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The Key Investing Lessons From COVID-19

It’s only been seven months or so since COVID-19 appeared. But there are already some investing lessons from COVID-19 that we can glean.

Note: This article was first published in The Business Times on 29 July 2020.

It may feel like a lifetime has passed, but it’s only been around seven months since COVID-19 emerged and upended the lives of people all over the world. 

Given the short span of time, I don’t think there can be many definitive investing lessons that we can currently draw from the crisis.  But I do think there are already key lessons we can learn from. At the same time, we should be wary of learning the wrong lessons. 

A mistaken notion

As of 21 July 2020, the S&P 500 index – a broad representation for US stocks – is flat year-to-date. Meanwhile, the Nasdaq – a tech-heavy index of US-listed companies – is up by more than 17% in the same period. Even more impressive is the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index’s 55.5% year-to-date gain. The BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index is created by venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners and it is designed to track US-listed SaaS (software-as-a-service) companies.

The huge gap between the performances of the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq and Bessemer’s cloud index is not surprising. 

Large swathes of the physical economy have been shut or slowed down because of measures that governments have put in place to stamp out COVID-19. Meanwhile, companies operating in the digital economy are mostly still able to carry on business as usual despite lockdowns happening across the world. In fact, COVID-19 has accelerated adoption of digital technologies.

Given this, it’s easy to jump to the following conclusion: A key investing lesson from COVID-19 is that we should invest a large portion of our portfolios into technology stocks. But I think that would be the wrong lesson.

We have to remember that crises come in all kinds of flavours, and they are seldom predictable in advance. It just so happened that COVID-19 affected the physical world.  There could be crises in the future that harm the digital realm. For instance, a powerful solar flare – an intense burst of radiation from the sun – could severely cripple our globe’s digital infrastructure.

I think there are two key investing lessons from COVID-19.

In the face of adversity

First, we should invest in companies that are resilient – or better yet, are antifragile – toward shocks. Antifragility is a term introduced by Nassim Taleb, a former options trader and the author of numerous books including Black Swan and Antifragile. Taleb classifies things into three groups: 

  • The fragile, which breaks when exposed to stress (like a piece of glass, which shatters when dropped)
  • The robust, which remain unchanged when stressed (like a football, which does not get affected much when kicked or dropped)
  • The antifragile, which strengthens when exposed to stress (like our human body, which becomes stronger when we exercise)

Companies too, can be fragile, robust, or even antifragile. 

The easiest way for a company to be fragile is to load up on debt. If a company has a high level of debt, it can crumble when facing even a small level of economic stress. On the other hand, a company can be robust or even antifragile if it has a strong balance sheet that has minimal or reasonable levels of debt.

During tough times (for whatever reason), having a strong balance sheet gives a company a high chance of surviving. It can even allow the company to go on the offensive, such as by hiring talent and winning customers away from weaker competitors, or having a headstart in developing new products and services. In such a scenario, companies with strong balance sheets have a higher chance of emerging from a crisis – a period of stress – stronger than before. 

Expect – don’t predict  

Second, when investing, we should have expectations but not predictions. The two concepts seem similar, but they are different. 

An expectation is developed by applying past events when thinking about the future. For example, the US economy has been in recession multiple times throughout modern history. So, it would be reasonable to expect another downturn to occur over the next, say, 10 years – I just don’t know when it will happen. A prediction, on the other hand, is saying that a recession will happen in, say, the third quarter of 2025. 

This difference between expectations and predictions results in different investing behaviour.

If we merely expect bad things to happen from time to time while knowing we have no predictive power, we would build our investment portfolios to be able to handle a wide range of outcomes. In this way, our investment portfolios become robust or even antifragile.

Meanwhile, if we’re making predictions, then we think we know when something will happen and we try to act on it. Our investment portfolios will thus be suited to thrive in only a narrow range of situations. If things take a different turn, our portfolios will be hurt badly – in other words, our portfolios become fragile.

It should be noted too that humanity’s collective track record at predictions are horrible. And if you need proof, think about how many people saw the widespread impact of COVID-19 ahead of time.

Conclusion

There will be so much more to come in the future about lessons from COVID-19.  We’re not there yet, but I think there are already important and lasting ones to note. 

My lessons rely on understanding the fundamental nature of the stock market (a place to buy and sell pieces of actual businesses) and the fundamental driver of stock prices (the long run performance of the underlying business). 

COVID-19 does not change the stock market’s identity as a place to trade pieces of businesses, so this is why I think my lessons will stick. 

DisclaimerThe Good Investors is the personal investing blog of two simple guys who are passionate about educating Singaporeans about stock market investing. By using this Site, you specifically agree that none of the information provided constitutes financial, investment, or other professional advice. It is only intended to provide education. Speak with a professional before making important decisions about your money, your professional life, or even your personal life.

2 Investing Pitfalls

These two investing mistakes have caused me to miss out on huge mutlibagger returns. Here’s what I’ve learnt from them, so you can avoid the same errors.

Investors are prone to behavioural biases. I am guilty of some, which have caused me to commit investing mistakes and miss out on some of the best deals in the market. Here are two biases that have cost me dearly.

Avoiding mega-cap companies

One investing fallacy is that mega-cap companies can’t grow much. 

Today, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft are each worth more than US$1.5 trillion. For those counting, as of 17 July, each of the trio was worth more than the entire South Korean stock market, which had a market capitalisation of US$1.4 trillion.

Can companies of that size realistically grow much more?

I used to shy away from mega-cap companies simply because I believed in the law of big numbers. It is much harder to grow meaningfully when a company reaches a certain size.

However, when I looked back at records, I realised that the biggest company 25 years ago is not considered big today.

Back in 1994, the largest US company by market cap was General Electric. At that time, it had a market cap of US$84.3 billion.

Back then, you would have thought that a company of that size could not grow much more. Today, Apple is worth more than 20 times as much as General Electric was at that time. This illustrates that there is no limit to how big a company can get.

25 years from now, a trillion-dollars might look like what a billion dollars is today.

Instead of focusing on the size of the company, we should look into the company’s fundamentals. 

Can the company grow its revenue, profits and free cash flow meaningfully over time from today? Does it have the right management team in place to take it to new heights? Is the company reasonably valued? These are more important than the size of the company. Sometimes, the biggest companies may still turn out to be the best investments.

