"(...) In the words of my first boss,
investors tend not to believe in “longevity of compound”. Conventional thinking has it that good things do not last, and indeed, on average that’s right! Empirical Research Partners, an investment research boutique, discovered that the chance of a growth stock keeping its status as a growth stockfor five years is one in five, and for ten years just one in ten. On average, companies fail.
The list above is far from exhaustive and we can all pick our favorites. No doubt some
combination of these, plus others, acted in the minds of sellers. It matters not particularly.
What matters is the effect of this collective mis-cognition.
Investors know that in timeaverage companies fail, and so stocks are discounted for that risk.However, this discount is applied to all stocks even those that, in the end, do not fail. The shares of great companies can therefore be cheap, in some cases, for decades. To illustratethe point, consider the graph below. The blue line represents the share price of Wal-Mart and the red line the price that one could have paid at any time since 1972 (the firm’s initial public offering) and then earned a return of ten percent (a proxy for a reasonable equity return)
through to today. The red line can be thought of as what the firm was really worth.
Just look how long the undervaluation persisted! If,
in 1972, u
pon reading that year’s twelve page annual report (!) an investor chose to make a purchase of shares, he could have paid over one hundred and fifty times the prevailing share price (a price to earnings ratio of over fifteen-hundred times, a ratio far in excess of what professional fund managers would consider prudent. They would be mistaken, as it turns out) and he would have still earned a ten percent return on his investment through to today. If, instead, the investor thought about it for a while and decided to purchase shares ten years later he could still have paid over two hundred times earnings for his shares (beware heuristics) and still earned ten percent on his investment. And ten years after that could also have paid a premium over the prevailing WalMart share price and done well subsequently. The market struggled to appreciate the magnitude and longevity of the business’ success. But why? (...)"
Trechos da carta da Nomad Investment Partnership de 2009 -
https://igyfoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Full_Collection_Nomad_Letters_.pdf (Paginas 162 e 163)
Vale a Leitura:
