TIP 049: Quantitative Value Investing

W/ Wesley Gray

5 August 2015

In this episode, we continue our discussion with best selling author, Dr. Wesley Gray. Preston and Stig ask Wesley to describe some of the finer points found in his book, Quantitative Value. Wesley also discusses his step-by-step approach to finding the best values in the world, all while minimize risk and maximizing returns with ETFs.

Subscribe through iTunes
Subscribe through Castbox
Subscribe through Spotify
Subscribe through Youtube

SUBSCRIBE

Subscribe through iTunes
Subscribe through Castbox
Subscribe through Spotify
Subscribe through Youtube

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:

  • How do I estimate the intrinsic value of an ETF?
  • What is the investment philosophy behind Wesley Gray’s value ETF?
  • Ask The Investors: Can you apply principles from Growth Investing in Value Investing?

HELP US OUT!

Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! It takes less than 30 seconds and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it!

BOOKS AND RESOURCES

NEW TO THE SHOW?

P.S The Investor’s Podcast Network is excited to launch a subreddit devoted to our fans in discussing financial markets, stock picks, questions for our hosts, and much more! Join our subreddit r/TheInvestorsPodcast today!

SPONSORS

  • Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors.

Disclosure: The Investor’s Podcast Network is an Amazon Associate. We may earn commission from qualifying purchases made through our affiliate links.

CONNECT WITH STIG

CONNECT WITH PRESTON

CONNECT WITH WESLEY

TRANSCRIPT

Disclaimer: The transcript that follows has been generated using artificial intelligence. We strive to be as accurate as possible, but minor errors and slightly off timestamps may be present due to platform differences.

Preston Pysh  01:03

Hey, how’s everybody doing out there? This is Preston Pysh. I’m your host for The Investor’s Podcast. And as usual, I’m accompanied by my co-host, Stig Brodersen, out in Denmark. And this is the second part interview that we have with Dr. Wesley Gray. And we’re going to go ahead and cut to that tape right now.

Stig Brodersen  01:18

Okay, so let’s talk about ETFs again, so I think the difference between ETFs and mutual funds is really something that the public will realize the next five or 10 years. At least, that is the trend I’m seeing in the market right now. But Wes, let’s just make a shortcut through those five or 10 years. Let’s just say, what is the one secret, if there’s any secret, there’s the difference between ETFs and mutual funds, what is it that people haven’t realized yet?

Wesley Gray  01:51

I think tax is huge. That’s probably 80% of it. And then the other one is the structural sales difference where it’s disintermediated by nature. And that just lowers the cost of how I would deliver any strategy when the distribution is at the margin lower cost structurally. But yeah, that’s number one.

Stig Brodersen  02:17

Yeah. And perhaps we could *revert to tax also removes that tax before. But could you just very simply explain why is it that we can defer tax on ETFs, which is basically 80% less you’re saying? And why is that we have to pay tax on mutual funds?

Wesley Gray  02:33

So I don’t know why it is. That’s just how the rules are set… I can just explain how the rules work, right? So in a mutual fund construct, or any construct, frankly, outside of like an insurance company, there are all kinds of other ways you can deal with tax problems. But let’s say we want to deal with the non-billionaire versions of these. You can do a mutual fund. You could do a hedge fund. You could do a managed account. You can you could do a limited partnership or hedge fund structure.

If it’s a mutual fund managed account or hedge fund structure, what will happen is if that portfolio trades, and it has a game that needs to be distributed out to the clients on a K1, in the case of a hedge fund, or some sort of 1099 in the case of a mutual fund person or a managed account person. And that’s fine. That would actually also happen in an ETF if you traded securities in the ETF and you didn’t trade them in kind through the authorized participants.

Now, the essence of how the tax works, and this is how a lot of tax ideas concepts work, is banks have what they call mark-to-market P&L accounting, which means that if I were, let’s say Stig is a bank and Preston is just some individual registered investment company. If Preston gives Stig a $10 stock with a zero dollar basis, and Stig is a bank, he doesn’t give his right because when he gets that security, he pulls it in with mark-to-market accounting, so his basis is 10. If he turns around and sells it immediately, he’s indifferent.