What goes up must come down

I prefer buying stocks that are below their all-time highs. Who doesn’t?

However, sitting on the sidelines can sometimes do more harm than good, especially if you have identified a quality company to own at a reasonable price. 

For example, Amazon is one of the best-performing stocks of the past two decades. Although there have been steep drawdowns along the way, its stock price also often reached new all-time highs, as top-performing companies naturally do.

It is very likely that most investors who managed to buy Amazon’s shares in the past, had to do so at (or close to) an all-time-high-price at the time.

Because of my aversion to buying in at a new high, I never got the chance to buy Amazon shares for my personal portfolio. I first wanted to invest in 2017 when its shares were trading around US$720. However, as it was near a peak then, I decided to hold out to try to get a bargain. As luck would have it, and because Amazon’s stock was likely worth much more, the stock price rose instead of falling. 

Not wanting to buy at US$720 meant I couldn’t pull the trigger when it reached US$900 either. Nor could I do it when it reached US$1200. By then, even though the stock experienced drawdowns, it never reached the price I initially wanted to buy it at. Consequently, I never bought Amazon for my personal portfolio and I missed out on market-beating returns. Today, Amazon trades upwards of US$3100 per share.

Lessons learnt

Behavioural biases affect our decision-making and often cause losses or result in us missing out on big returns.

I’ve learnt from these mistakes the hard way. My takeaway is that it’s more important to focus on company fundamentals and buy a company at a good price, regardless of the size of the company or recent share price movements.

DisclaimerThe Good Investors is the personal investing blog of two simple guys who are passionate about educating Singaporeans about stock market investing. By using this Site, you specifically agree that none of the information provided constitutes financial, investment, or other professional advice. It is only intended to provide education. Speak with a professional before making important decisions about your money, your professional life, or even your personal life. I have a vested interest in Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft.

What We’re Reading (Week Ending 2 August 2020)

The best articles we’ve read in recent times on a wide range of topics, including investing, business, and the world in general.

We’ve constantly been sharing a list of our recent reads in our weekly emails for The Good Investors.

Do subscribe for our weekly updates through the orange box in the blog (it’s on the side if you’re using a computer, and all the way at the bottom if you’re using mobile) – it’s free!

But since our readership-audience for The Good Investors is wider than our subscriber base, we think sharing the reading list regularly on the blog itself can benefit even more people. The articles we share touch on a wide range of topics, including investing, business, and the world in general.

Here are the articles for the week ending 2 August 2020:

1. The Ugly Scramble – Morgan Housel

There is no topic in business and investing that gets more attention than risk. But it’s almost always viewed through a universal lens: “What risks are we going to face in the future?” Or just simply, “What’s the economy going to do next?”

But risk has little to do with what’s going to happen next and a lot to do with how much you can endure, and how calmly you can react to, whatever happens next.

To the leveraged investor a small setback is a huge risk because of how they’re forced to deal with decline: by selling to cover their debts, right now, this moment, whatever the price is. Don’t think, just scramble to do you gotta do in the face of panic. They’re like the cat locking its limbs into place, doing whatever they can to survive even if it breaks them to pieces.

To the patient investor with a ton of cash, a huge market decline requires no immediate action. And not because it doesn’t affect them – it often does – but because however it affects them can be dealt with slowly and methodically. Maybe they realize they want a more conservative allocation. They can come to that conclusion after thinking it through, hearing opposing views, weighing alternatives, and calmly executing at the right time. Doing so may lead them to a different choice than their initial gut reaction. Taking time to understand a complicated problem often does.

2. Everyone’s a Day Trader Now – Michael Wursthorn, Mischa Frankl-Duval, and Gregory Zuckerman 

Much of the rapid-fire day trading culture plays out on social media, which has helped usher in a new class of social-media influencers who hype stocks to followers eager for get-rich-quick stock tips. They swap trading ideas over Twitter, Discord and Reddit, an update from the boiler-room chat rooms of the ’90s that sent dot-com stocks into a frenzy.

Stanley Barsch, Ms. Viswasam’s boss who got her into investing, touts the stocks he trades to his more than 76,000 Twitter followers, who refer to him by his handle, StanTheTradingMan. He also hosts his own Discord channel, where a tighter-knit group of day traders circulate unconfirmed rumors as potential catalysts for big gains.

Mr. Barsch, 42, is a former police officer turned real-estate broker, who said he had been making a steady six figures since 2010. Now, he boasts of how he says he turned the $20,000 he put into the market in January and February into more than $450,000 as of mid-July without any prior trading experience.

3. Statement by Jeff Bezos to the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary – Jeff Bezos

In my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the best way to achieve and maintain Day One vitality. Why? Because customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and a constant desire to delight customers drives us to constantly invent on their behalf. As a result, by focusing obsessively on customers, we are internally driven to improve our services, add benefits and features, invent new products, lower prices, and speed up shipping times—before we have to. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it. And I could give you many such examples. Not every business takes this customer-first approach, but we do, and it’s our greatest strength.

Customer trust is hard to win and easy to lose. When you let customers make your business what it is, then they will be loyal to you—right up to the second that someone else offers them better service. We know that customers are perceptive and smart. We take as an article of faith that customers will notice when we work hard to do the right thing, and that by doing so again and again, we will earn trust. You earn trust slowly, over time, by doing hard things well—delivering on time; offering everyday low prices; making promises and keeping them; making principled decisions, even when they’re unpopular; and giving customers more time to spend with their families by inventing more convenient ways of shopping, reading, and automating their homes. As I have said since my first shareholder letter in 1997, we make decisions based on the long-term value we create as we invent to meet customer needs. When we’re criticized for those choices, we listen and look at ourselves in the mirror. When we think our critics are right, we change. When we make mistakes, we apologize. But when you look in the mirror, assess the criticism, and still believe you’re doing the right thing, no force in the world should be able to move you.

4. Earth’s Asteroid Impact Rate Took A Sudden Jump 290 Million Years Ago – Phil Plait

We know that there’s a lack of old craters on the Earth, and it’s always been assumed that’s due to erosion. Wind, water, geologic activity: Over long stretches of time our Earth remakes itself, scrubbing the surface of blemishes like impacts*.

But the evidence for this is lacking. That’s what initially motivated the scientists, to try to see if there’s a way to support this idea. So they looked to the Moon. Our satellite is in the same region of space we are, so should get hit at very close to the same rate as Earth does. The idea is to look at big craters on the Moon, figure out a way to get their ages, do the same on Earth, then compare the two and see what you find.

