Guy Spier on Checklists for Investors

“A checklist is a way of managing your own mind and guarding against your own proclivities, so it needs to be based on this kind of self-awareness.” ―Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor

Investment Checklists and Surgeons

In The Education of a Value Investor Guy Spier discusses the subject of checklists, and how to develop and use them in investing. This is the main subject of chapter 11―An Investor’s Checklist: Survival Strategies from a Surgeon. Spier shares some of his own insights and his view of checklists as a tool to prevent investors from making mistakes.

What’s the Use in Using an Investment Checklist?

Let’s consider a few points before moving on, to get a quick refresher on the subject of investment checklists, and why a checklist could serve you as an investor good in your investing process.

All quotes below are taken from Guy Spier’s book as referred to above.

Who? An investment checklist for you yourself as an investor.

“…it’s important to recognize that my checklist should not be your checklist.”

What? An investment checklist containing broader categories (“including themes such as leverage and corporate management”) made up of individual checklist items (such as “has this management team previously done anything self-serving that appears dumb?”).

“…design checklist items that would help to prevent us from repeating […] mistakes.”

When? As a tool to be used before we make a final decision to buy or not buy into a certain business.

“Before pulling the trigger on any investment, I pull out the checklist from my computer or the filing cabinet near my desk to see what I might be missing.”

Where? As an integral part of your ongoing investment process, and as a tool in your business analysis and investing.

“The checklist is invaluable because it redirects and challenges the investor’s wandering attention in a systematic manner. I sometimes use my checklist in the middle of the investing process to deepen my understanding of a company, but it’s most useful right at the end as a way of backstopping myself.”

Why? Minimize the probability of permanent loss of capital. Our mind sometimes plays tricks on us and we better watch out and do our best to mitigate these so-called biases (or heuristics) that affects our decision making. As Warren Buffett once said: “Rule No. 1: Never loose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget rule number one.”

“The brain is simply not designed to work with meticulous logic through all of the possible outcomes of our investment decisions.” 

“The goal in creating a checklist is to avoid obvious and predictable errors.”

“…the items on [pilots’] checklists are designed to help them avoid mistakes that have previously led to plane crashes. In investing too, the real purpose of a checklist is to serve as a survival tool based on the haunting remembrance of things past.”

An Investment Checklist as a Way to Avoid “Cocaine Brain”

Spier talks about a certain problem, a mental state that he refers to as the “cocaine brain” and explains as…

“…the intoxicating prospect of making money can arouse the same reward circuits in the brain that are stimulated by drugs, making the rational mind ignore supposedly extraneous details that are actually very relevant. Needless to say, this mental state is not the best condition in which to conduct a cool and dispassionate analysis of investment risk.”

To keep it simple. Each checklist item you chose to put up on your checklist, you include for one reason, and one reason only. That is, to avoid the cocaine brain mental state, and to make your best effort in trying to make sure not to break the two rules mentioned above by Buffett.

Checklist Items: The Warren Buffett Way

The Oxford Dictionaries defines the word “Checklist” as:

A list of items required, things to be done, or points to be considered, used as a reminder. (Source: Oxford Dictionaries) 

As any checklist, an investment checklist is often made up of individual checklist items, that together constitute broader categories, that in turn form the checklist as a whole. Let’s look at an example to see what these broader categories may look like, by looking at a well-known quote from Warren Buffett taken from his 1977 letter to shareholders, where he lays out four things that he looks for in a business (emphasis added).

“We select our marketable equity securities in much the same way we would evaluate a business for acquisition in its entirety. We want the business to be (1) one that we can understand, (2) with favorable long-term prospects, (3) operated by honest and competent people, and (4) available at a very attractive price. We ordinarily make no attempt to buy equities for anticipated favorable stock price behavior in the short term.  In fact, if their business experience continues to satisfy us, we welcome lower market prices of stocks we own as an opportunity to acquire even more of a good thing at a better price.”

