Inflation risk, interest rate risk and principal risk

Typically, investors think of 3 basic risk types—inflation risk, interest rate risk, and principal risk. 


In fact, there’s no such thing as a riskless investment. 

While US Treasuries guarantee a return of your principal, they are subject to inflation risk (the risk that a dollar today may be worth less than a dollar tomorrow). 

If you keep cash under your mattress, you not only have inflation risk but you also have risk of fire and theft. 

Stocks may potentially reduce inflation risk but have a higher level of capital risk (i.e. if you invest in stocks, you can lose money).

When you substitute one kind of risk, you open yourself up to another. 


There are ways to eliminate or at least diminish certain kinds of risks while maintaining long-term objectives. 

An investor could simply not invest as much in vehicles that have risk to principal, like stocks. 

Or, they could allocate more money to principal-protected investments. 

Since investment returns are typically a function of how much risk you are willing to assume, the lower the risk, the lower the returns. 

That said, there are investments designed to give an investor some exposure to the stock market, while guaranteeing a stream of income during retirement. These typically have liquidity risk.  In other words, you might not be able to access your money for a certain period of time. 


 

Does the Magic Formula Really Work?

What You Will Learn

• Understanding what the Magic Formula is and how to use it
• Performance of the Magic Formula and whether it is achievable
• Whether the Magic Formula is worth using going forward

Magic.

That’s what you need to beat the market and that’s what the Magic Formula is supposed to do.

As a result of brilliant marketing, promotion and becoming a New York Times bestseller in 2005, Joel Greenblatt has turned the Magic Formula into a key strategy for many in the value investing and mechanical investing community.

Buy at least 20 stocks from the Magic Formula screening tooland then rebalance at the end of the year. Do this and you will beat the market, the book says.

The Little Book that Beats the Market

Greenblatt wrote The Little Book that Beats the Market for his children who were aged between 6-15 at the time.

It’s written in plain English and 6th grade math to make it easy to follow along. This is the strong point of the Magic Formula theme.

Everything is very easy to understand. The concept is simple, the explanation is simple, but most important of all, the execution for investors is simple enough to do on their own.

In it’s most naked form, the Magic Formula is described by Greenblatt as

a long-term investment strategy designed to help investors buy a group of above-average companies but only when they are available at below-average prices.

The Ingredients to the Magic Formula

Here is the formula courtesy of wikipedia. From beginning to end, it consists of 9 steps.

1. Establish a minimum market capitalization (usually greater than $50 million).
2. Exclude utility and financial stocks
3. Exclude foreign companies (American Depositary Receipts)
4. Determine company’s earnings yield = EBIT / enterprise value.
5. Determine company’s return on capital = ebit / (net fixed assets + working capital)
6. Rank all companies above chosen market capitalization by highest earnings yield and highest return on capital (ranked as percentages).
7. Invest in 20–30 highest ranked companies, accumulating 2–3 positions per month over a 12-month period.
8. Re-balance portfolio once per year, selling losers one week before the year-mark and winners one week after the year mark.
9. Continue over a long-term (3–5+ year) period.

Pay close attention to step 4 and 5 because they are the key driving formulas for it all to work.

• Earnings Yield = EBIT / Enterprise Value
• Return on Capital = EBIT / (Net Fixed Assets + Working Capital)

Earnings Yield is used because it targets companies with below-average prices. The idea behind of Return on Capital is to select good companies that are outperforming. This fits in line with what Greenblatt said

a long-term investment strategy designed to help investors buy a group of above-average companies but only when they are available at below-average prices.

The Magical Performance

So how magic is this Magic Formula in terms of performance? This table of values is from the revised 2010 version of the book.

and a better representation.

Starting with $10,000 the Magic Formula would have made you a millionaire by 2009.

The Magic Formula is famous for returning a 30% CAGR. From 1988 to 2004, it did achieve a 30.8% return, but the CAGR has declined significantly. No strategy can sustain a CAGR of 30%. Although the backtest in the book only provides data up to 2009, I wouldn’t count on 2010-2012 results showing vast out-performance.

The Magic Formula is a Fraud?

By popular demand, the Magic Formula will soon be added to the list of value stock screens, but the one thing that has held it back is the reliability of the backtest performed by Greenblatt.

I just don’t believe the results are as good as it seems.

What’s more, other blogs have tried to simulate the Magic Formula performance from the book, but none of them  have come close.

• Magic Formula that JUST beats the market
• Turnkey Analyst tests the Magic Formula
• Another article suggesting that the Magic Formula beats the market by 4.5%

Read more: http://www.oldschoolvalue.com/blog/investing-strategy/the-magic-formula-investing/#ixzz3cvbPJIfM

Warren Buffett’s Greatest Competition

There’s no disputing that Warren Buffett is the best investor of all time. His net worth speaks for itself. In fact, there is only one person in history worthy of comparison.

That person is young Warren Buffett.

Let’s take a look at the numbers Buffett achieved in the 1950s and 1960s compared to his performance thereafter.

From 1957 to 1969, Buffett achieved an average return of 29.5% and a cumulative return of 2794.9%!

In this timeframe, the Dow had a negative return in 5 out 12 years. Buffett had a positive return in all 12 years, with his most successful year, 1968, reaching a remarkable 58.8%. That beat the Dow by more than 50 percentage points.

This was the pinnacle of Buffett utilizing the strategies of Benjamin Graham and investing in net net stocks. He focused on the best possible NCAV investments, such as Western Insurance Securities Company, and often chose fairly concentrated portfolios. Once he found the stocks, he simply puffed the cigar and celebrated his victories.

Back then, finding these valuable, cheap companies was difficult. Young Warren Buffett had to do his own research and put in relentless man-hours. He spent months combing through Moody's stock manuals to find a handful of available net nets. Today, you can find a good selection of high-quality international net net stocks by signing up for free net net stock picks or, even better, opting for full access to Net Net Hunter.

For comparison, between the years of 1965 and 2014 when Warren Buffett became a behemoth, Berkshire achieved a compounded annual return of 19.4%, over 10% less than the best years of his investment life. And, these numbers were heavily boosted by the returns young Warren Buffett achieved in the late 1960s. During this timespan, he also had a few negative years and a few more in which the S&P 500 outperformed his portfolio.

A return of 19.4% annually is nothing to sneeze at. Most investors do worse. Still, 84-year-old billionaire Warren Buffett wouldn’t last a round in the ring with his agile, quick-footed 30-year-old self. At a Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, he admitted it:

"Yeah, if I were working with small sums, I certainly would be much more inclined to look among what you might call classic Graham stocks, very low PEs and maybe below working capital and all that. Although -- and incidentally I would do far better percentage wise if I were working with small sums -- there are just way more opportunities. If you're working with a small sum you have thousands and thousands of potential opportunities and when we work with large sums, we just -- we have relatively few possibilities in the investment world which can make a real difference in our net worth. So, you have a huge advantage over me if you're working with very little money." – Warren Buffett

You have thousands and thousands of potential opportunities that Buffett does not! By being able to invest in net net stocks, classic Graham stocks, you have a huge advantage over the Oracle of Omaha.

Following Benjamin Graham and a Young Warren Buffett

So, this brings us back to the beginning. A young Warren Buffett risked everything and hopped on a train to Washington D.C. to work for Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing.

In 1954, he accepted a job at Graham’s partnership for a starting salary of $12,000 a year. Under Graham’s tutelage, he fine-tuned his ability to spot promising net net stocks, as opposed to merely cheap stocks.

Both are obviously value stocks, but cheap stocks can be any stock where the current price is lower than the underlying intrinsic value. Net net stocks are valued purely on their net current assets. That’s cash, accounts receivable, and inventory minus total liabilities, preferred shares, and various off-balance sheet liabilities. Working capital. This is better known as the NCAV, or Net Current Asset Value.

If the stock price was 2/3 of the NCAV, Graham would buy. When the stock price returned to the full NCAV, Graham would sell. Assuming he found a good net net stock, his downside is protected by the discount to net liquid assets, providing a huge margin of safety. It’s such a solid strategy that you, as a small investor, don’t really have to know a thing about the industry. By comparison, Buffett went into textiles in a major way and lost his shirt.

There have been multiple studies that show Graham’s strategy consistently shows returns of a basket of net net stocks in the 20-35% range. From 1970 to 1983, an investor could have earned an average return of 29.4% by purchasing stocks that fulfilled Graham’s requirements and holding them for at least a year.

Buffett himself, using Graham’s strategy, stated that he would see returns within a 2-year timeframe 70 to 80% of the time. He would take a puff and sell instead of collecting boxes of cigars and waiting for them to appreciate in value.

Despite the simplicity of his approach, it seems most investors ignore the stocks that Graham would have most coveted. Investors nowadays want to invest as if they’re billionaires, choosing a wide range of large cap stocks and holding on to them until retirement, death, or the next big market crash.

Going against the market takes conviction and faith in your approach, something both Graham and Buffett had in spades. Smart value investors don’t brag about owning Apple or Google. They talk about small wholesale electronics factories and unknown retail companies. They are excited about international microcap stocks in Japan or Australia.

