3 Signs of a Terrible Investment

3 Signs of a Terrible Investment
By Matt Koppenheffer
January 4, 2010 |

There's nothing wrong with fixing your focus on trying to find the next Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT). After all, isn't that what we're here for in the first place?

But before you go diving in after that hot new small cap you found, let's take a moment to remember some of Warren Buffett's priceless investment advice: "Rule number one: Never lose money. Rule number two: Never forget rule number one."

Maybe we should rename Warren "Captain Obvious."

But as obvious as Buffett's advice may seem, it's an important and often overlooked aspect of investing. So how do we avoid losing money? I've found a few great lessons from some of the past decade's worst investments.

1. Poor business model
In Buffett's 2007 letter to Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK-A) shareholders, he described three types of businesses: the great, the good, and the gruesome. He described the "gruesome" type as a business that "grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money."

Buffett's prime example of a gruesome business? Airlines. And he's not alone in thinking this. Robert Crandall, the former chairman of American Airlines, once said:

I've never invested in any airline. I'm an airline manager. I don't invest in airlines. And I always said to the employees of American, 'This is not an appropriate investment. It's a great place to work and it's a great company that does important work. But airlines are not an investment.'

So then it shouldn't be much of a surprise that AMR (NYSE: AMR), American Airlines' parent, would come up as a stock that has massively underperformed the market. Though American is the only legacy airline not to have declared bankruptcy, the business has performed only marginally over the years, and its voracious appetite for capital has gobbled up all of the company's cash and then some.

Investing large amounts of capital into a business isn't a bad thing in itself. However, investors need to be sure that there's a good chance that capital investments will actually translate into healthy shareholder returns.

2. Sky-high valuation
We can take our pick of overvalued stocks when looking back 10 years, but Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) seems to stick out as a prime example.

Yahoo! had a lot going for it back in 1999 -- it was a pioneer and leader in the Internet search arena, it was growing like a weed, and by the end of 1999 was actually profitable. And, in fact, Yahoo! continued to get even more profitable and managed to expand its revenue 12-fold by the end of 2008.

However, the 259 price-to-revenue multiple that investors awarded the stock at the end of 1999 was absolutely ludicrous. Even if Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) had never come along and pushed Yahoo! aside as the industry leader, it would have been nearly impossible for the company to live up to the expectations that Yahoo!'s 1999 valuation implied.

As Buffett has said, "It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price." And it's never a good idea to own even a great company at an absurd price.

3. Loss of focus
What exactly was it that made E*TRADE (Nasdaq: ETFC) so successful for so many years? That's simple: It was a leader in the online brokerage market, making it easier for Fools like us to buy and sell stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and options.

However, the need for speed on the growth front, along with the pre-crash excitement in the housing and credit markets, led E*TRADE to rapidly bulk up its lending activities and investment portfolio, including feasting on food-poisoning-inducing asset-backed securities. As it turns out, E*TRADE wasn't especially good at managing these areas, and when all hell broke loose in 2008, the company found itself on the brink of extinction.

E*TRADE competitors like optionsXpress and Charles Schwab (Nasdaq: SCHW) have either stuck to their knitting or never let their noncore operations get out of control. As a result, their stocks have held up much better through the market turmoil.

Successful companies tend to be successful because they're good at their core business -- online brokerage services in E*TRADE's case. Is it possible for a company to branch out in a related area and be successful? Absolutely, but investors should always be on high alert when a company charges full throttle into uncharted waters.

The best of both worlds
Keeping these lessons in mind when evaluating an investment will help you avoid some of the next decade's worst investments, but they may also help you achieve the goal that we started with -- finding the next Wal-Mart. After all, Wal-Mart is a company with a great business model and a laser-like focus on its core low-priced-retail strategy, and it's been a fantastic investment for those who bought at a fair price.



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