Everybody “knows” that value investing doesn’t work anymore. It’s in all the headlines.
Investing today is about technology, everyone says. It’s about artificial intelligence. It’s about quantum computing, about the rebirth of nuclear energy.
Some of this is true, some isn’t, but what’s really not true is that value investing doesn’t work. In fact, it still works better than just about any other investing approach.
The reason people say otherwise is because they’ve got value all wrong. “Value,” they think, is just another word for “cheap.” But most cheap stocks are cheap because they’re bad investments.
Here’s how to invest in value the right way using just two metrics – and beat the markets handily.
What People Get Wrong About Value
There are a couple of problems with the way people define value investing. First, we need to address the fact that the sound of it is boring. Value investing sounds like a professor with tweed elbow patches smoking a pipe in an old dusty office in some brick and ivy university somewhere up in Vermont or Maine during a snowstorm. It just sounds boring.
Perhaps if we could call it vulture investing, market pillaging, or some other equally interesting name, it would attract more attention.
But then again, since we seem to have a corner on it, do we really want to attract all that much attention?
Second, let’s talk about the way people track value. For instance, the Russell Value Index is supposed to represent value. When you compare it, growth has outperformed value for several hundred consecutive years, according to the literature.
That may be a slight exaggeration, but you get the point.
When you examine the Russell 1000 Value index, it’s allegedly the bottom half of the Russell 2000 weighted by value components.
The top holdings include Berkshire Hathaway, Cisco Systems, McDonald’s, Walt Disney, Raytheon, and Caterpillar. These are all great companies.
What they are not is value companies.
The Truth About Value
When we really look at the hard data, the truth is that absolute value never stopped working. When you look at companies that are trading at discounts to asset value, low multiples of the cash produced by the business, and low multiples of liquidation value, which is still one of my favorites, the truth is that they have continued to work and work very well.
The key thing that most people leave out is they will run a list of companies trading below book value and will say, “Look, these underperformed the market.” That is, in fact, true.
More than half of those companies are unprofitable and overleveraged, and their products are going completely out of style. You know, they are CD-ROM manufacturers or buggy whip makers in the business of making something we are never going to use again.
Many of the companies that trade below book value, in all honesty, do so for a reason. They are headed for the garbage pile.
Making Value Work: Financial Strength
How do we get rid of those? You have to adjust for a couple of factors:
- You want strength in the financial statements.
- You want the ability to survive, and you prefer that they are profitable.
Two papers, with several follow-ups, have come out in the last twenty-five years that show us how to do this.
One of these is Joseph Piotrowski’s publication “Value Investing: The Use of Historical Financial Statement Information to Separate Winners from Losers.” The F-score is based on that paper.
Value plus the F-score crush the market. When we add value plus the F-score plus credit scores, I prefer the Altman Z score—then you annihilate the market.
The key variable here is profitability and financial strength.
The Missing Factor: Profitability
The other paper, which very few people seem to have read, is important.
In 2013, an economist, Robert Novy-Marks, published a paper that should have but didn’t redefine the entire playing field for investing. It is called “The Other Side of Value: The Gross Profitability Premium.”
Basically, they found that highly profitable companies outperform, no matter how cheap or expensive they may look. It is a single idea that gross profitability is the missing dimension, the missing factor.
It has found its way into some of the academic models. Novy-Marksed followed up on it with “Profitability Retrospective: What Have We Learned?”
This is key because many people today will tell you that quality matters. We have got to buy these quality companies. Everyone has a 16, 17, or 18-factor model that supposedly helps us identify truly high-quality companies.
Novy-Marks has found in both the original 2013 study and the retrospective today that you only need one factor to identify quality. That factor is profitability, which is defined in the original paper as gross profits as a percentage of assets.
The higher that is, the better the company is.
Quality Simplified
It explains all of the excess returns from so-called quality investing. When you ask what exactly we are looking for here, it turns out it all boils down to one simple measure.
