The Mystery of Sears

Sears Holdings (Nasdaq: SHLD) announced another desultory quarter today (AP: "Sears' 2Q profit drops 62 percent"). No mystery there. The mystery I refer to in the title of this post is what well-respected professional investors such as Bruce Berkowitz see in the company. I've heard the pitch that Eddie Lampert is a great asset allocator, and Sears has great assets in its brands and its real estate, but I don't see it. I have no idea what its brands are worth, but their association with a shabbily run retailer can't be making them more valuable. Whatever the real estate was worth a few years ago, it's certainly worth less now, and, in any case, this would seem to be an inauspicious time to try to monetize it.

Truth be told, I considered buying puts on SHLD when the stock was trading at $80, but my procrastination in filling out the options paperwork at my brokerage prevented me from doing so. At this point, I think I'll continue to hold off. As long as fund managers such as Berkowitz are intent on maintaining Sears as a core holding, that could continue to support the stock. If one of these prominent investors decides to dump Sears though, things could get interesting. There seems to be something of a herd mentality at work here, with one investor's conviction in the company reinforcing another's.

The photos above are of the Sears in Hackensack, and I took them all today. The first one came out much better than I expected, considering the technique I employed, which was simply holding a digital camera out of my open sun roof as I drove toward the building and vaguely aiming it at the Sears tower. Apparently this sort of free-standing Sears building is relatively rare. I believe this one was built in the 1930s.

The second photo was taken using a similar sun roof technique, except that time I was aiming the camera vaguely backward and to the right as I drove past. That photo is of the Sears building's Main Street entrance, which for some reason Sears doesn't use. It's now a bus stop, so the woman in the photo is presumably waiting for a bus.

The third photo is more prosaic, but it gives you an idea of how business is going at Sears Brand Central on a typical weekday afternoon in Hackensack.

Forbes Interview with Bruce Berkowitz

Joshua Lipton of Forbes interviews Bruce Berkowitz, the manager of the Fairholme Fund. Here's the link: "Bruce Berkowitz Stays in the Sunshine". Berkowitz has racked up a great track record while running a concentrated portfolio since founding the Fairholme Fund in 1999. The fund has only had one down year since then (2002), and was only down -1.58% that year. Berkowitz has been one of the best at following Buffett's old aphorism about "Rule Number 1" ("Don't lose the money"). I disagree with one point he makes in this interview though. Here's the relevant excerpt:

[Forbes] But investors might be worried about committing capital to pharmaceutical and managed care companies because we don't know who will be in the White House next year and what that change in administration will mean for these industries.

[Berkowitz] So there is a simple question: Who else will do it? Barack Obama talks about having health care like they have in Congress. Who does the health care in Congress? It's the HMOs. The government can only write a check. When all you can do is write a check, you can't control costs.

When the government is the only one writing a check, it doesn't need HMOs to control costs -- it can simply write a smaller check. That (along with rationing) is essentially how "single payer" systems control costs, and that is the direction in which some mainstream Democrats want to go (for example, my local Congressman, Steve Rothman, has advocated expanding Medicare to everyone). Therein lies the political risk in investing in HMOs, in my opinion.

From Joel Greenblatt to Jim Rogers, Part II: The Downside of Excessive Diversification

The intent of this series of posts is to put my later posts about specific investment ideas in context, by describing the evolution of my thinking on investing over the last year and a half, as I've made mistakes and tried to learn from them. I'm going to break this up into a few posts, just to keep each post from being too long. This is Part II.

The Downside of Excessive Diversification

An observation I've made over the last year is that during a period when most stocks and most sectors are performing poorly, excessive diversification can be a liability. With his own money, Joel Greenblatt is a concentrated value investor: he has written that he feels comfortable keeping 80% of his assets in 5-8 well-researched, high-quality companies. For his Magic Formula methodology though, he recommended that non-expert investors diversify more broadly, buying a total of 20-30 stocks over a period of several months. A problem with this, from my experience, has been that there haven't always been 20-30 stocks worth buying on the Magic Formula list. Many of the "good" (high ROIC) stocks recently haven't been "cheap" (high earnings yield), as investors have flocked to the relative handful of winners, and many of the "cheap" (high earnings yield) have been cheap for a reason: in some cases they had no consistent earnings but ended up on the list because one windfall quarter (e.g., from a legal settlement) distorted their trailing twelve month EBIT numbers; in other cases companies were facing negative macro trends that would be reflected in their earnings over the coming year or more, etc.).

An example here is the retail sector. Last year around this time, a number of retailers appeared on the Magic Formula list. If you bought a large basket of them, you would have probably had poor performance since then. But if you had bought Wal-Mart (as Greenblatt himself did), you would have had a 20%+ return on it. I didn't think of this at the time last year, but in hindsight, Wal-Mart was well-positioned to benefit from the weakness of the American consumer over the next year. With economic headwinds* affecting consumers (I consider the resulting weakness of the U.S. consumer a macro trend), it makes sense that many of them would spend less, while spending a higher percentage of their budgets at a lowest-cost retailer such as Wal-Mart.

A few data points I've seen that support the advantage of running a more concentrated portfolio in this sort of market:

• One of the professional investors who bucked the trend and posted solid results last year was Bruce Berkowitz, who manages a concentrated portfolio in his Fairholme Fund. About 50% of the fund's assets were in cash and its two largest positions.
• Another professional investor, Ken Heebner, who manages the CGM Focus Fund, had spectacular returns last year running a relatively concentrated portfolio (although, in Heebner's case, his out-performance was due more to his astute attention to the relevant macro trends).
  
• One of the only individual investors on the Yahoo! Finance Message Board who claims to have had 70% cumulative returns over the last year. The difference in his application of the strategy? He confined his portfolio to 10 holdings that he chose from the Magic Formula list after doing his own homework.
  
• Two of the individual investors I have corresponded with on investing websites (one of whom I've mentioned previously here, Daniel Wahl) had good-to-excellent performance over the last year with portfolios of fewer than 10 stocks each.
  

As important as it is to avoid excessive diversification for diversification's sake, the example of Ken Heebner shows the greater importance of paying attention to the relevant macro trends. More on macro trends in the next post.

*These four economic headwinds, specifically: the negative wealth effects due to the real estate bust, high debt levels, lower access to credit, and rising energy prices.