Drew's Views

On the misleading claims of Hendrik Bessembinder about diversification; and the convenient, post-hoc, and the spurious conclusion to always buy and hold.

Drew and Toby chat about narrative-driven investing, Ben Graham's voting machine, behavioral explanations for stock mispricing, and managing a concentrated portfolio of investment ideas.

This had a lot to do with bad banking, but most to do with an overzealous client. Meanwhile, it had very little to do with holdings disclosure. Sure, our kneejerk reaction is (always) for more regulation, because we want to believe that some regulatory response will immediately solve all our future problems. But we should question this intuition.

He implies that a biased sample of self-selected winners suggest that it is a mistake to ever sell any shares in any companies that you think are “winners” either historically or prospectively. That sure would be nice, wouldn't it?

I know, these are weird and trying times. It all makes you wonder what the point of stock-picking is. What is the purpose of kicking the tires, looking under the hood, and doing our jobs?

For a fundamental, value-oriented investor, we are reasonably active in the management of our portfolio names.

If you are managing a portfolio of equity investments, whether personally or institutionally, there are many factors that (should) go into its construction.

We aren’t big fans of dipping our toes in the water when entering a position, nor of timidly reducing when exiting.

After discovering the next great investment idea, why is it so easy to start with a half-sized position, watch it a bit, and then go full-sized later?