So you’ve crunched the numbers on a particular company and they’re looking good. It has a long history of profitable dividend growth, and that growth has been faster and more consistent than average. It doesn’t have much debt and the current yield is significantly better than the market average.
Does that mean your job as an analyst is now done? That you’ve found your next investment and you should just go ahead and buy it?
Perhaps, but then again, perhaps not.
Numbers and ratios can only take you so far
If you stopped at this point and just went ahead and bought the shares you’d be doing something called “mechanical” investing, which is where you have a fixed set of rules that you follow, like a machine, with no exceptions.
This sort of thing is ideal work for computers, and there are a million and one computer powered stock screens based on all sorts of mechanical rules.
Various research studies over the years have found that portfolios which mechanically follow a set of sensible rules generally do better than portfolios where a human applies the same set of rules.
That’s because humans tend to ignore or bend the rules when they want. That would be fine, except that humans generally bend the rules to buy what’s already going up and sell what’s going down. The result is that they buy high and sell low, which is rarely a winning strategy.
Computers on the other hand are decidedly lacking in the emotional department. They have no problem following rules to the letter, even in the height of a bubble or the depths of an economic depression.
But there’s a problem.
Even if a mechanical approach tends to win in the long-run, that’s an irrelevant fact if you still control the actual buy or sell decision. You – the human – are ultimately in charge and the human cog is where most mechanical systems break down.
I have first-hand experience of this. Back in the 1990’s I was a passive investor, primarily tracking the FTSE All-Share. The FTSE indices are a good example of a purely mechanical investment system (although most people don’t think of it like that), where stocks enter and leave the index based purely on their market cap.
I, like most people, had zero knowledge of the 600 or so companies in that index. I didn’t know what they did, where they operated or even what their names were. I also didn’t understand valuations, so I didn’t realise – like most people – that by 1999 the stock market had become ludicrously overvalued and that a significant decline was virtually inevitable.
When the UK stock market collapsed by around 50% in little more than a year I – like most people – had no idea what was going on and so – again, like a lot of people – my response was to panic and sell on the way down. That, of course, was a mistake, and simply locked in my losses and kept me out of the subsequent market rebound.
Stories, emotions and the need to believe
I could have avoided those losses if I’d had some understanding of what the index is and how it actually makes money. I should have built a story in my mind around the idea that the FTSE All-Share is a collection of 600 or so multi-million and multi-billion pound companies that, in aggregate, produce a fairly reliable and growing stream of profits and dividends.
By building an investment story – a narrative – around an investment you can build the sense of understanding, faith and belief that you’ll need when the going gets tough, as it invariably will at some point.
If a company’s share price drops by 20% and you know nothing else about the company other than its PE, it’s easy to sell in a panic. But if you know that the company is a huge multi-national, selling millions of toothbrushes or tins of beans every day, just as it has for the past 50 years, you’ll probably be less inclined to panic.
Of course qualitative research isn’t only about generating faith and belief, important as they are. It’s also about finding out the things that numbers and ratios can’t tell you.
It can help you understand where a company’s growth has come from, or how it coped with competitors and other challenges in the past; whether it’s reliant on a small number of key staff or whether it has a sustainable competitive advantage.
Financial numbers are not good at answering those and many other ‘soft’ questions.
Don’t let belief in your story turn into certainty
Although you’ll need faith and belief in your investment story before you invest, be careful. Belief can very easily turn into fantasy, or its darker cousin – certainty.
You must remember that your investment story is just a story. You need an investment story because that’s how human brains cope with an uncertain and unpredictable world, but don’t believe your story to the exclusion of everything else.
You shouldn’t chop and change your story every five minutes, otherwise it has no value. But on the other hand you shouldn’t hang onto it long after it has become obviously false.
Don’t emotionally tie yourself to your story being ‘true’ or ‘right’.
Personally I’m quite happy for any of my investment stories to be proven ‘wrong’. I realise that the story is a tool to help me commit and stick with an investment through the short-term ups and downs of the stock market and business news cycles.
If your story turns out to be wrong, learn from it. Find out why it was wrong and if it was even possible to see the true story in advance. In many cases it won’t have been, and there was no way to know that the investment would have turned out badly. That’s why it’s a good idea to hold a diversified portfolio, so that no single ‘failure’ drags you down either emotionally or financially.
A story is just one tool among many
Don’t make the story your central focus either. Investing, like engineering, is still primarily a numbers game. At the end of the day, even after I’ve spent hours researching a company to build an investment story, my investment decisions are based primarily on numbers, not stories.
I would say that perhaps 80% of my defensive value investing approach is quantitative, with just 20% being driven by qualitative analysis, stories and “gut feel”.
I think that’s a reasonable balance, which allows room for stories, opinion and judgement, but only within the confines of a rigorous and methodical framework.
I like this article, it is very good.
We always build a story when you buy a stock. What I don’t agree with is transforming a story into a long term investment when the expected story has never happened. I am happy sometimes to wait for 2 years to see a turnaround in a company, but I will not remain invested for 10 years into a company waiting that by chance something may happen.
I am saying this because in the small cap there are always good NEW stories. My approach to find winners here is bloody simple. I look into the portfolios of three or four investment managers and when a stock is in every portfolio, I look to find the story behind that. Now, with a couple of investment managers I have direct access to them as I sell their funds, so I can drop them a line to tell me the story behind the stock.
I would have not invested in Rightmove without them, neither have the confirmation that UK Mail that John promoted on this website is a good story without seeing the stock in these guys’ portfolios.
Obviously with European and US stocks this is harder, sometimes I get the story in my county of origin where this European companies have investments, for example one of the a Swedish car parts manufacturer doubled its workforce last year in Romania, so I thought this story will pay out and it did nicely. Fair enough, I had if confirmed by two European investment managers that I appreciate by checking their portfolios.
Where I want to get is this: there are too many good stories out there, so holding to something that may pay one day in the next 10 by chance it is not worthwhile.
Hi Eugen, interesting approach there. I know some people do something similar, where they can see fund manager holdings on CityWire (http://citywire.co.uk/top-stocks) and then use that as a starting point for further investigation.
Riding coat-tails is a bit of an art form in the US.
As for waiting 10 years for something to happen, that’s more my style. I’m quite happy to just sit around collecting dividends waiting for some luck and good news to give me an exit point. I don’t want to have to keep swapping and changing investments around all the time. Slow and steady is how I prefer to do things.