Tag: Benjamin Graham

Value Investment Strategy in Venture Capital

Why succeed in every investment (or the majority of them) is more important than depending on the statistical model of “Spray and Pray”.

Starting a business is not easy. One has to invest a lot of effort, time, and brain in order to introduce an idea that can stand out and is of value to others. Every individual is naturally inclined toward investing in a startup with better prospects than a start-up that would not generate any value and likely to fail in the future. Every investor would want to see his investment a complete success, whether it be an investment in a single stock or a bucket full of stocks. Same is the case with Venture Capitalists; they wish every investment to be successful, and for the same reason, prefer to use value investment strategy over the statistical model of spray and pray.

Although, spray and pray has got a lot of media attention in the past few years, and the face behind it is none other than Dave McClure, the founder of 500 startups, yet, you cannot deny the fact that it is important to reasonably manage your risk.

Nurturing the Idea is as Important as Making Money Out of it

Nurturing the idea is as important as making money out of it and this is exactly what value investors believe in, because you won’t be able to make money out of it if it doesn’t grow well. Manu Kumar, the founder of K9 Ventures, said that most companies do not turn out to be a failure because of their investors, but despite their investors. This is why he doesn’t want the startups, he has invested in, to fail, and wants a reasonable success rate in his investments. He keeps an average of four or five companies in his portfolio and he wants each one of them to be a success. This is why he is very selective and prefer to go for the one with good prospects. He keeps his investment between $100k and $200k and screen companies down while expecting a much higher rate of success. He looks for appropriately priced deals and doesn’t touch anything that is five or higher.

Value Investing Strategy – Bridging the Gap between Investors’ Mindset and Founders’ Perception

Another famous name among the Venture Capitalists, Thomas Korte, said that they do everything in a scaled way, because the majority of the founders tend to take the funds they are offered in the seed stage. There are very few in the market who believe that their investors would take them through Series B and Series C, and their apprehensions are true to a certain extent. At one point, McClure said, “it is not that their portfolio has a high death rate, it’s just that there is a higher death rate out there.” Instead of aligning himself with the founder and an acquirer, he prefers to align with an investor and acquirer. So, if a company has a scalable impact, he makes a deal as soon as possible. It is not easy to bridge the gap between investors’ mindset and this commonly held belief of startups. However, Value investing strategy can contribute towards changing this mindset and bringing harmonization to achieve common goals.

Benefits of Value Investing

Potential to Make High Profits – As opposed to spray and pray strategy, value investing has a potential to make high profits, because value investors tend to invest in companies that are being offered at a discount price and sell them well above their intrinsic value by bringing their true value to light through solid research on a value stock, its peers, and the sector.

Avoid Exposure to High Risk – Investing in a few companies with good future prospects will not only enable the investor to focus on materializing the potential value, but also keep the overall cost to a minimum. The investor will not be dependent to succeed on that only company that make the revenue beside all the others have already failed.

 

Yes, there might be a lot of effort and hard work involved the value investment strategy to be implemented while choosing the startups for investments, but it is important to note that short term price fluctuations are not always a true depiction of the true value of an asset.

As Benjamin Graham, the founder of value investing and mentor of Warren Buffet, once said, “In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.”

Value Investment

Value investment strategy is one of the strategies used in the stock market, where investors look for the companies that have the ability to generate returns at a reasonable level during a sustained holding period. In other words, a value investor tries to find a company that is undervalued by the market, but it has a potential to show an increase in its share value once the market rectifies the error of valuing that firm. So, it allows an investor to buy a well performing share at a cheaper price.

How to Screen for a Value Stock?

Value investors are not concerned with the factors that usually cause price fluctuation in the market. For them, the factors that would impact a stock price are oil prices, inflation reports, wars, and hikes in the Federal rates. This is the reason why they look for stocks with strong dividends, earnings, cash flow, and book value, because value investing is not just about purchasing an undervalued stock, it is about purchasing a good stock that is undervalued. However, just having the strong fundamentals doesn’t necessarily mean it will be a value stock investment opportunity, because a company with strong and consistent earnings growth, attractive cash-flows, decent dividends, and a minimal amount of debt might represent a growth investment, and so, value investors won’t be interested in it.

An investor must keep three questions in mind when he seeks a high value stock:

  • How is the cash-flow position of a company?
  • If the company is generating profit from its key operations?
  • What are the future prospects in terms of growth potential?

Quantitative Aspects

How to assess a good value stock? (Just some RATIOS)

  • High Dividend Yield – The stock with an ability to generate high dividend yield, is considered a good value stock. However, a comparison should be made in the same industry.
  • Low P/E Ratio – It is a comparison between a share price and the earnings generated by each share. Paying less for more profit will be a good indication of a good value stock.
  • Low Price to Book Ratio – The lower this ratio is, the better it would be, as it shows how much will be left after the liquidation.
  • PEG Ratio – Value investing doesn’t simply means investing in low Price to earning stocks. Another largely accepted metric for finding out the intrinsic value of a company is PEG ratio, which is calculated by dividing the P/E ratio of a stock with its projected earnings growth rate over the years. It measures how cheap a stock can be while keeping in mind the growth of its earnings. Therefore, a PEG ratio of less than 1 means a company is undervalued.
  • Net-Net Method – According to this method, if a company trades at 67 percent of its current assets, an investor doesn’t have to adopt any other measure of worth, because it depicts that a buyer is getting all the non-current and intangible assets free of cost. But, there are only a few companies that are trading this low.

Qualitative Aspects

Value stocks can be found in any industry, including finance, energy, and even TECHNOLOGY. Yet, they are mostly commonly located in industries that have recently been hit by a difficult time, for example, the cyclical nature of auto industry give rise to a period of undervaluation of companies like General Motors and Ford.

Warren Buffett, one of the most astute investors of all time, learned the art of trading from Benjamin Graham, who was the father of value investing. Buffett has always emphasized that buying a good company at a fair price is far better than buying a fair company at a good price, which is true. Value investing is not about purchasing stocks at a bargain price and hoping for the best, nor is it about making quick money on a market trend. The main idea behind it is to invest in companies with strong business models.

It is important to have a long term strategy with value investing. The investors shouldn’t get faltered by short term market features, such as volatility or daily price fluctuations, because a good firm will not lose its worth even on a bad day. Although, value investment strategy is dependent on a stern screening process, yet, it has a potential to generate reasonable returns in the long run.