Buy-and-hold works - up to a point

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#1
So is she or is she not advocating value investing? It's confusing. Tongue

The Straits Times
www.straitstimes.com
Published on Jan 13, 2013
moneywise
Buy-and-hold works - up to a point

Key still lies in picking low-valuation stocks and knowing when to cash out and reinvest

By Teh Hooi Ling

It's very hard for us to think outside the environment we are in, a learned friend told me. In other words, many times, we are products of our environment.

Take someone who, early in his or her investment career, went through the boom years of the 1920s only to see everything wiped out during the Great Depression.

Most likely, such a person would have a rather pessimistic view of the stock market.

In contrast, a person who knows only of bull markets would have been conditioned to think that the market can only go up.

Hence, it is always instructive to study history, to talk to people with lengthy experience in their chosen fields.

I have this friend who I reckon is in his 60s. He used to run his own construction business and is now retired. He said he was an ignorant young man in the 1980s and lost money investing in a fund. He then resolved to educate himself about investment. Like most value investors, he idolises famed investor Warren Buffett.

Having experienced and seen the results of making wise investments, this friend is fervent about convincing others of the importance of learning that skill.

At his age, he still buys and reads books such as Trump Strategies For Real Estate: Billionaire Lessons For The Small Investor and Accounts Demystified by Anthony Rice.

Three years back, he asked me to help edit a two-page message that he wanted to circulate to the younger people around him. In it, he gave the example of his cousin.

Back in 1958, the cousin earned less than RM200 a month as a primary school teacher. But she put some savings away every month. By the early 1960s, she had accumulated a sum of money that she could invest in stocks.

"She did the 'right' thing in investment," wrote my friend. "She chose the 'good' stocks - companies with good businesses. She held on to the stocks for the long term."

Over the years, she bought more of the stocks with additional savings as well as the dividends received from the stocks she held. Her stockholding also grew as the companies distributed bonuses and issued rights.

"Thirty years later, she had become a millionaire. She managed to send her kids to England to study. Despite her wealth, she is still very careful with her money. As a retired civil servant, she receives a pension of RM1,000 a month. But dividends from her stocks come to RM3,000 a month."

The example is heartening. But again, I think it's important to put a context to it. The period during which the cousin grew her wealth ran from the 1960s to the 1990s. Perhaps during that period, a buy-and-hold strategy worked. Would it still work today?

I tracked down stocks that have been listed in the Singapore market since 1973. There are 16 - some counters might have been delisted, for good or bad reasons.

So there is a survivorship bias, that is, only the good or viable ones remain.

In any case, even among the 16 stocks, the performance varies. As of today, the best performer over the past 40 years has been Asia Pacific Breweries (APB). Its price, excluding dividends, has appreciated by 9.7 per cent a year.

It has grown by some 40 times over the past 40 years. For those who reinvested the dividends back in the stock, the return would have been a lot higher.

Jardine Cycle & Carriage was the second-best performer, with price appreciation of 9.1 per cent a year. It was followed by Fraser & Neave (F&N) with 7.8 per cent. For the banks, prices grew by about 5 per cent a year.

Auric Pacific Group fared the worst. Back in 1973, it was trading at about $1.50. At the start of this year, its shares changed hands at $1.13. WBL, Haw Par and United Engineers all managed to chalk up price appreciation of less than 2 per cent a year.

The thing is, APB wasn't the leader of the pack every step of the way. In the early 1980s, Straits Trading had its days in the sun.

By the early 1990s, Natsteel (now NSL) was ready to take its turn. The new millennium saw the spotlight fall on DBS Group Holdings. And now it is APB that has caught the market's fancy.

The market is such that it will be fascinated by different themes or the latest fads at different times. During any of these episodes, it might not be entirely rational in pricing stocks.

At such times, when one of your stocks catches the fancy of the market, and you think the market price has gone far beyond the fair value of the stock (remember the valuation metrics we discussed in the past few weeks?), it is not a bad idea to lock in your profits.

Remember, a stock that falls 50 per cent will need to recover by 100 per cent before it gets back to its old levels.

To illustrate how important it is to protect your downside, I charted the performance of the Straits Times Index as calculated by Thomson Datastream from 1973 up to last week.

The price appreciation was 3.9 per cent a year. If you had invested $10,000 in the index from the start, that sum would have grown to $47,000 today. Assuming you missed the 10 worst trading days of the past four decades - the most recent was in October 2008 when the market fell 8 per cent - your performance would have been boosted to 7.3 per cent a year. Your $10,000 would have grown to $165,200.