04:26

Now let’s revert this. Let’s say Stig is an individual, Preston is an individual. If Preston gives Stig a $10, security with zero dollar basis, Stig is going to swiftly turn around and punch Preston in the face because you just gave him a deferred capital gain liability, right? So I guess you call it the tax arbitrage happens because we deal with two tax regimes. ETF structures or registered investment companies have flown through capital gain prompts like QRI. Banks are mark-to-market, so when we dump low basis stock on a bank, they’re indifferent. And essentially that capital gain liability it vanishes.

So that’s the same thing like they do structured products, swaps, and all these other different tax minimization concepts that are out on the street that most people don’t know about unless they got a large amount of dough. It all works on that, right? You go to a bank, and if you want to swap, you say, “Listen, I don’t want to pay capital gains on or day to day short term on the strategy. I’m going to give you this index, can you write me a total return swap on this index?”

So now, instead of buying and holding the index, which has a lot of activity that would kill you on taxes, you go to the bank and they write a swap on that contract, which now you turn something that has a lot of taxes into something that is long-term tax-deferred. It’s the same … It’s just structuring an ETFs leveraged the fact that banks and people or individuals or RICS, registered investment committees have a different tax regime.

Read More

Preston Pysh  06:08

All right, Wes, I got a question for you, so recently, billionaire Carl Icahn has been in the news about ETFs here because he got in a spat with Larry Fink, who’s the CEO of BlackRock, about these bond ETF, these junk bond ETFs and their potential bottleneck for investors as they potentially try to exit those positions, so do you agree with Carl Icahn’s position? And can you describe some of the contexts of this being an expert in ETFs? Because I think a lot of people in the audience are very interested in this topic and really understanding this potential junk bond bubble as well.

Wesley Gray  06:42

Sure, so I mean, obviously, Carl Icahn is a smart guy. And so a lot of what he says is potentially true. The problem is, I think he may lack the institutional knowledge of how ETFs actually work, so if you remember ETFs structures are bait. You can arbitrage an ETF every day, right? So if there is a spread between underlying and NAV, you could do a mark on close order at like 359.59. And if that the NAV is really $1, but the underlying is 99 cents it’s free money, basically, right?

So as long as there’s a lot of competition, and a lot of prop guys and market-making desks that have supercomputers that literally have buttons, that in real-time figure out the bid-ask spread, or bid-ask spread costs impact costs, what have you… And incorporate that into their little arbitrage mechanism, that spread is going to be tight. And what that means is ETF liquidity is basically a reflection of the underlying liquidity under the assumption that the arbitrage mechanism continues and people like to make free money.

So now, let’s look if we know that given that assumption, arbitrage is capable, and ETFs are basically a reflection of the underlying liquidity, clearly, ETFs that buy junk bonds, if junk bonds, if we go into a 2008 financial crisis, and there isn’t a bid on junk bonds whether you own the junk bonds directly, or whether you own them through an ETF, you’re completely screwed. You’re not getting any liquidity, but I don’t think the ETF layer screws with the liquidity any more than just the underlying liquidity of the asset. And I don’t think Icahn really fully appreciates that as much as maybe he should.

Preston Pysh  08:43

Yeah. No, and I think Stig and I see it the exact same way. What are your comments on the bond, the junk bond market being the potential next bubble? I’m really curious to hear your thoughts on that.

Wesley Gray  08:55

Listen, my thought from an asset allocation perspective is that junk bonds are just another version of equity, just lower beta, right? And figure out what you want to buy, what’s the best value because in the end, when we build a portfolio, we don’t care about diversification on the junk bonds versus equity in the normal sense, we care about when the beta goes terrible in the whole world, blows up, junk bonds as everything blows up, so I’d say just find the smartest way to gain generic equity exposure at the cheapest best value and do that. And maybe avoid things like junk bonds where I can’t account for what risk you’re taking.

