We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP658: Peter Lynch’s Guide to Investing in Your Expertise w/ Kyle Grieve
Episode Date: September 8, 2024On today’s episode, Kyle Grieve discusses the importance of simplicity and understanding for investment success, why you can succeed in investing while being wrong often, cloning characteristics too... many investors follow that should be avoided to improve investing success, the significant differences in analyzing large and small businesses, how to treat stock tips with caution to avoid risky investments, why separating your investments into subtypes can be a helpful investing tool, and a whole lot more! IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN: 00:00 - Intro 03:44 - Why investing in things that you understand well is still such a big competitive advantage in investing. 04:59 - The vital interplay between fundamentals, momentum, value, and price. 11:18 - How to succeed in investing while being dead wrong 40% of the time. 16:12 - Why market timing is one of the quickest ways to decrease returns. 18:18 - The crucial connection of contrarianism and patience that Peter says makes a successful investor. 21:05 - The significant differences in analyzing small businesses compared to larger businesses. 31:34 - Why you should look to market pricing to find great opportunities and not to assess performance. 32:45 - How you should treat stock tips. 37:05 - 13 unconventional characteristics of outstanding investments. 52:51 - Lynch's six investment types, and why delineating them was important. And so much more! Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps 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, Kyle, and the other community members. Buy One Up On Wall Street here. Follow Kyle on Twitter and LinkedIn. Check out all the books mentioned and discussed in our podcast episodes here. Enjoy ad-free episodes when you subscribe to our Premium Feed. NEW TO THE SHOW? Follow our official social media accounts: X (Twitter) | LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | TikTok. 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm
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You're listening to TIP.
Peter Lynch is among the most successful investors of all time, generating a whopping 29% compounded
annual return over 13 years vastly outperforming the S&P 500 by a wide margin during that time spent.
His book, One Up on Wall Street, explains some of the most significant concepts that helped
him reach such lofty success levels.
The most powerful concept in the book was for retail investors.
His insistence on using what you already know to help you generate stock ideas that Wall Street
doesn't widely hold.
He outlines numerous places to look to help you find ideas that you will already understand well.
This flies in the face of much of the typical Wall Street dogma, which is buying whatever is hot,
popular, and hard to understand.
Peter Lynch was a master of turning over more rocks than other analysts and other fund managers,
which was a significant reason for his success.
His investing strategy required many tracking positions where he would buy all sorts of businesses
in a particular industry, and then he'd increase his bets on the companies that he thought
had competitive advantages over competitors.
While Wall Street doesn't widely use this method, it was incredibly successful for Peter Lynch.
Today, we'll cover topics like the importance of simplicity and understanding for investment success,
why you can succeed in investing while being wrong often, cloning characteristics too many investors
follow that should probably be avoided to improve investing success, the significant difference
in analyzing large and small businesses, how to treat stock tips with caution to avoid risky
investments, why separating your investments into subtypes can be a helpful investing tool
and a whole lot more.
So if you're an investor looking to generate new ideas thoughtfully and intelligently,
you won't want to miss this show.
Now, let's get right into this week's episode.
Celebrating 10 years and more than 150 million downloads.
You are listening to the Investors Podcast Network.
Since 2014, we studied the financial markets
and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most.
We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected.
Now, for your host, Kyle Green.
Welcome to The Investors podcast.
I'm your host Kyle Grieve, and today we'll be discussing One Up on Wall Street, one of the most practical books on investing ever written.
There are only a few investing books that I recommend to people who want to learn about investing.
And One Up on Wall Street is always in my top five.
Why is that?
It's practical.
It gives plenty of detailed examples, and the information comes from a top-notch source, Peter Lynch, who has one of the most enviable track records in investing history.
It's entertaining.
Peter Lynch makes a traditionally dry subject like investing and adds his own humor and personality
to make the book highly readable, funny, and relatable.
And lastly, the advice is based on just sound and timeless investing principles.
Even though the book was first published in 1989, it's still just as relevant today in 2024
as it was then.
Now, even though the book is less than 300 pages, it's jam-packed with different investing
information.
So I've separated it into multiple thematic sections, which I'll share with you today.
The first section I want to discuss is the essence of the book, which is the importance of simplicity.
Investing is not a game where being trendy and ahead of the curve is required in order to succeed.
Peter Lynch points out that many great investors, including himself, are technophobes,
just like Warren Buffett.
His advice is to buy what you know and understand.
If you don't know or understand it, just don't buy it.
You'll note that many of the examples he gives are very simple businesses.
He talks about businesses like Dunkin' Donuts and Chrysler as businesses that he thinks,
that he can understand.
When it comes to the internet back in the 90s, he admitted he didn't bother play in that game
because without any expert help from his wife or kids, he couldn't even find the web.
Now, this point about buying what you understand really is the essence of the book.
I've shared this benefit before about being able to buy things that you really understand
and I've gotten some pushback from other people who say that everyday investors just can't
compete with billion dollar hedge funds who have access to billion dollar information,
such as satellite imagery of retail parking lots.
The thought process here is that they can track foot traffic of their stores
to get additional insights into a business that the general public just can't access.
Now, while this is an interesting analytical tool,
I can think of a pretty easy caveat.
What about retailers inside of a mall?
How does this analysis help you determine where they are going?
An analyst in New York isn't going to understand how busy a store inside of a mall
is going to be on the West Coast.
And even if they could determine that,
there are other barriers for larger investors that don't exist for retail investors, which we'll
cover a little bit more later in this episode. Lynch takes further aim at Wall Street, saying that
there is an unwritten rule on Wall Street. If you don't understand it, then put your life
savings into it, shun the enterprises around the corner, which can at least be observed,
and seek out the one that manufactures an incomprehensible product. His point is that too many
investors, whether on Wall Street or your next door neighbor, invest in businesses whose products
they barely understand. And then they wonder why they lose so much money in investments.
This is one of the hard parts of investing. The interplay between fundamentals, price appreciation,
momentum, and appraisal. For instance, you can have a business where the fundamentals can
increase. Price can skyrocket generating even more momentum. But often, the appraisal
the business becomes just too euphoric. Look at Zoom video. Revenue and operating income were
exploding between 2020 and 2022. Revenue kegher during this time,
was 156%. And operating income compounded annual growth rate at this time was a ridiculous 812%.