In contrast, if you had missed the 10 best days, that $10,000 would have grown to just $17,100 - a gain of 1.4 per cent a year.

However, if you buy when market valuations are low, there is a high probability that you will avoid the worst days in the markets and yet not miss out on the best days.

The key message that investors should never ever forget is to protect their downside. Let the upside take care of itself.

The strategies that we have talked about in the past few weeks - and that appear to work well - have been about buying low-valuation stocks, taking profits and redeploying the capital to the next batch of low-valuation stocks.

There appears to be persistence in the performance in these kinds of strategies.

hooiling@sph.com.sg
My Value Investing Blog: http://sgmusicwhiz.blogspot.com/
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#2
(13-01-2013, 09:02 AM)Musicwhiz Wrote: So is she or is she not advocating value investing? It's confusing. Tongue


It's not confusing to me.... She's suggesting what some of us from the more 'deviant' group of Value Investors are trying to practise...Tongue

She's recommending Stocks Selection based on Valuations and in the past couple of articles, she'd used PB and PE as examples. In this article, she's suggesting that one should also learn to sell when valuations are no longer attractive. Her historical data shows that very few SGX listed companies last forever anyway.

In short, in the lingo of the 'deviant' group, 'switch'... ie. Buy when valuations are low, sell when your original reasons for buying are no longer true eg. A low PE or PB stock that has now become a high PE or PB... A Growth company that not only stopped growing but had gone into decline... A Yield stock that reduces dividends and doesn't look like it's going to be able to return back to paying high dividends... A cyclical stock that'd peaked and is now heading towards the down cycle... An asset play that'd sold all the assets and used up all the cash... A cash rich company that's diworseified and is now highly geared...My interpretations only...Big Grin
Luck & Fortune Favours those who are Prepared & Decisive when Opportunity Knocks
------------ 知己知彼 ,百战不殆 ;不知彼 ,不知己 ,每战必殆 ------------
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#3
In short this is called "STOCK RE-BALANCING". Protect your profit and re-invest somewhere else including cash.

The key is still when do I start doing that.

Just my Diary
corylogics.blogspot.com/


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#4
To summarise

Buy like an investor, Sell like a trader
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#5
(13-01-2013, 09:41 AM)KopiKat Wrote:
(13-01-2013, 09:02 AM)Musicwhiz Wrote: So is she or is she not advocating value investing? It's confusing. Tongue


It's not confusing to me.... She's suggesting what some of us from the more 'deviant' group of Value Investors are trying to practise...Tongue

She's recommending Stocks Selection based on Valuations and in the past couple of articles, she'd used PB and PE as examples. In this article, she's suggesting that one should also learn to sell when valuations are no longer attractive. Her historical data shows that very few SGX listed companies last forever anyway.

In short, in the lingo of the 'deviant' group, 'switch'... ie. Buy when valuations are low, sell when your original reasons for buying are no longer true eg. A low PE or PB stock that has now become a high PE or PB... A Growth company that not only stopped growing but had gone into decline... A Yield stock that reduces dividends and doesn't look like it's going to be able to return back to paying high dividends... A cyclical stock that'd peaked and is now heading towards the down cycle... An asset play that'd sold all the assets and used up all the cash... A cash rich company that's diworseified and is now highly geared...My interpretations only...Big Grin

Ha! Ha!
Sound like Peter Lynch. You will make money. i do it too. But if i have bought F & N and APB from day one and hold until now, will i make more money? APB i bought once and found it so hard to sell. i sold once and never buy again. F & N many times B/S. So i don't know whether if i buy and hold F & N from the 1st day until now, whether i will make more money. i do know now if i B&H Keppel Corp, Semb Corp, i will make so much more money. A blogger has written about it many times in his blog.
i think we should do both B/S with B/H. The problem is no one will really knows which counter is for B/H. Just imagine i buy APB and hold it until now, a solid 24 years. Nevertheless, i most probably will sell it much earlier when the price has gone "crazy".
It's really hard to B&H when now you can sell with only a few keystrokes. Unless i B&F; if not i don't think i can do it.
Shalom.
WB:-

1) Rule # 1, do not lose money.
2) Rule # 2, refer to # 1.
3) Not until you can manage your emotions, you can manage your money.

Truism of Investments.
A) Buying a security is buying RISK not Return
B) You can control RISK (to a certain level, hopefully only.) But definitely not the outcome of the Return.

NB:-
My signature is meant for psychoing myself. No offence to anyone. i am trying not to lose money unnecessary anymore.
Reply
#6
I avoid her article, she just trying very hard to get fame and attention. Years ago, she compute tables of S-chips and pennies stocks portfolio, when these stocks crash and suspended. She stopped reporting


(13-01-2013, 09:02 AM)Musicwhiz Wrote: So is she or is she not advocating value investing? It's confusing. Tongue

The Straits Times
www.straitstimes.com
Published on Jan 13, 2013
moneywise
Buy-and-hold works - up to a point

Key still lies in picking low-valuation stocks and knowing when to cash out and reinvest

By Teh Hooi Ling

It's very hard for us to think outside the environment we are in, a learned friend told me. In other words, many times, we are products of our environment.

Take someone who, early in his or her investment career, went through the boom years of the 1920s only to see everything wiped out during the Great Depression.

Most likely, such a person would have a rather pessimistic view of the stock market.

In contrast, a person who knows only of bull markets would have been conditioned to think that the market can only go up.

Hence, it is always instructive to study history, to talk to people with lengthy experience in their chosen fields.

I have this friend who I reckon is in his 60s. He used to run his own construction business and is now retired. He said he was an ignorant young man in the 1980s and lost money investing in a fund. He then resolved to educate himself about investment. Like most value investors, he idolises famed investor Warren Buffett.

Having experienced and seen the results of making wise investments, this friend is fervent about convincing others of the importance of learning that skill.

At his age, he still buys and reads books such as Trump Strategies For Real Estate: Billionaire Lessons For The Small Investor and Accounts Demystified by Anthony Rice.

Three years back, he asked me to help edit a two-page message that he wanted to circulate to the younger people around him. In it, he gave the example of his cousin.

Back in 1958, the cousin earned less than RM200 a month as a primary school teacher. But she put some savings away every month. By the early 1960s, she had accumulated a sum of money that she could invest in stocks.

"She did the 'right' thing in investment," wrote my friend. "She chose the 'good' stocks - companies with good businesses. She held on to the stocks for the long term."

Over the years, she bought more of the stocks with additional savings as well as the dividends received from the stocks she held. Her stockholding also grew as the companies distributed bonuses and issued rights.

"Thirty years later, she had become a millionaire. She managed to send her kids to England to study. Despite her wealth, she is still very careful with her money. As a retired civil servant, she receives a pension of RM1,000 a month. But dividends from her stocks come to RM3,000 a month."

The example is heartening. But again, I think it's important to put a context to it. The period during which the cousin grew her wealth ran from the 1960s to the 1990s. Perhaps during that period, a buy-and-hold strategy worked. Would it still work today?

I tracked down stocks that have been listed in the Singapore market since 1973. There are 16 - some counters might have been delisted, for good or bad reasons.

So there is a survivorship bias, that is, only the good or viable ones remain.

In any case, even among the 16 stocks, the performance varies. As of today, the best performer over the past 40 years has been Asia Pacific Breweries (APB). Its price, excluding dividends, has appreciated by 9.7 per cent a year.

It has grown by some 40 times over the past 40 years. For those who reinvested the dividends back in the stock, the return would have been a lot higher.

Jardine Cycle & Carriage was the second-best performer, with price appreciation of 9.1 per cent a year. It was followed by Fraser & Neave (F&N) with 7.8 per cent. For the banks, prices grew by about 5 per cent a year.

Auric Pacific Group fared the worst. Back in 1973, it was trading at about $1.50. At the start of this year, its shares changed hands at $1.13. WBL, Haw Par and United Engineers all managed to chalk up price appreciation of less than 2 per cent a year.

The thing is, APB wasn't the leader of the pack every step of the way. In the early 1980s, Straits Trading had its days in the sun.

By the early 1990s, Natsteel (now NSL) was ready to take its turn. The new millennium saw the spotlight fall on DBS Group Holdings. And now it is APB that has caught the market's fancy.

The market is such that it will be fascinated by different themes or the latest fads at different times. During any of these episodes, it might not be entirely rational in pricing stocks.

At such times, when one of your stocks catches the fancy of the market, and you think the market price has gone far beyond the fair value of the stock (remember the valuation metrics we discussed in the past few weeks?), it is not a bad idea to lock in your profits.

Remember, a stock that falls 50 per cent will need to recover by 100 per cent before it gets back to its old levels.

To illustrate how important it is to protect your downside, I charted the performance of the Straits Times Index as calculated by Thomson Datastream from 1973 up to last week.