If you’ve read this far, you’re not Warren Buffett, the immobile billionaire. You’re young Warren Buffett, the wide-eyed investor hopping on a train heading toward immeasurable wealth.

Read more here:

http://www.netnethunter.com/how-young-warren-buffett-started-his-fortune/

Is Benjamin Graham Still Relevant in 2015?

 Benjamin Graham in the Shadow of Buffettology?

Part of the question of whether Benjamin Graham is still relevant today arises from the popularity and success of Warren Buffett. During the course of his career, Buffett has essential blazed a trail away from the core strategies of Benjamin Graham. He's been quite successful, too, recording returns much higher than Benjamin Graham ever did.

Buffett's most recent plain vanilla approach to investing involves buying good companies at good prices and not looking for the statistical bargains that Graham advocated. Instead of buying bargains and selling them when they rise back to fair value, Buffett mostly holds onto his stocks forever.

Buffett has also spent a lot of time talking to the press and students about investing and business, which has lead many people to adopt the contemporary Buffett approach to investing.

Investors should definitely keep two things in mind when it comes to Buffettology, however. First, Buffett's investment philosophy is still rooted in the philosophy of Benjamin Graham and, second, Buffett racked up his biggest returns in the 1950s and 1960s when he was still using Benjamin Graham's investment philosophy.

Buffett still uses significant aspects of Graham's approach -- specifically the focus on valuation. All of his investment decisions involve judging the value of the business and then using that value as the bedrock from which he assesses the investment's merit. Bad things can happen to your net worth when you buy great companies at expensive prices. He also recognizes that reversion to the mean is nearly a fundamental law in business so looks to ways to protect himself by buying firms with strong competitive advantages.

Despite Buffett's great long term track record, his Buffett Partnership letters reveal that he was achieving his highest returns while he was using Benjamin Graham's classic value investing approach -- the cornerstone of which was Graham's net net stock strategy. During the 1950s and 1960s he earned returns of roughly 30%, and only changed his strategy when his portfolio became to large to continue buying net net stocks.

Warren Buffett had the best results of his career during his partnership days. His later returns had to be much lower to drag down his average returns to 20%.

After the change, while Buffett still earned outstanding results, they were not nearly as good as they were before the change in investment strategy. It's worth noting that even now Buffett would chose to use a classic Benjamin Graham approach to value investing if he was managing a portfolio under $10 million.

Read more here:

http://www.netnethunter.com/benjamin-graham-still-relevant-or-a-complete-waste-of-time/

Joel Greenblatt’s Forgotten Original Magic Formula

Joel Greenblatt has one of the best records on Wall Street. Aside from being an adjunct professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Business, he's also well entrenched in the Hedge Fund industry through his management of Gotham Capital. From 1985 to 2005, Greenblatt is reported to have racked up an even better record than Warren Buffett did during his partnership days, earning 48.5% compounded over 10 years through a combination of special situation and deep value investing.

If you've heard about Joel Greenblatt, it's probably due to his widely read book, "The Little Book That Beats the Market". In it, Greenblatt makes the case for a formula that investors can use to achieve superior results over the long run. Essentially, the formula looks for businesses with a large earnings yield and a high return on capital. The premise is that, over the long run, stocks of firms that are both cheap and good would vastly outperform the stocks of firms that are just cheap -- and it definitely seems to have worked. As Greenblatt reported in his book, from 1988 to 2009 the magic formula produced a CAGR of 23.8% versus a 9.6% CAGR for the S&P 500.

The Original Magic Formula

Joel Greenblatt's love for cheap stocks of good companies started long before he developed his latest Magic Formula, however.

It's probably no surprise that the backbone of Joel Greenblatt's original magic formula rested on Benjamin Graham's net net stocks strategy. Greenblatt had been following Graham for years, carefully studying the principles and philosophies of the Dean of Wall Street, and was deeply impressed by, in his words, "the dramatic success of companies that the market priced below their value in liquidation...".

Benjamin Graham's own NCAV stocks strategy was to buy a diversified list of net net stocks that were trading at least 1/3rd below their net current asset value. Graham screened out stocks that failed to show a decent past record and those that were losing money. By putting together a diversified list, Graham hoped to take advantage of the population returns of net net stocks and ride that fantastic statistical record to great profits.

In 1981, at just 24 years old, Joel Greenblatt teamed up with Richard Pzena (a great value investor in his own right), and Bruce Newberg to test their own version of Graham's NCAV investing approach. The result was a fantastic research paper called, "How the Small Investor Can Beat the Market: By Buying Stocks That Are Selling Below Their Liquidation Value" (The Journal of Portfolio Management 1981.7.4:48-52).

Defining Net Current Asset Value

According to Joel Greenblatt:

Current Assets (Cash, Accounts Receivable, Inventory, etc.), less…

Current Liabilities (Short Term Debt, Accounts Payable, etc), less…

Long Term Liabilities (Long Term Debt, Capitalized leases, etc), less…

Preferred Stock (Claims On Corporate Assets Before Common Stock)…

Divided by the Number of Shares Outstanding…

Equals Liquidating Value Per Share (NCAV Per Share).

In his paper, Joel Greenblatt wondered what would happen if he carved up the world of net net stocks even further, eliminating a lot of the terrible firms from contention. To do this he turned to one of the most widely recognized valuation metric in value investing: the PE ratio.

Using both Graham's net current asset value and value investing's classic PE ratio, he put together 4 different portfolios and compared those portfolios against the OTC and Value Line's own value index from 1972 to 1978. According to Joel Greenblatt, this period was characterized by an extreme amount of volatility which made for a much more robust test.

To select the stocks, Greenblatt only looked at firms in the Standard and Poor's Stock Guide with market caps of over $3 million and names that started with either an A or a B. He then drew net net stocks from the roughly 750 candidates left in order to put together his model portfolios.

Portfolio 1 Price below NCAV PE floating with corporate bond yields No dividends required	Portfolio 2 Price below 85% of NCAV PE floating with corporate bond yields No dividends required
Portfolio 3 Price below NCAV PE of less than 5x No dividends required	Portfolio 4 Price below 85% of NCAV PE of less than 5x No dividends required

Purchases were made based on the above criteria. Stocks were sold after a 100% gain or two years had passed, whichever resulted first. The portfolios themselves were equal weighted, so the actual yearly returns of each portfolio were just the average returns of the stocks within each portfolio.

All of the portfolios beat the indexes by a wide margin. By combining liquidation value with smaller PE ratios, however, results exploded.

Take a look at portfolio #4. The CAGR of portfolio #4, Greenblatt's original Magic Formula, blew the market away. While the OTC CAGR totalled just 1.3% for the 6 year period, and the Value Line index came to a slight loss, Joel Greenblatt's original Magic Formula was up over 42% compounded per year from August 1973 to April 1978!

Greenblatt et al even included returns after commissions and taxes, for those of you who aren't holding your portfolio in a tax free retirement account for some strange reason. Re-examined, Greenblatt's best performing portfolio still destroyed the market, up over 29% versus flat returns for the indexers.

It's important to realize what this means for average investors. Since the American market indexes return roughly 10% per year on average, Greenblatt's forgotten original Magic Formula should be good for between 29% and 39% on average over the long run.

Granted, Greenblatt's study only covered a period of 6 years, but in my experience buying net net stocks with tiny PE ratios has proven to be a very profitable strategy. In fact, most of my best performing stocks have been these sort of net nets. Also keep in mind just how tumultuous the markets were during that period which, as Greenblatt wrote, made for a much more robust test.

(As an aside: if you're stuck holding your funds outside a tax shelter, for some reason, you can boost the tax efficiency of your portfolio by just holding your stocks for longer. This becomes a lot more viable if you're investing in the highest quality net nets.)

Three Major Takeaways from Joel Greenblatt's Study

It's hard to argue with returns like that.

Still, the more observant of you might have noticed a few potential flaws with the study and results.

At first glance, it definitely appears that you can't hold a large number of stocks in a portfolio using Joel Greenblatt's criteria. If you look to the right of each period's return, you'll see exactly how many stocks he held. In fact, Greenblatt et al were out of the market entirely for a lot of 1972 and 1973.

I don't think this is a crippling flaw to his strategy at all, however.

It's important to realize that Benjamin Graham's obsession with wide diversification isn't really necessary. In Joel Greenblatt's first book, "You can Be a Stock Market Genius," he argues that you need fewer than 10 stocks to eliminate most of the systemic risk that you face while investing in stocks. Ultimately, you don't need 30 or 100 different stocks to diversify away most of your risk. You can do it with ten.

You can even leverage Greenblatt's original Magic Formula, portfolio #4, while maintaining a fully stocked portfolio during the upper reaches of a bull market. The trick is to put together a portfolio of other net net stocks and then replace the weakest links in your portfolio with a portfolio #4 type net net when new candidates become available. Doing so would allow you to leverage the returns of NCAV stocks as a group while still employing Greenblatt's original magic formula when available.

You could even chose the best net net stocks that don't meet Greenblatt's criteria by focusing on NCAV stocks that are trading at an incredibly cheap price to NCAV, have no debt, are growing NCAV per share, are buying back stock, or which have insiders who are buying big blocks of shares, themselves.

Lastly, remember that Joel Greenblatt et al only looked at companies with names that began with the letters A or B. That inevitably eliminated most net nets from contention. In my own experience, there are a lot of net net stocks available for smart investors willing to invest internationally. I send many of these stocks out to those who requested free net net stock ideas.

The second takeaway is that both quality and price have a major impact on returns. Looking at the results, when holding PE requirements constant, the cheaper portfolios in terms of price to NCAV outperformed the more expensive portfolioes. Likewise, when holding price to NCAV requirements constant, the portfolios that demanded more earnings for the price paid outperformed their peers. By combining both value and quality, as Greenblatt did in portfolio #4, an investor can do very well in the stock market.

Finally, it's fairly clear that Joel Greenblatt's original Magic Formula, and NCAV stocks in general, trumps Greenblatt's contemporary Magic Formula. Sure, the Magic Formula that Greenblatt champions in his latest book is a good investment strategy, on the whole, but it just doesn't live up to his forgotten original Magic Formula. While his contemporary Magic Formula was reported to return just north of 23% per year vs. the S&P 500's 9.6% return, Greenblatt's original Magic Formula spanked that return -- and did so during a flat market, as well!

 How I'm Leveraging Greenblatt's Original Magic Formula

As you can see, Greenblatt's original Magic Formula is magical indeed.

His study has had a huge impact on my own selection criteria. When selecting net net stocks, I look for firms that have a deep discount to NCAV but still focus on high quality situations. For example, I currently own two deeply discounted stocks based on NCAV and earnings: one trading at just over 5x earnings and just over 40% of NCAV; the other offering a PE of 6 and trading at 68% of NCAV. Joel Greenblatt would be proud.

The biggest challenge to earning 25-35% annual returns is not the actual investing -- it's finding the investment opportunities. Right now Net Net Hunter members have access to over 450 net net stocks in 5 countries, as well as Shortlists of the best possible net net stock opportunities in each country. Make the most of your time by quickly finding the best net net stocks available.

http://www.netnethunter.com/joel-greenblatt-original-magic-formula/

Joel Greenblatt’s Original Magic Formula (NCAV)

Most investors are familiar with Joel Greenblatt’s Magic Formula, made famous in his book, “The Little Book That Beats the Market”.

The key drivers of the Magic Formula we know today are Earnings Yield (EBIT / Enterprise Value) and Return on Capital (EBIT / (Net Fixed Assets + Working Capital)). Companies are ranked according to these two metrics — highest earnings yield and highest return on capital — then the 20 to 30 companies with the highest ranks are purchased at a rate of two to three positions per month over a 12-month period.

However, before Greenblatt came up with this quality-and-value screen, he built a strategy around Benjamin Graham’s net-nets strategy, which relatively unheard of and has since become known as Greenblatt’s Original Magic Formula.

Greenblatt’s original Magic Formula

Greenblatt developed his Original Magic Formula with Richard Pzena, who currently manages Pzena Investment Management LLC, a value oriented global investment management firm with $28 billion in assets under management, and Bruce L. Newberg. The three money managers published their findings within the The Journal of Portfolio Management Summer issue 1981, Vol. 7, No.4, in an article entitled, “How the Small Investor Can Beat the Market: By Buying Stocks That Are Selling Below Their Liquidation Value”

Greenblatt and his co-authors argued within the article that only way the small investor can beat the market, is by looking for undervalued stocks. To do this successfully, the investor has to look outside the realm of Wall Street’s analyst coverage:

“We should recall, however, that Wall Street research houses limit their coverage to fewer than 500 actively traded issues…Meanwhile the NYSE trades 2000 stocks, Amex trades 1000 companies, and the OTC market trades another 7000 issues…Under these circumstances, the individual may in fact be able to locate unrecognised values in the nearly 9000-stock second tier not closely followed by the “experts”.

The figures are different today, but the underlying argument remains the same. Greenblatt built up his deep value strategy from there:

“In an effort to discover whether inefficiently priced, undervalued securities do exist, we turned to the acknowledged father of security analysis, the late Benjamin Graham…decided to update Graham’s studies to see if his simple fundamental approach still provided the returns that could not be explained by an efficient market.”

To start, Greenblatt used Graham’s traditional net-nets formula to screen for bargains:

Current Assets – Current Liabilities – Long Term Liabilities – Preferred Stock / Number of Shares Outstanding = NCAV Per Share

After using this formula to build a rough list of qualifying NCAV stocks, Greenblatt went further, in an attempt to remove any ‘junk’ firms from the list — something that’s been a thorn in the side of the deep value investors ever since the strategy was first conceived. To try and remove the wheat from the chaff as it were, Greenblatt enlisted the help of the P/E ratio.

Separating out the chaff

Benjamin Graham’s last will was a set of ten rules used for stock selection based on Graham/s five decades of stock market experience. The list of ten points, published around the time of Graham’s death, will be familiar to most value investors:

1. An earnings-to-price yield at least twice the AAA bond rate
2. P/E ratio less than 40% of the highest P/E ratio the stock had over the past 5 years
3. Dividend yield of at least 2/3 the AAA bond yield
4. Stock price below 2/3 of tangible book value per share
5. Stock price below 2/3 of Net Current Asset Value
6. Total debt less than book value
7. Current ratio greater than 2
8. Total debt less than 2 times Net Current Asset Value
9. Earnings growth of prior 10 years at least at a 7% annual compound rate
10. Stability of growth of earnings in that no more than 2 declines of 5% or more in year-end earnings in the prior ten years are permissible.

There’s no denying that this list of rules is extremely onerous and in most markets the number of stocks that meet all ten criteria is likely to be minimal. (Société Générale publishes a monthly stock screen based on the Graham criteria —the April update can be found here — the bank’s analysts note that in the past two decades, only three companies have passed all ten criteria out of a universe of FTSE World Developed, FTSE 350 stocks and FTSE World Emerging stocks.)

When Joel Greenblatt set out to create his new NCAV strategy he clearly wanted it to be less restrictive than Graham’s criteria. However, Greenblatt also wanted his new deep value strategy to outperform, with less risk than the wider market.

To accomplish these goals, Graham’s list and put together and added the P/E ratio to his NCAV screening criteria. Greenblatt tested four different four portfolios, each with a different P/E screening criteria.

Portfolio one

• Price below NCAV
• P/E floating with corporate bond yields
• No dividends required

Portfolio two

• Price below 85% of NCAV
• P/E floating with corporate bond yields
• No dividends required

Portfolio three

• Price below NCAV
• P/E of less than 5
• No dividends require

Portfolio four

• Price below 85% of NCAV
• P/E of less than 5
• No dividends required

Stocks with a market cap of less than $3 million were discarded from the study. Stocks were sold after a 100% gain or two years had passed, whichever resulted first. The portfolios themselves were equally weighted, so the actual yearly returns of each portfolio were just the average returns of the stocks within each portfolio. The returns of the four portfolios were compared to the Value Line’s own value index.

The results show that portfolios three and four, which demanded qualifying stocks trade at a P/E of less than five, racked up the best performances of the group.

The average performance of portfolio three was 32.2% p.a. per annum excluding tax and commissions — the high portfolio turnover meant that returns were impacted significantly when including commissions (12.1% p.a. after including taxes and commissions).

Portfolio four returned 42.2% p.a., although this dropped to 29.2% p.a. after excluding taxes and commissions. Interestingly, these two portfolios performed better than Greenblatt’s second Magic Formula, which boasts of 30% p.a. returns.

http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/04/original-magic-formula/

Meredith Whitney Says She's Done With Hedge Funds After Struggle

By Max Abelson


Meredith Whitney, who turned fame as a banking analyst into a stint running her own hedge fund, is through with managing other people’s money.

“I think that chapter of my life is over,” she said in an interview with Fox Business on Wednesday. “This whole experience has been highly unfortunate and I’m putting it behind me.”

Whitney’s prescient warning before the financial crisis that Citigroup Inc. would cut its dividend turned her into a Wall Street star and put her on magazine covers. Her firm Kenbelle Capital and its American Revival Fund started investing in heartland stocks in November 2013, after she predicted on TV and in a book that the center of the U.S. would boom.

More from Bloomberg.com: A $3 Trillion Traffic Jam Is Seen Looming in Credit by Citigroup

Her top investor, a fund tied to billionaire Michael Platt’s BlueCrest Capital Management, sued in December to get back its $46 million after months of losses. A court filing this month showed the two had resolved the claims. Whitney didn’t immediately respond to messages left at her office.

In a brief phone call Wednesday, Stanley Arkin, a lawyer for Whitney, wouldn’t elaborate on her interview.

“She’s an honest woman,” he said. “I’m not at liberty to say anything more than that.”

Starting her debut fund without a staff of analysts to help choose investments and relying too much on one investor’s money helped lead her astray, a person with direct knowledge of her firm told Bloomberg earlier this year, after her New York office went on the market and top executives left.


“At the end of May I returned money to every single investor,” she said in the Fox interview. Whitney is now focused on analyzing financial stocks, including the company that made her famous. “Citi’s interesting,” she said.


http://finance.yahoo.com/news/meredith-whitney-says-shes-done-171526255.html

Enterprise Value (EV)

DEFINITION OF 'ENTERPRISE VALUE (EV)'
Enterprise Value, or EV for short, is a measure of a company's total value, often used as a more comprehensive alternative to equity market capitalization. The market capitalization of a company is simply its share price multiplied by the number of shares a company has outstanding. Enterprise value is calculated as the market capitalization plus debt, minority interest and preferred shares, minus total cash and cash equivalents. Often times, the minority interest and preferred equity is effectively zero, although this need not be the case.

EV = market value of common stock + market value of preferred equity + market value of debt + minority interest - cash and investments.


INVESTOPEDIA EXPLAINS 'ENTERPRISE VALUE (EV)'
Enterprise value can be thought of as the theoretical takeover price if the company were to bought. In the event of such a buyout, an acquirer would generally have to take on the company's debt, but would pocket its cash for itself. EV differs significantly from simple market capitalization in several ways, and many consider it to be a more accurate representation of a firm's value.

The value of a firm's debt, for example, would need to be paid by the buyer when taking over a company, thus enterprise value provides a much more accurate takeover valuation because it includes debt in its value calculation.


ENTERPRISE VALUE AS AN ENTERPRISE MULTIPLE
Enterprise multiples that contain enterprise value relate the total value of a company as reflected in the market value of its capital from all sources to a measure of operating earnings generated, such as EBITDA.

EBITDA = recurring earnings from continuing operations + interest + taxes + depreciation + amortization
The Enterprise Value/EBITDA multiple is positively related to the growth rate in free cash flow to the firm (FCFF) and negatively related to the firm's overall risk level and weighted average cost of capital (WACC).



EV/EBITDA is useful in a number of situations:

The ratio may be more useful than the P/E ratio when comparing firms with different degrees of financial leverage (DFL).
EBITDA is useful for valuing capital-intensive businesses with high levels of depreciation and amortization.
EBITDA is usually positive even when earnings per share (EPS) is not.


EV/EBITDA also has a number of drawbacks, however:

If working capital is growing, EBITDA will overstate cash flows from operations (CFO or OCF). Further, this measure ignores how different revenue recognition policies can affect a company's CFO.

Because free cash flow to the firm captures the amount of capital expenditures (CapEx), it is more strongly linked with valuation theory than EBITDA. EBITDA will be a generally adequate measure if capital expenses equal depreciation expenses.

Another commonly used multiple for determining the relative value of firms is the enterprise value to sales ratio, or EV/Sales. EV/sales is regarded as a more accurate measure than the Price/Sales ratio since it takes into account the value and amount of debt a company has, which needs to be paid back at some point. Generally the lower the EV/sales multiple the more attractive or undervalued the company is believed to be. The EV/sales ratio can actually be negative at times when the cash held by a company is more than the market capitalization and debt value, implying that the company can essentially be buy itself with its own cash.



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Warren Buffett's Investing Formula Revealed

With his humble Midwest beginnings, plainspoken wisdom and wit, and incredible wealth, Warren Buffett has become the most-watched investor in the world. But as interesting a character as Buffett is, the more important piece of the Buffett puzzle for investors is this: How did he do it?

My Buffett-based Guru Strategy attempts to answer that question. Based on the approach Buffett reportedly used to build his fortune, it tries to use the same conservative, stringent criteria to choose stocks that the “Oracle of Omaha” has used in evaluating businesses. The model is based on the book Buffettology, written by Mary Buffett, Warren’s ex-daughter-in-law, and David Clark, a Buffett family friend, both of whom worked closely with Buffett.

The Forbes E-book On Warren BuffettThe $59 Billion Philanthropist, chronicling 50 years of Buffett’s investment savvy and unprecedented giving, is available now for download.

Some of Buffett’s broader strategy is well known. He likes, for example, to invest in companies that have very recognizable brand names, to the point that it is difficult for competitors to take away their market share, no matter how much capital they have. One example of a current Berkshire holding that meets this criterion is Coca-Cola, whose name is engrained in the culture of America, as well as other parts of the world.

In addition, Buffett also likes firms whose products are simple for an investor to understand—food, diapers, razors, to name a few examples.

What a lot of people don’t realize, however, is that in the end, for Buffett, it doesn’t come down to a subjective assessment of whether a company meets these vague criteria. It comes down to cold, hard numbers—those on a company’s balance sheet and those that represent the price of its stock. And that’s where my Buffett-based Guru Strategy comes in. It looks at a myriad of figures on a company’s balance sheet and in its fundamentals to find only the most attractive stocks of solid companies.

In terms of the numbers on the balance sheet, one theme of the Buffett approach is solid results over a long period of time. He likes companies that have a lengthy history of steady earnings growth, and, in most cases, the model I base on his philosophy requires companies to have posted increasing earnings per share each year for the past ten years. There are a few exceptions to this, one of which is that a company’s EPS can be negative or be a sharp loss in the most recent year, because that could signal a good buying opportunity (if the rest of the company’s long-term earnings history is solid).

Click here for 10 Stocks Warren Buffett Would Love

Another part of Buffett’s conservative approach: targeting companies with manageable debt. My model calls for companies to have the ability to pay off their debt within five years, based on their current earnings. It really likes firms with enough annual earnings that they could use those earnings to pay off all debt in two years or less, if need be.

Smart Management, and an Advantage

Two qualities Buffett is known to look for in his buys are strong management and a “durable competitive advantage.” Both of those are qualitative things, but Buffett has used certain quantitative measures to get an idea of whether a firm has those qualities. Two of those measures are return on equity and return on total capital. The model I base on Buffett’s approach likes firms to have posted an average ROE of at least 15% over the past 10 years and the past three years, and an ROTC of at least 12% over those time frames.

Another way Buffett has examined a firm’s management is by looking at how it spends the company’s retained earnings—that is, the earnings a company keeps rather than paying out in dividends. My Buffett-based model takes the amount a company’s earnings per share have increased in the past decade and divides it by the total amount of retained earnings over that time. The result shows how much profit the company has generated using the money it has reinvested in itself—in other words, how well management is using retained earnings to increase shareholder value.

The Buffett method requires a firm to have generated a return of 12% or more on its retained earnings over the past decade.

The Price Is Right?

The criteria we’ve covered so far all are used to identify “Buffett-type” stocks. But there’s a second critical part to Buffett’s analysis: price—can he get the stock of a quality company at a good price?

One way my Buffett-based model answers this question is by comparing a company’s initial expected yield to the long-term treasury yield. (If it’s not going to earn you more than a nice, safe T-Bill, why take the risk involved in a stock?)

To predict where a stock will be in the future, Buffett uses not just one, but two different methods to estimate what the company’s earnings and stock’s rate of return will be 10 years from now. One method involves using the firm’s historical return on equity figures, while another centers on earnings per share data. (You can find details on these methods by viewing an individual stock’s scores on the Buffett model on Validea.com, or in my latest book, The Guru Investor: How to Beat the Market Using History’s Best Investment Strategies.)

This notion of predicting what a company’s earnings will be in 10 years may seem to run counter to Buffett’s nonspeculative ways. But while using these methods to predict a company’s earnings for the next 10 years in her book, Mary Buffett notes: “In most situations this would be an act of insanity. However, as Warren has found, if the company is one of sufficient earning power and earns high rates of return on shareholders’ equity, created by some kind of consumer monopoly, chances are good that accurate long-term projections of earnings can be made.”

A Strong Rebounder

One of Buffett’s mantras is that investors “should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful,” and he’s lived up to that recently—while others have run from stocks during the recent downdraft, he says he’s been buying quite a bit. Not surprisingly, my Buffett-based model has tended to do best coming out of downturns. In 2009, for example, after the market had been pounded, it gained 47%—doubling the S&P 500′s 23.5% return. The reason: While other investors overreact and ditch quality stocks when times are tough, the value-focused Buffett-based approach—like Buffett himself—scoops up the bargains they leave behind. And over the long term, that can pay off big-time.

In the end, Buffett-type stocks are not the kind of sexy, flavor-of-the-month picks that catch most investors’ eyes; instead, they are proven businesses selling at good prices. That approach, combined with a long-term perspective, tremendous discipline, and an ability to keep emotions at bay (allowing him to buy when others are fearful), is how Buffett has become the world’s greatest investor. Whatever the size of your portfolio, those qualities are worth emulating.

The stocks currently on my Buffett-inspired portfolio are an interesting group, and some of the holdings might not seem like “Buffett-type” plays on the surface. But they have the fundamental characteristics that make them the type of stocks Buffett has focused on while building his empire. Among the stocks that made the cut are two off-price retailers,  a pet pharmacy, a maker of nutritional products and a manufacturer of medical devices.

Click here for 10 Stocks Warren Buffett Would Love

http://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2011/10/11/warren-buffetts-investing-formula-revealed/