Preston Pysh  09:39

I’m really curious to hear your opinion on this because I’ve heard…  This was a really interesting idea that somebody threw at me, so my understanding is that this junk bond market calls it anywhere from $10 to $15 trillion, which is just totally insane. Of that amount, I guess, 3 trillion of this is in debt that relates back to oil companies. And whenever you look at these oil prices, and now they’re potentially going to even go as low as the $30 range, they’re in the mid-40s. And going lower right now. My understanding is all these big oil companies, they are not assuming that risk for that lower price. They had futures contracts locked in a call it $80, $75, or somewhere around in that price.

Somebody basically ensured that the price point of calling it $80. And now it’s down in the $40 range, maybe even the 30. Somebody is eating that cost. And that is an enormous, enormous value. And it’s just a matter of how long that’s going to take the play out of who is that person that’s all ultimately assuming that risk because I don’t think it’s the oil companies, even though they’re getting slaughtered. I don’t think it’s the big investment banks. I think it’s people that are buying this junk debt and I think it’s been nested into their somehow to the tune of around 3 trillion, is the number that I’m hearing. And whenever that comes to fruition and people are going to have to start paying that bill. I think we’re going to see something really interesting happening. And I can’t help but look at the parallel to 2007-2008 when oil prices went wild, up to $150. It almost seems like that was the Yin and now this is the Yang, and you’re seeing the exact same circumstances play out and somebody is ensuring that price. And I just don’t know who it is. I know it’s not me that’s ensuring that price, but there’s somebody out there that is and I’m sure they don’t know. And I’m curious to hear your thoughts on that.

Wesley Gray  11:35

So my thoughts on a fixed income are that people that trade equity are usually pretty smart people that trade fixed income and bonds are really, really smart. I think it’s a way more competitive marketplace, and just knowing which ones are my friends went that way versus equity. You know, I just don’t want to compete in that space. There’s a lot of nuances because the problem is you’re *inaudible like oil services or what have you, it could be a great example.

But the question is: Is it asset-backed or not? So for example, if I own debt on Exxon. You know, that debts actually awesome because if it is asset-backed by what Exxon owns those assets that could be gold where if there’s another situation where it’s on an oil company, but it’s just on the good faith and credit of Exxon, that’s a completely different story.

 

So I think there’s also callability. There’s just so much nuance within bonds. I almost think like making a macro statement, while you probably could. In the end, the devil would be in the details on that, specifically, I think.

Preston Pysh  12:44

My concern is the longer it stays down at that price, the worse is this is going to get.

Wesley Gray  12:47

Oh yeah. No, no. Clearly, I mean, we took a big energy bet because I mean, we’re value guys and you buy what everyone hates. And when prices shoot down and expect returns shoot up, we know on average, you’re explaining that psychology of oppression and hatred. You know, that’s just what you got to do. But clearly, oils that like whatever 40-45 bucks could it go to 30? Could it go to 20? Sure, is that the marginal cost of extraction for the average player? The equilibrium probably needs to be around 75 to 80. But that could happen next week or could happen 50 years from now after they’re already all bust, so it’s a risk-reward, I’d say.

Stig Brodersen  13:33

Yeah, another thing I want to talk about and I’m reverting here to value investing into *inaudible, is still Greenblatt, so Joel Greenblatt, a fantastic writer, I think most of the audience is familiar with his work and the Magic Formula. And what I’m experiencing right now in my inbox is that a lot of people they’re saying, “Have you read Toby’s book or I’ve read Toby book.” And of course, most of all, and also, Toby’s book that he wrote with you, “Quantitative Value.” And they’re basically saying, “So what do you think about that when you compare that to the Magic Formula?” But actually, I think I want to forward that question again to you because clearly, I have some opinion about Greenblatt and also have some sort of idea about what you’re doing. You shouldn’t sound like a threat, or anything, I think, really interesting what you’re doing, but I don’t know if you could just wrap up like your research on Joel Greenblatt’s formula.

