Joel Greeblatt's New Back-Tested Results

A few days ago, I (and everyone else, I assume, whose e-mail address was on file at Greenblatt's Magic Formula website) received an e-mail announcing that Greenblatt's Formula Investing venture had released new back-tested results for the Magic Formula over the last ten years. Here are the results. The first number that jumped out at me was the positive double-digit return in 2007, which seemed surprising given the negative performance of my Magic Formula stocks that year. A glance at the first disclosure offered a partial explanation. From the Formula Investing site:

The results of the model portfolio performance:

• Reflect the strategy of buying an equity portfolio of 24 top-ranked US listed equities that are within the 20% largest companies, as measured by market capitalization. As of June 30, 2009, these companies would have market capitalizations of approximately $890 million or greater.

Well, limiting one's portfolio to names of $890 million or greater would certainly have kept you from micro cap Magic Formula stocks such as these two¹:



Why, one might ask, would someone have bought micro cap Magic Formula stocks in the first place? Greenblatt's book² suggested two reasons:

1) The back-tested results for the all-cap version of the Magic Formula, which included micro-cap stocks, were higher than those of the larger cap version: 30.8% per year, on average, versus 22.9% for the larger cap version.

2) The worst one-year return for the all-cap version was -4% (in 2002) versus -25.3% for the larger cap version (also in 2002).

Recently though, as I noted in a previous post, Greenblatt raised the minimum market cap on the screener on his Magic Formula site from $1 million to $50 million. It's too bad he refused to explain why he did this during his recent Q&A with GuruFocus readers. My guess is that Greenblatt back-tested the numbers for all-cap portfolios since his book was published and found those numbers were uglier than he expected.

¹Another simple modification to the Magic Formula would also have eliminated these two names: including a requirement that each company have positive earnings in each of its previous four quarters. Neither of these companies were consistently profitable; each had one windfall quarter in the last four, and in both cases the windfall was from a one-time legal settlement. I knew this at the time, but (perhaps I over-thought this) I assumed that the inclusion of these sorts of speculative stocks was the reason for the higher back-tested returns of the all-cap portfolios. Perhaps it was.

²See pages 56 and 61, respectively, of The Little Book that Beats the Market.

Talent: Not Everyone Has It...

...And those who do have it often don't seem to realize that. That thought came to mind twice recently, first when skimming a recent post on GuruFocus about Joel Greenblatt's book about special situations investing, You Can Be a Stock Market Genius. Clicking on the Amazon link, I found this comment by a reviewer from Orange County, CA named Mike Ferry:

Look before you LEAP

I get up in the morning and walk my dog on the walking path just off the beach (Pacific Ocean adjacent). On my walk I always say hello to Mrs. Rothchild who is reading the Investor's Business Daily while sitting on her polished teakwood patio set. I jibe her that she should switch to the Wall Street Journal and get a real job investing like I do. After a quick but nutritious breakfast, I settle down to my state of the art computer where I E-trade my way to this lavish lifestyle I currently enjoy (takes no more than an hour!). After my "investing", I'll cruise PCH in my new convertible BMW and work on that driving tan. Thanks Joel Greenblatt!

What the heck? Oh drat, the alarm went off. I was having that dream again; now I must get ready for the drive to Pomona in my '98 Daewoo. So kick me, I am not yet a stock market genius. Can I be if I apply the lessons of this book? Maybe... but I have neither the time nor the money. For the person with both it might still be a great idea to have a stock market genius walk them through the paces for a few months.

On the merits of readability, Greenblatt dishes out the drudgery in a well presented and entertaining style. You get case studies, nifty chapter summaries, advice not to run through dynamite factories with lit matches, and a Gilligan's Island hit in the glossary (not bad for fourteen Yankee Dollars).

P.S. All you reviewers and review readers out there, have any of you struck pay dirt following the advice in this book?