The quote above contains four points (or broader categories): 1) an understandable business, 2) favorable long-term prospect, 3) honest and competent people, and 4) an attractive price. For each one of these points one needs to determine what factors (individual checklist items) to consider to be able to reach a conclusion. Another quote from Buffett could give some advice on what to look for when evaluating management (emphasis added).

“Passion is the number one thing that I look for in a manager. IQ is not really that important. They need to be able to work well with others and the ability to get people to do what you want them to do. I’d say intelligence, energy, integrity. If you don’t have the last one, the first two will kill you. All you have is a crook who works hard. If a person doesn’t have integrity, you want them dumb and lazy.” (Source: Buffett FAQ)

And how could you find the information you need to make a judgement call like this? Again, let’s turn to Buffett for some advice (emphasis added).

“Almost everything we learn is from public documents. I read Jim Clayton’s book, for example. There is adequate information out there to evaluate businesses. We do not find it particularly helpful to talk to managements. Often managements want to come to Omaha to talk, and they come up with all sorts of reasons, but what they really hope is that we become interested in their stock. That never works. The numbers tell us a lot more than the managements. We don’t give a hoot about anyone’s projections. We don’t want even want to hear about it.” (Source: Buffett FAQ)

Checklist Items: A Few Examples from Guy Spier

In the book Spier gives a few examples of different kinds of checklist items in connection to different case studies that he goes though to show the reader the reasoning behind how he derived the items in question.

To put each checklist item below in the proper context, I urge everyone to check out Spier’s book and to read each of the case studies. In this post I will just briefly quote the questions as examples of what a checklist item could look like.

The first case study called “The Man Who Lost His Cool” is about the author’s investments in different for-profit education companies. Here the reader gets two checklist items that seem to belong in the corporate management category.

CHECKLIST ITEMS

“Are any of the key members of the company’s management team going through a difficult personal experience that might radically affect their ability to act for the benefit of their shareholders?”

“Also, has this management team previously done anything self-serving that appears dumb?”

The second case study is called “A Tortuous Tale of Tupperware,” and it’s about the Tupperware Plastics Company. This investment turned out to be a failure, and a failure that failed slowly. The reason? Because “…there was too much competition, and the high price of its products had become a serious obstacle to growth.” In this case, Spier concludes that he “…failed to ask the most obvious question: does this product offer good value for money?” Spier further concludes that “This misadventure taught me an invaluable lesson: I want to invest only in companies that are a win-win for their entire ecosystem.” With ecosystem Spier refers to “the value chains.”

CHECKLIST ITEM

“Is this company providing a win-win for its entire ecosystem?”

In case study number three “What Lies Beneath?” Spier goes on to discuss his investment in CarMax―“the Wal-Mart or Cotsco of secondhand cars.” CarMax business is heavily dependent on the company being able to provide its customers with financing, since without financing customers won’t be able to buy a car. In other words, debt markets was (and is) of utmost importance for CarMax’s business model. So, what happened? The financial crisis happened, and customers were not able to obtain the credit needed to buy a car, and as a result sales dropped and the stock price dropped too.

Spier’s greatest insight from his CarMax investment was that the “…situation taught [him] how critical it is to discern whether a business is overly exposed to parts of the value chain that it can’t control.” 

CHECKLIST ITEM

“How could this business be affected by changes in other parts of the value chain that lie beyond the company’s control? For example, are its revenues perilously dependent on the credit markets or the price of a particular commodity?”

The fourth, and the last, case study is “How I Lost My Balance.” This case study is about a food company called Smart Balance (since renamed Boulder Brands), and about the author’s “narcissistic hubris” that led him to pay too high a price for the business.

CHECKLIST ITEMS

“Is this stock cheap enough (not just in relative terms)?”

“Am I sure that I’m paying for the business as it is today—not for an excessively rosy expectation of where it might be in the future? Does this investment satisfy me psychologically by meeting some unmet personal need? For example, am I keen to buy it because it makes me feel smart?”