Wesley Gray  14:28

Sure, so any and one has to really sit back and think, why does value investing work? Okay, so when I was a kid, and I had my grandmother making me read, like intelligent *inaudible or those things. I was like, “Oh value works because I’m just going to go figure out the DCF. And as long as it’s lower than intrinsic value, like overtime, value is its own catalyst.” Okay. That’s incarnation one of value investing.

Then I started thinking about it in the end, how you make money in a market is very simple. Front run expectations, if how the market forms expectation and how they’re going to have that expectation formed in the future, and you can bet ahead of that you will make money by construction, because market prices reflect current expectations and immediately reflect changing expectations, so then we think back to the value not only how and why it works. And if you look back in the research going back to Lakonishok, Shleifer, and Vishny. These guys are called LSV, which is a huge asset management firm with $500 billion. They make this point that the reason value works are because investors form expectations that fail to consider or appreciate systematic *inaudible version in fundamentals. What does that mean? Or what do they find not what does that mean?

That means that the cheapest securities out there, their fundamentals tend to all on average do better than expected. The most expensive securities in the marketplace, their fundamentals tend to do worse than expected, so that is fundamentally why primarily psychology, overreaction, a bad news overreaction a piece of good news, that is the so-called value anomaly, period. It’s all about price, the fundamentals.

16:35

Now let’s go think about something like quality, so everyone likes to think that Warren Buffett because he changed the mantra from Ben Graham and Graham said, “Buy cheap stuff, margin safety. Period.” Warren Buffett comes along says, “Well, that’s interesting. You know, I hate taxes. I like the compound over the long haul. I’m going to buy cheap but I’m also going to really focus on quality.” Okay? So now we got to ask yourself, we know why price and cheapness works, it goes back to that psychology of people form expectations that are screwed up because they fail to appreciate universal fundamentals.

When we look at quality at the outset before it is said, well, quality sounds good. We got to understand why would that be mispriced? And I would argue that there is no psychology to suggest that quality is mispriced in the market. Everybody knows that Google is a great company. Everybody knows that Procter and Gamble can sell toothpaste at a 50% margin when everyone else can’t, so why would you build systems that organically don’t have an edge, and it doesn’t even make intuitive sense that they’re going to give you an ability to front-run expectation. And you do that by basically incorporating quality at the outset like the Magic Formula. It’s just diluting the performance of the anomaly.

Stig Brodersen  18:03

I really wanted to talk about quality because one of the things that I really find interesting about Greenblatt’s formula is because he’s saying quality that is the return on capital, then when the *inaudible, you’re saying, basically, that quality is not that important, or you shouldn’t just say that’s the same as return on capital. And then I read your white paper, which is telling us about how you invest your fund and it actually also includes return on capital. And I’m curious to see how do you look at quality differences with Greenblatt?

Wesley Gray  18:39

Preston, you want to make a comment? I’ll answer that question for you.

Preston Pysh  18:42

I think it’s important to highlight that Wes is most likely saying that based off of a basket of stocks, not individual stocks, but go ahead, Wes.

Wesley Gray  18:50

Yeah, what I’m talking about is the average effect, so this is a very nuanced point that a lot of people overlook, with respect to quality, so what I’m saying is that there’s clear evidence-based and there’s also a lot of psychology research suggests that price if cheap, this works because of the overreaction to fundamental psych. At the outset, if I just sort securities on quality, of course, you don’t see any sort of spread on average because intuitively why would that be mispriced? It’s like, obvious, it’s quality, so why would at the outset quality be weighed equally to price to fundamentals when we already know that quality is that price component of value and then price to fundamentals tends to be a mispriced element?

Where you want to use quality is it’s the ordering that matters, so the Magic Formula is all about 50% you know, even to enterprise value, 50% EBIT ROCE. It’s basically a 50% quality, 50% price, and that’s fine. It works because it’s 50% price, but it actually is diluted because it’s 50% quality.