I didn't read all the other comments, but, in the ones I did read, I don't recall anyone mentioning that he had struck it big implementing Greenblatt's advice. Has Joel Greenblatt considered that maybe we can't all be him? Maybe he has, and that's why he came up with the Magic Formula, so retail investors could lose invest their money in an automated fashion.

The second time the thought in the title of this post came to mind was a few minutes ago, when I read this post by the Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates, "Taking Myself Way Too Seriously". From his post:

I went to the Met yesterday, the boy likes to draw, so we've put him in a class there. I've been several times before, indeed we have a family membership. And yet somehow, I'm never prepared for the raw power of the place. Samori [Ta-Nehisi's son] went up with the kids to sketch in the modern art gallery.

[...]

I found my way down to the sculpture garden and circled The Burghers Of Calais a few times. It's funny to know something is beautiful, and not know why.

[...]

I sat for a minute, insecure, because everyone else sitting was sketching and I can't draw a lick, and for some reason, I think I should be able to.

[...]

I stopped in front of a color pencil drawing of two women smiling over a small cake. According to the description, the women were strangers. Some guy stopped next to me and took me for an artist. I think it was my gutter style--hoodie and Air Force ones, but perhaps not, since he introduced himself as an artist too. He was wearing a three-piece suit. I told him I did not have the gift, and he shook his head. "Just get some pencils and put some stuff down man."

This struck me.

It's exactly what I tell people when they say things like, "I wish I could write." or "I wish I had the gift to write." In my mind there is no gift--there is a considerable amount of labor, but I don't have much interest in talking about talent. There are a lot of talented niggers on the corner, in jail, under early tombstones. That's what my mother used to say.

I probably disagree with what Ta-Nehisi writes more often than not, and as an autodidact, he'll make a grammar mistake occasionally (as he readily admits), but the man can write. He's got talent, but, like many talented people, he doesn't seem to realize that not everyone does. That doesn't make what his mother used to tell him wrong: there are plenty of talented people who never achieve much -- that's true. But that's not the same as saying that everyone has talent. It just means that some measure of talent is often a necessary, but not sufficient, requirement for success.

"Value Investing Pro"

Alex Garcia, another occasional commenter here, and, like Paul Price, a commenter on GuruFocus as well, has launched a subscription-based investment website as well, Value Investing Pro. From Alex's site:

Welcome To Value Investing Pro

Is it possible to outperform the stock market by using a simple formula. According to Joel Greenblatt’s The Little Book That Beats The Market, the answer is yes. As a matter of fact, this “formula” has produced returns that professional money managers could only dream of. This “magic formula” offers individuals uses a low-risk method to automatically purchase great businesses selling at attractive prices.

Unfortunately, the magic formula has some kinks in the armor which include unprofitable companies that benefit from one time gains, biotechs whose main products patents will soon expire, companies with fad products, etc..

This is where ValueInvestingPro.com comes in. Using basic security analysis, any investor can tweak the formula and outperform the market.

Benefits To You

• Take control of YOUR portfolio


• Discover a 3 step-30 second approach to determine whether a stock requires further  investigation


• Own a tax efficient portfolio


•  Purchase companies, not stocks


•  Receive a weekly list of companies to research


• Discover a time efficient method in which your portfolio is almost completely automated

Good luck with the site, Alex.

Answers from Joel Greenblatt

In a previous post ("My Questions for Joel Greenblatt"), I wrote,

GuruFocus announced it will be hosting a question and answer session with Joel Greenblatt and solicited questions from readers. Below are the questions I submitted for Greenblatt. For others' questions, click the link above.

Why did you set the minimum market cap to $50 million on your new Magic Formula screener, when users used to be able to enter a market cap as low as $1 million on your original screener? Did you find that the Magic Formula does not work as well for stocks with market caps below $50 million? If so, would you mind reimbursing me for the money I've lost buying Magic Formula stocks with market caps below $50 million¹?