The price appreciation was 3.9 per cent a year. If you had invested $10,000 in the index from the start, that sum would have grown to $47,000 today. Assuming you missed the 10 worst trading days of the past four decades - the most recent was in October 2008 when the market fell 8 per cent - your performance would have been boosted to 7.3 per cent a year. Your $10,000 would have grown to $165,200.

In contrast, if you had missed the 10 best days, that $10,000 would have grown to just $17,100 - a gain of 1.4 per cent a year.

However, if you buy when market valuations are low, there is a high probability that you will avoid the worst days in the markets and yet not miss out on the best days.

The key message that investors should never ever forget is to protect their downside. Let the upside take care of itself.

The strategies that we have talked about in the past few weeks - and that appear to work well - have been about buying low-valuation stocks, taking profits and redeploying the capital to the next batch of low-valuation stocks.

There appears to be persistence in the performance in these kinds of strategies.

hooiling@sph.com.sg
Reply
#7
Hi KopiKat and 2V,

Thanks for the explanation. I think her methods are too pure "Graham" - mechanical methods of buying and selling based on metrics, ratios and a set of numbers without accounting for the underlying businesses and the dynamic nature of companies and competition. While it has proven to work in the past, more and more information is now available which erodes the advantage which Graham used to have (not that people in his era were lazy - they just didn't have much access to information, and he was well-known for digging up details).

I do not have any issue with her personally, so I will not think she is looking for fame and fortune. She is more of a number cruncher so uses massive reams of statistics (along with superior data mining skills) to filter out companies and draw conclusions. Nothing wrong with doing that, I suppose, but back-testing may not work for the future.

Which is why I prefer to emphasize a combination of Graham, Buffett and Fisher. In addition to quantitative analysis (Graham), we need to pay a fair price for a great company (Buffett) and do scuttlebutt to assess the qualitative aspects of a business (Fisher).
My Value Investing Blog: http://sgmusicwhiz.blogspot.com/
Reply
#8
I think she is a quant? Data mining, crunching numbers, analysis historical records over long term and arriving at deductions on better strategies..

But what she says make sense. Shouldn't we sell out when the value that compelled us to buy in the first place disappear? For example if the price spike up such that it is way over-valued, we should cash out regardless of time frame..

I also feel that the world economy is very dynamic and volatile nowadays, such that the traditional buy and hold for decades is not so suitable anymore, for we can't even be sure of what will happen in next 2 years, how can we be sure that the company will still thrive 20 yrs down the road? One must also put things into perspective that it is easier to find companies suitable for buy and hold for decades, during a time when we are growing rapidly into a first world economy such that these business grow along with the economy year after year, riding on the mega macro trend. Now is a different story..

Hence it is important to monitor the business closely, and be flexible enough to withdraw when the value has been realized, or when the company deteriorates fundamentally, regardless of time frame.. IMHO.
Reply
#9
(13-01-2013, 09:41 AM)KopiKat Wrote:
(13-01-2013, 09:02 AM)Musicwhiz Wrote: So is she or is she not advocating value investing? It's confusing. Tongue


It's not confusing to me.... She's suggesting what some of us from the more 'deviant' group of Value Investors are trying to practise...Tongue

She's recommending Stocks Selection based on Valuations and in the past couple of articles, she'd used PB and PE as examples. In this article, she's suggesting that one should also learn to sell when valuations are no longer attractive. Her historical data shows that very few SGX listed companies last forever anyway.

In short, in the lingo of the 'deviant' group, 'switch'... ie. Buy when valuations are low, sell when your original reasons for buying are no longer true eg. A low PE or PB stock that has now become a high PE or PB... A Growth company that not only stopped growing but had gone into decline... A Yield stock that reduces dividends and doesn't look like it's going to be able to return back to paying high dividends... A cyclical stock that'd peaked and is now heading towards the down cycle... An asset play that'd sold all the assets and used up all the cash... A cash rich company that's diworseified and is now highly geared...My interpretations only...Big Grin

It's not confusing to me too. Tongue It seems that Peter Lynch follower will not be confused by this article, IMO

The strategy for growth stock is to buy-and-hold, it's the same as most WB followers.

The strategy for most others, sell when the story to buy initially becoming less relevant. This is the key point the article is highlighting IMO
“夏则资皮,冬则资纱,旱则资船,水则资车” - 范蠡
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#10
I think my greatest lesson learnt in this article is missing out the best 10 days would only yield 1.4% in long term. I should learn to stay vested and not cash liquid as much as possible.
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