Mental Model: How To Make Money Investing

In my line of work, I see a lot of client investment portfolios. Very few of these portfolios are constructed from any kind of first principles-based examination of how financial markets work. Most client portfolios are more a reflection of differences in advisory business models.

If you work with a younger advisor who positions her value add as financial planning, you’ll get a portfolio of index funds or DFA funds.

If you work with an old-school guy (yes, they are mostly guys) who cut his teeth in the glory days of the A-share business, you’ll get an active mutual fund portfolio covering the Morningstar style box.

No matter who you work with, he or she will cherry-pick stats and white papers to “prove” his or her approach to building a fairly vanilla 60/40 equity and fixed income portfolio is superior to the competition down the street.

My goal with this post, and hopefully a series of others, is to help clarify and more thoughtfully consider the assumptions we embed in our investment decisions.

So, how do I make money investing?

There are two and only two ways to get paid when you invest in an asset. Either you take cash distributions or you sell the asset to someone for a higher price than you paid for it.

Thus, at a high level, two factors drive asset prices: 1) the cash distributions that can reasonably be expected to be paid over time, and 2) investors’ relative preferences for different cash flow profiles.

What about gold? you might wonder. Gold has no cash flows. True enough. But in a highly inflationary environment investors might prefer a non-yielding asset with a perceived stable value to risky cash flows with massively diminished purchasing power. In other words, the price of gold is driven entirely by investors’ relative preferences for different cash flow profiles. Same with Bitcoin.

So, where does risk come from?

You lose money investing when cash distributions end up being far less than you expect; when cash distributions are pushed out much further in time than you expect; or when you badly misjudge how investors’ relative preferences for different cash flow profiles will change over time.

That’s it. That’s the ball game. You lose sight of this at your peril.

There are lots of people out there who have a vested interest in taking your eye off the ball. These are the people Rusty and Ben at Epsilon Theory call Missionaries. They include politicians, central bankers and famous investors. For some of them almost all of them, their ability to influence the way you see the world, and yourself, is a source of edge. It allows them to influence your preferences for different cash flow profiles.

Remember your job!

If you’re in the business of analyzing securities, your job is to compare the fundamental characteristics of risky cash flow streams to market prices, and (to the best of your ability) formulate an understanding of the assumptions and preferences embedded in those prices.

If you’re in the business of buying and selling securities, your job is to take your analysts’ assessments of cash flow streams, as well as the expectations embedded in current market prices, and place bets on how those expectations will change over time.

Ultimately, as the archetypical long-only investor, you’re looking for what the late Marty Whitman called a “cash bailout”:

From the point of view of any security holder, that holder is seeking a “cash bailout,” not a “cash flow.” One really cannot understand securities’ values unless one is also aware of the three sources of cash bailouts.

A security (with the minor exception of hybrids such as convertibles) has to represent either a promise by the issuer to pay a holder cash, sooner or later; or ownership. A legally enforceable promise to pay is a credit instrument. Ownership is mostly represented by common stock.

There are three sources from which a security holder can get a cash bailout. The first mostly involves holding performing loans. The second and third mostly involve owners as well as holders of distressed credits. They are:

• Payments by the company in the form of interest or dividends, repayment of principal (or share repurchases), or payment of a premium. Insofar as TAVF seeks income exclusively, it restricts its investments to corporate AAA’s, or U.S. Treasuries and other U.S. government guaranteed debt issues.
• Sale to a market. There are myriad markets, not just the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ. There are take-over markets, Merger and Acquisition (M&A) markets, Leveraged Buyout (LBO) markets and reorganization of distressed companies markets. Historically, most of TAVF’s exits from investments have been to these other markets, especially LBO, takeover and M&A markets.
• Control. TAVF is an outside passive minority investor that does not seek control of companies, even though we try to be highly influential in the reorganization process when dealing with the credit instruments of troubled companies. It is likely that a majority of funds involved in value investing are in the hands of control investors such as Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway, the various LBO firms and many venture capitalists. Unlike TAVF, many control investors do not need a market out because they obtain cash bailouts, at least in part, from home office charges, tax treaties, salaries, fees and perks.

I am continually amazed by how little appreciation there is by government authorities in both the U.S. and Japan that non-control ownership of securities which do not pay cash dividends is of little or no value to an owner unless that owner obtains opportunities to sell to a market. Indeed, I have been convinced for many years now that Japan will be unable to solve the problem of bad loans held by banks unless a substantial portion of these loans are converted to ownership, and the banks are given opportunities for cash bailouts by sales of these ownership positions to a market.

For you index fund investors snickering in the back row—guess what? You’re also looking for a cash bailout. Only your ownership of real world cash flow streams is abstracted (securitized) into a fund or ETF share. In fact, it’s a second order securitization. It’s a securitization of securitizations.

I’m not “for” or “against” index funds. I’m “for” the intentional use of index funds to access broad market returns (a.k.a “beta”) in a cheap and tax-efficient manner, particularly for small, unsophisticated investors who would rather get on with their lives than read lengthy meditations on the nature of financial markets. I’m “against” the idea that index funds are always and everywhere the superior choice for a portfolio.

Likewise, I’m not “for” or “against” traditional discretionary management. I’m “for” the intentional use of traditional discretionary (or systematic quant) strategies to access specific sources of investment return that can’t be accessed with low cost index funds. I’m “against” the idea that traditional discretionary (or systematic quant) strategies are always and everywhere the superior choice for a portfolio.

What sources of return are better accessed with discretionary or quant strategies?

That’s a subject for another post.