Wednesday, 14 May 2014

A falling share price can be a good thing

Is a falling share price always a bad thing?

I don't really seem to think so. If a stock falls for legitimate reasons such as an earnings downgrade that's normal but I'm not referring to this. What I'm making reference to is when a share price declines with no simultaneous change in underlying firm value. I'll illustrate the way i see it with an example so you can better understand my style of investing. If you're going shopping and you buy milk today for $1.50 and you come back tomorrow and it's $1.25 will you be upset? Well i can't answer for you, but i surely wouldn't be because i can now buy more milk at a cheaper price.

What i like looking for in the stock market are bargains, like the milk example. Traditional value investing has come a long way from Net-Net investments which in my opinion are irregular. Information was much less available to the market in the early days of this style of investing when Graham was applying such a technique. In other words the market has become more efficient. Now a days, i believe the mindset has shifted towards finding high quality business who have rising intrinsic values. Sometimes as Phil Phisher has pointed out you may have to pay a fair price for a good business. But in my opinion this is better than paying a good price for a fair business. Some examples of which i wold regard as high quality (Australian) businesses would be  Real Estate Group, CSL, and Flight Centre. This isn't always easy in this day and age. But as Walter Scholls said, the market can at times get nervous, and that bad news causes trouble. When this happens, you can sometimes find a good company not for a fair price but also for a good price. Warren Buffett did this with his American Express purchase. They had a  fraud slip up and it sent the stock falling. Buffett swooped in and bought some stock at a good price. This is rare but I'm constantly on the search for this type of opportunity. The Global Financial Crisis would have been the perfect time to start buying (or adding to your positions) in high quality business, but i wasn't involved in the market at that time. These sorts of opportunities are once in a lifetime. And i believe the patient, long-term investor who seeks superior businesses will be rewarded in the long run. Buffett doesn't care at all about stock prices, he only looks at them to see if there is a discrepancy  between what the business is worth and what its currently trading at. He once said "if you buy a good business and it does well, then you'll do well in the stock market." Sometimes, i believe that this is completely true.

On a side note, Buffett has moved on from his "Cigar-butt" type investments to buying for quality (growth style) you might say he's a function of both value investing and growth investing (but i think more heavily weighted towards value). Some have said the rise of Berkshire Hathaway could be partially attributed towards Buffetts profound blend of both growth and value investing mind frame/techniques. I watched a good interview with Jean-Claude Van Damme where he was asked to describe his fighting technique. He said it was a blend of many different styles. He used the example of a good chef and a great chef. He said you can be a good chef and master one style of cooking. But you can become a great chef by mastering various different style such as French, Chinese, and Indian Cuisine and blending them to create your own styles/dishes. This is what Himself but also Bruce Lee did with fighting styles. Rather than learning one style they mastered many and formulated their own distinct fighting styles by blending moves from different fighting styles and mixing them up. This is what Buffett in one way or another has done with investing. As he himself says "I'm 85% Graham and 15% Phisher". Which are two people with two completely different investing styles.


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