June's research paper: Intangible Value ✨

Can value investing strategies be improved by adding intangible assets?
👾 The Asset-Light Economy
🔮 The Dark Matter of Finance
🏰 Intangible Moats
📉 The Disruption of Value
👨‍🎓 Fixing the "Value Factor"

(Not investment advice)

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Paying 50-100x earnings for 'blue ocean' sectors has become normalized with promise of changing trends and immense future opportunity. Stock markets look forward, if the future opportunity is great, in most cases that 100x valuation already factors a 30x valuation in 3 years.

For investors, the question of where the buck stops is difficult to answer, because the goal post keeps changing. 30x is reasonable for one business, for another 70x is acceptable. So why not everything in between too?

Not every business captures the opportunity available. There is many a slip between the cup and the lip, as my English teacher used to say. When investors have seen valuations creep from 20x to 100x in a matter of a year or two, it is easy to to keep dancing to the same music.

But like we used to play musical chairs in childhood, someone will be left standing too. And here the rules aren't that 1 person gets eliminated at a time, hundreds get crushed at the same time. In childhood, we had a 1/X chance of being caught standing when the music stopped.

The margin of safety was high till you got down to the last 3-4 people playing the game. Similarly, your margin of safety reduces dramatically when valuation becomes irrelevant. A few months of underperformance and suddenly things don't look so rosy any more.

@SunDudez @Iamsamirarora Even if one had invested when Infosys valuations' were at its peak, one would have still made index-par returns in hindsight

A reminder of rule number one from @mjmauboussin

A word of advice and caution. When you buy a High Pe stock. Make sure that you are very certain about the growth. Plenty of good and bad examples

Eicher=Growth stopped, Got derated.

Pi Industries= At 52+Pe in 2015, growth continued (5bagger since then)

Symphony=Growth stopped as more competitors copied them, painful time correction.

Astral=Kept growing and entering newer adjacencies since 2015 when it was at 60+ Pe. (Been a 10 bagger since then)

Page Industries=Growth stopped as the company matured. No returns for last 4 yrs.

Bajaj Finance= Kept growing (barring Pandemic). Kept rerating with the earnings growth.

HDFC Life=Been absurdly valued since 2018. Leading to very poor returns.

Relaxo=Kept getting rerated on back of earnings growth.

High Pe means market is expecting strong earnings growth. What happens when it fails to come? Likely derating or painful time correction.

Paying a high multiple, you need to make sure that the growth is certain.

What I do to grasp such opportunities or to ignore them is to have a mix of deeply valued companies (like some financials I own) with Companies where I think they will grow at 30-35%+ (Navin).

This is what my framework is:-

Pf=High Pe+Already seen value+Strong earnings growth

Grateful to @AswathDamodaran for sharing his wisdom in this remarkable conversation with @veiled_value about the book, The Dark Side of Valuation.

Excerpts follow in this thread.
Members, access the full interview

On every investor's worst enemy:

On uncertainty:

On multiples vs. DCF:

On stories and valuation: