As part of my paid subscription, I recently added a stock in the portfolio. I bought this company at around 16 times earnings and as I am constantly preaching about buying stocks on the cheap, it must have surprised a few subscribers.

A good friend of mine wrote to me and we exchanged a few emails where I shared my thinking behind this pick. I have lightly edited the conversation and added some additional commentary to detail out my thought process. Think of this post as a continuation of the previous post on value traps.

Hi Rohit,
What is the reasoning behind buying XXX? The stock already is trading at P/E of 23+. Also they don’t seem to be in a market where they have monopoly.

Bye,
Kedar

Hi kedar
Because i like the company 🙂 and it will look good in the portfolio

Jokes apart, the company on a consolidated basis is selling for around 16-17 times earnings and earns 60%+ return on capital. In addition the company has been growing at 15%+ (slowed down lately a bit) and expanding globally and in India too.

The company is also making small acquisitions to add to the product/ technology portfolio and is planning to spend 3%+ on R&D in the future. Finally the company has an associate company at book value for 250 crs on the balance sheet, which is worth much more than that.

All in all a good business with good competitive advantage, but it is not cheap.

Hi Rohit,
The business may be good but if the market price is close to fair value, why will you buy it. I have not seen you buying stocks unless the market value is at least at 40% discount to fair value.

regards
Kedar

Hi kedar
It is not really selling at fair value …still a 25-30% discount. There is a key difference in the approach here. I am paying up for quality here.

One approach is to buy at a 50% discount for a decent business and wait for the gap to close…like seamec which is cheap and the returns will come when the PE re-rating happens. As the fair value is increasing slowly, the stock price will rise slowly after that. In all such cases we have the re-investment risk – what to do with the money once the company sells at fair value?

The other approach is to buy a good business which is selling at a smaller discount, but at the same time is also growing its intrinsic value – think LMW, gujarat gas, crisil etc. These are high quality businesses which will increase fair value at a decent rate – call these steady compounders.

In such cases you can get a step jump due to re-rating of the PE as the market recognizes the quality of the business. At the same time as the fair value is growing at a fair clip, one can hold onto the stock and get above average returns from the rise in fair value. This increase will not happen in a nice smooth upward trend, but over time it works out pretty well.

The best situation will be to buy these companies at a discount ..isnt it ? but that is not likely to happen very often ..unless there is a crisis in the market like 2008, but then we have to wait forever for that.

I have been thinking on these lines for some time and have always invested this way (Crisil, LMW etc are in that bucket) , just now doing more explicitly with the new picks.

A personal experiment
My drift towards higher quality companies has not been a sudden one. I still cannot resist a cheap stock :).

I have maintained a dual portfolio for sometime now. The main portfolio has carried my high conviction bets with sizeable positions in each of the idea. At the same time, i have maintained a smaller portfolio of cheap, unloved stocks such as ultramarine pigments, Denso india etc.

The results, as expected have been mixed. A few companies such as Denso india gave high returns, but others such as ultramine pigments have dissapointed. In the final analysis, the main portfolio has beaten the cheap , graham style portfolio by a wide margin.

I will continue to opportunistically pick the cheap and unloved stocks, but at the same time i am more comfortable now with quality stocks and paying up for it. It is one thing to read about it and something else to arrive at a conclusion based on personal experiences. The latter remains with you much longer.

The number one problem faced by value investors is not a big permanent loss of capital, due to overpayment for growth, but the weak and anemic return from an average business bought at a cheap price.

Let me explain further –

A typical value investor (who are far and few anyway) generally tend to be conservative in paying up for a business. The deep value types go for the really cheap stocks (as measured by low PE or P/B ratios), whereas the others would pay up a bit for the quality of the stock and growth, but not too much.

A deep value investor typically looks for a company which is selling in low single digit PE ratios and in some cases if you back out the cash or other assets on the balance sheet, the core business could be available for almost nothing.

What is a value trap?
The problem with most of these investments is that the underlying business is stagnant with a comatose management who is not interested in either growing the business or ready to return the excess cash to the shareholder. In such cases, the market discounts this cash heavily and refuses to bid up the stock price.

Let me a give a personal example – Kothari products. You can read my earlier posts on this company here and here

Let’s look at the price history for the company below

As you can see, that the stock has gone nowhere in the last 5 years. If one includes dividends then, the return comes to around 15% for the entire 5 year duration. The index during this period has more than doubled.

Even a savings account would have done better!!

What are the key causes?
There are several causes for such value traps. The primary cause is a stagnant or declining business with a management which keeps pouring capital into the sinkhole. If on the other hand, the business is generating excess cash, the management keeps hoarding it and refuses to return it to the shareholder.

