Category: Excerpts

Hat Tip : Nilesh Shah

“We are always prepared for volatility and rapidly moving markets – they should surprise no one.

I am a little perplexed when people are surprised by large market moves.Oftentimes, it takes only an unexpected supply/demand imbalance of a few percent and changing sentiment to dramatically move markets. We have seen that condition occur recently in oil, but I have also seen it multiple times in my career in cotton, corn, aluminium, soybeans, chicken, beef, copper, iron – you get the point.

Each industry or commodity has continually changing supply and demand, different investment horizons to add or subtract supply, varying marginal and fixed costs, and different inventory and supply lines. In all cases, extreme volatility can be created by slightly changing factors.

It is fundamentally the same for stocks, bonds, and interest rates and currencies. Changing expectations, whether around inflation, growth or recession (yes, there will be another recession – we just don’t know when), supply and demand, sentiment and other factors, can cause drastic volatility.”

-said Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Chase

So 6 to 8 ideas were usually 80 plus percent of our portfolio, so that portfolio management theory doesn’t like that strategy very much.

Warren Buffett has a good response to that as well. You know he says listen let’s say you sold out your business and you got $1 million and you are living in town and you want to figure out something smart to do with it. So you analyze all the businesses in town and let’s say there’s hundreds of business and you stick to — if you find businesses where the managements really good, the prospects for the business are good, it’s run well, they treat shareholders well, and you divide your million dollars between eight businesses that you researched well in town, no one would think that’s imprudent, they would actually think that was pretty prudent.

But when you get to call them stocks and you get stock quotes daily on these pieces of paper that bounce around put people put numbers on it and volatility and all these other things where really it’s not that meaningful, you know from one sense if you’re investing in businesses and you did a lot of research and invested in eight different businesses with the proceeds of your sale, people would think you’re a pretty prudent guy.

All of a sudden if you invested in stocks and did the same type of work, people think you’re insane, and it’s just an interesting analogy that I was think of when people make fun of me that I was that concentrating.

–said Joel Greenblatt