So here’s what I’m doing: Not Panicking.This analysis is provided by Eden Bradfeld at BlackBull Research.
Listen, the US has survived the depression of WWI, the Great Depression, the depression of WWII, oil shocks, the dot com bubble, the GFC, the COVID-sell off. It’ll likely survive this.
In the scope of history, that $1 survived very well indeed. Panicking and running for the hills does not do so well. Winston Churchill was a great and flawed man but a terrible investor; he bought and sold shares prior to the 1929 crash in such speculative investments as mining companies, railways, and so on — most of them lost money (hence why Churchill continued to write at such a pace — to fund his Champagne-and-spec stock lifestyle). Hetty Green, on the other hand, (known as the “Queen of Wall Street”, managed to do very well her time — her quote?
I buy when things are low and no one wants them. I keep them until they go up, and people are crazy to get them.
Now, that’s something I can get behind.
Nobody wanted Meta a few years ago. I wrote an internal memo, close to its plummet in ‘22 (it got to $99 or so a share!). I wrote this:
ii) Yet what if we were to tell about about a company with this set of heuristics? Let’s call it “Company A”
Company A has a 31% return on equity and a 20% return on capital.
It has a net income margin of 37% and a FCF margin of 21%
Its income has a compounded annual growth rate over the last 5 years of 41%
If we add in numbers, now, let’s say the net income for 2020 was $29 billion, and $10 billion of that was used to repurchase stock from shareholders?
Let’s say the unlevered FCF is around $6 billion per quarter, and let’s say the debt to equity ratio is about 9x.
In other words, Company A is grows at a quick clip, and has done sustainably for the majority of its life. Its return on capital and return on equity would make any investor happy. Its FCF is an absolute machine.
Would you buy Company A?
Company A was Meta . You would’ve roughly made 4x or 5x’d your money if you’d bought around then. The point is, the fundamentals of a business matter, and right now there a quite a few exceptional businesses with good fundamentals trading at a good price. Alphabet (Google) trades at ~16x earnings. LVMH trades at ~18x earnings. And so on. Brown-Forman trades at ~15x earnings. These are all “inevitables” — Google will continue to be a dominant advertising platform, LVMH will continue to sell luxury, and Brown-Forman will continue to sell Jack Daniel’s and so on.
I talked to my ma in the weekend. She is not really a share person. Her portfolio is a bunch of “inevitables”. It’s done very well. She said “aren’t you worried about this stock market?”, and I said “You love supermarket shopping, Mum. If you see something at a 25% discount you buy it. You come home, and you’re delighted that you found some mince on special²”
She was like, “oh, that makes sense”.
The problem is you have a lot of people looking at charts and catching worry that the world will end. The world, I am delighted to say, has a magnificent disposition to carry on.
