<<Jim, you've made good calls in the past. But long-term do you really see yourself a market timer forever? >>
I don't see myself as a market timer now. Maybe the biggest danger in making one market call is not that you're wrong, but rather that you're dead-on right like I was last July. So then you think you can do it again. The jury is still out on this one, but so far I have passed on three stocks I otherwise would have bought.
Maybe this is part of the suicidal value investor behavior you referred to. It may very well be. Its one thing running a personal account in this environment. Its quite another facing clients every quarter, and facing less of them each quarter than the one before. And you rack your brain, but can't figure out what you're doing wrong. "Oh, you're firing me because I didn't buy Amazon. OK, that makes sense." Maybe its gotten to me.
For the last year, working at a value shop has been like working in a morgue. (Actually, I like Charlie Munger's metaphor better - It feels like "being a one legged man in an ass-kicking contest".) Maybe the best signal that this has to turn soon is that good disciplined value investors that you have heard of are quite literally worried about going out of business if this two tiered market persists through the second quarter. Most frustrating is that every time you lose a client, you have to sell stocks to fund the redemption, which drives your illiquid holdings down further. Sometimes you find that you are among the biggest quarterly sellers of a stock you love. Its enough to drive you to market time. If market timing satisfies the urge that would otherwise be spent doing bodily harm to yourself or others, its for the better.
(I write this not to bask in misery, but rather to give you something to print out and hang on your wall to show what a growth-value inflection point might look like. Who knows, we might see similar posts on the Amazon thread in a few weeks.)
Cheerfully,
JJC |