The second reason is that the underlying economics of the business has deteriorated and the market realizes it with a lag. Case in point – the telecom industry. The economics of this industry has gone into a tailspin for the last few years, with almost everyone bleeding money (except probably bharti airtel). In such cases, if you keep looking at the past data and do not understand how the economics of the industry has changed, you can get stuck in a no-win situation

The last category of value traps are the low return, second and third tier commodity players. These companies have a low return on capital over the entire business cycle, and unless you can dance in and out of the stock in time, you can get stuck with very low returns.

How to indentify value traps before hand ?
That’s the tough bit.

For starters, investors like me need to get out of the low PE, cheap stock mindset. A really cheap stock is often cheap for a reason. It makes sense to dig deep and understand the business in detail to figure out why the market is valuing the company at such low valuations ?

If a company has been cheap for the last 5 years, why should it suddenly get re-rated just because smart lil me bought the stock?

One needs to understand the economics of the business in depth and also confirm that the management is creating value for the shareholder and not just twiddling their thumbs. Only if you have a strong belief that that business is doing well and will continue to do so and the management is also good, then should you think of making a commitment to the stock

What if you are caught in value trap?
There are no easy answers. For starters, swallow your pride and sell the stock. That’s easier said than done – ask me!. The unfortunate bit is that people like me take 10 years to realize it :). Luckily for me these mistakes have not been big enough to damage my long term returns.

The risk of holding onto such investments is that although you do not lose money on paper, in reality you are losing the benefits of compounding by not investing the same money in other opportunities. It would be silly to compound your money at 10% in a value trap, when the index itself can give you 15% without any effort.

If you have invested in one of those low return commodity stocks, hope that the commodity cycle turns and market in its temporary fits of insanity, re-prices the stocks. As soon as this happens, sell the stock and never look back !

It is always a constant struggle to avoid value traps, as they come in various shapes and forms. One has to be vigilant and learn to exit them, once you have realized that you are stuck in one

The idea for this post came from a question from a reader –

Rohit – you gave us the ingredients in the last two posts on banking (see here and here for various factors on analyzing banks), but these ingredients or factors alone are not sufficient. Where is the recipe? How do i combine the various factors to come up with a final decision or idea?

This is a very interesting question, and I plan to publish a post on how I would combine these factors to arrive at a decision.

The analogy with cooking
Most of us have watched cooking shows or would have seen recipes in a book or a magazine. These cookbooks list out the various ingredients with the precise amounts and then they guide you through the steps of putting these ingredients together to come up with a final dish.

Personally, I am an atrocious cook – I can even burn water :). There have been times when my wife has given the list of ingredients and the exact steps and yet I have managed to mess up the dish completely. Even if you are not as horrible a cook as I am, you must have had the experience that inspite of the following the recipe to the T, the final dish does not come out as good as you thought it would.

There is an art to cooking and after all the instructions and teaching, there is no substitute to practice and experimenting. One tends to get better at it over time and there are subtle nuances that cannot be written in a cookbook (which is why old grannies can cook great food, without any formal training).

If you think of it, there is a lot of similarity with investing. I can tell you all the factors and maybe some kind of recipe , but in the end there is no substitute for actually doing it. You may mess it up once a while, but over time if you are interested in the craft of investing, it will work out for sure.

The case for fund managers or chefs
Now that I have decided to bring in the analogy of cooking, let’s take it a step further. Even if you can cook, you still prefer to go to a restaurant to eat once in a while. The reasons are many – variety, better food, less effort etc.

The case for mutual funds or PMS can be similar too. You may be able to invest well if you worked hard at it, but a lot of times you have other priorities in life and would like to hand over the job of investing to a professional (hopefully a good one) who does this full time.

The same logic applies to almost everything else – otherwise we would be growing our own food, milking our cows and doing most of the other basic work too.

The need for oversight
If you decide to outsource some aspect of life, it does not mean that you should ignore it completely. Do you hire a carpenter or a plumber for some job, pay him cash and ask him to do whatever he wants with no oversight from anyone ?

Why should it be different for a mutual fund or a PMS ?

On the other extreme, do you instruct or monitor every nail that you carpenter hits ? Evaluating weekly or monthly portfolio performance is akin to that.

Irrationality in money
The reason the above points raised by me sound funny or absurd is due to the irrational relationship we have with money. A lot of people either ignore it completely (and hope things will work out) or think it is a form of entertainment to invest money / trade in the market.

I can think of only one rational reason for investing – wealth creation. You invest money so that you are able to build an adequate amount of wealth over time which will help you to realize your goals such as retirement, healthcare or children’s education etc. All of the rest – whether you beat the market by X % or find a hot stock is fluff.

By the way – Although I invest my own money, I will never eat my own cooking unless I want to torture myself 🙂