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Thomas Phelps

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2023-06-02
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2023-06-02
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  1. Very end of that episode where we chat more about the mastermind community. All right, that's all I have for today's episode. I really enjoyed putting this one together, as always, for the audience. Thanks so much for tuning in, and I hope to see you again next week.

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. Learning and getting to know like minded individuals. I'm also in the works of planning an in-person meetup for our TIP mastermind community members in New York City from October 6th through October 8th of 2023. I'm in the works of planning the itinerary and I'm just very excited for that trip personally. We currently have around 35 or so paid members in the mastermind community and we've closed it to new members, but we're going to be opening it back up to another cohort either in June or July. If you'd like to be notified of when we open up the new cohort, you can join our waitlist by visiting the investors podcast.com slash mastermind. That is the investorspodcast.com slash mastermind to check out the community and join our waitlist. Also Stig and I talked more about the mastermind community in his mastermind episode, which will be released on Saturday, June 3rd. If you'd like to learn more about the community, then you can go to the

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. That concludes my discussion on Thomas Phelps's book, 100 to 1 The Stock Market, and some of Ocri Capital's articles here. Before I close it out, I also wanted to mention one of the resources I've personally been using to help build a watch list of high-quality companies to invest in, and that is our TIP mastermind community. We launched the TIP Mastermind community back in April of 2023, and we've already seen a high level of interest from the audience members wanting to meet like-minded investors and continue to share ideas. We've been having these weekly Zoom calls where we have things like roundtable discussions where members share an individual stock pick, we have Q&A sessions with investors like Stig Broderson and Gottembade, and we also have a forum to share links, share articles, or ask questions with other members. It's amazing some of the members we have so far, many of them have been investing for decades and they have an immense passion for stock investing, as well as just, you know, lifelong

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. Out the noise to prevent you from making the mistake of selling too early. The financial press in Wall Street live on attracting eyeballs and creating transactions by investors, so they're going to continually try to tempt you to sell something that you already own. And it's so fitting that he fits in a Thomas Phelps quote here. Never forget that people who self-interest is diametrically opposed to your own are trying to persuade you to act every day, end quote. To help tune out the noise, Accry's firm puts a big amount of attention to determining the true essence of a business and what are the key variables that really matter. We want to narrow down all of these moving parts within a business down to a few key variables that make it much easier for them to determine if a company still deserves to be in their portfolio, and it makes it much easier for them to stay the course for the long term and take full advantage of compounding.

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. Second is when the business's competitive advantage has become impaired. The competitive advantage is what allows a company to reinvest at high rates of return, so if the company's mo is impaired, then it may be time to exit that position. And third is when there's an adverse change in the management team. Sometimes there may be an excellent management team in place for years, but eventually they need to pass the torch to someone else. And Chris Serrone does mention here that they do give new management teams time to settle in and possibly give them a little bit of extra slack to get comfortable with their new roles first. Other more rare cases of them selling may also include the need to free up capital to invest in a new high quality business that they've gotten to know pretty well, or simply because they've changed their mind on an existing investment after getting to know it better as time has progressed. And then at the end of this piece, Chris highlights the big importance of being able to tune

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. Dollar bill may be worth a dollar now, but we expect it to be worth $1.20 next year in $1.40 the year after that. When in possession of these kinds of businesses, we believe that you are much better holding them for the long term in allowing them to compound, end quote. The only way we can have 100 bagger is to not sell a company when it doubles, when it becomes a five bagger, a ten bagger, a 20 bagger, and not even selling when it becomes a 50 bagger. Now this doesn't mean that we should be so stubborn and never sell our companies. We just need to be crystal clear on when it's appropriate to actually do so. There are three primary scenarios where Acre Capital is comfortable with selling out of a position. First is when the business is no longer growing at an above average rate because when a business is

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. Reason they're reluctant to sell based on valuation is because the opportunity to buy a great business at an attractive price is really rare. When you're selling one company you believe is expensive, it needs to be allocated somewhere else at some point and you don't know when that opportunity is going to come. And then the third reason is because the very best businesses have a tendency to exceed expectations. What might look like a high price today in hindsight might end up being a really attractive price. And then he has a section here on price targets and mentions that conventional wisdom of value investing is to buy something that's cheap relative to the intrinsic value and then sell it when the company reached its price target or your estimate of intrinsic value. It's like buying a dollar bill for 60 cents and then selling it when it reaches or gets close to that one dollar. Chris writes, with growing competitively advantaged businesses, however, that proverb

