE of around 23, then it seems like a reasonable multiple to pay because you're getting a high quality company at what is the market average. Once you get to around two or three times a market PE, say a PE of 46 or 69, then things start to get questionable for me personally, but everyone has their own approach and may have special knowledge or insights into some of these really exceptional companies trading at super, super high prices. Long story short, in Phelps's mind, buying right is just as important as holding on and it needs to be well understood. Phelps also highlights not only the importance of the multiple you're paying, but also the quality of the earnings on that multiple.

Starting point is 00:30:08 Considering items such as how durable the earnings are, how fast they're growing, what the competitive landscape looks like for a company, they all factor into the quality of earnings. Accounting considerations should also be considered to ensure we're looking at an accurate, figure for the company's real, true, normalized earnings to ensure that the accounting earnings aren't misleading like they oftentimes are, and this is due to the shortcomings of Gap accounting, as explained in Adam Ziesel's book, where the money is. One should also consider what the company is doing with those earnings. We'd much rather own a company that's reinvesting back into the business at high rates of return, rather than deploying that capital in a way that isn't value accretive to shareholders,

Starting point is 00:30:49 such as by paying a dividend or making pricey acquisition, One other item I wanted to mention here is keeping an eye on how honest the management team is and what their track record looks like. It's much better to partner with managers who have a track record of being honest and not trying to play accounting games because accounting numbers can easily be manipulated to try and hit these EPS targets. Companies who take shortcuts with their EPS numbers eventually have things come back to haunt them in some way, shape, or form.

Starting point is 00:31:17 And it's typically the type of managers you just don't want to associate with. And then another item related to management is how they treat their employees. Do they pay their employees fairly and have high employee morale in the workplace? Or do they squeeze everything they can out of employees to the point where the highest performers are inevitably going to leave and go somewhere where they're treated much better? Again, you want managers that are playing long-term games with long-term people. And that's assuming that you're looking to be a long-term shareholder yourself and a high-quality business. Phelps states, the best safeguard against slate of hand bookkeeping is to have nothing

Starting point is 00:31:53 to do with it or with the men who practice it, end quote. Jumping ahead to chapter 15, Phelps has a chapter titled Profits in Ethics. He's a big proponent of investing in companies that make the world a better place and avoiding companies that make the world worse like the plague. Everyone has their own opinions on Facebook or meta, but I personally just don't want to own that stock, no matter how cheap it is. That was my opinion when I covered it on the show near its lows in November 2022, and now the stock is up well over 100%. Topics like this made me realize that investing is much more than all about the money. It's all about aligning your investments with who you are and what helps you sleep well at night too. This isn't me saying that you shouldn't buy meta or

Starting point is 00:32:37 you need to have the same opinion as me, but I'm just using it as an example since it's such a well-known company. Phelps has the quote that you should never do business with a man you do not trust, he writes, no matter how tempting the prospect, how are luring the chance for a quick profit, stay away from men, companies, and ventures based on defrauding rather than helping customers, end quote. This also ties into the Buffett quote that if you aren't willing to own a stock for 10 years, don't even think about owning a stock for 10 minutes. If you truly think about owning a business for over 10 years and actually commit to that mindset, then naturally you're going to shy away from managers who aren't trustworthy. Phelps writes, if we buy stocks because we

Starting point is 00:33:19 believe in them, expecting to hold them for the rest of our lives, the chances are good that others will come to appreciate them too. Then if someday we do decide to sell them, they will appeal to the wisest buyers, a market that is always liquid, end quote. And Godin Bade also talks about this idea in his book where there's always a market and there's always liquidity for quality companies. In Chapter 16, Phelps touches on the importance of the business reinvesting at a high rate of return, something we talk about a lot on the show here. As I've stated many times on the show before, a business's returns over the long run trend towards the return of the company itself in what the company earns. If a business continually reinvest into new projects at say a 20% return,

