The Leading Business Education Network for Doctors, Financial Advisors and Health Industry Consultants

By Vitaliy Katsenelson CFA

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Today, we’re diving into two thought-provoking questions:

What’s a famous investment rule I don’t agree with? Which key characteristics should a good investor have? Again:

1. What’s a famous investment rule I don’t agree with?
2. Which key characteristics should a good investor have?

A Famous Investment Rule I Don’t Agree With: “Buy and Hold”

Buy and hold becomes a religion during bull markets. Then, holding a stock because you bought it is often rewarded through higher and higher valuations. There’s a Pavlovian bull market reinforcement – every time you don’t sell (hold) a stock, it goes higher.

Buying is a decision. So is holding, but it should not be a religion but a decision. The value of any company is the present value of its cash flows. When the present value of cash flows (per share) is less than the price of the stock, the stock should not be “held” but sold.

Warren Buffett is looked upon as the deity of buy and hold.

Look at Coca Cola when it hit $40 in 1999. Its earnings power at the time was about $0.80. It was trading at 50 times earnings. It was significantly overvalued, considering that most of the growth for this company was in the past.

Fast-forward almost a quarter of a century – literally a generation. Today the stock is at $60. It took more than a decade to reclaim its 1999 high. Today, Coke’s earnings power is around $1.50–1.90. Earnings have stagnated for over a decade. If you did not sell the stock in 1999, you collected some dividends, not a lot but some. The stock is still trading at 30–40x earnings. Unless they discover that Coke cures diabetes (not causes it), its earnings will not move much. It’s a mature business with significant health headwinds against it.

“Long-term” and “buy-and-hold” investing are often confused.

People should not own stocks unless they have a long-term time horizon. Long-term investing is an attitude, an analytical approach. When you build a discounted cash flow model, you are looking decades ahead. However, this doesn’t mean that you should stop analyzing the company’s valuation and fundamentals after you buy the stock, as they may change and affect your expected return. After you put in a lot of analytical work and buy the stock, you should not simply switch off your brain and become a mindless buy-and-hold investor.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be patient, but holding, not selling, a stock is a decision.

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Filed under: "Ask-an-Advisor", Experts Invited, Investing, Portfolio Management | Tagged: Buffett, buffett deity, buy, buy hold, hokd, inestment rules, investor traits, investors, navy, real-estate, Vitaliy Katsenelson CFA, Warren Buffet |