I spend a lot of time thinking about my actions trying to determine if I made the right or wrong decision and if I made wrong decision, what lesson I need to take from the experience to apply to future endeavors. So of course one of the questions I asked myself is did I sell too early?

One thing I try to remind myself of in situations like this is “What the market does after you open or close a position really has no bearing on the quality of your decision.” While I would like to take credit for that thought, I imagine it was probably inspired by something I read from someone much wiser and with more experience under their belt. In essence what I am trying to say is that especially in the short term you should not use the market to judge your decisions. Even though the market values VVTV at over $7 and IGOI at over $4, that is not an indication on the quality of my decision to sell at cheaper prices.

Why? The answer really boils down to my investment philosophy. I started investing because I felt I strongly identified with the value investing framework. It makes sense to me and I feel confident that if applied with discipline it can lead to superior performance. While there are many interpretations of the value investing framework, one of the core tenets of value investing is the “Margin of Safety”. Buffett’s early investment style was influenced by his mentor Ben Graham. His style today is probably influenced by many people, two of which are Phil Fisher and his long time partner at Berkshire Charlie Munger. As his style has evolved the margin of safety is still a key component.

I entered both of these positions because I felt they provided adequate margins of safety trading at good discounts to their liquidation value and in both cases the companies had the chance turn around their business as an ongoing concern. So far they have both been making good progress and the market is treating them nicely for that progress. However lets not forget that these are not fantastic businesses with strong moats. So in my case, I bought them at discount to their value dead and got a premium because things worked out well. If only all situations could work out that way!

Both of these companies have a chance of success however once the margin of safety is gone there is nothing to backstop the value. Both of these companies have to execute with little or no error to continue on the upward path they are on. In this case the value the market puts on their progress is of no concern to me, what is of concern is the companies strength and the margin of safety I have if I hold.

Buffett has said that the best businesses are ones that can be run by a ham sandwich, because someday a ham sandwich will run them. I did not enter these positions because of their great business, I entered them because the market was selling them a large discount. They were Graham style cigar butts.

In the event that they enjoy great success long term the shares will appreciate accordingly, however in the event that they fail there is a higher risk of capital loss than I am comfortable with. Unlike companies with strong moats they can’t afford to make mistakes for a year or two. They must do a lot of things right.

So in conclusion when thinking about selling stocks do not think about the market. Think about the business and the margin of safety it offers at its current price. If you do that you will probably be right more often than you are wrong.

Disclosure: No positions in the stocks mentioned in this article.

Yesteday the Reuters Blog posted an article by Rolfe Winkler called “Buffett’s Betrayal”.

Rolfe goes on to say

Today, Buffett remains famous for investing The Right Way…

…But it turns out much of the story is fiction. A good chunk of his fortune is dependent on taxpayer largess. Were it not for government bailouts, for which Buffett lobbied hard, many of his company’s stock holdings would have been wiped out.

The gist of the article is while backing companies like GE and Goldman Sachs with debt, Berkshire Hathaway holding stocks like Well’s Fargo, Bank of America, and US Bank, Buffett has used his weight to save Berkshire Hathaways and hence his own investments. As a result he is a major benefactor of the bailout. The take away for me is that the author feels that Buffett’s skin in the game makes his support of the bail outs unethical.

Then he goes on to say…

Yeah, Buffett TALKS a lot about derivatives, about leverage, but what does he DO? He trades derivatives and, if I recall correctly, has said he doesn’t want to see more substantial margin requirements.

…

And I didn’t even mention the accounting shenanigans these guys are playing. Buffett SAYS a lot about accounting integrity, but his businesses are engaged in some very shady number fudgery.

And what about the General Re case? Everyone forgets that now too.

People give Buffett a free pass because they think, deep down, he really cares about their interests. I think he does too. Just not when they conflict with his own.

I spent about 30 minutes working a response to this article. To argue what I believe some misleading statements. Then I noticed this morning that the article has been picked up on Seeking Alpha. Browsing through the comments I found someone that resonated most of my thoughts which you can read here.

The only other thing I think worth mentioning is the derivatives statement. People love to poke at Buffett, going on about how he has said they are “Dangerous” and “financial weapons of mass destruction”. Well you don’t have to dig to deep to hear his explanation of those contracts. This years shareholder meeting someone asked him about this and (forgive my memory these are not exact quotes) his answer was basically, “yes they are dangerous. Cars are dangerous too when not used properly. ” “We felt these contracts were missed priced and we feel we will make some money on them in the long term, in interim we have premiums to invest today”.

