By Guest Post. Originally published at ValueWalk.
By: J. Dennis Jean-Jacques, author, The Five Keys to Value investing – full bio at bottom
Brexit. Trump. The Fed. Change, whatever it may be, is the only constant in the world. The stock market is not immune, invest in it. ETFs and passive investment strategies are great vehicles to capture directional bets – positive ones, if you are lucky. But in order to truly outperform, you need to go where traditional investors are not and where ETFs, quantitative funds and passive 
March 2nd 2009: It was a cold and windy night at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. As the snow piled up and the flight delays piled on, I was anxious to get back to New York. The Dow Jones Industrial Average had just hit 10-year lows. I had come to Chicago earlier that day to participate in a private, investment retreat to discuss the economic environment and to debate the applicability of core value tenets. The snow delays presented an ideal setting to think about what was transpiring in the marketplace. It was, quite frankly, a blizzard.
That was then. Today, the stock market is at all-time highs, yet “change” is still as present as ever.
Recent political and economic shifts suggest we may be in the dawn of an unprecedented era of real transformation. Again. Increasing deficits and new financial regulations repealing and replacing old ones. In regard to the stock market, the evolution of new, untested – “fake news” prone – quantitative investment strategies add to the complexity and increase risks for investors. Some of these complexities are man-made, others not. It has been reported that high-frequency trading (computer-run programs that trade hundreds of stocks in nanoseconds) account for nearly two-thirds of the volume in the stock market on any given day. This can cause significant swings in share prices based on a variety of macro and esoteric factors. A few years ago, investment giant PIMCO labeled this phenomenon the “New Normal,” an environment slow economic growth and higher levels of volatility.
That was then. Today, the guys at PIMCO have introduced a new term: the “New Neutral,” an environment with absolutely no growth at all. Yikes.
This is consensus thinking, and is exactly why better-resourced firms can offer you the competitive advantage of independent thinking. Much success in investing, unlike in other professions, is based on your ability to have a different view from the consensus. For example, lawyers may huddle to find earlier precedence and base their arguments on similar logic. You would also want your dentist to be expert in the most widely used procedure prior to your root canal surgery. In most professions, achievement is not based on having a different perspective from your peers. In the stock market, however, the stock price already reflects the consensus perspective. To outperform the stock market, you have to think differently from that consensus – to have a distinctive point of view. Undoubtedly, you will have many setbacks going against the crowd. The goal, therefore, is to use a process to minimize mistakes.
January 10, 2017
Over a decade ago, I wrote a book borne from the private teachings of legendary investor Michael Price about a unique strand of value investing that operates outside the mindset of the general investment public — a discipline based on having a different perspective from the crowd about the change agents affecting the value of a company. Some have labeled this approach narrowly as event- driven or special situation investing. Yet, the best opportunities are often not one-time “events” or anything “special.” The best opportunities often stem from something as boring as a company being able to raise prices to catalyze future profits. As such, I prefer the broader term: “catalyst and milestone-focused.”
The Old Normal — investing with catalysts and milestones
The catalyst and milestone focused approach is not new; it has been practiced by a sect of value investors for quite some time because of its emphasis on independent thinking and gauging predictability. Benjamin Graham is widely regarded as the father of value investing. In 1949 in his classic book “The Intelligent Investor
One of Graham’s most attentive students formed a hedge fund designed specifically to invest in companies with catalysts and milestones. His name is Warren Buffett. I urge you to read every Buffett Partnership letter, available on a variety of websites that you can get your hands on. (The letters are not to be confused with the well-known and much-admired Berkshire Hathaway annual reports; I am talking about the Partnership letters.) Study each one carefully, particularly those covering the difficult years of the Dow Jones including 1966 when the market was down -15.6% and the Buffett Partnership was up +16.8%. Try to reengineer or recreate the analysis Buffett might have done on a few of his investments at that time.
Even among value investors, there are misconceptions about what a “catalyst” is, and so you will be ahead of the game if you understand clearly what a catalyst is and is not. Catalysts are not only, as one might believe, one-time events such as news about a merger or a restructuring announcement. Indeed, such catalysts would instantaneously be reflected in the stock price, leaving little time for non-quant traders to participate as the stock price rises or falls on the news. Luckily for those of us without supercomputers, catalysts also include “long-dated” opportunities: situations that may have a pre-defined timeframe, but that take a longer time to develop and are therefore often overlooked by an impatient market place.
Investors, even Buffett’s own shareowners, have often questioned catalysts and milestones. In his January 18, 1963 letter to his partners, Buffett tried to clarify what he viewed as catalyst and milestone opportunities: “These are securities whose financial results depend on corporate action rather than supply and demand factors created by buyers and sellers of securities. In other words, they are securities with a timetable where
January 10, 2017
we can predict, within reasonable error limits, when we will get how much and what might upset the applecart.”
Catalysts are situations that will move a stock price up or down over a period of time based on certain milestones. Such a discipline forces you to invest bottom-up, company by company, with a clear understanding of what will make a company’s value go up (or down) over time, and what metrics you will use to monitor that progress. Opportunities in this area are abundant due to
The post Invest in Change: How to Become a Catalyst and Milestone Focused Investor appeared first on ValueWalk.
Sign up for ValueWalk’s free newsletter here.