The problem is getting the lunar crater ages, since very few have absolute ages found for them. But they came up with a clever idea. In a big impact, one that leaves a crater 10 kilometers across or wider, rocks from the lunar bedrock get ejected from the explosion and deposited around the crater. Over long periods of time these erode. Not due to air or water, of course, since the Moon doesn’t have those.

Instead, they erode from tiny micrometeorites raining down constantly. These sandblast the rocks, slowly wearing them away (this doesn’t happen on Earth because our atmosphere stops them). Also, the temperature change from day to night on the Moon is hundreds of degrees Celsius. The rocks are constantly expanding and contracting from this, which causes them to crack and erode.

They figured that by looking at the abundance of rocks around a crater compared to the fine powdery eroded rock material (called regolith), they can get a relative age; craters with more intact rocks are younger, and ones with more eroded ones are older.

5. Bill Gates says 3 coronavirus treatments being tested now ‘could cut the death rate dramatically.’ They may be available within months. – Hilary Brueck

“The very first vaccine won’t be like a lot of vaccines, where it’s a 100% transmission-blocking and 100% avoids the person who gets the vaccine getting sick,” the billionaire philanthropist told Insider.

Vaccine trials take months, they don’t have to create completely effective inoculations, and they won’t help protect people who are already sick.

That’s why Gates is more excited, in the immediate term, about coronavirus therapeutics.

6. How a power-hungry CEO drained the light out of General Electric – Mary Kay Linge

 For years, GE’s profits had been a mirage built on whirlwind mergers and accounting sleight of hand. The funds that had been doled out to shareholders as fat dividends — and had covered its managers’ lavish perks and pay — had largely been borrowed on the strength of the company’s golden credit.

The book’s authors paint a damning portrait of Immelt’s 16 years at the helm of GE, where a rubber-stamp board of directors allowed him to hemorrhage money almost unchecked…

… At the same time, GE’s established divisions were expected to meet earnings goals far removed from reality. “Under Immelt, the company believed that the will to hit a target could supersede the math,” Gryta and Mann report.

It was a recipe for a disaster. Up-and-coming middle managers knew that a missed goal could stymie their climb up GE’s ladder; division heads “didn’t necessarily know how his underlings got to the finish line and it didn’t really matter,” the authors write.

Those toxic incentives drove the debacle that Flannery uncovered at GE Power. The division made its money not on the generators and turbines it built, but on the service contracts it sold to maintain the machines.

All a manager had to do was tweak the future cost estimates on those decades-long contracts to jack up profits as needed — and to paper over real losses from unsold inventory and declining demand.

7. Tweet storm from an executive who worked with Jeff Bezos to launch the Kindle – Dan Rose

Ignore the “institutional no”. Amazon’s core retail business was pummeled after dot-com crash, and we were still pulling out of the tail spin in 2004 when Jeff started the Kindle team (same year he started AWS team). Everyone told him it was a distraction, he ignored them.

Cannibalize yourself. Steve Kessel was running Amazon’s media business in 2004 (books/music/DVD’s). Books alone generated more than 50% of Amazon’s cash flow. Jeff fired Steve from his job and reassigned him to build Kindle. Steve’s new mission: destroy his old business…

… Make magic. Syncing over WiFi without cables was innovative, and our team was proud of it. But Jeff didn’t think it was magical enough. He insisted on syncing over cellular, and he didn’t want to charge the customer for data. We told him it couldn’t be done, he did it anyway.


Disclaimer: The Good Investors is the personal investing blog of two simple guys who are passionate about educating Singaporeans about stock market investing. By using this Site, you specifically agree that none of the information provided constitutes financial, investment, or other professional advice. It is only intended to provide education. Speak with a professional before making important decisions about your money, your professional life, or even your personal life.

How To Avoid Confirmation Bias In Investing

Psychological biases are the human tendency for us to make decisions in an illogical way. The concept was introduced by psychologists Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky in the early 1970s. Kahneman later won a Nobel Prize for his work and went on to write the best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

In his book, Kahneman describes the “fast thinking” part of the brain as System 1. This way of thinking helps us make snap decisions, such as jumping away when we hear a loud noise.

Slower thinking, or System 2, is used to solve more complicated problems. Usually, Systems 1 and 2 work very well, but in some situations, System 1 may cause a person to jump to conclusions too quickly and lead to what we now know as psychological biases.

What is confirmation bias?

There are numerous psychological biases and one of the more common and well-known of them that affects us as investors is confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is our tendency to cherry-pick information that supports our existing beliefs.

It partly explains why two people with opposing views can come to very different conclusions when they see the same piece of information. It can also cause us to make bad investing decisions. Take the scenario below for an example.

A friend at a party whispers a hot investing tip to you. You get excited at the prospect of making money but realise that it is important to do your own research. When you reach home, you hastily search for more information. Unfortunately, because of your preconceived conception of the company, you unwittingly reject data that goes against your belief and only look for information that supports it. Thinking you did sufficient due diligence, you make your trade the next day.

This is a common phenomenon. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to interpret data and statistics to fit your preexisting view.  Shane Parish, in his Farnam Street blog, wrote:

“Confirmatory data is taken seriously, while disconfirming data is treated with scepticism.”

In his book, Six Thinking Hats, Edward De Bono wrote:

“There may be more danger in prejudices which are apparently founded in logic than in those which are acknowledged as emotions.”

Why do we suffer from confirmation bias?

If the above scenario sounds familiar, then you have suffered from confirmation bias.

There is an innate desire for us to want to have been right. In the book The Web of Belief, authors Willard V Quine and J.S Ullian wrote,

“The desire to be right and the desire to have been right are two desires, and the sooner we separate them the better off we are. The desire to be right is the thirst for truth. On all counts, both practical and theoretical, there is nothing but good to be said for it. The desire to have been right, on the other hand, is the pride that goeth before a fall. It stands in the way of our seeing we were wrong, and thus blocks the progress of our knowledge.”

Confirmation bias is so ingrained in our brains that knowing that we tend to suffer from confirmation bias is not enough. The act of seeking out other data is not the solution- the problem is not being open to an alternative view.

How do we overcome it?