So the fundamentals were increasing and so was the stock price. But how well did investors
understand the business? Were they buying it because they had insights into Zoom's competitive
advantage? Or were they buying it because the stock price was going up? My assumption is the latter.
Since its all-time high, it has been at a 90% drawdown. The market appraised this business at a
1,600 times EV to EBIT multiple. That's right, 1600 times. Today, it's 15. Now, this is a good
sag and some cautionary advice for investing that Peter Lynch writes about. While you can like a product and
even have intimate knowledge of a product, this isn't really enough information just to own the stock.
Lynch cautions to never invest in a business until you do your own homework on things, like company
earnings, financial health, positioning versus competitors, plans for growth, management, and so forth.
Returning to the Zoom example, many investors had used Zoom pretty extensively during the pandemic and probably had a great experience using the product.
However, as Lynch said, that is insufficient information to buy the sock.
A quick analysis of Zoom may have identified competitors such as Google Meets, Microsoft Teams, or WebEx, and failed to see the competitive advantage that Zoom had versus these tech giants.
In that case, they may have simply taken a pass and avoided the 90% trip on the way down.
Now, there's a mental model that I've been thinking about a lot lately that I've coined
as covert cyclicality.
It just means that we fail to see the embedded cyclicality of a business and make mistakes
because of it.
Did investors really expect Zoom to continue growing revenue at 156% per year for multiple
years into the future?
It's just not a sustainable growth rate.
But if you use that growth rate, perhaps you could have actually justified paying those
nosebleed valuations for the business.
Another great example Lynch goes over is that of electronic data systems.
This was a hot stock in the late 1960s.
But when Peter saw a brokerage report on the business, his jaw dropped.
It had a PE of 500.
This meant it would take five centuries to make back your investment if EDS earnings remained constant.
The even crazier part about this was that the analyst's writing about it suggested that
the PE was actually cheap and that EDS deserved an even higher evaluation of 1,000 times earnings.
Now the interesting thing about EDS is that the business EDS continued flourishing.
Lynch writes, in the years that followed, EDS the company performed very well.
The earnings and sales grew dramatically and everything it did was a whopping success.
EDS the stock was another story.
In the following years, the price of the business declined from $40 to $3.
And this was all during positive momentum with the business.
But paying an infinite price will often end in misery.
Now, let's be honest about investing.
There are zero investors who make a profit on every single investment that they make.
For every winner a good investor has, they have a dud that moves nowhere or loses money.
But the fascinating part about investing is that even though you won't be right 100% of the time,
you can still be wildly successful.
Peter mentions that he's observed that you only really need six out of 10 winners in a portfolio
to produce satisfactory returns.
Now, there are very few jobs in this world where you can be unsuccessful 40% of the time
and still be considered competent, but investing is one of them.
Now, the key here is to think of two profound words, which are frequency and,
magnitude. You'll have a frequency of how often you're right or wrong. But the frequency isn't
actually what matters most. It's the magnitude of what you make when you win and what you lose
when you lose that matters the most. George Soros said, it's not whether you're right or wrong,
but how much you make when you're right and how much you lose when you're wrong. He's directly
talking about frequency and magnitude here. If you had one big winner, it can really just carry
your investing for almost an entire lifetime. But by the same token, if you put all your money into
with stock that goes to zero, you have decimated your ability to make money into the future.
So make sure that you are taking very good care of your winners and avoid making mistakes
that can really sabotage your entire portfolio.
Now, what is one way to blow up your entire portfolio?
Using leverage.
Don't bother.
The risk is just too high.
One of Lynch's legendary quotes is,
Dumb Money is only dumb when it listens to the smart money.
I love this quote for just so many reasons.
As I've gained more experience in investing, it makes just,
more and more sense. One of the biggest investment problems is the lemming-like behavior of retail
investors who just go out and copy hedge funds. Now, there are actions that hedge funds make that
I personally think are pretty pointless and don't bother copying myself. So here's seven of them.
One, trying to beat the index every single quarter. Two, trying to time the market.
Three, buying businesses with momentum. Four, going short. Five, using leverage. Six, pigeonholing yourself.
into exclusively buying into high market cap businesses. And seven, buying overly complicated
financial derivatives. Now, this is why one of my guardrails is to never watch financial news.
I know I'll probably generate some type of bias if I do. And to combat this, I just simply
don't take part by not watching it. And this isn't just a saying. I literally never watch it.
I couldn't even tell you what channel it was on if you asked me. Now, investing is a game where
you're better off learning timeless principles from investors with worthy track
and putting those principles into action. If you observe Wall Street long enough, you'll realize
very few follow the most common and valuable investing principles that have been around now for over
a century. When I speak with other investors, I often find myself in awe of the number of mature
businesses that they have in their portfolios, even when they seem to be telling me that they're
in growth mode. As we'll go over more later, slow growers or stalwarts are businesses that
probably have the same chance of underperforming the market as they do overperforming it. So if you
you aim to make outsized returns, you are kind of misaligned if you own too many of these businesses.
Now let's get back to one of the primary mistakes investors try to clone from the smart money,
which is trying to time the market.
Timing the market has existed since the inception of the market and will continue until the stock market ends.
Speculation is simply a part of human nature.
To fight the folly of market timing, there are a few things that you must first understand.
Lynch made the excellent point that investors tend to be pessimistic and optimistic at precisely
the wrong times. And because of this, it's simply pointless to attempt to invest in good markets
and exit bad ones. In a study called Mind the Gap, they basically had a 10-year sample size that ended
in 2023. And what they show was that fund investors earned a 6.3% per year dollar-weighted return
over 10 years ended December 31st, 2023, while their fund holdings earned about 7.3%. Now, this was
because they mistime buys and sells and they decrease their time in the market. Now, whether
you own index funds or individual stocks, you're better off having your cash invested rather than
trying to buy in at a future price that you hope will be cheaper than it is currently.
Now, doing this sounds good in practice, but as these 10-year studies show, it just doesn't
work in reality because you just have an inability to time them properly and your emotions
do things that make you do silly things at the wrong times. But Lynn shares some really good news
about our inability to time the markets.
You don't have to be able to predict the stock market to make money in stocks, or else I wouldn't
have made any money.
I've sat right there at my quotron through some of the most terrible drops, and I couldn't
have figured them out beforehand if my life depended on it.