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. Based on valuation, you don't get the opportunity to re enter that company at an attractive valuation in the future. A great example of this is Constellation Software, which is a company Acry's firm has owned for many years, I believe since 2014. Constellation is a company that many people have called expensive for many years. But since the company's IPO in 2006, the stock has increased by over $125 and never had a drawdown of more than 30%. An investor might have doubled their money in constellation, gotten to know the business really well, spent a lot of time on it, and after doubling it, they might have sold it and said it simply became too expensive. And then maybe they thought they would just wait and just wait for a better price. And then they just sat on the sidelines and maybe they just watched this doc go up tenfold. This is the type of thing that Chris is talking about where he says that their biggest mistakes have been selling too early. The second

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. Was accumulated in the later part of his life. And that's because of this compounding force in the way the variable of time plays into that equation. One of the biggest reasons that Buffett is one of the richest people in the world is because he simply invested much longer than most of the other really great investors and entrepreneurs. Now because of how powerful long-term compounding is, Chris explains that they're very careful about determining a good reason to sell an investment. Their firm tends to tune out politics and the economy when they're making a sell decision. And they don't let valuation play a big part in their sell decisions, as he writes. We try to resist the temptation to sell or even trim on the basis of valuation alone. We are unphased when our businesses are quoted in the market at prices above what we would pay for them, end quote. He then lists three reasons why they don't sell solely based on valuation. The first is that because oftentimes when you sell

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. I'm definitely a math guy and I love numbers. And when you look at a formula for compound interest, the variable that's in the exponent line is time. So the more time you apply to the compounding of money in the case of investing, the more you're going to benefit from compounding. Increasing your returns does help, of course, but time is definitely a really, really important variable and it's something you have a lot of control over. You can achieve 100% return, for example, and then do that for one year and you've doubled your money. But if you take a more modest return, say 10% and you apply that over 40 years, then you've increased your investment by 45 times. And if you manage to achieve a 15% return for 40 years, then your investment would increase by $260 times. Morgan Housel has a chapter in his book, The Psychology and Money About This Topic, and he discusses how the majority of Warren Buffett's wealth

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. Being very careful to not mistakenly sell these businesses because that interrupts that compounding process. He says that allowing our investments to compound uninterrupted is our North Star. And he gives the example of a penny doubling for 30 days and how this force of compounding grows a penny to be worth over $10 million in thirty days. The original penny doesn't cross the $1 million mark until the 27th day. And in the final four days, it grows from around $700,000 to over $10 million. And this illustrates that most of the benefits from compounding aren't seen until really, really far out in the future. So it's a good reminder that when you sell a company and incur capital gains taxes, then you risk hurting that compounding process that's at play. It also illustrates that the compounding effect is not intuitive. Our brains are really designed to think linearly, not an exponentials.

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. Has been selling too soon. Reflecting on these mistakes gave rise to this letter in its title, The Art of Not Selling. Taking a step back, our investment philosophy involves concentrating our capital in a small number of what we believe to be growing and competitively advantaged businesses. These kind of businesses are rare and are only periodically available for purchase at attractive valuations. With that in mind, we do our best to hold on for the long term so that our capital may compound as the businesses grow. Holding on means resisting the temptations to sell, and there are many. We tune out politics and macroeconomics into the surprise of many, neither valuation nor price targets play a role in our sell decisions. Acre Capital really understands the true power of compounding. So as Chris talks about here, they're very careful in selecting businesses that are well positioned to compound in the future.