In your book The Little Book that Beats the Market, you alluded to the dramatic under-performance of a certain investor's² strategies in the few years after he published a book on those strategies. Do you think it's a coincidence that the few years following the publishing of your book have been difficult times for adherents of the Magic Formula as well? Is it possible that, by the time someone decides to write a book on an investment strategy, that strategy is typically due for a period of under-performance?

¹A joke, Prof. Greenblatt. I find that having a sense of humor helps in handling market losses.

²You didn't mention this investor by name, but I believe you were alluding to James O'Shaughnessy.

Yesterday, GuruFocus posted the answers to the questions to which Greenblatt deigned to respond. Greenblatt ignored my first question above, about why he added a minimum market cap to his Magic Formula screener, and offered this semi-answer to my second question,

A new updated study [of the Magic Formula's recent returns] should be published at FormulaInvesting.com soon.

Another GuruFocus poster asked an interesting question, about the merits of using a long-only equity strategy such as the Magic Formula if we are in a secular bear market. Here was Greenblatt's response:

A new updated study should be posted on FormulaInvesting.com in the near future and the results appear to be quite good relative to a flattish market over the last 10 years or so. Also, since the market has not performed well over the last decade or so, that may turn out to be a good time to invest, not a bad time.

It's worth remembering, when reading that answer, that Greenblatt started working on Wall Street "at the end of 1981" (as he noted in response to another question. So he became a professional investor right before the beginning of an unprecedented 18-year secular bull market. It's not surprising, given that experience, that Greenblatt would recommend a long-only equity strategy to the masses, but I wonder whether that makes sense at this point, since, as Vitaliy Katsenelson has pointed out, secular bear markets (or range-bound markets, as he calls them) tend to last about as long as the secular bull markets that preceded them. That means we could be in for another decade or so of more of the same. Perhaps a more opportunistic approach would be better.

My Questions for Joel Greenblatt

GuruFocus announced it will be hosting a question and answer session with Joel Greenblatt and solicited questions from readers. Below are the questions I submitted for Greenblatt. For others' questions, click the link above.

Why did you set the minimum market cap to $50 million on your new Magic Formula screener, when users used to be able to enter a market cap as low as $1 million on your original screener? Did you find that the Magic Formula does not work as well for stocks with market caps below $50 million? If so, would you mind reimbursing me for the money I've lost buying Magic Formula stocks with market caps below $50 million¹?

In your book The Little Book that Beats the Market, you alluded to the dramatic under-performance of a certain investor's² strategies in the few years after he published a book on those strategies. Do you think it's a coincidence that the few years following the publishing of your book have been difficult times for adherents of the Magic Formula as well? Is it possible that, by the time someone decides to write a book on an investment strategy, that strategy is typically due for a period of under-performance?

¹A joke, Prof. Greenblatt. I find that having a sense of humor helps in handling market losses.

²You didn't mention this investor by name, but I believe you were alluding to James O'Shaughnessy.

The photo above of Joel Greenblatt is from GuruFocus.

Joel Greenblatt Makes Some Changes

Joel Greenblatt made a few changes to his Magic Formula Investing site last month. He notes one of them in his recent column:

[W]e’ve added something new. The site now has description and link to a new website FormulaTrading.com that I helped create with Blake Darcy. Blake is the founder and former CEO of DLJdirect, a pioneer in the internet brokerage field. Formula Trading is designed to make it easy for people to invest using my system. You can invest in one of two ways: either in a self directed manner (you’ll have the tools to easily select, purchase, track and sell stocks chosen by the Magic Formula system) or in a fully managed account (Formula Trading will invest it for you using the Magic Formula system). I am a significant investor in this new venture and have worked with FormulaTrading.com to ensure that it will adhere to the principles of the Magic Formula. (Either way, though, I plan to keep MagicFormulaInvesting.com a free site so that you can follow the Magic Formula system in any manner that works best for you.) This new firm hopes to open in the late spring of 2009.

It's nice to see entrepreneurship is alive and well during these difficult times.