So what about the connections between the market and the general economy?
Economic booms and busts and interest rates.
To this, Lynch would say there is definitely a correlation between something like interest
rates and the stock market. The problem is that nobody can predict what interest rates will be in the
future. So any potential information that you get from attempting to predict that is going to be
as useful as flipping a coin. Lynch points out that there are 60,000 economists in the U.S.
And that they could only forecast recessions and interest rates twice in a row. They'd all be
millionaires. But they aren't. And that should tell you something. Now, instead of market timing,
Peter observed what people were talking about at dinner parties. He mentioned that when
10 people were more interested in chatting with a dentist about plaque than Peter about
stocks, that would probably be a really good sign that the market was about to turn up.
People love to talk, and a lot of that is just that. Talk.
So how do we separate the noise from the facts we need in order to make better decisions?
Lynch says that logic really goes a long way to helping identify the illogic of Wall Street.
Here he says Wall Street thinks just as the Greeks did.
The early Greeks used to sit around for days and debate how many teeth a horse
had. They thought they could figure it out just by sitting there instead of just going and checking
the horse. A lot of investors sit around and debate whether a stock is going up as if the financial
news will give them the answer instead of just checking the company. Now to me, this just
screams that you should be checking the fundamentals of the business regularly much more often than
you should be checking the stock price. Instead of water cooler talk where people are talking about
which industry is going to be the next hot sector to rotate into, look into a specific business
and just find out if their products are flying off the shelf.
Are they so busy that they now have to establish a backlog in order to meet customer demand?
Or maybe the business is forced to increase its capacity by expanding its manufacturing.
These are all honest signals that a business is improving rather than just looking at the stock price.
And these are really the signals that you want to be focusing on when thinking about new investments
rather than pontificating on what AI stocks are going to see the largest increase in a stock price.
Peter had some other classic stories about the macro environment and how confusing
it could be. For instance, he mentioned that the Cuban missile crisis was the closest that the world
ever got towards nuclear war. Peter was scared for his family, himself, and his country. And yet on the
same day as the crisis, the stock market fell a mere 3%, a number that is a lot lower than you'd expect,
given the real possibility of a nuclear event. Then he notes that seven months later, President Kennedy
forced the steel industry to roll back prices. Lynch didn't have any fear for anyone's life.
And yet the market had one of the most precipitous drops in history at minus 7%.
Lynch writes, I was mystified that the potential of a nuclear Holocaust was less terrifying
to Wall Street than the president's meddling in business.
Now, I really like this insight because it shows that if we can even predict future events,
we can never predict how the market will react to these events.
And in our ever-changing world, there's always something to worry about.
If every worry you have eats away at you and prevents you from staying invested, it's yet another
reason that you probably should not be invested in individual stocks as you're going to have a very,
very hard time succeeding.
Now let's take a short detour here and talk a little bit about what Peter Lynch thought
about the efficient market hypothesis.
As you may have already guessed, he was not a fan.
Through all the experiences that Lynch had, he could see that the academic side of investing
was really disconnected from reality.
And therefore, it had limited utility for him.
He made an observation that it's hard to support academic theory that states the market is rational
when you know someone who just made 20 times on a KFC investment and spelled out in advance
before they made that money why the stock was likely to rise. Because of this, Lynch distrusted
theorizers and prognosticators. This point here about Lynch being a contrarian on Wall Street
is worth discussing more. When he wrote this book, IBM was the equivalent of our Apple,
I think, in 2024. Lynch said that there was an unwritten rule in Wall Street.
Wall Street, that you'd never get fired from your job if you lost money investing in IBM.
If you bought IBM and its stock went down, your boss would call you into his office and ask,
what's wrong with IBM? But if you bought something like LeQuintamotorins and it went down,
your boss would ask, what's wrong with you? Now, this fits in perfectly with a recent chat that I
had with Scott Barbie on TIP 651. In that episode, I referenced a quote that Scott wrote in one of
his letters. As a deep value investor, if you get it wrong, you can get hit. It's one thing to forecast
Cisco earnings wrong in 1999 and lose money conventionally. But if a deep value investor loses
money failing to spot an accounting scam on, say, a small mining stock, that can really
damage their reputation. Now, the primary lesson here is that investors on Wall Street don't have
the luxury of purely looking for businesses that will go up in value in the future. They have
investors to a piece. They have bosses looking over their shoulders.
some even have a legacy that they want to maintain.
So fitting in the crowd and not doing anything overly exciting
is often the easiest way to tick off all these boxes
and act similarly and get similar results
to all the other investors out there.
But following the crowd isn't the roadmap
to finding outstanding investments.
This is yet another reason to avoid following Wall Street blindly.
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Back to the show.
On the other side of things,
being a contrarian doesn't mean
you should also be shorting stocks
that are currently popular on Wall Street,
as Lynch outlines.
For him, a true contrarian
is an investor who waits for those incredible companies
until Wall Street and other investors
no longer care about them.
If you bring up a name that
makes other investors yawn, you're on the right track. Now, this has all sorts of second order
effects. One, these businesses have very little institutional interest. Two, they will tend to
lack much, if any, institutional ownership. And three, unloved investments often carry a heavily discounted
price. The best part of all of this is that these businesses often have incredible products that
are in high demand. This can spell reasonable and sustainable growth that is heavily discounted
by the market, but not necessarily discounted in heavily followed stocks.
I own a business that shall remain unnamed.
That does a great job of exemplifying some of this.
I own it for a year now.
When I bought it, it was selling out of trailing PE of around eight, but it had just
doubled its operating cash flow quarter over quarter.
Now, not only were the fundamentals shown in the financial statements, but they also
had some really big audacious goals and plans for the future that they released in their
presentations.