The first thing we should do is to give ourselves time to make a decision. Giving ourselves time to conduct research, talk to people in the know, and look for a different point of view, can reduce the risk of confirmation bias. Darren Matthews wrote in an article:

“It seems logical to add time to making decisions, slowing things down. Time offers a perspective that brings with it the capacity to bring other steps into play.”

Second, actively search out opposing views. Find arguments that reject your initial view and dig into the other corner of the Internet. Further, be willing to change your opinion if you find sufficient evidence to do so. 

Third, acknowledge that changing our opinion can be extremely difficult. In The Little Book of Stupidity, Sia Mohajer wrote:

“Research has shown that attempts to “enlighten” believers can be either entirely useless or serve to bolster their current belief systems. This bolstering of belief is often referred to as entrenching. This is the idea that once you have invested mental energy into a habit or belief, you strongly reject any potential contradictory information.”

We, therefore, have to make a conscious effort to realise the challenge we face in changing our opinion.

Final words

“What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.”

Warren Buffett

Confirmation bias is part of our everyday life. It affects anything from our political views to our religious beliefs to our investing decisions.

The first step to overcoming confirmation bias is to acknowledge that it affects us. Only then can we take active steps to have safeguards to ensure that it does not negatively impact our lives – or in this case our investment returns.

DisclaimerThe Good Investors is the personal investing blog of two simple guys who are passionate about educating Singaporeans about stock market investing. By using this Site, you specifically agree that none of the information provided constitutes financial, investment, or other professional advice. It is only intended to provide education. Speak with a professional before making important decisions about your money, your professional life, or even your personal life.

How You Can Beat Professional Investors

You can beat professional investors. Career risk is one of the biggest reasons that hold professional investors back from performing their best.

It’s only natural for us to believe that individual investors don’t stand a chance against professional investors. After all, the pros have access to research capabilities, analytical support, and technology that individuals don’t. 

But if you’re an individual investor, you can still beat professional investors at their game. The trick is part patience, and part something else.

Long term investing

In Board Games, Coffee Cans, and Investing, I shared investment manager Robert Kirby’s Coffee Can Portfolio article that was penned in the 1980s. Here’s what I wrote in my piece: 

In The Coffee Can Portfolio, Kirby shared a personal experience he had with a female client of his in the 1950s. He had been working with this client for 10 years – during which he managed her investment portfolio, jumping in and out of stocks and lightening positions frequently – when her husband passed away suddenly. The client wanted Kirby to handle the stocks she had inherited from her deceased husband. Here’s what happened next, according to Kirby:

“When we received the list of assets, I was amused to find that he had secretly been piggy-backing our recommendations for his wife’s portfolio. Then, when I looked at the total value of the estate, I was also shocked. The husband had applied a small twist of his own to our advice: He paid no attention whatsoever to the sale recommendations. He simply put about $5,000 in every purchase recommendation. Then he would toss the certificate in his safe-deposit box and forget it.

Needless to say, he had an odd-looking portfolio. He owned a number of small holdings with values of less than $2,000. He had several large holdings with values in excess of $100,000. There was one jumbo holding worth over $800,000 that exceeded the total value of his wife’s portfolio and came from a small commitment in a company called Haloid; this later turned out to be a zillion shares of Xerox.”

The revelation that buying and then patiently holding shares of great companies for the long-term had generated vastly superior returns as compared to more active buying-and-selling helped Kirby to form the basis for his Coffee Can Portfolio idea. He explained:

“The Coffee Can portfolio concept harkens back to the Old West, when people put their valuable possessions in a coffee can and kept it under the mattress. That coffee can involved no transaction costs, administrative costs, or any other costs. The success of the program depended entirely on the wisdom and foresight used to select the objects to be placed in the coffee can to begin with.””

The twist

In his article, Kirby also shared how he would use the Coffee Can Portfolio concept to build an actual portfolio. His solution: (1) Select a group of 50 stocks with desirable investment-qualities, (2) buy them all in equal proportions, and then (3) simply hold the shares for a decade or more. Kirby’s reasoning that such a portfolio will do really well has two legs: 

“First, the most that could be lost in any one holding would be 2% of the fund. Second, the most that the portfolio could gain from any one holding would be unlimited.”

But here’s the twist. Kirby did not put his solution into action, even when he thought it was a brilliant idea. There were two big problems. First, Kirby thought that the hurdles involved with assembling a team of investment professionals who can excel in constructing a long-term portfolio is too high to overcome. Second, there was massive career risk for him. “Who is going to buy a product, the value of which will take 10 years to evaluate,” Kirby wrote. 

The latter problem holds the huge edge that individual investors have over professional investors: There is zero career risk. After all, you can’t fire ourselves, can you? This means that individual investors can use the best portfolio management idea they have.

Earlier, I said that the trick to beat professional investors at their game consists of part patience and part something else. The patience bit involves the necessity of investing for the long run. The something else refers to individual investors not having to face career risk.

Stacking the odds

I first came across Kirby’s The Coffee Can Portfolio article a few years ago. I remember I was stunned to learn that Kirby was unable to act on a great investing strategy due to something (the career risk) that was not at all related to the effectiveness of the strategy. Individual investors have the luxury of not having to worry about this.

It is true that professional investors have a certain edge over individual investors in parts of the investing game. But not all hope is lost. Being able to invest for the long-term – a wise investing strategy, I should add – without career risk is a huge advantage that individual investors have over the pros.

DisclaimerThe Good Investors is the personal investing blog of two simple guys who are passionate about educating Singaporeans about stock market investing. By using this Site, you specifically agree that none of the information provided constitutes financial, investment, or other professional advice. It is only intended to provide education. Speak with a professional before making important decisions about your money, your professional life, or even your personal life.

What We’re Reading (Week Ending 26 July 2020)

The best articles we’ve read in recent times on a wide range of topics, including investing, business, and the world in general.

We’ve constantly been sharing a list of our recent reads in our weekly emails for The Good Investors.

Do subscribe for our weekly updates through the orange box in the blog (it’s on the side if you’re using a computer, and all the way at the bottom if you’re using mobile) – it’s free!

But since our readership-audience for The Good Investors is wider than our subscriber base, we think sharing the reading list regularly on the blog itself can benefit even more people. The articles we share touch on a wide range of topics, including investing, business, and the world in general.

Here are the articles for the week ending 26 July 2020:

1. I Gave a Talk to a Federal Credit Union – Nathan Tankus

First we have the idea of a legal system. It may seem obvious that money starts with law, but that isn’t necessarily obvious to most academics. It’s certainly not where a traditional money and banking textbook would start. MMT emphasizes that money is inherently legally designed and grounds money in the functioning of the legal system which authorizes its existence and enforces legal obligations denominated in money. We’ll return to this crucial point in a bit.

Second there is the idea of physical resources. These are raw materials, physical land, machinery, factories etc. which are necessary to produce goods and services that the government needs to accomplish its goals. Production is the combination of these physical resources with labor and technology to produce useful goods and services. The most obvious example of this is of course war time. Governments need to produce tanks, guns, rations, uniforms etc. to fight wars and they need their domestic populations to produce those resources. Modern Monetary Theory may have “monetary” in the name, but the ultimate object of MMT academics in the policy sphere is to use our monetary system in order to mobilize physical resources. Thus, the availability and usability of physical resources is important to Modern Monetary Theorists.

The final part of the definition is the most important part. In my experience, this is the idea at the foundation of MMT that people learning about it tend to have the most difficult time grasping. It’s also a point that is consistently overlooked and underemphasized by mainstream journalists who try to produce “explainers” about MMT. This is the idea that specific financial instruments have value, in fact that they are monetized, because those instruments can be used to pay legally enforceable obligations. The most obvious and important obligation that money can settle is one’s tax bill, but all sorts of legal obligations can be settled with money. Lawsuits, child support, damages, fines, fees and all sorts of other court ordered monetary payments can be settled with specific financial instruments which legal systems treat as money. I can’t emphasize enough that money is money because it can be used to settle legal obligations within a specific jurisdiction.

2. Hacked Printers. Fake Emails. QuestionableFriends. Fahmi Quadir Was Up 24% Last Year, But It Came at a Price – Michelle Celarier

In response, she believes, the company initiated “cybersurveillance, including numerous hacking attempts with aggressive measures to obtain sensitive information about us and our personal lives,” she wrote to investors in August.

“We are not fearful,” she bragged in that letter. “When companies resort to such intrusive and illegal tactics against a small fry, perhaps we are not as small as they think we are and more importantly, perhaps it’s the company that’s shaking in its boots,” she added.

Quadir declined to tell Institutional Investor the name of the company, but said she’d received emails falsely purporting to be a journalist she knew, leading her to believe it was an attempted hacking.

That wasn’t all.

“We’ve received documents from lawyers, but it’s not actually from those lawyers. And there was a time in my home — I have a basically defunct printer at my home — when suddenly, in the middle of the night, I think it was like 2:00 a.m., the printer just turns on and starts printing emails from whistleblowers. In the middle of the night!”

Quadir has since brought on cybersecurity experts “to clean everything,” she says. “I’m not concerned for my safety; I think this just comes with the territory. Did we expect it to all happen in the first year of launching? No. But it’s just the lengths these companies go to intimidate.”

3. How the U.S. Consumer Became the Most Resilient Force in the Economy – Ben Carlson

To pay for all of this stuff the Roaring Twenties also introduced installment payment plans. The phrase “buy now, pay later” became part of the popular nomenclature during this time.

Robert Gordon estimates by the end of the 1920s consumer credit financed 80-90% of furniture sales, 75% of washing machines, 65% of vacuums, 25% of jewelry and 75% of radios.

Previous generations attached a social stigma to borrowing. The 1920s chipped away at this idea as people purchased products that didn’t exist for those generations.

And while the country as a whole achieved a level of prosperity from 1923-1929 like never before, farmers were decimated. The depression of 1920-1921 cut the price of farm products in half and they regained just a fraction of those losses by the end of the decade. Incomes for farmers fell more than 60%.

The end of agriculture as the dominant career choice in the early part of the 20th century led to an urbanization boom. The first Sears store opened in Chicago in 1925. By the time the expansion was coming to an end in 1929 they were up to 300 stores, mainly in big cities.

4. Quarterly Investment & Market Update, Summer 2020 Q2 – Ensemble Capital

One mistake we think some investors have made during this unprecedented period is substituting a forecast of the virus for a forecast about the economy or financial market performance.

While clearly, the pandemic is a huge negative impact on the economy, they are not the same thing. And stocks are not a direct reflection of the US economy.

The market doesn’t care about the economy today, it cares about corporate cash flows over time.

So while today it seems that the stock market and the economy are totally disconnected, in reality stock prices are reflecting a view that while the economy is very bad now, it will recover in the years ahead. And in fact, you don’t even need to believe the entire US economy will recover to understand the rebound in the market.

While the S&P 500 is often referred to as “the market” and is the benchmark by which we evaluate our strategy, it represents what are essentially the 500 largest, most well capitalized companies in the country. These are the companies best positioned to manage through a period of very severe economic conditions. Meanwhile, the S & P 600, an index of smaller companies shown by the dotted orange line on the chart, is still down 20% this year.

5. The Nine Essential Conditions to Commit Massive Fraud – Josh Brown

When it comes to the massive frauds – the kind that wipe out tens of billions of dollars and result in career-ending, corporation-killing infernos, there are some necessary conditions that seem to appear with great regularity accompanying them. These are the conditions that allow the seed of a fraud to take root and germinate, they provide the fertile ground and atmosphere letting the sprout become something larger, thornier and more interconnected with the flora around it.

Ivar Krueger aka The Match King was one of the most notorious purveyors of investment fraud who ever lived. His story is relatively unknown in modern times despite the fact that the global scale of what he did was ten times more intricate and ultimately destructive than anything Madoff attempted. When you read about the details of the Krueger saga, you realize that everything that’s happened since (and will happen hence) is merely an echo of an old story.

6. Repetition Economics: The Story of the Hunter, the Mammoth, and The Wolves – Breaking The Market

You decide to throw the wolves a bone, literally, and give up the deer to them. As hoped, they leave you alone and start to eat the deer. Oh well, there is still some food at home. Hopefully you don’t see them again.

But the next day you catch another deer and on your way back the wolves show up again. It was pretty clear the way they devoured the deer last time they can be vicious animals so you don’t really want to mess with them. You lose the deer to the wolves again and leave. There’s not as much food at home, but there is still some.

Same thing happens again the next day, losing the deer to the wolves.