20:06

Now, a smarter way to do that’s also grounded in actual like evidence and psychology research is get to price first, that’s where the anomaly is the cheap, crappy stocks that everybody hates, right now, when we have to cheap crappy stocks, or what is preceded cheap, crappy stocks, but one is huge debt losing a lot of money and sells at a P of five. The other one is no dead maybe not, but they’re making money p five. Now we can argue because there’s an older thing about what they call limited attention to fundamentals. And this is like the Petrosky work where it’s okay, now, we’ve got cheap, this is the anomaly, but within that people just throw the baby out with the bathwater and don’t pay attention to fundamentals of money. Those most hated. And now we can use that in a beneficial way, not a way that like shoot ourselves in the foot as the magic formula does.

Preston Pysh  21:10

I totally agree with that analysis. And I think it’d be really interesting to see how many of those companies that aren’t highly leveraged that are in that PE ratio that you’re describing of like a five. How many of them have a change of management that causes their price to come back up? I’d be really curious to know what that percentage would be, as you’d be doing that analysis. And I don’t know if you’ve done that research or not, but I would think that it’d be extremely high.

Wesley Gray  21:35

Well, yes. I didn’t tell you something we have done is going back to that data mining we did on valuation metrics. It popped out enterprise multiples or early just EBIT TV. Basically, what we use. Toby talks a lot about that are perturbations in his book, “Deep Value.” You know, we actually went and said, “Well we don’t want to just be data miners. We want to be evidence-based investors.” And one of our hypotheses is that it is also related to “Deep Value” is cheap, EBIT, tone enterprise value stocks are not just cheap to maybe like some guys like me or you who are in the public equity, but private equity guys focus on those sort of metrics, right? Because they gotta buy this whole company.

So one of the things we said is, “I wonder if the most… if you just sort securities into like, say your most extreme, PE stocks, like your cheapest PE stocks and your cheapest even enterprise value yield stocks, is there a higher propensity for takeout from private equity is much higher for those extreme enterprises, the cheap enterprise multiple firms than cheap PE firms?” Because that’s how a lot of times you’re winning in public equities. You’re buying cheap equity that the outside guys want and then you get your premium on the takeout or wherever, so I think it’s certainly the case that private equity is a good, good person to sell out too if you buy cheap public equity stocks.

Preston Pysh  23:10

So that’s one of my biggest concerns moving into this next crash, whatever that might be. And we have no idea when it’s going to be. But whenever it does happen, one of our biggest concerns is that people are going to get back into the market too quickly.

The reason that we feel that equities are going to maybe get punished a little longer than they did during 2009 turned down is that the Fed doesn’t have the tools that they had at their disposal back in 2008-2009. Back then, they could lower interest rates, and they could do QE. Now they’re pretty much left because I don’t think interest rates are going to get high before the next crash. And I think a lot of people would agree with that. You already have Carl Icahn putting on credit default swaps and things like that, which he’s not going to do that unless he thinks it’s going to be in the near term.

But with all that said, we don’t think that the Fed has a lot of tools at their disposal except for quantitative easing, which would devalue the dollar, so my concern at this point is how useful and how much of that can they do without drastically putting big waves into the market with real estate and other things? And do you maybe see commodities as being a really good play in that interim between market downturn and time to get back into equities as you wait for that to happen?

Wesley Gray  24:22

Sure. So, are you guys familiar with managed futures at all? By chance?

Preston Pysh  24:29

No, I’m not.

Wesley Gray  24:29

Okay, so so let me explain how we deal with this problem, so our issue is, after thinking long and hard, we realize that we don’t know anything and have no edge and trying to predict exactly whether we’re going to go hyperinflation or hyper deflation, so if you can’t predict, you need to build systems that front-run these things. And you basically use the predictions of the marketplace to help you to move your assets.