And the thing that was really interesting was that up to that point, they were executed.
at a very high level. And even today, a year later, still haven't sold any of my shares,
and the business continues to execute. The business is now trading at a forward P of about 20 times
with recurring revenue now making up 88% of its total revenue. So you could say it's much more fairly
valued now. But even with the business growing almost 200% year to date, the business is only
valued at a market cap of about $160 million. Now, if we took the same business that I'm
talking about here, multiplied its market cap by, you know, 10 or 20, and therefore,
would probably also have many, many people on Wall Street knowing about it, there's no chance
that I ever would have been able to buy it at a P of 8. It might be at a P.E. of something like 40 or
maybe even more. Now, this is why the contrarian move is to look for businesses that barely
anybody is talking about. You'll find hidden gems that Wall Street will once again fall in love
with at a later date. And then you'll have your multi-bagger returns. The following section I want
to discuss is investing in the types of business I listed above. It's not for everyone. Small businesses
definitely do have a bad reputation. For every winner you see in the microcrap market,
the expectation is that there will be a bunch of zeros. And I don't necessarily disagree with
this, although I think a lot of the negative bias is just that bias. Whether a business is 10 million
or 10 billion in market cap doesn't mean the business is much different. It's just operating
at different scales. They still have management, production, offices, customers, suppliers,
aboard capital allocation decisions, and so forth. To say a smaller business is more dangerous than a
bigger one is like saying a two-seater car is more dangerous to drive than a minivan.
Now, the primary difference of investing in smaller businesses is the amount of easily
and accessible information.
If you want to learn more about Google, you can access many years of conference calls
and transcripts as well as analyst reports.
Or if you have some decent connections, you can find a specialist in the industry to talk
to to learn more about the business, how it's position versus competitors and the industry
in general.
With smaller businesses, you don't always have access to any.
of this information. They might not have quarterly calls because they have little or zero interest
from analysts. There are zero analyst reports to learn information from. And finding anyone who's even
heard of the business is going to be a challenge. And often, some of these businesses don't even
have IR sites or have any types of presentations. But investing is a solitary game where
if you are willing to do the work and form your own opinion, you can find some insanely
undiscovered gems. We should never strive to borrow conviction from others anyways.
Nor should we rely on the opinion of others to validate our own.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had a large influence on Buffett's father, explained this better than I ever could.
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion.
It is easy in solitude to live after our own.
But the great man is he, who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
If you want to learn about any business, large or small, you should try to talk to people in the business.
is customers, suppliers, former employees and competitors to best shape your own opinion.
The final point here on smaller businesses that Lynch points out is why some of these
businesses are underfollowed in the first place.
The simple reason is regulatory reasons.
Institutions are mandated to be able to easily move in and out of a stock.
And in order for that to happen, there often has to be market cap restrictions that must be
met until a business is available for purchase by institutions.
Lynch mentions $100 million in market cap, which still seems like the magic number today in 2024.
Now, let's say a business trades at a market cap of $50 million.
Very few institutions will bother with this business as they can't even own it in the fund if they wanted to.
But now let's say over a short period of time, the business appreciates a price to $100 million.
Now funds can buy in.
Lynch noted that this resulted in a strange phenomenon.
Large funds are allowed to buy shares in small companies only when the shares,
are no bargain. You have to decide if investing in smaller businesses is right for you. There are no
shortcuts in investing. But no matter what market cap you want to eventually own, you'll need some
sort of framework to help you find the company in the first place. And this is where one up on
Wall Street really shines. Peter Lynch says the best place to start looking for multi-begger
stocks, which are stocks that can double in price or more, is close to home. You can literally
start in your own home. A technique that Monich-Pabry shared at the Berkshire
Hathaway annual this year, was how college students with little life experience could find ideas.
His solution was simple.
Look at your bank and credit card statements and observe where you're spending money.
Those are products and services that you have firsthand knowledge of and might have an edge over the market in.
Another way I like to add to this is by asking friends and family.
I know Peter Lynch got many of his ideas from his wife and children and learning where they shopped,
which would lead him to his next area of mining for ideas, which would be.
was going to the mall. A trip to your local mall is a simple way of finding new ideas that
might also be undiscovered by Wall Street. For instance, Lynch says the customers in central
Ohio, where KFC first opened up, the mob down at Pick and Save all had a chance to say,
wow, this is great. I wonder about the stock. Long before Wall Street got its original clue.
The other interesting piece of information that the average person can get on a business is to spot
when a business is really starting to heat up. Lynch says that the grassroots observer can
witness the power of a turnaround six to 12 months before a regular financial analyst can.
And this can give a really good head start to investors that are anticipating increased earnings
power, which is ultimately what makes a stock go up in price. We'll be going over this a little
more later in this episode. The primary lesson that he imparts here is that investors should put
in at a minimum the same amount of work they do when shopping for groceries. Most people want a good
deal when they go grocery shopping, and the same should be true for picking stock.
Now, the last great place to search for ideas is through your work.
Your work offers incredibly good insights into products and services that a business simply
cannot run without.
I was recently chatting with a member of the TIP Mastermind community who specializes
in the food industry.
Through his privately owned partial ownership of a local food manufacturer, he has come to gain
excellent insights and contacts into things like products that are flying off the shelf
in other retail locations, distribution, sales strategies, and observations on margins of
of different companies in that arena and their competitors.
Now, all this information he uses to help him generate ideas for investing in public businesses.
If you look at Stig, through his extensive work managing the investor's podcast network,
he's gained excellent insights into podcast distribution and advertising,
which is a significant reason why, as far as I know, he still owns Spotify and Alphabet.
So, you know, the simple reasons with Spotify is it's the biggest podcast distributor in the world,
and he has worked with them now for quite a few years and has some decent insights into how they
operate and the lead that they have over competitors.
And then when you look at Google, you know, YouTube is another great video distributor.
And even though TIP, you know, you're probably listening to this maybe as a podcast,
but you might also be just throwing this on YouTube and not even watching me speak, but just listening
to it.
So because of that ability of YouTube to work both on video and audio, it's a very powerful
platform and SIG realizes the power of that, which is why you'll see all of our episodes on YouTube
as well. Now, Lynch makes it very clear that simply using a business's product is not enough
reason to buy the stock. There are three things you must do to find out if a product or a
service that you're using is also a publicly traded business worth owning. So the first thing you have
to do is do the proper analysis on the business to understand if, you know, it has the right
metrics? Is it a business that's not growing at all? Is it losing money? Is it piling up debt? Is management
involved in some sort of fraud or has management not have any track record of success in previous
endeavors? These are all things that you need to take into account. The second one is that if you think
a business is good in your location, you should actually wait and see if it's good in another location
as well. And the third one here is if you love a specific product, you must ensure that the parent
company will earn meaningful revenue from its sales growth. Now, I already covered some of the
tenants of proper analysis, but in case you need a quick refresher, they are things like analyzing
a company's earnings, financial health, positioning versus competitors, plans for growth,
management skills, capital allocation, etc. The second point here about a business that is
testing new geographies is very important. Lynch writes, successful cloning is what turns a local
taco joint into a Taco Bell or a local clothing store into the limited. But there's a
no point buying the stock until the company has proven that the cloning actually works.
