A lot of times, people convince themselves that if “they just had a little more money” they wouldn’t be in the financial dire straits they are. Their bills would be paid. They wouldn’t have financial stress. The problem is, everyone else with any sense in their life is likely thinking, “Yeah, you’ll be right back in this situation in a few years” but no one wants to say it aloud.
From the time I was a kid and had only a few thousand dollars in the bank, I have wanted a Bosendorfer Strauss model grand piano, probably in a 7 foot size (which is comparable to a Steinway & Sons Model B semi-concert grand). Yet, the list price is $111,080 plus you’d be looking at sales tax of roughly $8,331 for a grand total of $119,411. The time value of money opportunity cost of buying a Bosendorfer Strauss grand piano, then is enormous.
John Templeton was a billionaire mutual fund pioneer that specialized in using a value investing strategy to buy stocks around the world. By practicing a disciplined version of Benjamin Graham’s teaching on a global scale, Templeton amassed an astounding record that made shareholders of his fund wealthy and earned him hundreds of millions of dollars in well-deserved fees. Toward the end of his life, John Templeton ran his international investments from his mansion on Lyford Clay in the Bahamas.
Many famous portfolio managers that practice a value investing strategy have said they think of stocks as “equity bonds”. Instead of receiving a fixed rate of return, like you would when you buy a traditional bond, you receive a variable return based on the company’s underlying profit. This approach makes it easier to value a business. The most common starting point for the valuation process is calculating a financial ratio known as earnings yield. In this article, you will learn what the earnings yield ratio is, how to calculate it, and why it is important to so many value investors.
Whether or not a business can lavish employees and owners with huge bonuses, paychecks, dividend checks, and profits on a sustainable basis depends upon one metric and one metric only: operating profit per employee.
By Charlie Munger (Warren Buffett’s partner at Berkshire Hathaway) Speech at Harvard Law School (1995) Transcription of The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, comments [in brackets] by Whitney Tilson. Note from Joshua Kennon: I’ve written a lot about Charlie Munger over the years, especially the influence he has had on my life and how we run…