One of the tools that we leverage is the concept of managed futures, which is, and the typical, most famous managed feature construct is short term trend falling, so for example, the prices above the hundred a day, moving average your long, otherwise, you’re short. We do that system across the commodity complex and the bond complex across the globe. The idea being is that if all of a sudden, some you said mentioned like there starts to be a trend where bonds start blowing up or maybe they don’t, maybe they stay flat, but now all of a sudden, we’re getting like a like an inflation expectation problem. You’re going to start seeing that movement in underlying commodity contracts. Short term trend falling is going to get you into that trend early. And if it actually expresses itself, you’re going to make a ton of money. It essentially serves as portfolio insurance because it is going to protect you whether we go into an extreme bond scenario or become Japan, asking to protect you if we go into extreme commodity scenarios if we become Zimbabwe. And we just leverage managed future technologies and structures to front run and get ahead of those trades.

Preston Pysh  26:17

So is there something that the individual person could access to help them with doing that?

Wesley Gray  26:24

Yeah, I mean, there’s man AQR has I mean, there’s, there’s managed products you can do. There’s me AQR has a mutual fund, there’s FUTS it’s like some ETF the basically the short term trend following. You can also just do it yourself. I mean, just go create an account in Interactive Brokers. Learn a little bit about futures trading. I mean, it’s a little bit complex, but you could do it yourself or there’s a lot of different managed future offerings out there. I mean, I just, that’s… Or you can just trend follow across like DBC and I don’t know, IEF, like 10-year bond and some generic ETF commodity complex and just do a simplified version of trend following. That’s just what I would do to deal with that problem.

Stig Brodersen  27:13

Okay, Wes, so let’s go back to ETFs, in general. And actually, I would like to talk about your ETFs. As you can see, right now, you have two actively managed ETFs. You have one that is the US. One that is international. I’ll make sure to link to the white paper that you’ve been reading about the philosophy behind it, but perhaps you could just break it down to us. I know you have like five somewhat simple steps that you go through and find the stocks you ultimately want to invest in.

Wesley Gray  27:46

Sure, yeah, so for the two value ETFs at a real high level, what we’re trying to do is simple. Buy the cheapest, highest quality value stocks, do it at an affordable price, tax-deferred. Period. With tons of tracking air. We’re not trying to benchmark hug whatsoever. 5-10 year horizon, so how the heck do we do that?

Well, going back to this outline, this five-step process. I’ll put some numbers on it. Let’s say the universe has 1000 names, mid-large liquid domestic equity, that you know, that has shares outstanding, we actually trade, so we have 1000 names. Step two is one of the problems with value investing is catching that proverbial falling knife. It’s the firm, it’s cheap because there’s a good shot it’s going to go bankrupt in the next six months. It’s cheap because the numbers are fake.

28:43

So step two is all about forensic accounting, leveraging technology from various academic research papers to try to forensically identify who might be that falling knife. And all we’re going to do there is if you pop as the worst 5% relative to all our securities, even if you’re Walmart, I don’t care, we’re booting you out. It’s just a red flag. Okay, and let’s say that brings us from 1000 names to 900, so now we have a universe of 900 names that we’ve at least tried to eliminate a thing that could be like a total permanent loss of capital. Is it going to be perfect? No, but we need to do something.

29:23

Then step three, because we want to exploit the actual value. Normally, we get down to cheap fast, so we want to look at that top decile cheap based on enterprise multiples, right, so now we’re down to 90 securities. Once we have these 90 securities, they’re the cheapest securities in the universe that literally everyone pretty much hates, which we like. Our job is then to try to identify which ones are those are the highest quality because we think that those firms that are cheap but also have evidence for higher quality, have a higher shot of ability to mean revert back to their previous life form, than firms that are cheap and like totally pieces of crap.

And so we have 90 securities. Step four and that quality section, we’re going to split it, get down to, in this case, 45 securities. And then after trading execution and all the realities of the marketplace, because of liquidity, maybe we get down to 35 to 40. That’s, that’s the portfolio we hold.