Now, this is a very good cautionary warning to ensuring that a business will take off in other
states where preferences can be different. The beginning of the quote I said above actually
references a business that Lynch didn't buy, which was called Buildner's, which at the time
Lynch thought was a mistake. But fast forward a few years and Buildner's excessively aggressive
growth actually spelled the demise of the business and it ended up filing for Chapter 11.
in bankruptcy. While it was great in Lynch's home straight of Massachusetts, it just didn't
fare well in other locations. Now, many of you will be familiar with Seas candies, the low-hanging
fruit example. Buffett and Munger had a heck of a time attempting to expand the business outside
of the state of California, before ultimately giving up for a time. But they clearly didn't give up fully
as I went on Seas website and I can see that they're selling their products in many different
States as well as internationally, albeit on a much smaller scale than in the U.S.
Now, if you find a product you use and like and the company is looking to expand, it might be
worth waiting a while to observe how busy locations are in other states or countries.
One example that I like to use this on is Eritzia.
I've been traveling pretty regularly to the U.S. in places like New York, Washington State, or
Hawaii, and whenever I'm there, I love going to the local Eritzia store to see how busy the locations
are and I usually see that they're packed and I love seeing that. So the final point here
before you decide to buy a stock of the product you like is to make sure that the product
produces a meaningful amount of revenue for the parent company. Lynch gives a really good example
of a skin cream that was made by Johnson & Johnson, which was called Retinae. The product was
originally intended for use as a treatment for acne. But then doctors discovered that it could
also be used to fight skin blots and blemishes that were caused by the sun. The product is
The product picked up a news headline and took off as an anti-aging wrinkle fighter.
Investors clearly loved all the positive news as well.
Johnson and Johnson's stock jumped $8 per share in 1988 in the two days after the article
was released.
This added a whopping $1.4 billion in market capitalization to Johnson and Johnson.
Now, this sounds great in all, but it's a pretty clear example of how irrational markets can
be.
When looking at the previous year's sales of Retinae, they were readily available, and the product
only brought in $30 million of revenue.
And to boot, Johnson and Johnson was still under review from the FDA on the new claims that were
featured in this news article.
So when it came down to it, retinae product was really a nothing burger for the overall
movement of Johnson and Johnson's intrinsic value.
Unfortunately, many of the great brands that you probably use on a daily basis are just
a small part of large conglomerates.
The deodorant I use is part of Proctor and Gamble.
My toothpaste is part of Haley on PLC, which also owns Advil and Centrum.
One of my favorite condiments Heinz ketchup is owned by the Kraft Hines company.
So because of that reason, not everything that you use on a daily basis will actually make
a rational investment.
But, you know, keep searching because there definitely are many winners out there that can move
the needle.
Now, Peter mentions something significant in how investors should think about the stock
market. Judging performance based on short-term results from the market is going to cause all
sorts of just poor decision-making. You'll think you're a genius when you're lucky, and you'll
think you're an idiot when you're unlucky, which is why thinking of the stock market as an abstraction
is so important. Lynn shares a wonderful point that Warren made about the stock market.
The gist of it being that Warren doesn't believe that the stock market exists. The only reason
it's there is as a reference to see if anybody is offering to do anything foolish. This helps him
make the market his servant and not his master. In the Warren Buffett way, Robert Hags from shares
some more information on this. For Buffett, stocks are an abstraction. He doesn't think in terms of market
theories, macroeconomic concepts, or even sector trends. He makes investment decisions based only on how
a business operates. And this is really just a beautiful way to invest and think about the stock market.
It helps you focus on the business and eliminates a large amount of noise out there that's just
screaming at you to make poor decisions.
Now, on the topic of poor decisions, many investors are overweighing stock tips.
Luckily, Peter Lynch has some excellent advice on how we should treat this type of advice.
He has two primary pieces of advice.
One, you can listen to stock tips, but treat them as anonymous pitches that are delivered
to your mailbox.
And two, avoid the opinions of others on the stocks that you already own.
Now, he lists some very good reasons to treat advice and opinions this way.
For stock tips, people will be biased towards the people that are giving them a tip.
He gives two really good examples.
One being when a hypothetical family member you have who is buying a specific stock,
shares the name with you and also happens to be rich.
When you associate the two, you may erroneously assume that the stock they're sharing with you
will also make you rich.
And the second one here is if you were to get a team,
from the same family member that maybe sometime in the past had given you a name that doubled
in a very short time, you'll give them a much higher weighting in future ideas. But the problem
with that is one person can have one stock double and have 50 stocks that go in half. So that
unfortunately, you can't really use that information in that sense. Second, is if you were to get a
tip from someone in the past that had a double in a short time. Now, let's say that person is buying
another stock, which prompts you to believe that a similar result is going to happen with this
new idea. Now, you can obviously tell there's going to be tons of problems with this. One person
could have a stock that doubled and they could have 50 that went down 50%. So this just is not a
good way of taking stock tips. So treat stock tips like you would treat a new product that
you are really enjoying. Make it a lead to allow you to do your own research.
and due diligence, but never a justification to blindly buy a stock. Now, equally as painful
as stock tips is relying on the opinions of others, on businesses that you already own that can
just cause you to do just some very silly things. Lynch gives a really good example on Warner.
So Lynch received a call from a technical analyst on Warner. Now, Peter was not a technical-based
investor at any point of his career that I'm aware of. But out of curiosity, he asked this
analyst his opinion on Warner. The analyst told him the technicals
were showing that the stock price was extremely overextended.
Lynch did nothing with his advice for six months, which was probably the right move.
But during that time, Warner had continued to increase in price, going from $26 all the way up
to $32.
The little voice in Peter Lynch's head was telling him that if the business had been extended
at 26, then 32 was likely to be extremely overextended.
Lynch checked the fundamentals of the business and nothing had changed to erode his conviction.
