Winona? Who would ever go there?!?

Want to know what the best performing stock in the U.S. has been over the past twenty-five years?  No, it’s not Apple.  Or Microsoft.  Bloomberg Businessweek recently reported that Minnesota’s very own Fastenal (NDQ: FAST) holds that distinction, rising 27% per year since 1987.  That’s double the annual return of Apple and triple the S&P 500.

Fastenal, the Winona-based* distributor of nuts and bolts, is a fascinating story.  Founder Bob Kierlin started the business with a single store, a used car, and boxes of nuts and bolts in the late 1960s and through years of hard work and drive, the company has quietly grown to over 2,500 store locations and 15,000 employees.  It is an all-American story that warms our capitalist hearts.

Fastenal is pretty well-known among investors today, after this amazing period of creating significant wealth for its shareholders.  In fact, it is what you might call a “darling” stock, especially among growth-oriented money managers.  But how well-known was it back in 1987, and what characteristics back then might have led an astute investor to join the party before the run began?

As it turns out, not many investors were paying attention at the beginning.  In 1987, Fastenal had a market capitalization of a mere $50 million, small enough to put it in the bottom decile of public companies at the time and well below the radar of most professional money managers.  Moreover, it was based in a small Midwestern town that most New Yorkers had likely never heard of, and much of its stock was held by employees of the firm.  Far from being the latest, greatest technology company, its operations served a very basic purpose: get nuts and bolts to the people on the manufacturing line who needed it.

The reason that we bring up Fastenal is that there are hundreds of small public companies around the country that share many of the same characteristics as the Fastenal of 1987, many in our own backyard.  These are companies that serve basic needs, are run by honest and hardworking folks, and quietly generate significant returns to their shareholders over long periods of time.  And yet because of their size, or their location, or their unwillingness to play the Wall Street game, their stocks remain below the radar of most investors. 

They are the reason we get excited about investing in small- and micro-cap stocks.

*Several years ago we met with a well-healed investment consultant on the east coast and happened to mention the hamlet of Winona, Minnesota, when talking about a portfolio company.  The consultant, oblivious to how arrogant he was about to appear, exclaimed: “Winona?  Who would ever go there?!?”  Sometimes the best companies come from the most unknown places—just look at Fastenal.

We Like Good Companies, Maria

If we’ve heard it once, we’ve heard it a hundred times. A money manager, being interviewed on CNBC, describes his or her investment philosophy: “we like good companies.” Akin to the politician who is for “the American Dream,” it’s a statement so benign it’s hard to argue with.

What is a good business? And can that be an objective standard, or is beauty in the eye of the beholder? Our sense is that most people, having been trained to think like efficient-market investors and not like in-the-trenches businesspeople, don’t really get—or care about—the distinction. Good or bad, a company’s stock price already fully reflects its future prospects, so instead of trying to distinguish between them, you should just buy an index fund and hit the beach.

But if owning stocks is really owning fractional interests in real businesses (as we think it is), as opposed to pieces of paper to be traded for quick profit (as most peoples’ behavior seems to imply), the distinction is everything. Here are a few of our thoughts on just what defines a “good business.”

Perhaps the place to start is to first define the ideal business. If you were to start a business tomorrow and it could look like anything you wanted, you would want it to look like this:

1. Customers are required to buy your product
2. You are the only one who can provide it
3. There is unlimited demand
4. Little or no capital is required to start the business or grow it

Since we are financial guys and the objectivity of numbers gets us going, here’s how we would describe the same characteristics but in financial terms:

1. Consistent, predictable revenues
2. High profit margins
3. Steady growth over long periods of time
4. High and consistent returns on capital

Sounds pretty good, eh? Of course, no business enjoys all of these characteristics perfectly or completely; and if so, not for very long. But a unique few share many of these elements to a startling degree. Once one of these diamonds in the rough is uncovered, the question then becomes: how likely are these characteristics to persist? That is where the real work of research and analysis begins, and we spend much of our time trying to answer that question for ourselves.

Although markets are not perfectly efficient, they are quasi-efficient much of the time. Superior businesses usually carry superior valuations, giving credence to the old saying “good companies don’t always make for good stocks.” We agree wholeheartedly and avoid buying into “the hype” at all costs, except in two important cases: (1) when markets are distressed and the distinction between good businesses and bad ones becomes less important to other investors and (2) when superior businesses are too small to gain the attention of a majority of investors.

We believe the great advantage to being small- and micro-cap investors is that we are often early to the party. We traffic in a part of the stock market that doesn’t get much traffic and as a result get a crack at investing in some pretty exceptional businesses before they even show up on other investors’ Bloomberg screens. The absence of hype or even attention gives us the opportunity on a regular basis to buy truly great businesses at attractive prices.

Yes, Maria, we do like good companies.

Detecting Deception: "Trust, but verify" (Part One)

We recently concluded another earnings season, a quarterly time period that our team spends listening to tons of calls from public company executives of all sorts. During these calls, the vast majority of management teams trumpet the merits of their strategy, the quality of their businesses, and almost always argue that the "best is yet to come".

With literally thousands of public companies touting their prospects, it is a mathematical certainty that some are not telling the truth. Which management teams should investors trust? Who should be avoided? Is there a way to identify purposefully deceitful executives?

We believe that the quality of the jockey is often more important than quality of the horse.  As a result, gauging the personality of a management team is an integral part of our investment process.  We have historically favored the "quiet trumpets", that is executives committed to honestly assessing their business rather than cheer-leading their stock price. We are focused on finding passionate operators (not promoters) who are dedicated to capably executing a specific long term vision.

Making this determination is largely a subjective process that often depends on our "gut feel" (sometimes simply the absence of a slimy feeling) after meeting or speaking to a team directly. Admittedly, our batting average has not been 100%, and we occasionally are surprised to find out that we have misjudged a management team.  However, we have had success avoiding trouble by applying a checklist of sorts that seeks to eliminate self interested or overly-promotional management teams.  This list of "red flags" is pretty straight-forward and includes: 

• Excessive compensation or perquisites (company paid jets, private clubs, etc.) 
• Historical "Blow Ups" (Previous failures as public company executive) 
• Nepotism (Executives & Board members who all share the same last name)
• Dual share structures (granting majority voting control to executives who own a minority of the shares)
• Questionable related party transactions or other evidence of self dealing
• Excessive wearing of Jewelry
• Location of the company (Typically avoid Miami,  Las Vegas and Atlantic City)

After speaking to management teams we seek to confirm the accuracy of what we have been told.  This is our application of Ronald Reagan's famous "Trust, but verify" doctrine.  We get in touch with competitors, suppliers, and other industry experts to get their take and impression of the company we are researching. We also dig through archived conference calls, listening to what management was saying three or four years ago and comparing it back to reality. The tone of these calls, especially how management has responded to difficult shareholder questions, can be particularly revealing.    These additional steps help establish (or destroy) the credibility of a management team.

As students of behavioral finance, we have long been interested in improving our process to identify deception and weed out poor management teams.  We have enjoyed reading several recent studies which explore this topic in more detail and will discuss in subsequent posits:

• Detecting Deception on Conference Calls
• What we can learn from the prevalence of diving in Soccer matches
• Related Party Transactions and the incidence of fraud

 

A trip to the archives: Ben Graham, Behavioral Investor?

Given the recent spike in stock market related fears, we thought it would be timely to dig into our archives and re-visit the ideas of Ben Graham.  Long recognized as the founder of value investing, Graham also was an expert on market psychology and a critical observer of investor behavior. We have incorporated many of his core principles into our own investment process, and recognize in particular:
- the value of thorough research
- the importance of demanding a margin of safety (price in relation to value)
-Believe risk is also a direct function of investor sentiment (High expectations = High Risk).

While Graham and Dodd explain these ideas in detail in both Security Analysis and The Intelligent Investor, Graham's little known1963 town hall lecture, Securities In An Insecure World, perhaps expresses them most clearly.  The entire transcript is worth a read but we have included some relevant excerpts below:

On what it takes to outperform the market:

"Let me now make a general observation.  For obvious reasons it is impossible for investors as a whole, and therefore for the average investor or speculator, to do better than the general market.  The reason is that you are the general market and you can't do better than yourselves.  I do believe it is possible for a minority of investors to get significantly better results than average.  Two conditions are necessary for that.  One is that they must follow some sound principles of selection which are related to the value of the securities and not to their market price action.  The other is that their method of operation must be basically different than that of the majority of security buyers.  They have to cut themselves off from the general public and put themselves into a special category.

Genetics and your investment behavior

We have long observed that some individuals consistently make better decisions with their money than others.  Emotional control is often the most essential characteristic of successful investors.  Market volatility and other stresses can induce extreme emotions that cloud our judgment and prohibit us from thinking rationally.  Many other ingrained personality traits, such as one's  willingness to take risk and general tendency to save or spend, have an important financial impact.  But what causes individuals to decide and behave the way they do? Recent evidence shows that genetic inheritance plays a larger role than we may have thought.