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. A lot of investors judge business performance by what the stock price is doing rather than what the actual business performance is. Sometimes stock prices go down because of near-term worries or concerns. And remember that many people are trading in and out of stocks that you own and they may be doing it for totally different reasons than you. They may be selling because they have liquidity needs. They may be trading based on some algorithm or they may be simply selling because the stock price is down. Their time horizon is oftentimes a lot different than yours. What really drives the stock price over the long run is the business's performance and the growth of the company's earnings power over time. Chris Serrone is another partner at Okri Capital and he wrote this brilliant piece I absolutely love called The Art of Not Selling. He writes of our most costly mistakes over the years, almost all have been cell decisions. The mistake in virtually every instance

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. Behaviors that investors take. The first is trying to sell before the next recession, elist trying to buy just before the next bull market, repositioning portfolios based on what is supposed to do better in the next paradigm, dumping stocks during a downturn, and that deprives oneself of the means to eventually recover. And then he writes, people do these things because they're intuitive, because these actions appear rational in the face of heightened concern and uncertainty. This is precisely why compounding over the long term is so challenging and rare. It demands counterintuitive and seemingly irrational behavior." And he shares the buffet maxim that the stock market exists to serve investors, not instruct them. The point is that the movement of the stock price shouldn't tell you whether you should buy, sell, or hold a company.

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. Opportunities and a history of being able to reinvest at an above average rate of return. John Neff is one of the partners at Ockrey and he wrote an article titled Why Compounding is So Difficult and I feel like it ties really well into this content of covering Thomas Phelps' book. He explains that over the past 100 years, the world has gone through many very difficult things such as depressions, wars, financial crises, inflationary periods, pandemics, terrorist attacks. The list goes on and on and on. Yet over the long run, the stock market continued to march upward to new highs over and over again. Most people we know didn't benefit from that entire ride up, and those who stuck with it and rode along with the bumps on the road, they built tremendous amounts of wealth over time. It wasn't the events that derailed some people's compounding of their money, but it was their reaction to those events. Netflix's four counterproductive

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. By Okri Capital Management. They have some brilliant pieces on their website that I recommend all of our TIP listeners check out as their approach of concentrating into high quality businesses is well worth studying and understanding. I had the opportunity to grab lunch with one of their partners in Omaha for the Berkshire weekend, and I myself am just a huge fan of Chuck Ockrey. He's given a Google talk that's out there on YouTube that I really enjoyed, and I believe that during his talk, he mentioned that over his investment career, he has had two 100 baggers that he still owns today. The first being Berkshire Hathaway and the second being American Tower. Acre has made famous his three-legged stool approach of primarily looking for three things when selecting a high-quality business. First, he wants to own what he calls an extraordinary business. Second, he wants to partner with talent and managers. And third is that the company must have a plethora of reinvestment.

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. To do it for them. He says that if you want to pursue the path yourself, you of course need to get educated on all things finance, investing, accounting, etc. He also suggests that vast amounts of screening need to be done. Out of the thousands of companies that choose from, it's super helpful to filter down on metrics like earnings growth, revenue growth, and so on. And that gives you a list of companies and it really just narrows it down for you to study and then pick a handful or however many you'd like. And then we also need to understand the psychological side and be sure we're equipped to deal with things if they go wrong, such as if our stocks decline by 50% or if we end up being wrong about the business. Psychologically, are we able to sleep well knowing that we may have made a crucial mistake with our investments? All right, that concludes what I wanted to cover for Thomas Phelps' book. And then during this episode, I also wanted to share some of the content that's been put out.

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. And trustworthy. Another item that comes to mind here is that investing with a short term time horizon increases the need to be right on the valuation. When you get the company right and you're willing to hold on for the long haul, then getting the valuation right becomes less and less important because if the earnings are increasing by so much over the course of a decade, then the valuation will take care of itself. Here's an excerpt here I wanted to share as well. Perhaps the greatest advantage of all in buying top quality stocks without visible ceilings on their growth is that when we do so, we give ourselves the chance to profit by the unforeseeable and the incalculable. Year after year, mankind achieves the impossible, but persists in underrating what it can and will do in the future, end quote. And then Phelps also poses the question of whether individuals should be choosing and purchasing stocks themselves or if they should be hiring a professional.