Although he didn't mention it in that column, Greenblatt also made a few changes to the stock screener on his site: it now only lists 30 or 50 stocks for a given minimum market cap (instead of listing up to 100 stocks); it no longer lists the earnings yields and returns on invested capital for each stock; and it no longer allows you to screen for stocks with minimum market caps below $50 million. I sent a message to the site asking whether that last change was made because Greenblatt determined that his system didn't work for stocks below that market cap. If I get a response, I'll post it; if not, I'll try e-mailing Greenblatt directly, which I have had mixed success with in the past.

The photo above, of Greenblatt on his book tour, was borrowed from GuruFocus.

"Freddie Mac is the Cheapest Stock I've Ever Seen"

So said value investor Richard Pzena¹, of Pzena Investment Management, at the 3rd annual Value Investing Congress in New York last November, according to the notes of attendee Amit Chokshi. Chokshi posted the following notes from Pzena's presentation on Seeking Alpha last November 30th (hat tip to commenter "cm1750" on GuruFocus):

* Pzena's talk was entitled 'Evaluating Financials in a State of Panic'
* The only time good businesses sell for cheap prices is during times of distress
* Financial stocks are cheap on a P/B basis against historical multiples
* Freddie Mac (FRE) is the cheapest stock Pzena has 'ever seen':
* Losses are absorbable and GAAP is not useful in evaluating FRE
* Pzena believes the mortgage payment resets that result in higher monthly payments will be handled by borrowers because they will be reluctant to forfeit the equity in their homes
* Fears in the market don’t necessarily impact FRE’s business but are impacting its stock
* FRE Loan to Value = 60% and are mostly in fixed high credit
* Believes FRE will follow similar action to P&C insurance companies

1. Hurricane/natural disaster occurs, P&C insurance companies experience losses, P&C companies raise prices/premiums, P&C stock goes up
2. Housing crisis has occurred, FRE and other industry players will raise fees, tighten credit standards, experience lower losses resulting in strong capital returns and thus improving stock price.

At the time, Freddie Mac (NYSE: FRE) was trading at about $30 per share. Today it closed at 95 cents per share. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a value investor who has made money going long on a financial stock over the last year and a half, but another investor at last November's Value Investing Congress, David Einhorn, has done well shorting Lehman Brothers (NYSE: LEH).



¹Richard Pzena went to Wharton with Joel Greenblatt, author of The Little Book That Beats the Market. In that book, Greenblatt appeared to be alluding to Pzena as "the smartest money manager I know" on p.72.

Revisiting Return on Invested Capital

As I mentioned in an earlier post ("From Joel Greenblatt to Jim Rogers, Part I: The Magic Formula"), Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) is one of the two metrics that comprise Joel Greenblatt's Magic Formula.

A question raised on the Magic Formula Investing Yahoo! Message Board led to a discussion that highlighted the limitations of this metric. The question was why KSW, Inc. (Nasdaq: KSW), a micro cap HVAC contractor, was no longer on the Magic Formula list. One of the message board's moderators, Marsh Gerda (who also writes an MFI Diary blog) and I separately calculated the Magic Formula metrics to see if we could figure out why the company was no longer on the list.

Greenblatt's Formula for ROIC

Recall from the previous post on this that Greenblatt's formula for ROIC is EBIT¹/(Net Working Capital + Net Fixed Assets).

My ROIC Calculation for KSW

KSW is a $29.4 million market cap company with no debt and $17.75 million in net cash on its balance sheet. Using the standard definition of Net Working Capital (Current Assets - Current Liabilities), I got an ROIC of 38% for KSW. Using that standard definition of Net Working Capital made intuitive sense to me, because it put KSW's excess cash in the denominator of the ROIC formula, so holding so much excess cash reduced the company's return on invested capital.

Marsh Gerda's ROIC Calculation for KSW

Marsh Gerda used Greenblatt's more idiosyncratic definition of Net Working Capital, which excludes a company's excess cash, to calculate KSW's ROIC. He got an ROIC of 1757% for KSW. It appears that he calculated this the right way (with respect to the Magic Formula method) and I calculated it the wrong way, by ignoring Greenblatt's different definition of Net Working Capital.