Stig Brodersen  30:28

Yeah, I’m actually very curious about the number of stocks you’re holding, because I think I looked it up and it was actually very accurate to what you just said. I think it was 41 stocks or something you hold it, that you’re having in the US. I’m curious about the number of stocks. I’m like, why you want to say something like 40? Because if you think about, especially in terms of something like Greenblatt to some extent, I would think that you might want to have fewer stocks. I don’t know how many. If you look at it from say an academic standpoint, you will say something like 20 stocks, 25 stocks because that means that you don’t have exposure to the individual stock, but you have like a generic stock market exposure, so I’m thinking why not have fewer stocks and then the make some of the transaction costs and perhaps also, then the more heavily invested in the cheaper stocks?

Yeah, no, I totally agree. Like there’s a sweet spot there between, say, 20 and 40, or 50, where diversification benefits go away. The primary reason, frankly, is we’re subject to the 1940 Investor Company Act, and there’s just limitation, so you can’t have over 25% in a given industry. For example, you can’t have over 5% a given name. And even though we could get down to the margin on that, you don’t want to do that. You want to build a lot of buffers where you know if you’re at 4%, and the limit is five. You know, that’s just bad. You don’t want to run afoul basically of SEC rules, so we … We try to optimize given regulation constraints basically.

Preston Pysh  32:12

All right, well, so this is one of the questions we really like to ask everybody that comes on the show. If there’s only one book that you could recommend to our audience, that has really had an impact on you, what would that book be?

Wesley Gray  32:24

I’m sure someone said this, but I’m a huge fan of Dan Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” just because I think psychology and understanding the human mind and how it forms expectations is basically investing. The rest is details, so I think that book is maybe not very exciting but a good book about learning about how the human mind actually works.

Preston Pysh  32:48

I love that.

Stig Brodersen  32:49

I’m so happy you said that, Wes. I think it was a few days ago, Preston and I, we were emailing back and forth about what are the next books we’re going to do  and that was actually on our list so yeah.

Wesley Gray  33:02

Like I said, I haven’t sat by…it’s more of a reference book because it’s pretty boring if you ever read it’s like 800 pages, but I just think it’s a great book. And that guy’s really smart.

Preston Pysh  33:13

I love that. That’s too awesome. Okay, yep, so just so everyone knows will be reading that book and we will be doing an executive summary. People that sign up for our mailing list, get our free executive summary of all the books that we read so that one will be in the future. Stig, do the timeline when that might come out? It’s going to be in a few months, though.

Stig Brodersen  33:29

Yeah, it’s probably going to be eight weeks from now. It’s going to be full books from now, so this would have been like something like eight weeks.

Preston Pysh  33:36

All right, so that’s, that’s coming up. All right, so what we’re going to do right now and we’re going to keep Wes on the call here so that we can answer this question together with all three of us. And we’re going to take a question from our audience. And just so you know, Wes, we have people that record questions, and then we play them on the show, and then we provide feedback and our best answer that we can muster. And this week’s question comes from Kevin Carohara and here we go.

Kevin  34:01

Hi, Preston and Stig thanks for all the hard work that you do. I’m learning so much from your podcasts. You both mentioned the importance of questioning your own beliefs or sort of self-interrogation to get the optimal answer. That being said, what are your views on the practice of growth investing, as opposed to value investing? Are there any virtues that can be drawn from growth investing? Thanks, and keep up the good work.

Preston Pysh  34:27

All right, Kevin, I am so glad we have Wes on the call because I think he could probably give you a lot better response than I can. I don’t personally do any growth investing, so I’m probably the worst person to ask that question to. I don’t know about Stig’s opinion. But let’s throw it over to West first and hear what he has to say. And we’re definitely putting him on the spot because he had no idea we were going to play that question. Let’s hear what he has to say.

Wesley Gray  34:50

Yeah, no, no problem. I’ve heard it all at this point, so just so you know, we have two firm beliefs: systematic decision making and evidence-based investing. And that evidence-based investing creates a problem when we start talking about growth based investing. It’s just, I can’t find any evidence to suggest that it actually works over the long haul. And so we can’t find evidence that it works, then we’re just not going to do it.