Starting point is 00:34:03 then even if you pay a P.E. multiple of, say, 30, then your stock returns are still going to be around 20% over the long run. Phelps encourages investors to stay away from businesses with low return on invested capital if you want to own a long-term compounder that even has a shot of becoming a hundred-bagger. In Chapter 19, Phelps expands more on where to find potential 100-baggers. He lists a number of different things here, and it's funny that the first thing he lists is one I totally disagree with. He says that the record of the last 40 years suggests that first you want to look for inventions, which enable us to do things we always wanted to do, but never could do before. And he uses the examples of an automobile, airplane, and television. And all three, I believe,

Starting point is 00:34:49 are really bad industries to be in, mainly because there's just so much competition nowadays and there's low return on invested capital in these industries. Using the auto industry as an example, when you have so many different companies competing, it tends to turn into competing on price, which drives down profit margins for everyone. But when you look at a company like Tesla, who's doing much different things than the traditional players or a company like Ferrari, who's a luxury automaker, then it becomes a different story. Ideally, you want to be in an industry where you're investing in the clear winner. And the industry isn't cluttered with many different players.

Starting point is 00:35:23 It's dominated by just one or two players. And that's the type of situation where I believe you, seen super normal profits in very high investor returns. One example that comes to mind here is Alphabet or Google and their search business. They had practically no competition and they were able to earn super normal profits over the last decade. So if you were to apply Phelps' principle today of looking for industries with new inventions, things that come to mind here are AI, autonomous driving, electric vehicles, e-commerce, the cloud, and renewable energy. On Phelps's list, he does list ideas within this line of thought, whether that be looking

Starting point is 00:36:00 at technology that make things better, faster, cheaper, more efficient, or whether that be new or cheaper sources of energy. Out of the 365 companies that increased by 100-fold in his study, he broke them all down into four general categories. The first is the advance of companies who recovered from extremely depressed prices during the Great Depression, which was the greatest bear market in American history. And then this also includes more generally companies that had a special type of panic or distress that caused their stocks to fall dramatically before recovering.

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Starting point is 00:40:01 willingness today is to risk higher inflation rather than risk another deflationary bust like what happened in the Great Depression. And after seeing what happened in the overall markets with the Great Financial Crisis in March 2020, we know that the Fed will provide liquidity to the markets wherever necessary, at least for the time being, and they're willing to risk inflation if that's the way things head. The second group of companies in his study was those who produced a basic commodity. If an oil producer, for example, sees the price of oil go up by, say, 5x, then oftentimes you'll see many oil producers increased by multiples much higher than that.

Starting point is 00:40:40 Or maybe a company has a big unexpected discovery of a basic commodity that thus leads to explosive stock returns. after the discovery is announced. The third group of companies he lists here is the advance of those primarily due to great leverage and capital structure in long periods of expanding business and inflation. For this item, Phelps writes, leverage opportunities may result from situations where the senior claims on a company's earnings and assets equal or exceed those earnings or assets, leaving no present value for the equity.

Starting point is 00:41:12 When such a situation persists for many years with no visible prospect of interest, change, the equity may sell at a nominal price. Opportunities for profiting by capital leverage are easy to find. What is hard is deciding whether the added profit potential outweighs the added risk, end quote. And then the fourth and the final one is where the fun stuff is, in my opinion, and that is the growth of companies who reinvested their earnings at substantially higher than average rates of return on their capital. One of the most important pieces when analyzing those in this category is ensuring that these businesses have a really impenetable moat in place because businesses that earn really high returns are naturally going to attract

Starting point is 00:41:53 a lot of competition. I did an entire episode on moats and competitive advantages, and that was back on episode 524 for those who are interested in checking out that episode. Alphabet is actually a really good case study here to look at, I believe. They IPOed in 2004 at a split-adjusted price of under $3 per share, and they're currently trading around $124 per share, and that's over a 40 times increase in their stock price. All along the way, Google Search had an impenetrable mode, and they greatly benefited from the transition to digital advertising, and then they delivered an exceptionally valuable service to their advertisers. There were, of course, some bumps along the road in terms of alphabet stock price, but just looking at their top line revenue of their business