What The Numbers Mean

Theoretically, an ROIC of 1757% means that, for every additional dollar of capital a company invests in its business, it can earn $17.57 in earnings. In reality, of course, there are a couple of problems with this. First, if a company could really earn 1757% on its cash by investing that in its business, it wouldn't be holding most of its market cap in cash, where, presumably, it is earning less than 4% in annual interest. This would be a problem using my calculation of ROIC as well: 38% may be a lot less than 1757%, but it's still almost an order of magnitude more than the company can earn on its cash.

The second problem is that the amount of capital KSW can profitably reinvest in its business appears to be limited, for a few reasons:

- As an HVAC contractor, it requires little tangible capital, so it can't simply spend a lot of additional capital on new plant and equipment.
- Theoretically, it could use additional capital to expand into other cities (most of KSW's business is in NYC), but the commercial construction business is highly local: a contractor needs relationships with local developers, politicians, etc. (KSW could perhaps get around this by acquiring an HVAC contractor in a different city, but it may not have enough information about that city's construction industry to be an intelligent buyer, and it may not have enough cash to make a suitable acquisition).
- As a construction contractor, KSW probably has to pay up front for supplies and labor before it gets paid on a project. It make sense for the company to hold a certain amount of cash to cover these upfront costs, particularly when credit is less available, and more expensive (especially the sort of construction factoring the company would likely have to rely on).

Similar real-world constraints prevent other companies with theoretically high returns on invested capital from reinvesting most of their cash in their respective businesses. This frequent inability of profitable companies to invest most of their excess cash in their core businesses leads in some cases to the companies returning that cash to shareholders, via dividends or buybacks, and in other cases, to spending that cash on acquisitions (sometimes of businesses that are less profitable than the acquiring company's core business).

¹Earnings before Interest and Taxes

From Joel Greenblatt to Jim Rogers, Part IV: Conclusion

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. This is the last in the series.

Trying to Find Good Companies When they are Cheap and Poised to Benefit from Macro Trends

Joel Greenblatt's method of screening for good (as defined by ROIC) stocks that are currently cheap (as defined by EBIT/EV) makes intuitive sense. The idea of buying stocks that are poised to continue benefiting (or, even better, start benefiting) from macro trends makes intuitive sense as well (at least it does to me). What I have tried to do so far this year is buy only the Magic Formula stocks that I think have the potential to benefit from macro trends. This has been a challenge, because these sorts of stocks have been relatively scarce on the Magic Formula list.

Why This Sort of Stock has been Hard to Find on the Magic Formula List

Part of the reason for this is that good companies that are benefiting from macro trends often don't stay cheap long. One such example is Graham Corporation (GHM), a small cap company based in Batavia, NY that manufactures vacuum and heat transfer equipment. That may not sound too exciting, but this sentence from Yahoo! Finance's description of Graham's business will give you an idea of the macro trend tail winds behind the company (emphasis mine):

Graham Corporation's products are used in a range of industrial process applications comprising petroleum refineries, chemical and petrochemical plants, fertilizer plants, pharmaceutical plants, plastics plants, liquefied natural gas production facilities, soap manufacturing plants, air conditioning systems, food processing plants, and other process industries, as well as power generation facilities, including fossil fuel, nuclear, cogeneration, and geothermal power plants.

I had my eye on Graham in March, when it was trading in the mid-$30s, and planned to buy it the following month, when I was scheduled to make my Magic Formula trades. Before I was ready to buy it, Graham announced blowout earnings and the stock shot up 20 points, taking it off the Magic Formula list. It's up another 20 points since. Since then, I haven't seen any company on the Magic Formula list positioned to benefit from as many macro trends as Graham Corp.

Another reason it has been relatively hard to find stocks poised to benefit from macro trends on the Magic Formula list is that the list excludes most foreign stocks and ADRs¹. The reason for this is simply that Greenblatt didn't have the data to back-test his system with non-North American stocks; he has said that he still believes that the strategy of buying good stocks cheaply should work in other markets as well.

Combining Joel Greenblatt's Value Methodology with Jim Rogers's Insight that we are in a Secular Bull Market in Commodities

The secular bull market in commodities that Jim Rogers describes (see my earlier post Jim Rogers versus Vitaliy Katsenelson, Part I) is the mother of all macro trends. Since Rogers has written that non-commodity producing companies operating in regions benefiting from the secular bull market in commodities may profit indirectly from it², one way to find more Magic Formula-type stocks benefiting from macro trends may be to apply the Magic Formula screens to stocks in countries benefiting from the secular bull market in commodities. I suspect that a basket of high earnings yield, high return on invested capital stocks in a country such as Australia will outperform a similar basket of American stocks over the next several years. I haven't found (yet) a website that I can use to screen for Magic Formula-type stocks in other countries, but I did recently buy stock in a foreign company after (incorrectly, as it turned out) crunching the Magic Formula metrics on it myself. That company was Alloy Steel International (AYSI.OB), and since I've already threatened to write a post about it, you can expect that post soon.

Although I continue to look for stock ideas on the Magic Formula Investing website, I no longer limit myself to it, and am more concerned with finding stocks that appear to be undervalued based on their future prospects and positioned to benefit from relevant macro trends.

¹In practice, the Magic Formula list has been a little inconsistent with respect to foreign companies. Although it doesn't list any ADRs, it does occasionally list foreign companies that are listed directly on the Nasdaq, e.g., ELOS (Israel), and CAST (China).

²E.g., if an iron mine is operating full tilt and paying a lot of overtime, the miners may have more cash to spend at local restaurants, retailers, etc.

From Joel Greenblatt to Jim Rogers, Part III: The Importance of Macro Trends

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.

The Importance of Paying Attention to the Relevant Macro Trends

Another lesson I picked up over the last year and a half was the importance of paying attention to the relevant macro trends when evaluating potential investments. It's important to remember here that the Magic Formula is a backward-looking screening system: it uses trailing 12-month data to calculate earnings yield and return on invested capital, on the theory that, more often than not, trailing data are predictive of future performance. The impact of relevant macro trends can determine to what extent this will be true. For example, a wallboard company might have had impressive trailing twelve month earnings at the beginning of 2006, due to the residential construction boom that peaked during the previous year, but those trailing earnings wouldn't have been a good guide to its earnings during the construction bust to come. Below is an example of a mistake I made last year by not paying attention to the relevant macro trend.


Anatomy of a Mistake

I originally wrote the following postmortem on the GuruFocus website on April 24th. Since then, the stock is down a little bit more (it closed at $11.78 today), but otherwise nothing has changed materially.

Recently, I've written about the importance of acknowledging and addressing relevant macro-trends when evaluating investment opportunities. This doesn't mean that I think one should only invest in a company when the relevant macro-trends or macro-environment are in its favor; I would consider investing in a company facing negative macro-trends or a negative macro-environment if I thought those negative macro-trends were fully priced-in, or if I thought those negative macro-trends were nearing an end.


One example of an investing mistake I made by not paying attention to the relevant macro-trend was my investment in Barrett Business Services Inc. (BBSI) at $24.28 per share last year in my Magic Formula portfolio. Today BBSI closed at $12.50 per share.


Barrett is a staffing/PEO firm serving small and mid-sized businesses primarily. When I bought the stock last year, Barrett Business Services was fundamentally a solid company: no debt, lots of cash, a no-nonsense CEO who had steadily built the company up over 27 years and owned 25% of the company's stock, etc. That's all still true today, but nevertheless, it was a mistake to buy the company when I did, because I didn't consider the relevant macro-trend.


The relevant macro-trend in Barrett's case was the real estate bust in California. Although Barrett has operations in several regions of the country, and clients in different industries, most of its business comes from California. Because California experienced one of the biggest real estate booms in the country, it also is experiencing one of the biggest real estate busts, and the effects on California's economy have been worse than on the national economy so far (on today's conference call, Barrett's CEO estimated that California's unemployment rate is now about 7.5%). Also, during economic downturns, outsourced/temporary workers are often the first to get laid off, so Barrett was quick to feel the consequences of this (conversely, as Barrett's CEO pointed out on today's call, outsourced/temporary workers are also the first to get hired during an economic upturn).


Ideally, the best time to invest in a company like BBSI would be just as the negative macro-trend was ending, but of course there is no way to time that exactly. That doesn't mean, however, that I can let myself off the hook for buying BBSI when I did. The magnitude of the real estate bust in California was obvious at the time, and I should have connected the dots and realized how this would lead to a deterioration in California's labor market.


On today's conference call, Barrett's CEO discussed how he would be using this economic downturn (as he had used previous downturns) to increase market share and position Barrett to do well during the next economic upturn. I have no reason to doubt that. I would consider investing more in BBSI within the next few months, assuming it's still on the Magic Formula list. It was still a mistake for me to buy BBSI when I did though, at the beginning of the current downturn.

A counter example of a stock I bought last June that was facing a positive macro trend is the oil royalty trust BPT that I posted about here earlier today and last Friday. Not surprisingly, I am up 50%+ on BPT over the same time frame that I am down 50%+ on BBSI.

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.

From Joel Greenblatt to Jim Rogers, Part I: The Magic Formula

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.

The Magic Formula

For those unfamiliar with the Magic Formula, it's Joel Greenblatt's Buffett- and Graham-inspired mechanical system of buying a basket of "good" and "cheap" stocks. From Graham, Greenblatt got the emphasis on buying a basket of cheap stocks. In the Magic Formula, Greenblatt uses earnings yield, defined as EBIT/Enterprise Value, to measure "cheapness". Greenblatt uses EBIT instead of earnings to account for differences in interest payments and taxes among different companies, and he uses enterprise value instead of price to account for different levels of net cash or net debt. From Buffett, Greenblatt got the emphasis on finding "good" companies, defined as companies with high returns on tangible capital. Greenblatt calls this return on invested capital (ROIC) and defines it as [EBIT/(Net working capital + Net fixed assets)]. Greenblatt set up a website, Magic Formula Investing.com, to make it easy for individual investors to follow this system. The site ranks its universe of thousands of (mostlyAmerican) stocks by earnings yield and by return on invested capital, and lists those stocks that have the best combined scores (i.e., not necessarily the "cheapest" or the "best", but the stocks that represent the best combination of "cheap" and "good" according to the system).

After reading Joel Greenblatt's The Little Book that Beats the Market in late 2006, I began investing the better part of my money according to the methodology in the book in early 2007. During this time, I read a number of books on value investing (e.g., The Essays of Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor, etc.) that reinforced some of the principles of Greenblatt's Magic Formula.

I knew enough about the boom in commodities to be sure to include some of the handful of commodity companies that appeared on the list, but also included companies in other sectors. Aside from the commodity companies, all of which did well, and a couple of small cash-rich drug companies that were bought out for modest premiums, virtually every other stock in the portfolio plummeted. Judging from the lamentations on Yahoo! Finance's Magic Formula Investing Message Group, this has been a common experience.

In fairness to Joel Greenblatt, he did warn in his book that his Magic Formula system (like any mechanical system) wouldn't work all the time, and could under-perform the market for a few years in a row. In the book (pp. 71-73), Greenblatt also alluded to the hot-cold-hot roller coaster performance of O'Shaughnessy's screens in the 1990s, and to a period of under-performance experienced by his friend and fellow money manager Richard Pzena (neither O'Shaughnessy nor Pzena is mentioned by name in the book, but their identities are fairly clear from the descriptions). Nevertheless, the jaw-dropping Magic Formula losses last year (in what was, admittedly, an awful year for most broad-based value strategies) contrasted sharply with the back-tested performance of the Magic Formula system in Greenblatt's book. Over a 17-year testing period, the all-cap portfolio (with a minimum market cap of $1 million) only had one down year (the bear market year of 2002), and that year it merely had a single-digit loss.

After analyzing some of my losers, and see what some successful investors did differently, the lessons I took away were the importance of paying attention to the relevant macro trends, and that in a market when most stocks and most sectors are performing poorly, excessive diversification can be a liability.

What's Up Today: BPT, And a Few other Stocks

Despite the Dow moving into cyclical bear market territory today (closing at 11,346.51) and the decline of the S&P 500 and Nasdaq along with it, 15 of the 21 positions in my enterprising portfolio (my main stock portfolio; I am in the process of consolidating this into a more concentrated portfolio) are up today. I'm still down from my purchase price on many of these, especially the ones I bought last year, when I was still rigidly adhering to Joel Greenblatt's Magic Formula investing system (more on that in a later post), but the lack of correlation between this portfolio and the broader market indexes is partly a result of changes in my investment methodology over the last six months. Specifically, I began paying close attention to relevant macro trends for various stocks, and limiting my investments to those positioned to benefit from those trends. Some examples of those macro trends include the secular bull markets in energy, metals, agriculture, and the related infrastructure boom overseas, particularly in China.

One of the 15 stocks that is up today made a new all-time high, BP Prudhoe Bay Royalty Trust (BPT). Shares of this trust had been flirting with the triple-digit mark for the last few months, but finally closed above $100 per share today at $100.77. Despite the 50% total return for this trust over the last year, its stock still looks inexpensive, trading at only about 9x next year's estimated earnings. This is true, incidentally, of two other, radically different oil stocks I own: the integrated mega cap major ExxonMobil (XOM) and the small cap E&P Vaalco Energy (EGY) -- both trade with enterprise values at similarly low multiples to next year's estimated earnings. This demonstrates a point I and others have made recently, that despite the huge run-up in oil prices over the last year, the current high oil prices haven't been priced into many oil stocks yet. Perhaps this is because the biggest oil bulls have been investing in the commodity itself, via ETFs, and perhaps it's because many market participants believe oil will soon revert back to $70 or $80 per barrel.

Depletion is a concern for all American royalty trusts, of course, particularly one such as BPT that derives its royalties from a field as old as Prudhoe Bay. For detailed analysis and predictions on BPT's production and depletion rates, I recommend the occasional posts by "RoundRobinJack" on BPT's Yahoo! Finance message board. Here is a link to his latest Production/Distribution Update. More broadly, this man's posts demonstrate that although most comments on Yahoo! Finance message boards may be uninformed cheer leading, bashing, or just plain spam, occasionally you find an obviously knowledgeable poster whose comments are well worth reading. Just as with investing, sometimes you have to sift through the junk bin before finding something of value.

Of these three oil stocks, I currently have a GTC limit sell order on XOM. As Daniel Wahl has pointed out in correspondence with me, and in a post on his blog, integrated majors such as XOM have a few strikes against them, limiting their ability to benefit from the oil boom:

• Refining components. While the integrated majors may benefit on the exploration and production side of the business, their exposure to refining (where rising crude prices squeeze "crack spreads", i.e., profit margins on refined products) remains a liability.

• Their enormous size. This makes it difficult for new oil and gas discoveries to 'move the needle' in expanding the company's reserves.
  
• Their need (again, because of their size) to expand exploration and production in more politically unstable parts of the world, where their assets are subject to expropriation (e.g., as was the case with Exxon in Venezuela last year).
  

Despite these factors, I still think XOM is a value at these prices will probably do well over the next year. Nevertheless, I agree that there are investment opportunities in the sector with more potential, and the ideal sort of company to find would be an attractively priced small cap E&P with proven resources in a politically stable country such as the U.S. or Canada.