I understand why a lot of people do do it because it’s way cooler. You know, investment banks want to promote these names for various service offerings or what have you. But we just don’t participate because we have belief in evidence-based investing. And I don’t have any evidence on hand to suggest that it works, so not that it’s bad. It’s just for me personally, that’s what we believe in so we can’t do it.

Stig Brodersen  35:48

Yeah. And Kevin, I think that’s a great question because you’re saying are there any similarities. And basically, when we talk about growth investing and value investing, it’s the same thing and then not. It’s the same thing because basically, you are as Wes said before discounted the future cash flow and compared to the price.

Now, the problem with growth investing is that you are reliant on having high growth rates, which is just a very speculative way of investing compared to value investing Preston and I talked about and what also Wes is doing in his fund.

36:23

When you hear these stories about people that have been rich from growth stocks, one name that comes to mind would be something like Elon Musk because I’m reading a book about him right now. But he has not become rich because he bought a lot of great growth stocks these guys that usually get rich off growth stocks is because they created the assets and then made the IPO and sold the stocks. It’s really, really hard to find people that had just found really good tech stocks and just invest in that. That’s, that’s really hard.

And Wes was also talking about empirical evidence. I found the *inaudible from Fidelity and I’ll show the link to that in the show notes. And if you look from 1980 to 2010, so both you included that it’s 31 years, you can actually see that for large-cap stocks, so large-cap growth compared to large-cap value, large-cap value outperforming 1.7%. Annual compounding and the small bell cap is 4.2%. That’s massive. You have $10,000 to invest in, that’s a hundred and $88,000 compared to $601,000, over 31 years, so it’s really a massive difference if you look at the empirical evidence between growth and value.

Preston Pysh  37:43

So Kevin, fantastic question. We’re so excited that you recorded it for us. For anybody else out there. If you want to get your question played on our show, go to asktheinvestors.com and you can record your question there. And for Kevin, we’re going to send you a free signed copy of our book, the Warren Buffett Accounting Book for asking your questions, so we really want to thank Dr. Wesley Gray for coming on our show today. If you haven’t noticed, the guy knows what he’s talking about. It was pretty amazing to hear some of his responses to these difficult questions. And Wes, thank you for taking the time out of your busy day to talk with us on the show.

Wesley Gray  38:18

No problem, gentlemen. I really love what you guys are doing. And our mission is to empower investors for education.

Preston Pysh  38:24

Wes, if people want to find out more about you, where can they find you? And talk about your book “Quantitative Value,” just give people a handoff so that they know where they can read more about you.

Wesley Gray  38:34

The best find is just going to alphaarchitect.com, and click on the blog. And if you want to buy the book, we actually sell it, we bought a bulk buy from the publisher because we don’t want to make money on the book. If you click on a link from our website and buy for 19.99 as opposed to like 50 bucks or wherever the heck the publisher wants, so alphaarchitect.com and if you buy it through the link on our website, it’s $19.99 on Amazon, which is basically our cost.

Preston Pysh  39:04

Awesome, so what we’ll do is we’ll have a link in our show notes to that what Wes is talking about, and anything else we’ve talked about during the show, just go to our show notes. You’ll see that all there and then you can hop on over where he’s offering it for $19.99. So, Wes, thank you so much for offering that up to our community. I know that they’re going to greatly appreciate that.

Wesley Gray  39:22

Sure. Appreciate it.

Preston Pysh  39:23

All right guys, that’s all we have for you guys. And we’ll see you guys next week.

Outro  41:21

Thanks for listening to The Investor’s Podcast. To listen to more shows or access to the tools discussed on the show, be sure to visit www.theinvestorspodcast.com. Submit your questions or request a guest’s appearance to The Investor’s Podcast by going to www.asktheinvestors.com. If your question is answered during the show, you will receive a free autographed copy of The Warren Buffett Accounting Book. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. This material is copyrighted by the TIP Network and must have written approval before commercial application.

PROMOTIONS

Check out our latest offer for all The Investor’s Podcast Network listeners!

WSB Promotions

We Study Markets