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. Few people actually try to do it. Oftentimes people are told that stockpicking isn't for individual investors because mutual funds just can't outperform the market. Or many people are just playing very short-term games where mathematically it's just impossible to achieve a hunter bagger if you're always selling your companies within one or two years. He also argues that those wanting to multiply their capital by 100 also run less risk than those with short-term time horizons. One reason for this, as I mentioned earlier, is that there's always a market for the best of anything because people who appreciate quality always seem to have money. It's true for quality stocks, bonds, real estate, art, antiques, collectibles you name it. Another reason he prefers investing with quality is because oftentimes you're partnering with exceptional management teams. It's relatively easy to buy right and hold on when you're partnering with people who are exceptional at what they do and they're also honest

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. 2% average annual return 30 years would be 16.6 percent 20 years 26 average annual return and then to do it in 15 years would require a 36 annual return which is in the ballpark of what constellation software achieved over the past 10 or 15 years and i covered that company back on episode 531 one of my favorite episodes and one of the fan favorites as well Over the long run, the growth in a compounder is really driven by the growth in their earnings. And then investors can also further enhance their returns by taking advantage of Mr. Market's mood swings of optimism and pessimism. But if you misjudge those swings, then it may of course hurt your long-term returns trying to time it. Towards the end of the book, Phelps has a chapter here on ensuring you don't miss the boat on the next 100 baggers. He argues that the reason that so few people ever achieve such a feat is because so few

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. Businesses have a really impenetrable mot in place because businesses that earn really high Alphabet is actually a really good case study here to look at, I believe. The IPO'd in 2004 at a split-adjusted price of under $3 per share, and they're currently trading around $124 per share, and that's over a 40 times increase in their stock price. All along the way, Google Search had an impenetrable mode, and they greatly benefited from the transition to digital advertising. And then they delivered an exceptionally valuable service to their advertisers. There were, of course, some bumps along the road in terms of alphabet stock price, but just looking at their top line revenue of their business over the years, it's increased every single year since their IPO, and of course that may change in the coming years. Time will tell whether chat, GPT, or some other chat bot eats their lunch. And then Phelps shows how many years it will take for a company to become a hunterbagger at differing rates of return, to do it in 40 years would require a 12-point

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. Here is the advance of those primarily due to great leverage in capital structure in long periods of expanding business and inflation. For this item, Phelps writes, leverage opportunities may result from situations where the senior claims on a company's earnings and assets equal or exceed those earnings or assets, leaving no present value for the equity. When such a situation persists for many years with no visible prospect of change, the equity may sell at a nominal price. Opportunities for profiting by capital leverage are easy to find. What is hard is deciding whether the added profit potential outweighs the added risk, end quote. And then the fourth and the final one is where the fun stuff is, in my opinion, and that is the growth of companies who reinvested their earnings at substantially higher than average rates of return on their capital. One of the most important pieces when analyzing those in this category is ensuring that these

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. Phelps personally doesn't bank on finding the super distressed situations because people's willingness today is to risk higher inflation rather than risk another deflationary bust like what happened in the Great Depression. And after seeing what happened in the overall markets with the Great Financial Crisis in March 2020, we know that the Fed will provide liquidity to the markets wherever necessary, at least for the time being. and they're willing to risk inflation if that's the way things head. The second group of companies in his study was those who produced a basic commodity. If an oil producer, for example, sees the price of oil go up by, say, 5x, then oftentimes you'll see many oil producers increase by multiples much higher than that. Or maybe a company has a big unexpected discovery of a basic commodity that thus leads to explosive stock returns after the discovery is announced. The third group of companies he lives in

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. The first is the advance of companies who recovered from extremely depressed prices during the Great Depression, which was the greatest bear market in American history. And then this also includes more generally companies that had a special type of panic or distress that caused their stocks to fall dramatically before recovering.

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. Clear winner in the industry isn't cluttered with many different players. It's dominated by just one or two players. And that's the type of situation where I believe you've seen super normal profits in very high investor returns. One example that comes to mind here is alphabet or Google and their search business. They had practically no competition and they were able to earn super normal profits over the last decade. So if you were to apply Phelps principle today of looking for industries with new inventions, things that come to mind here are AI, autonomous driving, electric vehicles, e-commerce, the cloud, and renewable energy. On Phelps's list, he does list ideas within this line of thought, whether that be looking at technology that make things better, faster, cheaper, more efficient, or whether that be new or cheaper sources of energy. Out of the 365 companies that increase by a hundredfold in this study, he broke them all down into four general categories.