Things that are complicated can be dangerous, especially depending on who is employing them. This is also means they can be mispriced.

Disclosure: I own shares of Berkshire Hathaway at the time of this writing.

If you are not a professional investor, if your goal is not to manage money in such a way to get signifigantly better return than the rest of the world, then I believe in extreme diversification. I believe that maybe 98, 99 or maybe more than 99 percent of people who invest should extensively diversifiy and not trade. So that leads them to an index fund type of decision with very low cost. Because all they are going to do is own a part of America and they have made a decision that owning part of America is worth while. I don’t quarel with that at all and that is the way they should approach it… Unless they want to bring an intensity to the game and make a decision to start evaluating businesses. Once your in the business of evaluating businesses and you decide that you are going to bring the effort and intensity… and time involved to get that job done, Then I think that diversification is a terrible mistake…

If you really know businesses you probably shouldn’t own more than six of them, if you can identify six wonderfull businesses , that is all the diversification you need. You are going to make alot of money and I guarantee you that going into a 7th one instead of putting more money into your first one has got to be a terrible mistake. Very few people have gotten rich on their 7th best idea, but alot of people have gotten rich on their best idea.

But to quote Buffett again…

A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.

Regardless of what experts or friends say. Ultimately you have to decide whats best for you. You are the one that has to sleep at night with your investment decisions.

  $50  Market price in Boston

- $30  Market price in California

______

  $20  Spread

  -$1  Shipping 

  -$5  Comission 

  $14  Total profit per card

What you are doing here is a form of arbitrage.

Some people might call this
scalping; it won’t surprise you that practitioners opted for the
French term, arbitrage.

- Buffett in the 1988 Berkshire Letter to Shareholders

There are many different forms of arbitrage. People sometimes engage in arbitrage on sports betting, where they can place bets at different books at different odds in such a way that no matter what the outcome of the game or race they are guaranteed a profit. Casinos practice “statistical” arbitrage. All the games they offer have a statistical advantage in favor of the house that guarantees over time they will profit. 

Warren Buffet was engaged in a unique arbitrage situation involving cocao beans while working for Ben Graham’s Graham-Newman Corp. Buffett writes about in the 1988 Berkshire Letter to Shareholders:

 
Some offbeat opportunities occasionally arise in the arbitrage field.  I participated in one of these when I was 24 and working in New York for Graham-Newman Corporation.  Rockwood & Co., a Brooklyn based chocolate products company of limited profitability, had adopted LIFO inventory valuation in 1941 when cocoa was selling for 50 cents per pound.  In 1954 a temporary shortage of cocoa caused the price to soar to over 60 cents.  Consequently Rockwood wished to unload its valuable inventory – quickly, before the price dropped.  But if the cocoa had simply been sold off, the company would have owed close to a 50% tax on the proceeds.

     The 1954 Tax Code came to the rescue.  It contained an arcane provision that eliminated the tax otherwise due on LIFO profits if inventory was distributed to shareholders as part of a plan reducing the scope of a corporation’s business.  Rockwood decided to terminate one of its businesses, the sale of cocoa butter, and said 13 million pounds of its cocoa bean inventory was attributable to that activity.  Accordingly, the company offered to repurchase its stock in exchange for the cocoa beans it no longer needed, paying 80 pounds of beans for each share.  

     For several weeks I busily bought shares, sold beans, and made periodic stops at Schroeder Trust to exchange stock certificates for warehouse receipts.  The profits were good and my only expense was subway tokens.”

 

Risk arbitrage is the most popular type of arbitrage when it comes to securities markets and involves “merger & aquisition” situations. For example Lester Floor Tiling announces it is attempting to buy out Smith Carpet Company (company names are made up) and offering $20 per share of Smith Carpet Company stock. If you purchase Smith Carpet Company stock for under $20 you can profit from this transaction when and if it happens. 

As the name implies there is risk involved in these situations. Smith Carpet shareholders may vote against the buyout, regulatory agencies might step in and say that this would create a flooring product monopoly that would not be in the interest of consumers. In M&A activities there are endless lists of things that can prevent deals from happening.

Take all of these risks and then factor in the current credit freeze and market volatility. Things can get hairy and do.  Mergers that seemed likely months ago can now fall apart quite easily.