So he held on. Then the stock went up to $38. And then he writes here, for no conscious reason,
I began a major sell program. I must have decided that whatever was extended at 26 and hyper extended at
32 had surely been stretched into three prefixes at $38. Now luckily, this is a type 2 error where you
aren't necessarily hurt by the decision in terms of losing money, but you're definitely pained by
what could have been. And after Peter had sold Warner, it marched up to over a hundred
$180. Now, this is a lesson in self-reliance and really making your own decisions. The more you talk
about your ideas with others, the more opinions you're likely to run into. While some opinions
may agree with you, there will be ones that disagree with you as well. I personally find the
opinions of people that disagree with me to be highly valuable, as sometimes others have a different
perspective than I do regarding a business, and I think it's up to me to find out if I could be
wrong about my current assumptions. The key is to be open about being wrong and attempting to
really get to the truth. Just understand that there may be times when everyone thinks you're wrong
when you are actually right. And in those times is where the best investing opportunities lie.
But you can see the difficulty in being one of the very few people who is thinking completely
different than everyone else. This is why it's vital to come up with your own views and then
adjust them based on your own findings and not on the biases of other people. One of my favorite
aspects about investing is that if you find the right business, the decision to sell becomes
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All right. Back to the show. Let's go over 13 of the characteristics of stocks that are worth
holding on to for long periods, according to Peter Lynch. One, it sounds dull or even better
ridiculous. Two, it does something dull. Three, it does something disagreeable. Four,
it's a spinoff. Five, institutions don't own it and analysts don't follow it.
Look for low institutional ownership.
Now, I've covered this already, but I will add that Lynch felt the dream of a great investment
would be where the business has never had an analyst inquire about it or if analysts would deny
even knowing about it.
He said, when I talked to a company that tells me the last analyst showed up three years ago,
I can hardly contain my enthusiasm.
Six, the rumors abound.
It's involved in things such as toxic waste, dirty things like garbage, and or the mafia.
7. There's something depressing about it. Eight, it's in a no growth industry.
Nine, it's got a niche. 10, people have to keep buying it.
11, it's a user of technology.
12, the insiders are buyers. And 13, the company is buying back shares.
Now, instead of breaking down each of these points individually, I thought I'd go over a business
I've recently been researching and own a small stake in. This is natural resource partners.
Using the characteristics above, it ticks many of these qualities.
The simple name, Natural Resource Partners, is pretty dull and boring sounding to me.
Now, it's a royalty business on mineral rights and has a partnership on a soda ash mine.
So it kind of ticks that dull in terms of the business model.
It has mineral rights that are primarily involved in coal, which has a very negative association these days due to the carbon footprint of coal.
It does have institutional ownership, but the coal,
exposure is a major turnoff for many other institutions. They are in the coal industry, which is
unlikely to see significant growth due to all these different renewable initiatives out there.
And coal is cyclical as the royalty payments are based on things like coal volumes and coal pricing.
Now, the business definitely has some niche characteristics, especially in terms of their
carbon neutral initiatives. Now, this is kind of a future call option on carbon sequestration.
NRP's property is permitted to store the carbon, which is very powerful as you can't just put it anywhere that you want.
Now, in terms of having a product that is needed, I think thermal coal will eventually be phased out, but that's going to be in many, many decades from now.
But met coal is required for the manufacturing of steel, which is very unlikely to disappear anytime soon because steel is very important into infrastructure.
And as countries like China and India grow their infrastructure out, the need for steel is going to be continued.
continue to be there. In terms of insider buying, NRP has had insiders buying and as late as
2023 at prices that are just about 14% below the prices as of August 22nd to 2024. Now, the
business isn't currently buying back shares because their primary goal right now is to pay down
debt and retire the preferred shares. But after that point, they have signaled that they
will have significant free cash flows and buybacks will be one way that they can return that
cash flow back to shareholders. So this business has many characteristics of a good business,
which is what got me interested in it in the first place. Time will tell how that plays out.
Now, another point Peter points out to avoid buying the wrong stocks are threefold. One,
avoid buying the hottest stock in the hottest industry. Two, avoid buying businesses that are
getting the most publicity. And three, avoid stocks that everyone is talking about, such as your family,
friends, colleagues, Uber drivers, shoe shiners, etc. Now that we know some of the attributes of a
good stock, the next step is to understand why a stock changes in price. Now, I've seen pushback on
the emphasis that I personally place on earnings for stocks that go up in price, but I'll stick
with my guns. And I know Lynch agrees that it does all come down to earnings. For out the books,
he gives plenty of charts that show stock price and earnings. And while the price does fluctuate
in short periods over the long term. If a business is earning more money per share in, say, five
years than it is today, the stock price will reflect it. Sure, if you look at shorter periods,
you will see earnings go up and the price go down for various reasons, but it's very infrequent
to see a business with much higher earnings that doesn't also get an increased stock price.
When looking at the price of stocks, Peter Lynch generally will give preference to businesses
that are trading at a higher PE with higher growth, than a lower PE with low growth. Let's go
over an example of why this is. Let's say we have two companies, which we'll call just
Company A and Company B. They both start with a dollar in earnings per share, EPS. Company A is growing
EPS at 20% and starts with a PE multiple of 20 times, while company B is growing EPS at 10%
and has a PE multiple of 10 times. Now let's assume these businesses continue growing at these
historical rates into the future. Which one would you choose? The value investor in you might choose
the 10 times PE just because it's cheaper. But if you were looking to maximize your returns,
this would actually be the wrong answer. You'd want company A. By the end of 10 years,
company A now has an EPS of $6.19 versus an EPS of $2.59 for company B. At the same PE,
company A is worth $123.80 versus an original price of $20. And company B is now with $12.000.
$25 and 90 cents versus the original price of $10.
Now, you don't need to be a mathematician here to see that company A is a superior investment.
Now, this is just the magic of compounding.
If you find a business that can plow its earnings back into his business at high rates of return,
you can expect it to continue to rise in value faster than a different business with lower rates of return.
Peter Lynch gave Walmart as an example of a successful compounder where Walmart could plow all of its money back into the business and just open new wall.
Walmart stores. Now, part of investing is knowing what not to invest in as well as what you
should be investing in. So let's look at some other red flags in potential investments that
might immediately let you skip an investment and conserve your time. So the first thing here is
the next something. For instance, many tech stocks in Lynch's time were touted as the next IBM.
And most of these businesses failed miserably, as did IBM due to increased competition.
The next is to avoid diversification.