And then on the 4th day, when the wolves show up to the hunt again, you’ve had enough. The food has run out at home. It’s pretty clear if you keep losing your kills to the wolves you’re going to starve. You can’t keep repeating this process. And so on day 4 you decide to roll the dice and fight them off.

7. A Golden Oldie: The Best Investor You’ve Never Heard Of – Jason Zweig

That was the same year that another Grinnell trustee, Robert Noyce, called Rosenfield to tell him about a new company he was starting. Noyce had been kicked out of Grinnell in his junior year for stealing a 25-pound pig from a nearby farm and roasting it at a campus luau; his physics professor, who felt Noyce was his best student ever, got the expulsion reduced to a one-semester suspension. Noyce had never forgotten the favor, which was why he was offering the college a stake in his start-up, NM Electronics.

Was Rosenfield interested? “The college wants to buy all the stock that you’re willing to let us have,” he told Noyce instantly.

Grinnell’s endowment put up $100,000, while Rosenfield and another trustee each kicked in $100,000 more, enabling the school to supply 10% of the $3 million in venture capital that Noyce and his sidekicks, Gordon Moore and Andrew Grove, raised for the company that they soon renamed Intel.

By 1974, three years after Intel went public, Grinnell’s endowment had more than doubled to $27 million — even as the stock market lost 40% of its value.

Meanwhile, Rosenfield was keeping his eyes, and his mind, wide open. In 1976, Rosenfield heard from Buffett that a TV station, WDTN of Dayton, was for sale. Endowments rarely control private companies, but Rosenfield thinks like a businessman, not a bureaucrat. He grabbed WDTN for Grinnell at just $12.9 million, or a mere 2 1/2 times revenues at a time when TV stations were selling for three to four times revenues.


Disclaimer: The Good Investors is the personal investing blog of two simple guys who are passionate about educating Singaporeans about stock market investing. By using this Site, you specifically agree that none of the information provided constitutes financial, investment, or other professional advice. It is only intended to provide education. Speak with a professional before making important decisions about your money, your professional life, or even your personal life.

Board Games, Coffee Cans, and Investing

Doing nothing is one of the most important actions we can take as stock market investors, but it is also one of the hardest things to do.

David Gardner is the co-founder of The Motley Fool, and he’s one of the best stock market investors I know. 

There’s a fascinating short story involving David that can be found in a 2016 Fool.com article written by Morgan Housel titled Two Short Stories to Put Successful Investing Into Context.

In the article, Morgan shared a conversation he had with David. Once, Morgan spotted David playing video games at the Fool’s office and asked him in jest: “If you had to give up board games, video games, or stocks, which would you quit?” (For context, David is a huge fan of board games.)

David’s response surprised Morgan: He would choose to quit stocks rather than board games or video games. Here’s Morgan recounting David’s brilliant explanation in Two Short Stories to Put Successful Investing Into Context

“Games are hands-on by design. They are meant to be played, not left alone.

But a good portfolio can prosper for decades with minimal intervention. A basket of stocks is not a board game with turns and rounds. It’s something that should be mostly hands-off. After a proper allocation is set up, one of the biggest strengths of individual investors is what they don’t do. They don’t trade. They don’t fiddle. They don’t require daily monitoring. They let businesses earn profit and accrue to shareholders in uneven ways. 

David’s point was that he could be happy never touching his investments again, because he currently owns a big, diverse set of companies whose long-term future he’s bullish on.”

David’s response echoes one of my favourite investing articles, The Coffee Can Portfolio, written by investment manager Robert G. Kirby in the 1980s.

In The Coffee Can Portfolio, Kirby shared a personal experience he had with a female client of his in the 1950s. He had been working with this client for 10 years – during which he managed her investment portfolio, jumping in and out of stocks and lightening positions frequently – when her husband passed away suddenly. The client wanted Kirby to handle the stocks she had inherited from her deceased husband. Here’s what happened next, according to Kirby:

“When we received the list of assets, I was amused to find that he had secretly been piggy-backing our recommendations for his wife’s portfolio. Then, when I looked at the total value of the estate, I was also shocked. The husband had applied a small twist of his own to our advice: He paid no attention whatsoever to the sale recommendations. He simply put about $5,000 in every purchase recommendation. Then he would toss the certificate in his safe-deposit box and forget it.

Needless to say, he had an odd-looking portfolio. He owned a number of small holdings with values of less than $2,000. He had several large holdings with values in excess of $100,000. There was one jumbo holding worth over $800,000 that exceeded the total value of his wife’s portfolio and came from a small commitment in a company called Haloid; this later turned out to be a zillion shares of Xerox.”

The revelation that buying and then patiently holding shares of great companies for the long-term had generated vastly superior returns as compared to more active buying-and-selling helped Kirby to form the basis for his Coffee Can Portfolio idea. He explained:

“The Coffee Can portfolio concept harkens back to the Old West, when people put their valuable possessions in a coffee can and kept it under the mattress. That coffee can involved no transaction costs, administrative costs, or any other costs. The success of the program depended entirely on the wisdom and foresight used to select the objects to be placed in the coffee can to begin with.”

Doing nothing is one of the most important actions we can take as stock market investors, and it has served me immensely well. It is also one of the hardest things to do. But I hope those of you reading this article can achieve this. Don’t just do something – sit there!

DisclaimerThe Good Investors is the personal investing blog of two simple guys who are passionate about educating Singaporeans about stock market investing. By using this Site, you specifically agree that none of the information provided constitutes financial, investment, or other professional advice. It is only intended to provide education. Speak with a professional before making important decisions about your money, your professional life, or even your personal life.

The Fascinating Facts Behind Warren Buffett’s Best Investment

The Washington Post Company is one of the best – if not the best – investment that Warren Buffett has made in percentage terms. What can we learn from it?

One of the best returns – maybe even the best – that Warren Buffett has enjoyed came from his 1973 investment in shares of The Washington Post Company (WPC), which is now known as Graham Holdings Company. Back then, it was the publisher of the influential US-based newspaper, The Washington Post

Buffett did not invest much in WPC. He controls Berkshire Hathaway and in 1973, he exchanged just US$11 million of Berkshire’s cash for WPC shares. But by the end of 2007, Buffett’s stake in WPC had swelled to nearly US$1.4 billion. That’s a gain of over 10,000%.  

There are two fascinating facts behind Buffett’s big win with the newspaper publisher. 