Value investing blog Oldschoolvalue has been dilligently following a risk arbitrage opportunity regarding Emageon Inc. (symbol EMAG) and Health Systems Solutions Inc. (symbol HSSO). HSSO made an offer to purchase EMAG at 2.85 share. HSSO had a hard time meeting deadlines for the deal but ultimately ponied up $9 million in an escrow account to be paid to EMAG in the event that they could not follow through on the deal. $9 million may not seem like a lot, but put it in context HSSO’s market cap as of this writing is $8.3 million and the deal value of $69 million, its a fairly substantial deposit. So when news hit the deal was going to close February 11th the stock price started soaring up to $2.60 as people started getting in on the deal. The day before the deal was supposed to close the price started droping and investors were worried. Was there insider information about the deal falling through that was causing people to sell? The market in general was taking it in the pants so a lot of people (myself included) attributed the price drop to a combination of market volatility and people selling early to lock in their profits. 

The deal fell apart.Stanford International Bank in Antigua decided not to fund HSSO’s purchase and EMAG shot down to the $1 dollar level. To make it even more interesting, the decision to not fund the purchase has brought more attention to Stanford International and there is some speculation that the bank which has had abnormally high return rates on its certificates of deposits might be up to no good. In fact they are the subject of a probe.

I am left holding EMAG shares for quite a bit less than what I paid for them as are alot of other people. After doing a mental post mortem I have a couple of lessons learned.

1. Coming off of a successfull arbitrage with Puget Sound Energy I was probably not as critical of the EMAG deal as I should of been. Had the Puget Sound Energy deal fallen through I would have been content holding my position through the current market and collecting the dividends. In assessing the deal I did not put enough weight on the fact that EMAG is not a stock I would be content with holding an extended period of time. I think looking forward, my overall feelings about holding the secuirty in question should have a heavy weight on my decision. Even if the odds look like they are 90% or greater, the quality of the stocks in question should be paramount to my decision because I do not engage in enough arb situations to balance out the losses.

2. More due dilligence on Stanford International Bank may have set off some flags that I should steer clear of the deal. The fact that they offer abnormally high returns on CDs and are based in Antigua a place where I have little knowledge of the local financial regulations might have tipped me off. But of course hindsight is 20/20. 

3. I know very little about the industry that EMAG and HSSO are involved in. One nice thing about the Puget Sound Energy deal was that I live in Puget Sound and hence was close to the pulse. In addition I know a person that had been Puget Sound Energy shareholder for a long time who gave me some valuable insight as well.

Typically those who engage in arbitrage when faced with this type of situation sell their position, take their losses and move on. I was tempted to do this but I have decided not to for the following reasons:

1. Sell off. There are alot of people closing out their positions and driving down the price. I don’t believe the current price reflects the value of the stock and I do not have an existing opportunity waiting for the funds currently invested in EMAG. 

2. EMAG recieved 9 million in cash because the deal fell through. As of this writing EMAG is trading right around their book value and a little bit over their cash per share not including the 9 million in cash they just recieved. While the cash will not bring the book value up to my purchase price, I think they are better positioned or ride it out. 

While I understand the “cut your losses and move on” way of thinking, I believe the exit much like the entrance into the position requires some thought and in this case my thought is to hold on for a little while and not let the actions of the masses sway my judgement.

Some good arbitrage related reading:

1988 Berkshire Hathaway Letter

Buffett on Valuation: Risk Arbitrage Edition

Arbitrage: Emageon (EMAG)

Updates:

1.Turns out that the Stanford International is the focus of probe and key people are facing criminal charges.

2.I ended up selling my EMAG position because I feel I have found a good investment idea that will be a much better allocation of remaining funds instead of waiting for EMAG to recover.

Wesco Financial Corporation is a dividend champion and an achiever

Some people consider WSC to be a mini-BRK but Charlie states his own thoughts on that subject in the 2007 annual letter:

 

Business and human quality in place at Wesco continues to be not nearly as good, all factors considered, as that in place at Berkshire Hathaway.Wesco is not an equally-goodbut-smaller version of Berkshire Hathaway, better because its small size makes growth easier. Instead, each dollar of book value at Wesco continues plainly to provide much less intrinsic value than a similar dollar of book value at Berkshire Hathaway. Moreover, the quality disparity in book value’s intrinsic merits has, in recent years, continued to widen in favor of Berkshire Hathaway.

All that said, we make no attempt to appraise relative attractiveness for investment of Wesco versus Berkshire Hathaway stock at present stock-market quotations.

One interesting thing to note is that from a value perspective WSC is trading at a discount to its cash and book value. Considering who is at the helm I think you can trust their accounting  practices and valuations a lot more than most. 