So you'll probably know the diversification concept from Peter Lynch where he said that you don't want to make your portfolio worse by selling your really good stocks to buy more of your really bad stocks.
But in this sense, he's actually looking at it in terms of the business level.
And he says that a lot of businesses will use their cash to engage in M&A.
and unfortunately a lot of businesses engage in M&A the wrong way where they're buying businesses
that are outside of their core competencies.
The next error here is whisper stocks.
So these are stocks that reportedly can solve big problems, but they just come with too much
hair.
As Lynch points out, the solution is often overly complicated and very imaginative.
I assume he called these the whisper stocks because they're stocks that people didn't want to
necessarily talk about out loud because maybe they were just too speculative.
of. Beware of over-concentration. This can be heavily concentrated on suppliers or customers. So
this really reminds me of the early days of Nike when they had to rely on basically one supplier
and they ended up having a lot of issues with this one supplier, which almost ended the business
before it even took off. But they ended up getting through and diversifying their suppliers.
And then another recent example when you look at customers is Micron and Huawei. So
micron was no longer able to sell to Huawei because of their relationship with the Chinese government,
but Huawei actually made up 10% of Micron's revenue. So losing that one client was pretty painful
in the short term. Next one here is beware of the exciting name. So dot com in the tech bubble is just a
really good example. So in 1999, there was a business called MIS International. Now this business
basically didn't have any customers and didn't have any profits. Its stock was trading below 50,
cents a share. The firm then decided to change its name to jump on the internet bandwagon and they settled
on cosmos.com. The stock almost immediately soared to $5. So here are a few more red flags
focused on a business's financial health that can be easily analyzed to better understand whether
a business you are looking at is healthy or not. Using book value to determine whether a business is
valuable, Lynch gave an example of Penn Central which had a book value of $60 and then immediately
went bankrupt. He also gave the example of a business called Alan Woodsteel, which had a stated
book value of $40 per share. Within six months, it ended up filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy,
but unfortunately its assets were overstated in a mess, and they ended up selling for only $5 million.
So the point being that book value isn't always very valuable, especially in these bankruptcy
situations where the assets may be heavily marked up. Another one he talks about here is
buying businesses whose inventories are growing faster than sales growth.
This is a really, really good metric to track if you own retail businesses, groceries-type
businesses, or any business that requires inventory that it needs to sell in order to generate
sales.
He gave a really good example of a company that he visited where they had such a build-up
in inventory that they had to store their inventory in the parking lot.
And this was a really giant red flag that the business was unable to sell its inventory,
and it was probably a pass.
And then the last one here is just to do.
with pension plans. So vested pension plan benefits should hopefully be lower than pension
plan assets. But if it's in reverse, then if bankruptcy was to happen, those pension
plans need to be continued to be paid. So you as a shareholder are going to get further
punishment in that case. So now that we have a better idea of characteristics to look for in winning
and losing stocks, how do we manage them inside of a portfolio? Lynch had some really interesting
takes here that were not necessarily information that he followed himself while running the Magellan
Fund. He said that you shouldn't focus on a fixed number of stocks, but investigate how many good
stocks you know about on a case by case basis. He writes, in my view, it's best to own as many
stocks as there are situations in which, A, you've got an edge, and B, you've uncovered an exciting
prospect that passes all of the tests of research. Maybe that's a single stock, or maybe
it's a dozen stocks. Maybe you've decided to specialize in turnarounds or asset plays, and you buy
several of those. Perhaps you happen to know something special about a single turnaround or a single
asset play. There's no use diversifying into unknown companies just for the sake of diversity.
A foolish diversity is a hobgoblin of small investors. Now, I like this thoughtful view here
on diversity, but I also think if you were to follow this advice closely, you'd realize that
you'd have very few ideas that satisfy his two points on having an edge and where the business
passes all research tests.
For the average person with a lot of time, even 20 ideas seems like it's probably pushing it,
but it's probably doable.
But when you factor in a full-time job, I think 20 becomes a pretty tough number to handle.
Now, you might have an edge in many different businesses in a specific industry, but the time needed
to best understand each of those businesses is finite.
So it's up to the individual investor to determine how much time is required for the reachers process
and then to allocate time to potential and current positions.
The more positions you have, the less time you can spend on each one.
So just keep that in mind when thinking about your own diversification.
If you truly don't have time or don't want to bother understanding businesses at the depth
that I've discussed in this episode, I think you're probably best off indexing.
And there's nothing wrong with it.
All the work that I just mentioned throughout this episode can be ignored while you get to make
market-like returns.
Additionally, since our audience is wide in terms of age and experience, it's worth mentioning
how diversification changes as you get older.
Lynch points out that younger investors with the lifetime of wage-earning potential can
afford to take more chances on multi-beggers because any potential losses can be made up
through savings going on into the future.
But as you age and your wage-earning years get closer to
closer to zero, that same strategy becomes overly risky. Additionally, older investors who are no longer
earning a wage may require income from the portfolio to pay for their living expenses. As we will
discuss here shortly, dividend paying stocks have certain qualities that could be positive for some
investors and negative for others. Now that we have a better understanding of how to manage our
portfolios based on our time preferences and age, let's discuss one of the most difficult parts of
investing, which is selling. Lynch says that many investors follow selling adages that have been
set by short-term thinkers. He mentions platitudes like, take profits when you can, and a sure
gain is always better than a possible loss. But he points out that if you've done the necessary work,
bought the right stock, and have the business's fundamentals improving, it's really a shame if you sell
it. Now, there's always this tug between understanding when a business's growth story ends,
slows down for good, temporarily slows down, or hopefully accelerates.
And if you can properly designate your business into one of those buckets,
you can best understand which businesses we're selling or keeping or even buying more of.
Long-term investors should be concerned with businesses where growth is accelerating.
But a true value investor should look for temporary slowdowns in an otherwise great growth story.
These temporary hiccups and growth can often scare away many investors who fear that growth is permanently decreased.
When this happens, many investors will panic sell, offering wonderful opportunities to long-term
investors who have a good understanding of the temporary nature of concentrated periods of slow growth.
Lynch also discusses two examples of people who sell for completely irrational reasons.
One, are people who sell a stock because it's cheap and they can't lose much?
Now, let's say we have two people that have $10,000 to spend on one stock.
One person spends it on a stock that's $100 a share, and another person spends it on a stock.
stock that's a dollar a share. Now, if each of these stocks go to zero, you're still losing
$10,000. So this information is nonsensical. Now, the second irrational reason for selling
is in regards to when you use somebody else's gain and compare it as a personal loss to
yourself. Now, investing is a game where nobody, and I mean nobody, will pick every single
winner. So you don't want to be fomowing into a business where future success is heavily baked
into the price just because you weren't early enough. There will always be another opportunity
out there that is the right fit for you. If you're comparing yourself to others, you're just
constantly going to be letting yourself down. It's also worth noting that Lynch found that many
of his big winners languished in the unknown for multiple years before eventually becoming
multi-beggers. So just realize that even while a business is improving, the market may not see
it as quickly as you do. Be patient because once the business starts generating higher and higher
profits, it will reward the shareholders of that business with a higher share price, more in line
with the intrinsic value of the business. Now, the final section I want to discuss on Lynch's book here
is the categories for his six types of investments. They are, one, slow growers, two, stalwarts,
three, cyclicals, four, fast growers, five turnarounds, and six asset plays. The reason he separated
the stocks into these categories is because he understood that you can't treat investments that are completely
different in terms of value and growth the same. He wrote, there's no point in treating a young
company with the potential of a Walmart like a stalwart and selling for a 50% gain when there's a
really good chance that your fast grower will give you a 1,000% gain. On the other hand, if Ralston
Purino already has doubled and the fundamentals look unexciting, you're probably pretty crazy to
hold on to it with the same hope. But if you buy Bristol Myers for a good price,
it's reasonable to think that you might put it away and forget about it for 20 years.
But you wouldn't want to forget about Texas Air.
Shaky companies in cyclical industries are not the ones you sleep on through recessions.
Now let's go over each category.
Slow growers are businesses that are likely to grow a little faster than GDP growth.
Think of businesses today like Ford, Procter & Gamble, utilities, and you're definitely on the right track.
These are businesses that many investors like because they pay a steady and growing dividend
and have pretty stable earnings.
And they do have competitive advantages.
Peter noted that he liked businesses and slow growing industries
because you could still find some quality growth businesses
in these industries that would have very, very little competition.
Now, the next category is Star Wars,
which I see as businesses with a lot of similar qualities
to the slow growers,
but have a few additional percentage points of growth.
He says you can expect Star Wars to grow earnings
in the 10 to 12% range.
A few American businesses that fit this model would be
ResMed, tri-point home.
Homes, Westco International, United Health Group, and American Tower.
Stallwards will also tend to pay a dividend.
But there are downsides of paying a dividend.
The less money a business can invest into itself, the lower the compounding will be.
So if you are looking to maximize compounding, a low dividend is preferred.
Another argument for dividends is that dividend paying stocks have less downside during market
corrections.
At least during a correction, you will still get paid to hold the stock versus a business
that pays no dividend.
And another potential benefit, Peter outlines, is that it prevents the wrong business from spending
money poorly on bad acquisitions.
Lynch also makes a point on slow growers and stalwarts that they are unlikely to deliver
multi-bagger results in a shorter period of time.
They are now mature businesses, so you shouldn't expect to generate massive returns from these
types of investments.
But they are stable, and that is why he saw a place for them in his portfolio.
The next type of investment was cyclicals.
These are businesses where sales and profits could rise and fall in regular,
if not predictable fashion.
Think of commodities and you're on the right track.
The point being here is that if you understood a cyclical well,
you could buy it at the bottom of the cycle and sell it at the top of the cycle.
Now, some investors have made a career out of this and some fail miserably.
I would add that if you don't have very good insights and the ability to understand the nuances
of when the cycle is going to turn, you can get very burnt.
But if you do understand the cycles, you can ride the twin engines of growth in earnings growth
and multiple expansion that Chris Mayer has gone over.
Now, the next category is fast growers.
This was Lynch's favorite and mine.
These are among my favorite investments,
small, aggressive, new enterprises that grow at 20 to 25% per year.
If you choose wisely,
this is our land of 10 to 40 beggars and even 200 beggars.
With a small portfolio, one or two of these can make a career.
He also mentions here that fast growers do not have to belong in a fast-growing industry.
Lynch actually preferred businesses growing fast in slow-growing industry.
industries because it protected it from competition. A much-discussed stock that we discuss here
on TIP is Dino Polska. Despite the Polish grocery industry growing at a kegger of only 6% from
2016 to 2022, Dino Polskia's share price grew at a compounded annual growth rate of around
60% during that time period. Now, there are three keys on fast growers. One, don't overpay.
Two, don't forecast impossibly high growth for long periods of time to the future. And three,
understand the competitive landscape and why the business has advantages.
If you ace those three things, you can identify some incredibly good investments.
The next category are turnarounds, which are truly putrid businesses.
Lynch writes, turnaround candidates have been battered, depressed, and often can barely drag
themselves into Chapter 11.
These aren't slow growers.
These are no growers.
These aren't cyclicals that rebound.
These are potential fatalities.
Now, in order to profit from these types of businesses, you must understand what catalysts
is going to bring the business back from the debt.
Being acquired is often a good solution
as the acquirer may have the resources
to right the ship and improve the financial health of the acquired.
I personally don't bother with these types of businesses,
but I do see the attraction.
Many of these businesses will trade at very low,
single-digit P.E. multiples.
And if they can turn things around in short order,
you'll often profit just from multiple expansion alone.
The final category are the asset place.
These are businesses where a company is sitting
on a valuable asset that you know about,
but maybe Wall Street is overlooking.
While it doesn't happen very often with Wall Street having their army of analysts with great
resources, it does still happen if you look close enough.
Lynch points out that the local edge can be utilized to a high degree on asset plays.
Asset plays require the investor to have a good understanding of a business's balance sheet.
The key is to look at the assets on the balance sheet and determine if the assets are
at cost or current value.
Many businesses are not required to list their assets at current value.
So you can find businesses where they may have assets,
on the books that they bought 30 years ago, such as land, that have appreciated by multiples
since that time period. If you live in an area where you know the land is being developed and
you have some insider knowledge of value, you can really see where the local edge can play its
advantage. That's all for today. Thanks for tuning into this episode. If you'd like to connect on
X, follow me at a rational MRKTS or feel free to add me on LinkedIn. I'm constantly
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