Disclosure: I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it. I have no business relationship with any company or individual mentioned in this article. I have no positions in any stocks mentioned.

Q&A Session: “Value Investing in Japan and Beyond” with Mohnish Pabrai & Guy Spier (2012)

 

Mohnis Pabrai and Guy Spier at JIS 2012 (Transcript) – Value Conferences

Video and transcript found via Värdebyrån. See Värdebyrån for additional links.

Forbes Transcript: Mohnish Pabrai on Checklists

“No wise pilot, no matter how great his talent and experience, fails to use his checklist.”—Charlie Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanack

“So you know, and all of these questions are not questions I created out of the blue. What I did is I looked at businesses where people had lost money.”—Mohnish Pabrai

Steve Forbes Interview With Mohnish Pabrai

A few years back, in 2010, Steve Forbes interviewed Mohnish Pabrai. This interview is about half an hour long, and among the topics discussed, checklists was one of them. The interview is available on YouTube, and there’s also a transcript available at Forbes’ – see here.

Below is an excerpt of the part of the discussion where Steve and Mohnish talk about checklists. Emphasis added by me.

“Make Checklists

Forbes: So in the first quarter of 2010, did you add any positions?

Pabrai: Yeah, actually, we did. We did find. In fact, there’s one I’m buying right now. But I found two businesses, but they’re anomalies. They were just, you know, businesses that had distress in them because of specific factors. And I think we’ll do very well on both of them. They’ll go nameless here. But no, I think, for example, in the fourth quarter of 2008 or the first quarter of 2009, you could have just thrown darts and done well. And that is definitely not the case today.

Forbes: And finally, telling you about mistakes, one of the things I guess an investor has to realize, they cannot control the universe. Delta Financial: You had done the homework, you fell and then events took it away from you.

Pabrai: Well Delta Financial was a full loss for the firm, for the fund. We lost 100% of our investment. It was a company that went bankrupt. And we’ve learned a lot of lessons from Delta. And one of the lessons was that Delta was, in many ways, a very highly levered company and they were very dependent on a functioning securitization market. And when that market shut down, they were pretty much out of business. And they were caught flat-footed. And so there’s a number of lessons I’ve obviously learned from Delta.

It’s easier to learn the lessons when you don’t take the hits in your own portfolio. But when you take the hits in your own portfolio, those lessons stay with you for a long time.

Forbes: So that gets to, you’re a great fan of The Checklist Manifesto. And you now have checklists. You said one of the key things is mistakes, in terms of a checklist, so you don’t let your emotions get in the way of analyzing. What are some of the mistakes on your checklist now that you go through systematically, even if your gut says, ‘This is great. I want to do it.’

Pabrai: Yeah, so the checklist I have currently has about 80 items on it. And even though 80 sounds like a lot, it doesn’t take a long time.

It takes about 30 minutes to go through the checklist. What I do is when I’m starting a business, I go through my normal process of analyzing the business. When I’m fully done and I’m ready to pull the trigger, that’s when I take the business to the checklist. And I run it against the 80 items. And what happens the first time when I run it, there might be seven or eight questions that I don’t know the answer to, which is great, which what that means is, ‘Listen dummy, go find out the answer to these eight questions first.’ Which means I have more work to do. So I go off again to find those answers. When I have those answers, I come back and run the checklist again. And any business that I look at is going to have some items on which the checklist raises red flags. But the good news is that you’re looking in front of you with all your facilities at the range of things that could possibly cause a problem.

And when you look at that list, you can also compare it to how those factors correlate with the rest of your portfolio. And at that point, kind of, you have a go, no-go point, where you can say, ‘I’m comfortable with these risk factors here. I’m comfortable with probabilities. And I’ll go ahead with it.’ Or you can say, ‘I’m just going to take a pass.’

