The fifth and final memo of 2001 is focused on H. Marks favorite topic; cycles. Reading the title you’ll get a glimpse of the main takeaway from this memo. This memo is a must read if you have any interest understanding the environment that you interact with when investing and how you should cope with that environment as it changes.
Please comment if you have read the memo and what you thought of it. Also, if you have found a worldly wisdom in the memo that you think I should have included please comment on that as well. I’m very interested in what caught your eye while reading and why.
Worldly wisdom’s from You Can’t Predict. You Can Prepare. – 2001
1.
“The Economic Cycle
How can non-forecasters like Oaktree best cope with the ups and downs of the economic cycle? I think the answer lies in knowing where we are and leaning against the wind. For example, when the economy has fallen substantially, observers are depressed, capacity expansion has ceased and there begin to be signs of recovery, we are willing to invest in companies in cyclical industries. When growth is strong, capacity is being brought on stream to keep up with soaring demand and the market forgets these are cyclical companies whose peak earnings deserve trough valuations, we trim our holdings aggressively. We certainly might do so too early, but that beats the heck out of doing it too late.”
My thoughts: The last sentence is absolute gold. Survival is rationality as N. Taleb would say. However, prudence is also cyclical. Extract 2 and 3 will give you some examples of that:
2.
“The Credit Cycle
[…]
At the extreme, providers of capital finance borrowers and projects that aren’t worthy of being financed. As The Economist said earlier this year, “the worst loans are made at the best of times.” This leads to capital destruction – that is, to investment of capital in projects where the cost of capital exceeds the return on capital, and eventually to cases where there is no return of capital.
[…]
Of course, at the extreme the process is ready to be reversed again. Because the competition to make loans or investments is low, high returns can be demanded along with high creditworthiness. Contrarians who commit capital at this point have a shot at high returns, and those tempting potential returns begin to draw in capital. In this way, a recovery begins to be fueled.
[…] Prosperity brings expanded lending, which leads to unwise lending, which produces large losses, which makes lenders stop lending, which ends prosperity, and on and on.
[…]
In making investments, it has become my habit to worry less about the economic future – which I’m sure I can’t know much about – than I do about the supply/demand picture relating to capital. Being positioned to make investments in an uncrowded arena conveys vast advantages. Participating in a field that everyone’s throwing money at is a formula for disaster. “
3.
“The Corporate Life Cycle
[…]
The biggest mistakes I have witnessed in my investing career came when people ignored the limitations imposed by the corporate life cycle. In short, investors did assume trees could grow to the sky. In 1999, just as in 1969, investors accepted that ultra-high profit growth could go on forever. They also concluded that for the stocks of companies capable of such growth, no p/e ratio was too high. People extrapolated earnings growth of 20%-plus and paid p/e ratios of 50-plus. Of course, when neither the growth nor the valuations turned out to be sustainable, losses of 90%-plus became the rule. As always, the folly of projecting limitless growth became obvious in retrospect.
[…]
So the latest “wonder-company” with a unique product rarely possesses the secret of rapid growth forever. I think it’s safer to expect a company’s growth rate to regress toward the mean than it is to expect perpetual motion. ”
4.
“The Market Cycle
At the University of Chicago, I was taught that the value of an asset is the discounted present value of its future cash flows. If this is true, we should expect the prices of assets to change in line with changes in the outlook for their cash flows. But we know that asset prices often rise and fall without regard for cash flows, and certainly by amounts that are entirely disproportionate to the changes in cash flows.
Finance professors would say that these fluctuations reflect changes in the discount rate being applied to the cash flows or, in other words, changes in valuation parameters. Practitioners would agree that changes in p/e ratios are responsible, and we all know that p/e ratios fluctuate much more radically than do company fundamentals.
The market has a mind of its own, and its changes in valuation parameters, caused primarily by changes in investor psychology (not changes in fundamentals), that account for most short-term changes in security prices. This psychology, too, moves in a highly cyclical manner. “
My thoughts: This reminds me of an extract from the 2000 memo We’re Not In 1999 Anymore, Toto that included the following words of wisdom; “Be conscious of investor psychology”.
5.
“Cycles and How To Live With Them
No one knew when the tech bubble would burst, and no one knew what the extent of the correction could be or how long it would last. But it wasn’t impossible to get a sense that the market was euphoric and investors were behaving in an unquestioning, giddy manner. That was all it would have taken to avoid a great deal of the carnage.
Having said that, I want to point out emphatically that many of those who complained about the excessive market valuations – including me – started to do so years too soon. And for a long time, another of my old standards was proved true: “being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong.” Some of the cautious investors ran out of staying power, losing their jobs or their clients because of having missed the gains. Some capitulated and, having missed the gains, jumped in just in time to participate in the losses.
So I’m not trying to give the impression that coping with cycles is easy. But I do think it’s a necessary effort. We may never know where we’re going, or when the tide will turn, but we had better have a good idea where we are.“
My thoughts: Cycles are simple, but not easy.
Cigarrfimpar 