First, WPC’s share price fell by more than 20% shortly after Buffett invested, and then stayed there for three years.

Second, WPC was a great bargain in plain sight when Buffett started buying shares. In Berkshire’s 1985 shareholders’ letter, Buffett wrote:

“We bought all of our WPC holdings in mid-1973 at a price of not more than one-fourth of the then per-share business value of the enterprise. Calculating the price/value ratio required no unusual insights. Most security analysts, media brokers, and media executives would have estimated WPC’s intrinsic business value at $400 to $500 million just as we did. And its $100 million stock market valuation was published daily for all to see.

Our advantage, rather, was attitude: we had learned from Ben Graham that the key to successful investing was the purchase of shares in good businesses when market prices were at a large discount from underlying business values.”

How many investors do you think have the patience to hold on through three years of losses? Buffett did, and he was well rewarded. Patience is the key to successful investing. It is necessary, even if you have purchased shares of the best company at a firesale-bargain price.

Warren Buffett has investing acumen that many of us do not have. But there are also times when common sense and patience is more important than acumen in making a great investment. Buffett himself said that no special insight was needed to value WPC back in 1973. What was needed to earn a smashing return with the company was the right attitude and patience.

DisclaimerThe Good Investors is the personal investing blog of two simple guys who are passionate about educating Singaporeans about stock market investing. By using this Site, you specifically agree that none of the information provided constitutes financial, investment, or other professional advice. It is only intended to provide education. Speak with a professional before making important decisions about your money, your professional life, or even your personal life.

What Causes Share Prices to Increase?

Share price appreciation and dividends are the primary drivers of returns for shareholders.

In an earlier article, I discussed how stock prices are a function of future cash flows to the investor. In much the same light, investors sometimes value stocks based on multiples to earnings or revenue. This is because revenue and earnings is what ultimately drives cash flow to shareholders.

In this article, I discuss how business fundamentals and valuation growth may drive capital appreciation.

The two key factors

The equation below shows the relationship between share price appreciation, valuation, and a company’s growth.

Share price appreciation = Earnings/revenue growth X Price-to-earnings/revenue multiple expansion

Put simply, a company’s share price is driven by earnings/revenue growth and changes in the price-to-earnings/revenue multiple.

Increases in the price-to-revenue/earnings multiples are usually driven by a better outlook, new information, or market participants appreciating a company’s future prospects.

How to use this information?

As investors, knowing how stock prices rise can help us to pick stocks.

The sweet spot is to find a company that will grow its earnings/revenue and is also likely to experience valuation-multiple growth. 

But companies that can grow revenue/earnings at a quick pace without a valuation multiple expansion can still serve investors very well. For example, a company that is growing earnings at 20% per year, and does not experience a valuation compression, will give shareholders capital appreciation of 20% per year.

Too often, investors focus on the second part of the equation, hoping that valuation-multiple expansion can drive stock price appreciation, without taking into account that business performance also drives stock price performance.

In fact, even if there is a valuation compression, a company can still be a good investment if revenue or profit grows faster than the valuation squeeze. To illustrate this, I came out with a simple example. Let’s assume Company ABC grows revenue at 70% per year but is expensively priced at 60-times sales. 

The table illustrates what happens to ABC’s share price if there is a valuation compression each year.

Source: My computation

As you can see, ABC’s share price grew a decent 25% per year despite the price-to-sales multiple dropping from 60 to 30. The above example can give us perspective on what we are experiencing in today’s investing environment.

There are numerous technology companies that are growing at a triple or high double-digit pace, and are expected to grow at these rates for the next few years At the same time, their price-to-revenue multiples are so high that is it likely the multiple will fall over the years. But if the top-line can grow faster than the contraction in the valuation multiple, we will still see the shareholders of these companies be handsomely rewarded.

Risks to growth

Before you invest in any richly-priced stock, you must know that high valuation multiples also pose a risk. If a company cannot grow revenues or profits as fast as its valuation contracts, its stock price may fall off a cliff. 

As such, investors need to be mindful that a rich valuation also comes at a cost. Valuation contraction can be extremely painful for investors if the company does not live up to the kind of growth that the market is expecting of it.

Final words

Deep value investors tend to focus on the second part of the equation, hoping that the market will realise that a company’s valuation multiple is too low – when the market becomes aware of its folly, the valuation multiple could expand, which could lead to stock price growth.

But don’t underestimate the importance of the first part of the equation- business growth. This is ultimately the longer-term determinant of a company’s share price. Valuation multiples can only expand up to a certain point before the expansion becomes unsustainable, while business growth can continue for years. Business growth can lead to huge stock price appreciation and is to me, the best way to find multi-baggers over the long term.

Disclaimer: The Good Investors is the personal investing blog of two simple guys who are passionate about educating Singaporeans about stock market investing. By using this Site, you specifically agree that none of the information provided constitutes financial, investment, or other professional advice. It is only intended to provide education. Speak with a professional before making important decisions about your money, your professional life, or even your personal life.

What We’re Reading (Week Ending 19 July 2020)

We’ve constantly been sharing a list of our recent reads in our weekly emails for The Good Investors.

Do subscribe for our weekly updates through the orange box in the blog (it’s on the side if you’re using a computer, and all the way at the bottom if you’re using mobile) – it’s free!

But since our readership-audience for The Good Investors is wider than our subscriber base, we think sharing the reading list regularly on the blog itself can benefit even more people. The articles we share touch on a wide range of topics, including investing, business, and the world in general.

Here are the articles for the week ending 19 July 2020:

1. Here We Are: 5 Stories That Got Us To Now – Morgan Housel

We are lucky that a lot of today’s economy can shift seamlessly into remote work. It wouldn’t have been possible to this extent if Covid-19 struct in 2010 instead of 2020.

But it again sets up a stark contrast of haves and have nots, and groups of people who are experiencing Covid-19 in different ways.

Massachusetts did a survey in April that tells the story:

  • 88% of those with an advanced degree can work from home, vs. 35% with a high school degree or less.
  • 75% of those making more than $150,000 a year can work from home, vs. 44% of those earning less than $50,000 a year.
  • 74% of salaried workers can get their jobs done from home, vs. 40% of hourly workers.

There is a long history of economies being hit with downpours. But this is the first in which perhaps 70% of the economy has a sturdy umbrella while 30% is left to get soaked…

… In 1900 roughly 800 per 100,000 Americans died each year from infectious disease. By 2014 that was 45.6 per 100,000 – a 94% decline…

…This decline is probably the best thing to ever happen to humanity.