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. Find potential 100 baggers, he lists a number of different things here, and it's funny that the first thing he lists is one I totally disagree with. He says that the record of the last 40 years suggests that first you want to look for inventions which enable us to do things we always wanted to do but never could do before. And he uses the examples of an automobile, airplane, and television, and all three, I believe, are really bad industries to be in, mainly because they're just so much competition nowadays and there's low return on invested capital in these industries. Using the auto industry as an example, when you have so many different companies competing, it tends to turn into competing on price, which drives down profit margins for everyone. But when you look at a company like Tesla who's doing much different things than the traditional players or a company like Ferrari, who's a luxury automaker, then it becomes a different story. Ideally, you want to be in an industry where you're investing in the

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. Will appeal to the wisest buyers, a market that is always liquid. In Ghana Bade also talks about this idea in his book where there's always a market and there's always liquidity for quality companies. In chapter 16, Phelps touches on the importance of the business reinvesting at a high rate of return, something we talk about a lot on the show here. As I've stated many times on the show before, a business's returns over the long run trend towards the return of the company itself in what the company earns. If a business continually reinvests into new projects at say a 20% return, then even if you pay a PE multiple of say 30%, then your stock returns are still going to be around 20% over the long run. Phelps encourages investors to stay away from businesses with low return on invested capital if you want to own a long-term compounder that even has a shot at becoming a hunterbagger. In chapter 19, Phelps expands more on where to

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. Opinions on Facebook or Meta, but This isn't me saying that you shouldn't buy meta or you need to have the same opinion as me, but I'm just using it as an example since it's such a well-known company. Phillips has the quote that you should never do business with a man you do not trust. He writes, no matter how tempting the prospect, how alluring the chance for a quick profit, stay away from men, companies, inventors based on defrauding rather than helping customers, end quote. This also ties into the Buffett quote that if you aren't willing to own a stock for 10 years, don't even think about owning a stock for 10 minutes. If you truly think about owning a business for over 10 years and actually commit to that mindset, then naturally you're going to shy away from managers who aren't trustworthy. Phelps writes, if we buy stocks because we believe in them, expecting to hold them for the rest of our lives, the chances are good that others will come to appreciate them too. Then if someday we do decide to sell them, they

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. Some way, shape, or form, and it's typically the type of managers you just don't want to associate with. And then another item related to management is how they treat their employees. Do they pay their employees fairly and have high employee morale in the workplace, or do they squeeze everything they can out of employees to the point where the highest performers are inevitably going to leave and go somewhere where they're treated much better? Again, you want managers that are playing long-term games with long-term people. And that's assuming that you're looking to be a long-term shareholder yourself and a high quality business. Phelps states, the best safeguard against sleight of handbook keeping is to have nothing to do with it or with the men who practice it, end quote. Jumping ahead to chapter 15, Phelps has a chapter titled Profits in Ethics. He's a big proponent of investing in companies that make the world a better place in avoiding companies that make the world worse like the plague. Everyone has their own

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. Ensure we're looking at an accurate figure for the company's real, true, normalized earnings to ensure that the accounting earnings aren't misleading like they oftentimes are. And this is due to the shortcomings of gap accounting as explained in Adam Ziesel's book Where the Money Is One should also consider what the company is doing with those earnings. We'd much rather own a company that's reinvesting back into the business at high rates of return rather than deploying that capital in a way that isn't value accretive to shareholders, such as by paying a dividend or making pricey acquisitions. One other item I wanted to mention here is keeping an eye on how honest the management team is and what their track record looks like. It's much better to partner with managers who have a track record of being honest and not trying to play accounting games because accounting numbers can easily be manipulated to try and hit these EPS targets. Companies who take shortcuts with their EPS numbers eventually have things come back to haunt them and

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. A high quality company with a normalized PE of around 23, then it seems like a reasonable multiple to pay because you're getting a high quality company at what is the market average. Once you get to around two or three times the market PE, say a PE of 46 or 69, then things start to get questionable for me personally, but everyone has their own approach and may have special knowledge or insights into some of these really exceptional companies trading at super, super high prices. Long story short, in Phelps's mind, Buying Right is just as important as holding on and it needs to be well understood. Phelps also highlights not only the importance of the multiple you're paying, but also the quality of the earnings on that multiple. Considering items such as how durable the earnings are, how fast they're growing, what the competitive landscape looks like for a company, they all factor into the quality of earnings. Accounting considerations should also be considered to

