Latest stories

Evaluating management: Bayesian reasoning and fallacy of obviousness

E

When I invest in companies, I don’t vouch for or give a character certificate to management. I look at the past and current behavior and then try to arrive at a judgement. In majority of the cases, past behavior is a good indicator, but we do get surprises from time to time.

If new developments make me change my view, I will not try to defend my past decision which was made on a different set of facts. The key is to rationality is to evaluate new facts appropriately and move on from there. As John Maynard Keynes said a long time ago – when facts change, I change my mind. What do you do sir?

Let’s move to the point of how to evaluate management quality in light of poor behavior? For starter, there is no formulae which will give the answer. The best analogy to judge management quality comes from the court system in passing verdict on defendants. A defendant is assumed innocent till proven guilty.

I personally try to look at management with a neutral view when I start analyzing a company. They are neither good nor bad. This is a very important point. I have seen majority of investors start with a presumption of a good or bad management and then collect evidence to prove it. It is very easy to make an assumption and gather enough evidence to prove your point.

The fallacy of obviousness

See this wonderful article which makes the same point. I would highly recommend reading this article. Some excerpts –

So, given the problem of too much evidence – again, think of all the things that are evident in the gorilla clip – humans try to hone in on what might be relevant for answering particular questions. We attend to what might be meaningful and useful

However, computers and algorithms – even the most sophisticated ones – cannot address the fallacy of obviousness. Put differently, they can never know what might be relevant. Some of the early proponents of AI recognised this limitation (for example, the computer scientists John McCarthy and Patrick Hayes in their 1969 paper, which discusses ‘representation’ and the frame problem).

In short, as Albert Einstein put it in 1926: ‘Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.’ The same applies whether we are talking about chest-thumping gorillas or efforts to probe the very nature of reality

Equal priors

The key is to start without an assumption (50-50 probability for both scenarios or equal priors) and look at the meaningful (and not trivial) evidence to come to a conclusion. Once you have done that, your conclusion should not be set in stone, but treated as a hypothesis which can change based on new evidence.

If the management continues to behave well, your confidence is increased. If you start seeing negative behavior, your confidence goes down and at some point (which cannot be mathematically defined), you may lose faith in the management and exit the position.

The above approach is fancifully also called Bayesian reasoning.

One should think probabilistically when evaluating management and not consider these issues as black or white. That’s the essence of Bayesian reasoning.

The central point of this approach is to look at new evidence in light of your prior conclusion and change it in proportion to the evidence. In some case, the new episode may be a small one and will cause you to reduce your level of confidence a bit. In other cases, either the episode or series of episodes will be so awful, that you will be forced to change your mind completely.

—————-

Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

 

Cash and portfolio rotation

C

This short note went out to subscribers recently

You may have noticed that we have been churning the portfolio – selling down old positions and replacing them with new ones, but have not utilized the cash. This has been on purpose as I want to dispassionately look at all our positions and exit those where I feel that the overall risk reward equation could improve by replacing it with something else.

In some cases, the expected returns of the new position may still be the same, but the company has more avenues of growth and has shown consistent performance in the past. In effect the risk profile is lower for the new company. So, the rotation is not always to improve the returns, but often to reduce the risk of the overall portfolio too.

I have harped on the aspect of risk since last year and we were early on it. This will always be the case. No one can predict when the market will turn. Those who claim to do so, are lying and delusional. The best mindset to adopt is to focus on the performance of your companies and ignore all the chatter in the market.

We now have over 30% cash in the portfolio which is slightly higher than the start of the year. I continue to look for new ideas and that is my focus for now. As a result, I have even delayed the half yearly note, which can wait for now.

As the market continues to fall, several good quality companies have started to become attractive and we will deploy our cash when I am comfortable with these companies. I have no idea when the current downturn will end – though I am sure it will eventually.

In the meantime, we could suffer quotational losses on our portfolio (based on the market price), which should not disturb us if the companies we hold continue to perform well. The stock price will eventually follow the earnings.

As I have said in the past, one needs patience to invest sensibly in the stock market. Add a lot courage and a sense of long term optimism to it now.
—————-
Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

An underappreciated edge

A

I wrote the following note recently to our subscribers. Hope you find it useful too.
——————————————-
 
I wrote extensively on risk in the last year’s annual update (read here) and highlighted the fact that cash levels in the model portfolio were at an all-time high. (around 30%).

The reason for pulling back in, the latter part of 2017, was due to the frenzy and crazy valuations in the market. I was no longer comfortable with the risk reward situation and decided to stick to our process even if it meant that we had to forego easy returns.
I think we delivered fairly good results for CY 2017, even though we lagged the market in the second half of the year. More importantly, we dialed down the risk as much as we could.
Not easy to be disciplined
It was not an easy decision. It is painful to watch companies you are researching go up by 50% in a span of few weeks, even before you get a chance to finish your analysis. However, I have felt that a key edge for individual investors is their ability to be patient.
I can assure that it is not easy to sit and do nothing. I am an Engineer and MBA by education and have worked in a corporate job for a long time. As you all know, being patient and doing nothing is not acceptable in these roles. The more you do, the more you are rewarded.
Investing is not the same. More action in terms of buying or selling, especially for our style of investing does not improve returns. On the contrary, as I have often found out, may even result in worse outcomes. The work on research and analysis of current and new position continues behind the scene, but the act of pulling the trigger must be done thoughtfully.
Ignoring noise
We don’t have to react to every bit of news which gets published – oil prices up, interest rates up, some news about the manager’s nephew’s aunt etc. The point extends to the quarterly results too. I have been analyzing the results which have been good for a few of our positions. Overall, if the long-term trajectory of a company is intact, I do not want to read too much into it and take a short-sighted decision.
Most of you are aware of the above attitude and it is not new to you. However, it makes sense for me to emphasize this repeatedly to all of you. In this age of instantaneous news and social media, everyone thinks that reacting to news all the time is the key to making above average returns.
I am increasingly of the view, that in the current environment of hyper speed and automated systems, investors like us will do better by taking an opposite view – slow down, think deeply about a few companies and focus on the long-term trends. We will win as we simply have much lesser competition in this space.
Several of our current positions exemplify this mindset. We have held them for years and will continue to do so as long as they continue to perform and are not overly expensive.
Not blind to risk
The above does not mean that I am blind to risk and will be patient for the sake of it. If something goes wrong at a company level, I want to take time and think deeply about it and then take a decisive action.
However, my bias is usually do nothing as I have learnt from experience that most activity in the portfolio does not add much to the returns, only makes us feel that we are doing ‘something’. Although some of you may not share this sentiment and have numbers to back up a more active form of investing, I can only say that one has to invest based on their own temperament.
You will have to be comfortable with our slow and plodding style of investing.
A structural advantage
Mutual fund managers and other professional investors cannot  afford to lag the market for long due to career risk. If you think otherwise, then you under-appreciate the pressure on someone who may not be able to provide for his or her family if they lose their job due to under-performance. A rare few can manage that pressure, but don’t count it.
There is a structural advantage if the Investment advisor (we should mention Investment Adviser) does not have a career risk when he or she makes good long-term decisions, even if that causes the portfolio to lag in the short term. This advantage (for the clients) is further enhanced when the manager invests a majority of his net worth in the same manner as the client.
Me and Kedar have setup the partnership in such a way that we do not face any such career risk. This edge has allowed us to be patient and not worry about the optics of our actions. I have often ignored emails from some of you, wanting to do ‘something’, if I don’t think it makes sense in the long run.
In addition to that a large part of our networth is invested in the same fashion as the model portfolio. This does not guarantee that each of our decision will be right, but our incentives are aligned with yours. We eat our own cooking.
We have also made it a point to ensure that subscribers who join us, are aware of our approach and buy into it. We will not deviate from it even if some of you write to me and start getting impatient (wanting to pull the trigger).
In the pipeline
Our cash levels are around 30% of the portfolio and I continue to look at new ideas. I don’t want to rush into it. We will add to the existing positions or to new ones if the price is right and I feel comfortable with the company’s prospects.
If all of us plan to invest for next 10-20 years, a few months will not make all that difference. We are in this for the long haul.

 

—————-
Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

Get Ready

G

I wrote the following to my subscribers recently. Hope you find it useful too.

————————-
I am sure some of you got sick of my repeated discussion of risk management last year. In a bull market, the last thing you want to discuss about is risk. If a small cap stock, especially an IPO goes up by 3X in 3 months inspite of having an operating history of just a few years, forgoing such an opportunity to reduce portfolio risk appeared foolish.

This is always the case in bull markets. However, the same people who ignore risk in the stock market, do not behave in a similar fashion in other parts of their life. Have you ever heard someone with auto insurance, regret collecting the assured amount, inspite of paying the premium?

The price of focusing on risk and managing the downside during bull market is paid in the form of forgone returns. One should think of these ‘lost’ returns as an insurance premium you pay for the bear markets.
 
Let me explain how

Volatility at play
Let’s look at two managers who end up generating the same returns over a 5-year period.

Manager A (cautious and nervous)

Year 1 :           +20%
Year 2 :           +20%
Year 3 :           -5%
Year 4 :           +23%
Year 5 :           +20%

This manager has delivered a CAGR of 15% with low returns in up markets and a lower drop during the bear market.

Manager B (bold and confident)
Year 1 :           +50%
Year 2 :           +50%
Year 3 :           -50%
Year 4 :           +40%
Year 5 :           +30%

This manager has also delivered a CAGR of around 15% and beats the market by a big margin during up markets, but also get wacked during the downturn.

The reason manager B does well during bull markets, but get hurt during the downturns is often due to a high level of concentration in the portfolio. It is close to impossible to have a highly diversified portfolio of 30+ stocks and deliver a big outperformance.

The price of a concentrated portfolio (and high returns),is the much higher volatility of returns.

The guts to hold
Now, some of you may argue that as the eventual returns are the same, the path to it does not matter. To answer that question, you have to ask yourself – will you hold on if your entire portfolio dropped by 50% (and not one stock) and what if it’s the first year of your investment? More importantly, will you stay with a manager who performed this way?

I can state with a high level of certainty, that almost 99% of investors will dump the manager B and exit if the entire portfolio dropped by 50% or more. It is tough enough to hold based on your own conviction. To trust a person, you do not know personally, with this kind of volatility is close to impossible.

The net result of the above two styles is that manager A will end up delivering a CAGR of 15% for investors whereas those with manager B would end up with a CAGR of around 6% (assume they exit in year 3 and put all that money in FDs).

The above discussion is a mathematical and behavioral reason for my following comment – ‘No point getting rich, if you had a terrifying experience reaching that point’. The reality is that most folks will throw in the towel in middle of the journey and never get rich by the magic of compounding.

Time to get ready
We started raising the cash levels in the middle of last year as valuations went crazy. Our model portfolio trailed the midcap and small cap indices in the second half of the year

That was the insurance premium we paid to sleep better this year.

Since the start of the year, the two indices are down by 10-15% whereas we are down by much lower. I hope you are holding on and not planning to throw in the towel. I am amused to see a lot of commentators and investors talk of this drop as some major event. It clearly shows they have not followed the market history.

The Indian stock markets, especially the small and mid-cap indices have dropped by this level every few years. The real bear market in this segment is when the index drops by 25%+ and the scary one is if it drops 40%+. Will that happen in 2018? – I don’t know and have never tried to predict.

What I do know is that on average the companies we hold are doing well and as prices have dropped, the market is presenting an opportunity. By my last count, atleast 6 companies in the model portfolio are below the buy price and can be bought upto the allocations in the model portfolio.

Will the market continue to drop and more stocks drop below our buy price? Will the stocks already on the buy list continue to drop due to which you could have quotational losses (and not real losses) in your portfolio?

To both the questions – my answer is – I don’t know and it’s quite possible. I personally, don’t worry too much about these drops if the company is expected to do well in the long term.

I have said it in the past and will repeat here again – I can supply the analysis, but you need to come with the courage, cash and patience. If you have all the three in place, time to get ready and start purchasing slowly for your portfolio.

End note: By the way, Manager A has more career risk and will end up with lesser assets than manager B who can tout his returns during bull markets. However, investors in manager A come out ahead than those with manager B, as some of the investors in the latter case just drop out and never make the stated returns.

—————-
Stocks discussed in this post are for educational purpose only and not recommendations to buy or sell. Please contact a certified investment adviser for your investment decisions. Please read disclaimer towards the end of blog.

Subscription

Enter your email address if you would like to be notified when a new post is posted:

I agree to be emailed to confirm my subscription to this list

Recent Posts

Select category to filter posts

Archives