And one of the things that came out of running the checklist was I used to run a 10×10 portfolio, which is when I’d make a bet, it was typically 10% of assets. And after I incorporated the checklist and I started to see all the red flags, I changed my allocation. So the typical allocation now at Pabrai Funds is 5%. And we’ll go as low as 2%, if we are doing a basket bet.

And once in a blue moon, we’ll go up to 10%. In fact I haven’t done a 10% investment in a long time. And so the portfolio has become more names than it used to have. But since we started running the checklists, which is about 18 months ago, so far it’s a zero error rate. And in the last 18 months, it’s probably been the most prolific period of making investments for Pabrai Funds. We made a huge number of investments, more than any other period, any other 18-month period in our history. So with more activity so far, and it’s a very short period, we have a much lower error rate.

I know in the future we will make errors. But I know those errors, the rate of errors will be much lower. And this is key. The thing is that Warren says, ‘Rule No. 1: Don’t lose money. Rule No. 2: Don’t forget rule No. 1.’ OK, so the key to investing is downside protection. The upsides will take care of themselves. But you have to make sure that your losers are few and far between. And the checklist is very central to that.

Forbes: Can you give a couple of the things that are on your 80 [item] checklist?

Pabrai: Oh yeah, sure. The checklist was created, looking at my mistakes and other investors’ mistakes. So for example, there’s questions like, you know, ‘Can this business be decimated by low-cost competition from China or other low-cost countries?’ That’s a checklist question. Another question is, ‘Is this a win-win business for the entire ecosystem?’ So for example, if there’s some company doing, you know, high-interest credit cards and they make a lot of money, that’s not exactly, you know, helping society. So you might pass on that. Also, a liquor company or tobacco company, those can be great businesses, but in my book, I would just pass on those. Or a gambling business, and so on.

So the checklist will kind of focus you more toward playing center court rather than going to the edge of the court. And there’s a whole set of questions on leverage. For example, you know, how much leverage? What are the covenants? Is it recourse or non-recourse? There’s a whole bunch of questions on management, on management comp, on the interests of management. You know, just a whole–on their historical track records and so on. So there’s questions on unions, on collective bargaining.

So you know, and all of these questions are not questions I created out of the blue. What I did is I looked at businesses where people had lost money. I looked at Dexter Shoes, where Warren Buffett lost money. And he lost it to low-cost Chinese competition. So that led to the question. And I looked at CORT Furniture, which was a Charlie Munger investment. And that was an investment made at the peak of the dot-com boom, where they were doing a lot of office furniture rentals. And the question was, ‘Are you looking at normalized earnings or are you looking at boom earnings?’ And so that question came from there. So the checklist questions, I think, are very robust, because they’re based on real-world arrows people have taken in the back.”

Disclosure: I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it. I have no business relationship with any company or individual mentioned in this article. I have no positions in any stocks mentioned.

Mohnish Pabrai’s Google Talk: “Dhandho. Heads I win; Tails I don’t lose much”

Explain Why it Makes Sense

“The most important thing is that, before you invest, you should be able to explain the thesis without a spreadsheet within four or five sentences. Typically I write down those sentences before I invest, so if I have a conversation with someone you could very quickly explain why this investment makes sense.” —Mohnish Pabrai, Google Talk July 21, 2014

Patience is the Single Most Important Skill

“Good traits, or important traits for being a good investor, number one the single most important skill is patience. So I think the thing is that markets have kind of a way of deceiving us, because you know when you turn on CNBC and you see all those flashing red and green lights and all that, its inducing the brain to think that you need to act now, and you need to act immediately. Nothing could be further from the truth.  You know Buffett always talks about having this punch card where in a lifetime you make twenty punches, and each time you buy a stock you punch it once so in a lifetime you’d make twenty investment decisions. Which means that if you started investing at twenty and ended at eighty, every three years on average you’d make one investment. And that is very hard for most people to do. And so, the more you can slow down your investing, and the more patient you can be, so the issue is that the time scales of which companies go through change and such, is very different from the time scales of which the stock market operates. So you really have to focus not so much on the stock market and have a lot more focus on the nature of change in businesses and be willing to be in there for a while.” —Mohnish Pabrai, Google Talk July 21, 2014

Mohnish Pabrai – Background

Pabrai worked with Tellabs between 1986–91, first in its high speed data networking group, and then in 1989, joined its international subsidiary, working in international marketing and sales.

