Tag Archives: etfs

A Way To Own The Next Tech Unicorns

By Tim Maverick What investor wouldn’t want to own a tech unicorn? That is, a technology company, still private, that has a billion dollar-plus valuation based on its fundraising. Initial investors cash in on unicorns in a big way when these companies are either bought out or go public in an IPO. But that’s the realm of Wall Street and venture capital types… right? Wrong! There’s an obscure type of investment, tucked away in a recess of Wall Street, that allows everyday investors to get in on tech unicorns. Closed-End Interval Fund These closed-end interval funds have been in existence since the Investment Company Act of 1940. There are 58 such funds currently active. In effect, a closed-end interval fund is a strange mutual fund. It offers the same transparency and regulatory benefits of a normal mutual fund, and it’s continuously offered and priced every day. But, as the name suggests, closed-end interval funds are highly illiquid. Such a fund can only be sold at specified intervals . In many cases, such a fund can be sold only quarterly, and the fund will only buy back a portion of your shares. Thus, any money invested into such a fund isn’t money you’ll need anytime soon. It has to be very long-term, serious investment money. SharesPost 100 Fund But where do the tech unicorns come in? Well, one closed-end interval fund focuses on private firms that the fund manager believes are just a few years away from going public. In other words, late-stage tech companies. The fund is the SharesPost 100 Fund (MUTF: PRIVX ), and the investment minimum is only $2,500. Just to be clear to readers, I do not own the fund, and I have no affiliation with the fund. SharesPost 100 is currently invested in 31 companies. You can look at the current portfolio here . The fund’s eventual goal is to ramp to holding 70 to 90 names as more people invest. Ultimately, it aims to include more names from the SharesPost 100 list . According to Bloomberg, the fund has $68 million under management. Fund manager Sven Weber told Reuters he’d like to have $200 million under management within two years. Since its inception last year, the fund is up about 25%. But it hasn’t been very active recently, since the market for such companies has cooled in the past few months. It’s important to note that the fund will offer to buy back 5% of the outstanding shares from shareholders each quarter. If more than 5% of the shareholders want to bail out, they’d receive a pro-rated amount of the quantity they wanted to actually sell. The fund can suspend redemption privileges, as well. SharesPost also charges a sales load of 5.75% on amounts under $50,000, though the load drops as you invest more money. There’s also an advisory fee of 1.9%. So there you have it – a way to invest in tech unicorns, albeit one with a few warts. Personally, I could handle the fees and the risk of owning these shares, but the illiquidity is a big hang-up. What do you think? Leave us your thoughts in the comments section. And if you do decide to invest in the fund, please read the prospectus for a full look at the risks involved. Original post

SAT Investing

Can investors learn something from the SATs? It may be only a few more days to Christmas, but it’s also college application season. A lot of high-school seniors are filling out the Common App, writing and re-writing essays, and anxiously awaiting their latest test scores. And there’s a test-taking technique that kids use to improve how they do on standardized tests that can help investors. It’s elimination. When they come to a question to which they don’t know the answer, they can improve their scores by eliminating what is most clearly wrong. In a multiple-choice test, someone just filling in the circles gets 20 or 25% correct by random chance. But by eliminating the obviously wrong answers, students can better their odds. They won’t guess right every time, but they’ll do better than if they had left the answer blank. In the same way, investors can do better by eliminating what’s wrong. If a company’s business model makes no sense – if you can’t figure out how they earn their money – then don’t own that business. If management seems to be focused more on politics and celebrity than capital investment and HR, don’t buy the stock. This is a variant of The Loser’s Game by Charlie Ellis. We can be smart by avoiding dumb ideas. For example, in December of 2000, Enron employed 20,000 people and claimed revenues of over $100 billion. But some analysts started looking in depth at their derivative books and couldn’t figure out how the company was earning all their money. There was a gap between what was reported and what they could confirm. We know how this story ends: Enron filed for bankruptcy in December 2001. The executives used a willful, systematic, and intricately planned accounting fraud to inflate their earnings. (click to enlarge) Enron stock. Source: Bloomberg Investors would have improved their relative performance by avoiding Enron. That was difficult to do: the company was a media darling, considered a high-flying harbinger of the new economy. It had tremendous price momentum. But it was hard to see how they could turn 2% growth in utility revenues into consistent double-digit earnings growth for themselves. By looking under the hood – understanding the business, reading the financials – investors can sometimes avoid the big flops. And just like when kids take the SATs, if you can improve your odds – in a low-return world – that just might be enough.

Achieving 16.7% Returns With The Value Score

Summary What is the OSV Action Score? What is the OSV Value Score? How was the Value Score created? The Quality Score produces 16.8% CAGR in the tests that I’ve performed for the upcoming “Action Score” that I’m implementing into Old School Value. Next is the Value Score. Here is the full table of results again. stocks are bought at the beginning of the year held for one year rebalanced after 1 year commissions and fees are not included into these results If you followed this strategy, the 16.74% is the max return. After fees, it likely comes down to 13-14% range annualized. Here’s How I Created the Value Score When you create a ranking system (or even a screener) the higher the number of criteria, the worse the performance becomes. When picking individual stocks, making sure a stock passes lots of checks is a good strategy because you allocate based on your conviction. However, when you try to employ any sort of quantitative strategy, it is not a good idea to list 20 different criteria that must be passed. Of all the tests I’ve performed, a strategy with lots of checks consistently lose to the market by a wide margin. I mention this because people ask me whether I’ve tried combining several of the best performing value screeners on display. I have. And the results are pathetic. It severely handcuffs the number of stocks that pass and the screen ultimately fails. When you pick stocks individually, you have to be precise and picky. For anything quant based, it needs to be looser as you are buying a bunch. As I mentioned in the Quality Score article, instead of blindly coming up with metrics for each Q, V and G, I already had a list of metrics for each methodology based on previous research papers and proven results. Then the theory was tested and confirmed via backtesting. In its purest form, the Value Score is based on the following 3 factors: P/FCF – best range is less than P/FCF of 10 EV/EBIT – best range is less than 11 P/B ratio – preference for P/B to be less than 3 Here’s the initial backtest to confirm the theory for a 20 stock holding portfolio. Eliminating OTC stocks, financials, energy, mining or utilities and the results continue the outperformance. Great. Backtest works with the selected metrics. It now comes down to how well the same idea can be applied when creating a ranked database. To further clean up the results, additional weightings were applied to each of the above ratios. Then all the stocks are further ranked with the Piotroski score again to eliminate low quality stocks. P/FCF has the biggest impact on the results and receives the highest weighting EV/EBIT does a great job of identifying cheap stocks and receives the second highest weighting P/B acts as a “cleaning” filter to remove stocks where you overpay for assets. Also a way to remove bad stocks you wouldn’t want to own no matter how cheap it looks The Piotroski score is assigned a fairly high weighting so that the list removes “lotto” stocks and potential black swan stocks The Value Rank Results Even if I did follow this strategy, it’s not an easy one to follow. There is a LOT of volatility. If you can’t stomach big moves and have faith in the process, you are doomed. If you focus too much on beating the market each year instead of an absolute long term return, you are doomed. When buying and holding the top 20 ranked Value stocks each year for the entire universe of stocks, the scoring system achieves 16.74% CAGR. If you start with $10k, you’d end up with $138k after 16.5 years. Eliminate OTC, financials, miners, utilities and energy again and the results are shockingly great at 19.4% CAGR. $10k becomes $203.6K after 16.5 years. But what I don’t like about the Value Rank on its own is the lack of downside protection in 2008. Cheap stocks and growth stocks get hammered the most during severe bear years. But a -40% return is a huge blow and a can easily shatter your faith in the system and process. Something to think about. Top 20 Value Stocks from 2015 Here is the list of top 20 stocks that make up the Value Score portfolio starting from Jan 1, 2015 so that you get a sense of what type of stocks the Value Rating is selecting. Disclosure No positions in any stocks mentioned.