Starting point is 00:42:38 over the years, it's increased every single year since their IPO. And of course, that may change in the coming years. Time will tell whether Chat, GBT, or some other chat bot eats their lunch. And then Phelps shows how many years it will take for a company to become a hundred-bagger at differing rates of return. To do it in 40 years would require a 12.2% average annual return. 30 years would be 16.6%, 20 years, 26% average annual return. And then to do it in 15 years, would require a 36% annual return, which is in the ballpark of what Constellation Software achieved over the past 10 or 15 years. And I covered that company back on episode 531, one of my favorite episodes and one of the fan favorites as well. Over the long run, the growth in a compounder is really

Starting point is 00:43:26 driven by the growth in their earnings. And then investors can also further enhance their returns by taking advantage of Mr. Markets' mood swings of optimism and pessimism. But if you misjudge those swings, then it may, of course, hurt your long-term returns trying to time it. Towards the end of the book, Phelps has a chapter here on ensuring you don't miss the boat on the next 100 baggers. He argues that the reason that so few people ever achieve such a feat is because so few people actually try to do it. Oftentimes, people are told that stock picking isn't for individual investors because mutual

Starting point is 00:44:00 funds just can't outperform the market. Or many people are just playing very short-term games where mathematically it's just impossible to achieve a hundred-bagger if you're always selling your companies within one or two years. He also argues that those wanting to multiply their capital by 100 also run less risk than those with short-term time horizons. One reason for this, as I mentioned earlier, is that there's always a market for the best of anything because people who appreciate quality always seem to have money. It's true for quality stocks, bonds, real estate, art, antiques, collectibles, you name it. Another reason he prefers investing with quality is because oftentimes you're partnering with

Starting point is 00:44:40 exceptional management teams. It's relatively easy to buy right and hold on when you're partnering with people who are exceptional at what they do and they're also honest and trustworthy. Another item that comes to mind here is that investing with a short-term time horizon increases the need to be right on the valuation. When you get the company right and you're willing to hold on for the long haul, then getting the valuation right becomes less and less important. because if the earnings are increasing by so much over the course of a decade, then the valuation

Starting point is 00:45:10 will take care of itself. Here's an excerpt here I wanted to share as well. Well, perhaps the greatest advantage of all in buying top quality stocks without visible ceilings on their growth is that when we do so, we give ourselves the chance to profit by the unforeseeable and the incalculable. Year after year, mankind achieves the impossible, but persists in underrating what it can and will do in the future, end quote. And then Phelps also poses the question of whether individuals should be choosing and purchasing stocks themselves or if they should be hiring a professional to do it for them. He says that if you want to pursue the path yourself, you of course need to get educated

Starting point is 00:45:50 on all things finance, investing, accounting, etc. He also suggests that vast amounts of screening need to be done. Out of the thousands of companies that choose from, it's super helpful. to filter down on metrics like earnings growth, revenue growth, and so on. And that gives you a list of companies, and it really just narrows it down for you to study and then pick a handful or however many you'd like. And then we also need to understand the psychological side and be sure we're equipped to deal with things if they go wrong, such as if our stocks decline by 50% or if we end up being wrong about the business. Psychologically, are we able to sleep well knowing that

Starting point is 00:46:27 we may have made a crucial mistake with our investments. All right, that concludes what I wanted to cover for Thomas Phelps' book. And then during this episode, I also wanted to share some of the content that's been put out by Akri Capital Management. They have some brilliant pieces on their website that I recommend all of our TIP listeners check out as their approach of concentrating into high-quality businesses is well worth studying and understanding. I had the opportunity to grab lunch with one of their partners in Omaha for the Berkshire weekend.

Starting point is 00:46:57 and I myself am just a huge fan of Chuck Ackrey. He's given a Google talk that's out there on YouTube that I really enjoyed, and I believe that during his talk, he mentioned that over his investment career, he has had two 100-baggers that he still owns today. The first being Berkshire Hathaway and the second being American Tower. Ockery has made famous his three-legged stool approach of primarily looking for three things when selecting a high-quality business. First, he wants to own what he calls an extraordinary.

Starting point is 00:47:27 business. Second, he wants to partner with talented managers, and third is that the company must have a plethora of reinvestment opportunities in a history of being able to reinvest at an above average rate of return. John Neff is one of the partners at Ockrey, and he wrote an article titled Why Compounding is So Difficult, and I feel like it ties really well into this content of covering Thomas Phelps' book. He explains that over the past 100 years, the world has gone through many very difficult things, such as depressions, wars, financial crises, inflationary periods, pandemics, terrorist attacks, the list goes on and on and on. Yet over the long run, the stock market continued to march upward to new highs over and over again. Most people we know

Starting point is 00:48:10 didn't benefit from that entire ride up, and those who stuck with it and rode along with the bumps on the road, they built tremendous amounts of wealth over time. It wasn't the events that derailed some people's compounding of their money, but it was their reaction to those events. NF lists four counterproductive behaviors that investors take. The first is trying to sell before the next recession. He lists trying to buy just before the next bull market, repositioning portfolios based on what is supposed to do better in the next paradigm, dumping stocks during a downturn, and that deprives oneself of the means to eventually recover. And then he writes, people do these things because they're intuitive, because these actions appear rational in the

Starting point is 00:48:55 face of heightened concern and uncertainty. This is precisely why compounding over the long term is so challenging and rare. It demands counterintuitive and seemingly irrational behavior, end quote. And he shares the Buffett Maxim that the stock market exists to serve investors, not instruct them. The point is that the movement of the stock price shouldn't tell you whether you should buy, sell, or hold a company. What's much more important is the actual performance of the business. Investors who react to stock market moves by purchasing when shares are up and dumping when share prices are down are letting the market's moods guide their actions. And it really, really, really hinders their performance. A lot of investors judge business performance by what the stock

Starting point is 00:49:40 price is doing rather than what the actual business performance is. Sometimes stock prices go down because of near-term worries or concerns. And remember that many people are trading in and out of stocks that you own, and they may be doing it for totally different reasons than you. They may be selling because they have liquidity needs. They may be trading based on some algorithm, or they may be simply selling because the stock price is down. Their time horizon is oftentimes a lot different than yours.

Starting point is 00:50:08 What really drives the stock price over the long run is the business's performance and the growth of the company's earnings power over time. Chris Seroni is another partner at Ockery Capital, and he wrote his brilliant piece I absolutely love called The Art of Not Selling. He writes, Of our most costly mistakes over the years, almost all have been sell decisions. The mistake in virtually every instance has been selling too soon. Reflecting on these mistakes gave rise to this letter in its title, The Art of Not Selling.

Starting point is 00:50:40 Taking a step back, our investment philosophy involves concentrating our capital in a small number of what we believe to be growing and competitively advantaged businesses. These kinds of businesses are rare and are only periodically available for purchase at attractive valuations. With that in mind, we do our best to hold on for the long term, so that our capital may compound as the businesses grow. Holding on means resisting the temptations to sell, and there are many. We tune out politics and macroeconomics, and to the surprise of many, neither valuation

Starting point is 00:51:12 nor price targets play a role in our business. sell decisions." Ockery Capital really understands the true power of compounding. So as Chris talks about here, they're very careful in selecting businesses that are well positioned to compound in the future and being very careful to not mistakenly sell these businesses because that interrupts that compounding process. He says that allowing our investments to compound uninterrupted is our North Star. And he gives the example of a penny doubling for 30 days and how this force of compounding

Starting point is 00:51:44 grows a penny to be worth over $10 million in 30 days. The original penny doesn't cross the $1 million mark until the 27th day. And in the final four days, it grows from around $700,000 to over $10 million. And this illustrates that most of the benefits from compounding aren't seen until really, really far out in the future. So it's a good reminder that when you sell a company and incur capital gains taxes, then you risk hurting that compounding process that's at play. It also illustrates that the compounding effect is not intuitive. Our brains are really designed to think linearly, not in expenditures. I'm definitely a math guy and I love numbers. And when you look at a formula for compound interest, the variable that's in the exponent line is time.

Starting point is 00:52:32 So the more time you apply to the compounding of money in the case of investing, the more you're going to benefit from compounding. Increasing your returns does help, of course, but time is definitely a really, really important variable, and it's something you have a lot of control over. You can achieve 100% return, for example, and then do that for one year, and you've doubled your money. But if you take a more modest return, say 10%, and you apply that over 40 years, then you've increased your investment by 45 times. And if you manage to achieve a 15% return for 40 years, then your investment would increase by 267 times. Morgan Housel has a chapter in his book, The Psychology and Money about this topic, and he discusses how the majority of Warren Buffett's

Starting point is 00:53:17 wealth was accumulated in the later part of his life. And that's because of this compounding force in the way the variable of time plays into that equation. One of the biggest reasons that Buffett is one of the richest people in the world is because he's simply invested much longer than most of the other really great investors and entrepreneurs. Now, because of how powerful long-term compounding is, Chris explains that they're very careful about determining a good reason to sell an investment. Their firm tends to tune out politics and the economy when they're making a sell decision. And they don't let valuation play a big part in their sell decisions, as he writes, we try to resist the temptation to sell or even trim on the basis of valuation alone.

Starting point is 00:53:59 We are unfazed when our businesses are quoted in the market at prices above what we would pay for them, end quote. He then lists three reasons why they don't. don't sell solely based on valuation. The first is that because oftentimes when you sell based on valuation, you don't get the opportunity to reenter that company at an attractive valuation in the future. A great example of this is Constellation Software, which is a company Ackery's firm has owned for many years, I believe, since 2014. Constellation is a company that many people have called expensive for many years. But since the company's IPO in 2006, The stock has increased by over 125 times and never had a drawdown of more than 30%.

Starting point is 00:54:40 An investor might have doubled their money in Constellation, gotten to know the business really well, spent a lot of time on it. And after doubling it, they might have sold it and said it simply became too expensive. And then maybe they thought they would just wait and just wait for a better price. And then they just sat on the sidelines and maybe they just watched the stock go up tenfold. This is the type of thing that Chris is talking about where he says that their biggest mistakes have been selling too early. The second reason they're reluctant to sell based on valuation is because the opportunity to buy a great business at an attractive price is really rare.

Starting point is 00:55:15 When you're selling one company you believe is expensive, it needs to be allocated somewhere else at some point and you don't know when that opportunity is going to come. And then the third reason is because the very best businesses have a tendency to exceed expectations. What might look like a high price today, in hindsight, might end up being a really attractive price. And then he has a section here on price targets and mentions that conventional wisdom of value investing is to buy something that's cheap relative to the intrinsic value and then sell it when the company reached its price target or your estimate of intrinsic value. It's like buying a dollar bill for 60 cents and then selling it when it reaches or gets close

Starting point is 00:55:55 to that $1. Chris writes, With growing competitively advantaged businesses, however, that proverbial dollar bill may be worth a dollar now, but we expect it to be worth $1.20 next year, in $1.40 the year after that. When in possession of these kinds of businesses, we believe that you are much better holding them for the long term in allowing them to compound, end quote. The only way we can have a hundred bagger is to not sell a company when it doubles, when it becomes a five-bagger, a 10-bagger, a 20-bagger, and not even selling when it becomes a 50-bagger.

Starting point is 00:56:30 Now, this doesn't mean that we should be so stubborn and never sell our companies. We just need to be crystal clear on when it's appropriate to actually do so. There are three primary scenarios where Ackri Capital is comfortable with selling out of a position. First is when the business is no longer growing at an above-average rate, because when a business's growth is below average, then they expect their investment returns to be below average as well over a long enough time horizon. Second is when the business's competitive advantage has become impaired. The competitive advantage is what allows a company to reinvest at high rates of return, so if the company's moat is

Starting point is 00:57:08 impaired, then it may be time to exit that position. And third is when there's an adverse change in the management team. Sometimes there may be an excellent management team in place for years, but eventually they need to pass the torch to someone else. And Chris Seroni does mention here that they do give new management teams time to settle in and possibly give them a little bit of extra slack to get comfortable with their new roles first. Other more rare cases of them selling may also include the need to free up capital to invest in a new high-quality business that they've gotten to know pretty well, or simply because they've changed their mind on an existing investment

Starting point is 00:57:45 after getting to know it better as time has progressed. And then at the end of this piece, Chris highlights the big importance of being able to tune out the noise to prevent you from making the mistake of selling too early. The financial press in Wall Street live on attracting eyeballs and creating transactions by investors, so they're going to continually try to tempt you to sell something that you already own. And it's so fitting that he fits in a Thomas Phelps quote here, never forget that people whose self-interest is diametrically opposed to your own are trying to persuade you to act every day, end quote. To help tune out the noise, Akri's firm puts a big amount of attention to determining the true essence of a business,

Starting point is 00:58:28 and what are the key variables that really matter? They want to narrow down all of these moving parts within a business down to a few key variables that make it much easier for them to determine if a company still deserves to be in their portfolio, and it makes it much easier for them to stay the course for the long term and take full advantage of compounding. All right, that concludes my discussion on Thomas Phelps' book, 1001 in the stock market, and some of Ockrey Capital's articles here. Before I close it out, I also wanted to mention one of the resources I've personally been using to help build a watch list of high-quality companies to invest in, and that is our

Starting point is 00:59:03 TIP Mastermind Community. We launched the TIP Mastermind Community back in April of 2023, and we've also a lot of already seen a high level of interest from the audience members wanting to meet like-minded investors and continue to share ideas. We've been having these weekly Zoom calls where we have things like roundtable discussions where members share an individual stock pick. We have Q&A sessions with investors like Stig Broderson and Godham Bade. And we also have a forum to share links, share articles, or ask questions with other members. It's amazing some of the members we have so far, many of them have been investing for decades and they have an immense passion for stock investing,

Starting point is 00:59:41 as well as just lifelong learning and getting to know like-minded individuals. I'm also in the works of planning an in-person meetup for our TIP Mastermind Community members in New York City from October 6th through October 8th of 2023. I'm in the works of planning the itinerary and I'm just very excited for that trip personally. We currently have around 35 or so paid members in the mastermind community and we've closed it to new members, but we're going to be opening it back up to another cohort either in June or July. If you'd like to be notified of when we open up the new cohort, you can join our waitlist by visiting theinvestorspodcast.com slash mastermind. That is the investors podcast.com slash mastermind to check out the community and join our wait list. Also,

Starting point is 01:00:28 Stig and I talked more about the mastermind community in his mastermind episode, which will be released on Saturday, June 3rd. If you'd like to learn more about the community, then you can go to the very end of that episode where we chat more about the mastermind community. All right, that's all I have for today's episode. I've really enjoyed putting this one together, as always for the audience. Thanks so much for tuning in, and I hope to see you again next week. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to Millennial Investing by the Investors Podcast Network and learn how to achieve financial independence. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to

Starting point is 01:01:06 the investorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision consult a professional, this show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps

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