In 1991 he started his IT consulting and systems integration company, TransTech, Inc. with about US$30,000 from his own 401K account and US$70,000 from credit card debt. He sold the company in 2000 to Kurt Salmon Associates for US$20 million. Today he is the managing partner of the Pabrai Investment Funds (a family of hedge funds inspired by Buffett Partnerships), which he founded in 1999. (Source: Wikipedia)

The Dhandho Investor: The Low-Risk Value Method to High Returns

The Google Talk, see video below, centers around the investment concepts discussed by Mohnish in his book the Dhandho Investor, that was published a few years back. Some of these concepts are, among others, the Dhandho concept of doing business, risk vs uncertainty, circle of competence and margin of safety.

Excerpt about the book from Amazon:

A comprehensive value investing framework for the individual investor

In a straightforward and accessible manner, The Dhandho Investor lays out the powerful framework of value investing. Written with the intelligent individual investor in mind, this comprehensive guide distills the Dhandho capital allocation framework of the business savvy Patels from India and presents how they can be applied successfully to the stock market. The Dhandho method expands on the groundbreaking principles of value investing expounded by Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett, and Charlie Munger. Readers will be introduced to important value investing concepts such as “Heads, I win! Tails, I don’t lose that much!,” “Few Bets, Big Bets, Infrequent Bets,” Abhimanyu’s dilemma, and a detailed treatise on using the Kelly Formula to invest in undervalued stocks. Using a light, entertaining style, Pabrai lays out the Dhandho framework in an easy-to-use format. Any investor who adopts the framework is bound to improve on results and soundly beat the markets and most professionals.

Google Talk with Mohnish Pabrai

See video below for the brand new Google Talk (approximately 60 minutes) with Mohnish Pabrai from July 21, 2014. Enjoy.

Disclosure: I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it. I have no business relationship with any company or individual mentioned in this article. This article is informational and is in my own personal opinion.

Video: Mohnish Pabrai Interview On Forbes

Checklist: A List of Things…

Here comes some thoughts about checklists, and why it might be a good thing to use one, but also on how to build your own and from were to get your inspiration.

The Cambridge Dictionaries Online defines a checklist as “a list of things that you must think about, or that you must remember to do.” 

Actually, you don’t need to look up the word “checklist” in a dictionary to know its meaning. But I think that it’s always good to get a simple definition to read through and just look at.

Anyway, I didn’t really think a lot about checklists until I read the 1977 Letter to Shareholders written by Warren Buffett. In it Warren simply lays out the four things that Charlie and he look for when evaluating a business.

We select our marketable equity securities in much the same 
way we would evaluate a business for acquisition in its entirety.  
We want the business to be (1) one that we can understand, (2) 
with favorable long-term prospects, (3) operated by honest and 
competent people, and (4) available at a very attractive price.

These four criteria captures pretty much everything one should consider when evaluating a business. They may not look like much at first, but there is a lot of sublevels in each of them.

What then is the best way to learn about the four points and their content? A good start is to read all letters to shareholders that’s been published so far. You’ll find them at Berkshire Hathaway’s homepage. All of them are great reads and I recommend everyone to read them. 

These are some of the best business texts ever written for someone who wants to improve knowledge about business analysis and investing. And they’re available for free! 

In my next post I will write about two books I have read about checklists. Until then, get inspired by Mohnish Pabrai’s presentation The Checklist. 

Also, feel free to share your insights regarding checklist. Do you use an investment checklist? If you do, how do you use it and how did you compile it?