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. So relatively comparable. Another consideration between the two, of course, is inflation. On a relative basis, it's preferable to own stocks if there's high inflation because stocks in general offer much better inflation protection than bonds. Remember that Phelps quote of buying right and holding on. Both are essential parts of the equation of owning a hunterbagger. It's a lot harder if you pay an extraordinarily high multiple, he writes. Buying right will do you little good unless you hold on. But holding on will do you little good and may do you great harm unless you have bought right, end quote. A simple measure to ensure you're not paying a ridiculous multiple or paying too much is simply comparing a company's PE to the overall market. So if you're looking at a company in the United States, then it may be appropriate to compare it to something like the S&P 500, which as of recording is around a PE of 23. So if you have

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. Than the income stream from the second source. Otherwise, what they do makes no sense, end quote. Then he has this quote from Robert Wise that says, investors don't pay different prices for the same thing when they seem to be doing so, they're paying like prices for different anticipations, end quote. Two commonly used gauges of different expectations are the relative yields on stocks versus bonds in the relative PE ratios on different stocks. People oftentimes compare the S&P 500 earnings yield versus something like the 10-year treasury yield because it can give a general gauge for the market sentiment. Historically, these have been pretty correlated, but ever since the great financial crisis, interest rates have been artificially low, offering a low yield on bonds relative to the earnings yield on the S&P 500. As of late 2023, the S&P 500 earnings yield is 4.2%. In the tenure treasury yield is 3.7%.

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. When he says the stock market is like a parlay betting system, Phelps outlines a few rules we can keep in mind to help figure out the odds when purchasing a company. The first is that the value of any security is the discounted present value of all future payments, which is also Buffett and Munger's definition of the intrinsic value. The second rule is that a dollar of income from one source is worth as much as a dollar from another source, which essentially means that when you value two assets and discount the risk associated with them, you can compare these two assets on an apple's to apples basis, and this allows you to judge all of your opportunity costs against each other. Then for the third rule, he writes, Hence it follows that when investors pay more for a dollar of income from one source than they need to pay for an equivalent dollar of income from another source, they're expressing explicitly the opinion that the income stream from the first source will rise faster or dry up more slowly.

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. So, definitely a low multiple is preferred when purchasing these compounders, but it certainly isn't a requirement. Multiples can also give you a good sense of the sentiment around a company. Low multiples are typically associated with poor sentiment, so you should be mindful that if you pay a higher multiple, the business's earnings can continue to increase, but the multiple might fall or it might normalize. And also if you're paying a higher multiple, you can't purchase it speculating that the multiple will continue to expand. So buying something on the cheaper end definitely can give you a larger margin of safety because you're not only benefiting from the earnings going up, but you're also potentially benefiting from multiple expansion. In chapter 9, Phelps covers figuring out the odds. He states, The point is that in the stock market, as in poker, the wise investor tries to make bets when the odds are heavily in his favor, end quote. This is very similar to what Charlie Munger talks about.

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. Company to grow earnings by four times over the next five years, and do you agree with the market, then there probably isn't much money to be made because the market has already priced it in. And that's why we should always try to come up with a conservative intrinsic value estimate of what we believe a company is worth and only purchase if the market price is well below our conservative estimate of value. Phelps writes, To win in the stock market, as in checkers, one must think at least one move further ahead than the other fellow, end quote. In a perfect world, you would ideally have what Chris Mayer referenced in his book, The Twin Engines of Growth, a stock that increases its earnings by 40 times in its PE multiple increase by two and a half times, and that gives you a hundred bagger. For example, say the earnings per share go from $1 per share to $40 per share, and then you have a PE multiple that starts at $15, and then it goes to around $37.5.

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. Is already priced into these really popular companies. A highly valued growth stock can do really well as an investment. It just needs a lot of things to go right for it. It needs to continue growing at a high rate of return or have accelerated growth. It needs to have the market expect for that growth to continue or in other words the market needs to keep it at a high PE and then it can't have a really big multiple contraction and you need to ensure that the discount rate in the market doesn't increase substantially because if the market uses a higher discount rate, then this can significantly bring down the value of gross stocks because a lot of their big cash flows are priced far out into the future, say five or ten years from now. And that's a lot of what happened in 2022 with a lot of the no-profit companies just getting absolutely obliterated. Related to Phelps' point on finding something that the market doesn't find apparent, you have to have a different forecast than the market. If the market expects a

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. Buy. Because every stock buyer wants to make money, it's almost the truism that nothing kills a money-making opportunity faster than its widespread popularity. It is true that time is on the side of the gross stock buyer if the growth in the expectation of growth continue. This is simple arithmetic. The price of a growth stock will increase year by year at whatever rate that earnings grow if the stock's PE ratio remains constant, end quote. So for example, if we have a stock that has a PE of 25 and the company's earnings grow by 15%, then if the PE ratio remains constant, then it must be true that the stock price has also increased by 15% as well. And then to his point that nothing kills a money-making opportunity faster than widespread popularity, this is what keeps me from buying into a lot of the market's most popular companies because so many investors have already piled into them and a lot of the growth

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. But then I see other investors who did quite well in 2022 while the overall market was down. And these companies aren't like a one-off event that happened to do well in 2022. These are companies that have continued to increase their earnings over the past decade, and they continue to do really well despite all the macro headwinds and high interest rates, high inflation. In my personal opinion, it's best to just ignore the people that say the stock market is totally rigged because if you look hard enough, you'll always find companies that are continuing to grow quite well through any difficult environment. And that shouldn't be any surprise because there are thousands of different companies we can invest in and there are many tools online we can use to find them. Then in chapter seven, Phelps starts to dive into the characteristics he found in the Hunterbaggers and his research. He writes, The only way to make more than the going rate of return on your capital is to buy values not apparent to most people at the time.

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. Moving along to chapter six is where Phelps shows the entire list of 365 companies that increased by 100-fold. There are many familiar names here, many of which have withered away over time. Some names I recognize include Etna Life and Casualty, John Deere, Kodak, Sears, Lockheed, Allegheny, Warner Brothers, many of these names are stables of the economy such as utilities, railroads, energy. And after looking at this list, I'm reminded of how Chris Mayer also curated an updated list in his book, 100 Baggers, and it reminds me of how we shouldn't look back at past winners and think that we've missed the boat because there are always companies in industries that are growing at a pretty rapid clip. In new 100 baggers are currently in the making as we speak and their opportunities that can be seized by anyone. Oftentimes I'll hear from investors that the stock market is just totally manipulated and rigged and it's totally driven by the Fed.

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  41. Substantial research on a company and not allocating enough capital for it to really make a difference if it does play out as you'd expect.

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  42. News headlines. Now, one of the biggest troubles with finding high quality compounders is that they're often trading at pretty high valuations, and this is what keeps people from getting into them. Of course, you don't want to completely ignore valuation as paying a ridiculously high price can definitely get investors in trouble, but Phelps recommends when you find a company that offers a really attractive prospect and is at a fair valuation to inner position. And be ready to buy more if it happens to trade at a lower price in the future. His reasoning is that you want to focus on the long-term business fundamentals and whether the stock is at a PE of 15, 25, or 35, it really doesn't matter too much when you look out 10 or 20 plus years, because over the long run, the returns of the stock tend to approach the returns of the underlying business as long as you aren't paying a ridiculously high PE like say a PE of 100. Another common error that Phelps warns against is doing some

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  43. Even today, after the incredible bull market we've seen, there are countless examples of people who sold a great company too soon, only to watch the stock price continue to increase after they sold. Phelps says that selling too soon can be frightfully expensive. He points out that if a stock manages to compound at 20% per year, then it takes 25 years to take $1 and turn it into $100 or reach $100 bagger status. During this 25-year period, if you happen to sell in year 20, then you get less than $40 to $1 on your money. In the remaining $60 that you missed out on happens in the last five years, he then expands on that and says that you shouldn't sell an investment for a non-investment reason. A few examples he shows of this being the case is selling just because you believe the stock price is high, selling just because you have a profit. The stock price is no longer moving like other stocks are or something that is going on in the

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  44. A lost opportunity compared with the buying right and holding on. In a bull market, correcting mistakes often means taking profits, but when we do so, let us not kid ourselves when we're making money. The truth is we are acknowledging missing vastly bigger opportunities and incurring a capital gains tax liability along the way, end quote. He then explains the difficulty investors have with rising and falling stock prices. People naturally assume that a rising stock price correlates with a good investment and a falling stock price correlates with a bad investment. But sometimes great companies see their stocks fall and bad companies see their stocks rise. The second fallacy he highlights is that investors tend to overemphasize the risks of being in stocks and underestimate the cost of not buying in or sitting on