On a slightly humorous note it looks Wesco and Berkshire do share the same web designer

NATIONAL INDEMNITY CO  10% owner 1,800,000 $62.19 $1.11946E8 7.1889E7

NATIONAL INDEMNITY CO  10% owner 681,000        $63.43 $4.31969E7 7.257E7

NATIONAL INDEMNITY CO  10% owner 1,882,000 $61.65 $1.16031E8 7.4452E7

It should be noted that National Indemnity is a Berkshire Hathaway company.  It’s an Omaha based insurance company that Buffet purchased on behalf of Berkshire. If memory serves correct I believe this was one of first insurance companies he purchased and hence the beginning of his “float”  investing career.  The story of Buffett and National Indemnity is covered in some detail in “The Snowball” which I would highly reccomend reading.

The only reason I bring this up is because when reading information about insider purchases and sales you have to keep in mind that it might not always be clear who is purchasing the stock. In this case someone not familiar with Berkshire and it’s history of  buying BNI stock might not realize who is actually making the purchase.  As far as insider information goes InsiderCrow is the best site I have found so far for that info but please let me know if you have any others you use. Insider filings are available from the SEC site, but the search functionality on InsiderCrow is far better.

Back to BNI. Well I think there are two major things to consider:

1. Rail is the cheapest way to move goods across the country. When people start spending money again and gas prices work their way back up (both of which will happen eventually, nay sayers be damned) railroads will be in high demand.

2. Moat. This is a no brainer. When it come to moats railroads have it locked down. The threat to their competitive advantage (Moat) is that a cheaper way to move goods comes along.  

Riding on Coattails

Warren Buffett has talked about “riding on coattails”. Well here is a situation where it may be possible to ride on his.  We know what Berkshire has paid for all of its BNI stock.  So we can come up with an idea of what he considers to be a “fair” price. One thing to keep in mind is that in some cases he bought the stock on “puts” which means he collected a premium for taking on the obligation to buy the stock at a certain price.  In these cases he technically paid less than the price reported because that does not reflect the discount for the premium. 

With recent purchases its obvious he thinks its a good deal in the low 60′s and coincidentally it has also recently hit its 52 week low. But am I saying mimic what he does blindly? No.

 The thing I like about this situation is that I can research BNI on my own, come up with my own valuation for the stock, my own opinion and then compare it to someone elses. This someone else just happens to be far more knowledgable then I am. I am not saying buy a stock just because Buffet buys it.

In alot of cases Buffet gets deals that we can’t. With GE and GS he got high interest perferred shares with lots of consequences in his favor. Those are unique and should not be read as “Buffet is buying GE stock!”. While he is technically buying GE stock he is getting alot more reward and protection than anyone buying their common stock. In this case he is buying BNI common stock without any special deals.  

Risks and other thoughts

There are some things to take in consideration when looking at BNI from the perspective of a personal investor:

1. Buffett has to make large investments. There are great companies selling for great prices right now, alot that will probably make you more money than BNI but they are too small for large investors. This is where you have an advantage over Buffet. BNI is a good long term play but for someone who is not managing billions of dollars there are probably better oportunities. 

2. Buyout. It is possible that Buffett is working his way to a complete purchase of BNI for Berkshire Hathaway. If this happens sooner rather than later you will not get the same return and if it were to happen within a year of your purchase date you could pay higher taxes on your gains. Keep in mind there has been no talk of a buyout, but I think its something to consider. 

Personal thoughts

As I mentioned in a previous post, I look at investing as far more than a vehicle for income. I personally like BNI because I live in South Seattle close to alot of rail activity so I constantly get a personal real life view of my holdings and I derive much joy from that.

The video is from 2000, but like all of his advice its timeless. One the things mentioned in the talk that really stuck out in my mind is the following in reference to the failure of Long Term Capital:

 

 

To make money they didnt have and didnt need they risked what they did have and what they did need.

 

He goes on to make an example with someone who has 100 million dollars. If this person can earn 10% a year on his 100 million dollars without leverage at almost no risk, or take some risk and leverage his 100 million dollars to make a 20% return this person would be crazy to risk losing their 100 million for an additional 10%. Especially because they already have 100 million bucks, how is the additional 10% going to make their life that much better? It isn’t it. But the downside if they loose is obvious, they no longer have any money.

The google video link above is for the whole 1 hour talk, its also on youtube broken up in smaller chunks.

Other Warren Buffett videos:

Warren Buffett talks Business

Charlie Rose Interview