A few months ago three researchers published an astonishingly ambitious and compendious paper called “Is There a Replication Crisis in Finance?” (Their names are Theis…
James P. O’Shaughnessy’s What Works on Wall Street has long been one of my favorite books on investing. Not because it’s so readable—it includes pages and pages of backtests that are a real slog to get through. And not because it’s impeccable—there are some odd omissions, which I’ll get to later. And not because it strikes an estimable balance—there’s simply not enough about accounting measures, and what’s there is somewhat weak. . . .
The idea behind value investing is that you buy a stock well below its fair value, wait for it to appreciate to something close to…
In 2000, Joseph D. Piotroski was a young associate professor of accounting at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, having obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan the previous summer. That year he published a paper called “Value Investing: The Use of Historical Financial Statement Information to Separate Winners from Losers” in the Journal of Accounting Research. Seldom has an accounting paper made such a huge splash.
This article is the fourth in a series about screens designed by famous investors. The first, on Benjamin Graham, can be found here; the second,…
2020 was an insane year on a lot of levels: the pandemic, the mass unemployment, the impeachment proceedings, the killings on America’s streets, the hubris…
Marc Gerstein, a Forbes author who was until very recently Portfolio123’s director of research (you can see his work in stock models he created like…
The calculation of intrinsic value has become a forbidding and abstruse practice. It seems reserved for nerds and members of the Warren Buffett cult. As Aswath Damodaran, one of its most elegant and charismatic practitioners, and perhaps the person who has promoted it more than anyone of late, wrote recently, “uncertainty underlies almost every part of intrinsic value.” . . .
The fact that mature companies grow at a steady rate gives us a way to calculate the discount rate without depending on guesses as to the return of an equally risky investment. We know that the present value of an investment that pays dividends in perpetuity with a constant growth rate equals its dividend divided by the difference between the discount rate and the growth rate. So let’s take all mature companies—companies with fourteen or more years of annual reports—and find out what they’re actually returning to shareholders (shareholder payout).
Before we get into multi-stage analysis, let’s contrast young and mature companies. We shouldn’t look only at how many annual statements a company has filed to determine this; instead we should also use a company’s characteristics. There are plenty of companies that have reinvented themselves and gone from old age to infancy in terms of their growth rates.