You can use an 18-factor model, or you can use just gross profitability as a percent of assets. When you look at the largest cap companies that are in the upper end of the range: Apple AAPL, Amazon AMZN, Alphabet GOOGL, Meta META, Walmart WMT, Visa V, Eli Lilly LLY, MasterCard MA, Oracle ORCL, Johnson & Johnson JNJ, Procter & Gamble PG, UnitedHealth UNH, T-Mobile TMUS – all of the same companies that would show up if we use that super sophisticated, 18-factor quality model for which you will pay a massive premium to have access to the data – it turns out you can get the same list using just gross profitability.
Gross profitability also explains all of the defensive strategies.
All of the defensive low beta stocks are just highly profitable companies that also are growing their asset base slowly. They are doing very conservative investing. They are not de-worsifying the business. They are not trying to grow at a high rate.
They are just ridiculously profitable companies that are willing to sit in place and do what they are good at and continually pile up profits and cash.
Unifying Factor
Profitability explains quality. It explains the low beta and low volatility phenomena.
Many investors have looked for new ways to define value. Cash flow to price, earnings forecast, intangible adjusted tangible book value, adjust for a lot of different factors in R&D. These are going to “fix” value’s alleged shortcomings in a day and age of high technology.
The truth is that all these newer value strategies sneak in profitability as a factor in addition to value. Profitability by itself delivers market-beating returns.
Profitability plus value, whether that is price to book or a different model that works, like enterprise value to earnings before interest and taxes, beats the market even more.
Why Value Appears to Have Underperformed
When we look at the underperformance of “value” since 2007, the truth is that it’s because we junked up the value universe. We put a lot of garbage in there. There are many stocks trading below book value that are biotech startup companies. They are below the cash balance on the balance sheet, but they are burning cash at a rapid rate and will soon be out of money. The book value will, in fact, disappear.
There are all these companies that look cheap but are wildly unprofitable. They are burning through money.
Then you have a lot of garbage that came in through the two SPAC movements in 2007 and then again in 2020 when companies that were still basically at the garage stage of existence suddenly went public.
We really junked up the value universe with a lot of garbage.
The Foundation of Investment Success
Profitability is not just another factor but another tool.
It is a foundational tool that unifies multiple styles. It is part of quality, defensive value, and even some growth stocks.
Profitability explains a lot of the strategies that people use without relying on complicated, expensive 18-factor models.
If we take low-volatility companies and buy the most profitable, we are going to outperform the market.
If we just buy the most profitable companies, we are going to outperform the market.
If we buy the most profitable companies that are trading at low multiples of the cash produced by the business, we are going to absolutely crush the markets.
This is not a day trading system or a short-term trading system. It is the single best way to build long-term portfolios that beat the market and produce lasting wealth.
The Unified Theory of Investing
Profitability explains almost everything that happens in the market. If you have a great business, it is wildly profitable.
If you are a quality company with high returns on equity, low leverage, and earning stability, you are a very profitable company.
If you are a defensive company with low volatility and lower beta, all of the outperformance of these strategies is because they are profitable companies that are not reinvesting in the business to rapidly grow the asset base.
You have low-investment, profitable companies. There is your entire defensive strategy.
The underperformance of value investing over the last fifteen years or so is entirely because of the addition of so many unprofitable companies. If we use F-scores and profitability to screen out just the profitable undervalued companies, performance goes through the roof.
The Simple Path to Success
Most people won’t do it because it doesn’t make you rich by next Tuesday. It is not the absolute most exciting strategy on the planet. What it does is give you a very easy, quick way to uncover opportunities.
Two scores.
That is all you have to check. You can put together a universe of companies that can crush the market.
Basically, no folks, value investing is not dead.
If anything, if you understand that financial strength and profitability are the key to making value investing go from boring to the most exciting thing you can possibly do with your money, value investing is very much alive and still very successful.
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