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  45. Price because the earnings of the company have increased to make up for the difference. In Chapter 3, Phelps discusses mistakes that are made by professional investors that prevent them from buying and holding big winners. He argues that the answer in why professional investors don't succeed in this strategy is found in investor psychology and statistics. He says few investors, private or professional, seek the big game. They focus on chances to make five points here and ten points there. Then he later writes, For the individual or institution really have to make a fortune in the stock market, it can be argued that every sale is a confession of error. Let this not be construed as advocating hanging on to everything willy-nilly. The only thing worse than making an investment mistake is refusing to admit it and correct it. Usually the faster an error is rectified, the less it costs. But it's still an error.

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  46. By good stock selection than by good stock market timing, end quote. There's one more quote a little bit later about market timing that I wanted to share here as well because I just think it's such a good point. Some will argue that good market timing plus good selection is better than either alone. Bear market smoke gets into one's eyes and blinds him to buying opportunities if he's too intent on market timing. In the more successful one is at market timing, the greater the temptation to rely on it and thus miss the much greater opportunities in buying right and holding on. Now when you're buying a company that's increasing their earnings year after year and thus increasing their intrinsic value year after year, oftentimes these great companies will be continuing to hit new all-time highs. So even if the multiple contracts from say a multiple of 30 to a multiple of 25, you still may be purchasing a stock at a higher

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. Others to act on his opinion. No one intends to buy stocks at the top of the market or sell them at the lows. On the contrary, bull market highs are made when the outlook for still higher prices is most broadly convincing. Conversely, bear market lows are made when the likelihood of still lower prices seems overwhelming to the preponderance of reasonable, well-informed investors. Since bull and bear markets are to a considerable extent manifestations of changes in mass psychology, it is fatuous for anyone to believe that he can persuade of a representative group of investors to sell stocks when that mass psychology is bullish or to buy stocks when it's bearish. The wise professional who understands this concentrates on stock selection. Investors are far less emotionally involved in deciding whether the market is going up or down. To clinch the argument, it is readily demonstratable that far more money can be made

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  48. I quote, I don't know which is harder buying right or knowing enough to hold on. Mathematically, if you just stick pens into the quotation page, you have not one chance in 100 of hitting a stock that will give you a hundredfold appreciation. Even if the future is as good as the past, which is no certainty. And after you have bought your stock, some of the best brains in Wall Street will be trying to persuade you to sell it and buy something else. Lots of times they'll be right, at least for the short term. Every time they're right, it will make it harder for you to heed their advice the next time. In the next time, they may be advising you to sell your 100-to-1 stock after it has gone from one to two, end quote. In chapter 2, he has this good bit on market timing. He writes, There's another reason why professional investors should de-emphasize market timing. That is because even if the market forecaster is right, he seldom can persuade

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  49. Money will be put into something that will do even better than the high quality company you already owned. And then you have to take into consideration capital gains taxes, which is a really high bar. The second lesson Phelps had is to be weary of people who tell you to take money off the table because oftentimes their interests are counter to your interests. For example, a stockbroker makes money when you continually trade in and out of positions. Phelps says, Who was talking often means more than what is said? And again, this points to the incentives of the individual. Always look at the incentives. To round out the first chapter, Phelps has this quote in there that I absolutely love from George Baker. To make money in stocks, you have to have the vision to see them, the courage to buy them, and the patience to hold them. Patience is the rarest of the three, end quote. He has another excerpt here later in the book that I thought fit really well in here.

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  50. One of Phelps' biggest takeaways from studying this investor that did really well was that he bought Wright and he held on. He wasn't trying to trade in and out of different things and he wasn't incurring unnecessary friction in his portfolio, such as capital gains taxes and trading costs and commissions and the spreads you have to pay on buying and selling. There are two other lessons he shared related to buying right and holding on. In the first is that you should stay with your most successful stock investments as long as the companies are continuing to increase their earnings. It reminds me of Stigg's recent episode with Moniche Paburai where Moniche said that if you buy a high quality compounder, you should hang on to it when it becomes fully priced and still hang on to it when it becomes overpriced. The reason for this is because there are very few companies that are able to compound at high rates for a really long time. So if you were to sell a really big winner, you're taking the chance that wherever you reallocate that

    2023-06-02 · We Study Billionaires · TIP556: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT