I wrote this note to all of my subscribers. Hope you will find it useful too

Let me state this again – My approach is to buy good quality companies at a reasonable price. There is nothing magical or new about this. Every other value investor professes to do this and I am no different. There is no secret sauceand I make it a point to share my thought process and analysis as much as feasible.

I have practiced a value based philosophy for the last 15+ years and it has served me well. I have no plans of changing a sound and logical approach for something else in the future. As long as I continue to do follow it rationally and with discipline, I think the long term results will be good even with occasional spells of under-performance.

One the first comments I get from a new subscriber after joining is this – I had a look at the model portfolio and I cannot buy more than 2-3 positions for now. I have a stock response for that – please be patient and give it some time. I have usually seen that most new subscribers are able match the model portfolio over a span of 2-3 years as some stocks drop below the buy level and new positions are added.

If you look at the price action of our 17 odd positions for the last two years – you will find that at least 14 hit the buy point and even went lower for a few days or more. So in effect, it’s quite possible to be 80% matched to the model portfolio for those who joined the subscription in the middle of 2014. I do not have the statistics of how many have done that, but my point is that over a 1-2 year time frame, one will get enough opportunities to buy and build your portfolio. One needs to have the patience to do that and not get swayed by short term events.

We started the model portfolio in Jan 2011. We have had several actual and imagined events such as Grexit (did not happen), Chinese hard landing (cannot say if that has occurred), Brexit (did happen), oil crash (occurred in 2014) and mismanagement of the Indian economy by the previous government.

Now someone could counter this logic by pointing the risk of 2008/09 collapse when mid and small caps crashed by 60%. What if one of these events had snowballed into a similar crisis?

–           For starters, one cannot invest based on the low probability, high impact macro events. One can diversify against black swan risks at an individual company level, but not at the country level. To give an extreme and silly example – how will you protect yourself from the risk of an asteroid crashing into a major city in India and causing a major economic crisis? Can one really diversify against such an extreme risk?
–           My second argument is that one needs to invest based on the higher probability risks (such as inflation) and insure against the low probability, but extreme ones. In other words, invest to beat inflation or secure your retirement and buy life/ health insurance to hedge the other extreme kind of risks. Finally there are some kind of risks, where one can only hope and pray that they don’t occur and we can do nothing about it.

If a 10-15% drop in the portfolio is going to scare you (as it may have in Feb of this year) and cause you to lose sleep, then equities are not for you. I can share my analysis and thought process, but cannot fix your temperament. You will have to bring a steady and calm mind of your own to the table.

Looking for trends
Some of you may have noticed that the model portfolio generally does not have a specific theme or view. One will often hear from investors that they have positioned their portfolio to benefit from better monsoon or revival in capex or some such factor.

One needs to keep in mind that a good monsoon or lower inflation is not a long term trend, but only specific events which play out for a small period of time. A long term trend would be something like demand for housing/ housing loans which leads to a growth of 2-3X of the average GDP growth rate.

Why am I discussing this point now? I think there is a lot of value in identifying such trends early and investing based on it, provided one does not overpay for it. As a result, I have now started looking at some of the current ideas from a trend point of view. We will however not know if the trend was real or a mirage, till a few years pass.
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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.

A commonly used thumb rule in investing is that a company selling below a PE of 10 is likely to be cheap and one above 30 is likely to be expensive. I have been guilty of using this rule, often subconsciously and have paid a heavy price for it.

To see the example of a PE driven investment gone wrong, read the analysis of Facor alloys here. In a year’s time, I realized that I had made a mistake and exited this position with a 12% loss – you can read my analysis here.  If I had held on to the position, I would have lost close to 85% of my investment, even as the stock continued to sell at a very low valuation (current PE being 3)

Reasoning from first principles leads one to understand the fundamentals factors driving the issue in question. So how do we apply this concept to investing?

Quite simply, the one absolute and immutable fact of investing is that the value of an asset is the sum of the discounted free cash flow, it will generate over its life time. The above statement does not mean that an asset cannot sell above or below this value from time to time, but anyone holding an asset over its life time, cannot make more than the cash flows its generates over this period.

Lets break the above point down into its key components
–           Free cash flow
–           Lifetime
–           Discounted

Free cash flow – Can be estimated as follows : Gross rent – taxes – maintenance expense – other overheads

Lifetime –  This is the period an asset can be expected to generate a cash flow. In case of a flat or house one can take as it as 30 years, before one has to permanently replace it with a new construction. In an extreme condition you can stretch it to 50 years, however try letting out a very old house and you may realize that the rentals are much below the market rates.

So how would you value the house or flat now?
The gross rental yields these days are usually around 2-3%. At these yields , one is in effect paying 50 times pre-tax free cash flow. This of course assumes 100% occupancy and no taxes.

If you put all these cash flows together and discount it at around 10%, the final DCF value comes to about 1.5X purchase price. In other words, the asset is generating an IRR of 12%.

The problem with PE ratios
As you can see from the above example, the PE ratio is dependent on several variables which we had to estimate upfront. In the case of some assets such as a rental property, it may be possible to estimate it with a certain level of confidence.

Let say, for the sake of example, that the house turns out to be on an old burial ground where there are ghosts and so one want to rent or buy that land J . What happens then? Well the entire investment goes to zero.

So the initial PE turns out to be cheap or expensive depending on the subsequent cash flows and terminal value of the asset

In the case of companies, the problem we face is that the cash flows are quite difficult to estimate, there is no fixed duration and the terminal value in the real long run for any business is usually 0.

The above assumption turned out to be wrong. The cash flows were at a peak due to a cyclical high in demand from the steel industry. In addition to a crash in the demand, the management diverted the cash flows to another sister firm which demonstrated poor corporate governance.

As a counter example, consider the case of CRISIL(a past holding) which has always appeared expensive based on the usual measures of valuation. However the company has delivered above average returns as it has generated the expected cash flows without much variability in a fairly predictable fashion. The competitive position continues to improve and the company is likely to keep growing with a high return on invested capital for the foreseeable future.

The only way to evaluate if a company is over or underpriced is to be able to predict its cash flow. The higher the valuation, the longer the prediction period.

On the flip side, if you are looking at a company selling for 100 times earnings, one needs to have a high degree of confidence on the expected cash flow for 20+ years and beyond. Anyone claiming such clairvoyance is worth of worship !!

In summary, the best way to approach an investment candidate is to filter out the extreme cases and then dig into the business as much as possible. This should help one make a reasonable estimate of the cash flows and its duration. Once you have a reasonable fix on these key inputs, doing a valuation and comparing it with the market price is the easy part.

It is selling for 10 times earnings net of cash for sure. Personally I think the PE ratio here is meaningless. One is making a bet that Coal will continue to be a dominant fuel for us for the next 10-20 years in face of dropping cost of solar and other energy sources such as Natural gas. In addition there is also the headwind of climate change regulations and drop in prices globally. In short I don’t know enough to predict the cash flow and hence the idea is a pass for me. If you plan to buy or hold it, you need to answer the above questions with a high degree of confidence.

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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.

The following note was recently sent out to the subscribers. I hope you will find it useful.

A few of you may have noticed the frenzy around the NBFC and especially the MFI (micro finance institutions) space. The buying frenzy is not entirely irrational.

The Indian household debt at around 9-10% of GDP is among the lowest in the world and there is a huge pent up demand in the retail / MSME segment. The introduction of adhaar, regulatory changes and several new technology tools is now allowing the NBFC segment to reach new customers at a much lower cost and achieve rapid growth.

So we have a confluence of factors coming into play here – A new regulatory and technology platform which allows companies to reach out to a large set of under-served customers at a time when the dominant players in the ecosystem, namely banks, are not in a position to take advantage of these opportunities.

Tread with caution
There is however a dark side to this whole opportunity – A growth of 30%+ may lead to poor lending practices and weak credit underwriting in several cases. This may be truer in the case of newer institutions which lack the experience and management bandwidth to manage this growth (and later collect the bad debts).

The time to be cautious is now and not when poor lending practices lead to a blow up in the future. In other words – tread with caution and be sure what you are buying.

What are we doing ?
We are already around 20% of our model portfolio in financials via four companies. These companies operate in different segments of the financial ecosystem and I believe that the management of each of these companies is competent and has seen multiple cycles in their respective businesses. At the same time, if the frenzy continues and our concentration in this business segment continues to grow, I will start reducing the position size.

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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.