To follow that sentence with “but” is a step too far. It’s a wholly good thing.

However, it creates an anomaly.

We are medically more prepared to fight disease than ever before. But, psychologically, the mere thought of a pandemic has never felt so foreign, so unprecedented, so upending.

What was a tragic but expected part of life 100 years ago is now a tragic and inconceivable part of life in 2020.

2. 5 Thoughts on a World with No Yield – Ben Carlson

If you’re waiting for valuations to revert back to some magical 15x average CAPE ratio from 1871 you may be waiting for a long time if the low yield environment is here for some time.

The best argument against this line of thinking is a place like Japan where interest rates have been on the floor since 1990. Rates have been low or negative in many European countries for a number of years now too.

My counterargument to that case would be the United States now makes up 55% of the global equity market cap. Fifty percent of all Americans take part in the stock market (it was just 1% of the population in the Great Depression). Americans are on their own when it comes to saving and investing for retirement and we have a much worse social safety net than these other countries.

At the height of the dot-com bubble, the highest stock market valuations in history, investors could still earn 5-6% yields on U.S. Treasuries. That is not the case today.

Valuation is not useless but it does require context.

3. Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies – Patrick OShaughnessy and Charlie Songhurst 

There’s a book by Will Durant called Caesar and Christ, it’s a whole history of Rome, from the founding to 500 AD and sort of the full history and afterwards. So it’s interesting to think, how would you invest through that? Do you buy or sell Roman real estate when Caesar’s murdered? Cause you get a civil war and you get chaos, but then you get Augustus and peace afterwards. Then when you get this whole state of bad emperors and it looks like everything’s going to fall apart, maybe you would sell and then you get Hadrian and the good emperors and you get a great hundred years.

It makes you think about sort of volatility and about having to make decisions with only information available at that time. And what’s so interesting is, you do get this sort of pattern of going from a power and sort of fashion being to have your base in city of Rome, to being out in Capua or out in the smaller provinces. And that cycle seems to co-exist for like the 500 years of history. And if you look at London, I think the peak population was in the 1930s. I think it’s still higher than the present population. Or it may just have peaked so maybe that’s the beginning of one of these great 40 year demographic changes, but people move back to the suburbs or not. This is speculation. I certainly don’t have as much conviction on it as I do on startup stuff…

…Often my enthusiasm has been greater than my competence and it’s the people that bet on the enthusiasm more than the competence, I’m eternally grateful to them.

4. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings Responds To Whitney Tilson: Cover Your Short Position. Now – Reed Hastings

Next in the litany of Whitney threats is market saturation. In 2011, this is unlikely to affect us. Streaming is growing rapidly; it is propelling Hulu, YouTube, Netflix and others to huge growth rates. Streaming adoption will likely follow the classic S curve, and we’re still on the first part (acceleration) of the S curve. Since we expanded into streaming, Netflix net subscriber additions have been 1.9m in 2008, 2.9m in 2009, and over 7m this year (estimated). While saturation will happen eventually, given the recent huge acceleration of our business specifically, and streaming generally, saturation seems unlikely to hit in the short term.

The next issue is what Whitney calls our “weak content.” While Whitney may think “Family Guy” is weak content, our subscribers do not. Furthermore, our huge subscriber growth to date has been built on this “weak content,” so imagine how much upside we have as we improve our content, as we are always trying to do. I think what Whitney may be misunderstanding is that at $7.99 per month, consumers don’t expect to have everything under the sun. A variant of this misunderstanding is when DirecTV (DTV) advertises against Netflix, calling out some Netflix content weaknesses. When an $80 per month service is picking on an $8 per month service, the $8 per month service just gets more attention from consumers and grows even faster.

5. 3 lessons from owning FAANG stocks for over a decade – Chin Hui Leong

In January 2007, I bought shares of a little known, US-based business doing DVD rentals by mail. Little did I know that, by doing so, I had bought the first of a set of five coveted stocks that are now affectionately known as “FAANG”.

You see, that DVD-rental business slowly but surely morphed into a massive global online streaming service. The company’s name? Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX).

I still own around half of my shares from 13 years ago, and those shares are up over 160 times my original cost.

But that was not all.

6. State of the Cloud 2020 – Byron Deeter, Elliott Robinson, Hansae Catlett, Mary D’onofrio

By 2020 it’s estimated that the average cost of a data breach will be over $150 million, with the global annual cost forecast to be $2.1 trillion. New laws such as GDPR and CCPA are creating the demand for enterprises to tighten their data privacy practices.

“While many tech companies were architected to collect data, they were not necessarily architected to safely store data. Today there’s not just a rift, but a chasm between where data privacy technology, processes, and regulations should be and where they are, thus creating massive amounts of “privacy debt,” wrote Partner Alex Ferrara in his Data Privacy Engineering Roadmap.

“Like technical debt, privacy debt requires reworking internal systems to adapt and build to the newest standards, which will not only make consumers happier but also make companies better.”

We’re seeing a new category of technology dedicated to helping enterprises, large and small, comply with global privacy regulations and help protect consumer data. For example, last year Bessemer invested in BigID’s Series C, a data intelligence platform that finds, analyzes, and de-risks identity data, allowing enterprises to understand where their sensitive data lives, at scale.

7. “One of the Investment Greats” Explains His Portfolio Strategy – Robert Korajczyk and Lou Simpson

Well, I think you need a combination of quantitative and qualitative skills. Most people now have the quantitative skills. The qualitative skills develop over time.

But, as Warren used to tell me, “You’re better off being approximately right than exactly wrong.” Everyone talks about modeling—and it’s probably helpful to do modeling—but if you can be approximately right, you will do well.

For example, one thing you need to determine is: Are the company’s leaders honest? Do they have integrity? Do they have huge turnover? Do they treat their people poorly? Does the CEO believe in running the business for the long term, or is he or she focused on the next quarter’s consensus earnings?


Disclaimer: The Good Investors is the personal investing blog of two simple guys who are passionate about educating Singaporeans about stock market investing. By using this Site, you specifically agree that none of the information provided constitutes financial, investment, or other professional advice. It is only intended to provide education. Speak with a professional before making important decisions about your money, your professional life, or even your personal life.