Comment by MichaelDickens
2 months ago
> “Value investing” is dead for most, picking a company that you believe will generate solid long-term revenue is no longer interesting.
In that sense, value investing has always been dead—most people were never interested in that. That's why value investing worked.
I think the bigger problem is having a rational basis for choosing a company and believing in its revenue prospects. It's probably gotten harder now that companies much more commonly reinvest their profits in the company or into stock buybacks, rather than paying a dividend, for tax reasons. (Modulo the tax effects, paying a dividend vs letting the stock appreciate should be a wash, but it's harder to evaluate the current fair value of a stock when your evaluation is based on the expectation of that fair value changing over time.)
Technically, value investing still work.
The key tenant of value investing is that there exist companies which based on their financial metrics are fundamentally under valued by the market (in opposition to what market price efficiency predicts).
From there, an insane market should provide you with even more opportunities to value invest.
> an insane market should provide you with even more opportunities to value invest
This seems like a uniquely bad time to make this sort of argument.
There are many old tools for insane markets to perpetuate themselves that are recently stronger (revolving doors between industry/government and other garden variety corruption; all the monopolies we have to tolerate out of fear, convenience or greed; "too big to fail" and trends towards globalism in general). There are also several relatively new tools (algorithmic price-fixing so that industry "competitors" can now collude forever with impunity; total masks-off no-holds-barred corruption where the unelected/unqualified are simply appointed to positions of power regardless of clear conflicts of interest). Add to this what others have observed re: meme-stocks, huge moves based on tweets or concerted disinformation. Or there's the cooked books on a massive scale with Theranos or SBF or the out of control corporate fraud with VW's dieselgate or Boeing's 737 Max, or .. or .. pick your own recent scandal.
Value investing seems to need reliable information from somewhere to make informed decisions, but where is that going to come from? Investment in individual companies rather than in diversified aggregates seems nuts if the financial markets are going to be as "post truth" as the political world.
> Value investing seems to need reliable information from somewhere to make informed decisions, but where is that going to come from?
Value investment is entirely based on financial fundamentals. You don’t need magic information. That’s the whole point. For something that old, people like to use the world but seem blissfully unaware of what it actually is. Graham’s books are available pretty much everywhere.
The whole point of the thing is that fundamentals actually matter and markets misprice because they rely on other less sound things. That’s why it seems even more relevant in a post truth market.
None of the companies you listed would have qualified as sound for value investing by the way.
Nitpick: a tenet is a foundational principle or belief; a tenant is someone who pays rent. (Which I suppose could be used as a metaphor for a dividend-paying stock, but.)
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