Bill Miller is one of the most closely watched money managers in the industry, so it was big news when he announced his decision last week to step down as portfolio manager of Legg Mason Capital Management Value Trust (LMVTX) early next year. His departure also adds an intriguing chapter to the long-running debate regarding the value of active stock selection.
Miller's most frequently cited accomplishment is the fifteen-year period from 1991 through 2005, during which Value Trust outperformed the S&P 500 each calendar year, the only US equity fund manager to have ever done so. His success attracted a wide and enthusiastic following: Morningstar named him Portfolio Manager of the Decade in 1999, Barron's included him in its All-Century Investment Team that same year, and a Fortune profile in 2006 described him as "one of the greatest investors of our time." A former US Army intelligence officer and philosophy student, his formidable intellect covered a wide range of interests, and he believed that conventional investment analysis could be enhanced with insights drawn from literature, logic, biology, neurology, physics, and other fields not obviously related to finance. His expressed desire to "think about thinking" suggested an unusual ability to assess information differently from other market participants and arrive at a more profitable conclusion.
Miller's bold and concentrated investment style would never be confused with a "closet index" approach. Big bets on Fannie Mae, Dell, and America Online, for example, were rewarded with handsome gains (as much as fifty times original cost in the case of Fannie Mae). Unfortunately, similar bets in recent years revealed the dangers of a concentrated strategy as heavy losses in stocks such as Bear Stearns and Eastman Kodak penalized results. For the five-year period ending December 31, 2010, LMVTX finished last among 1,187 US large cap equity funds tracked by Morningstar. Considering the enormous variation in outcomes among these carefully researched ideas, Miller's overall investment record presents an interesting puzzle: How can we disentangle the contribution of good luck or bad luck, of skill or lack of skill?
Over the May 1982–October 2011 period, annualized return was 11.28% for the S&P 500 Index and 11.76% for the Russell 1000 Value Index. Value Trust slightly outperformed the S&P and underperformed the Russell index by over 0.40% per year. A three-factor regression analysis over the same period shows the fund underperformed its benchmark by 0.08% per month.
Do these results offer conclusive evidence of the failure of active management? Not necessarily. The fund's expenses are above average at over 1.75% and provide a stiff headwind for any stock picker to overcome. Gross of fees, the fund's performance over and above its benchmark goes from –0.08% to 0.07% per month. This swing from negative to positive raises an interesting point that Ken French speaks to at every Dimensional conference. There are almost certainly some mistakes in market prices and almost certainly some skillful managers who can exploit them. But who is likely to get the benefit of this knowledge—the investor with his capital or the clever money manager? If stock-picking talent is the scarce resource, economic theory suggests the lion's share of benefits will accrue to the provider of the scarce resource—just what we see in this instance.
To cloud the discussion even further, both of these results, positive and negative, flunk the test for statistical significance; in neither case can they be attributed to anything more than chance. So even with twenty-nine years of data, we cannot find conclusive evidence of manager skill—or lack thereof. This is the inconvenient truth that every investor must confront: The time required to distinguish luck from skill is usually measured in decades, and often far exceeds the span of an entire investment career.
Miller is well aware of the challenge of distinguishing luck from skill and has conspicuously declined to boast about his results, even when they were unusually fruitful. He has acknowledged that topping the S&P 500 each year for fifteen years was an accident of the calendar and that using other twelve-month periods produced a less headline-worthy result.
Commentators have said that Miller has "lost his touch" or that his investment style is no longer suitable in the current market environment. These arguments strike us as the last refuge for those who find the idea of market equilibrium so unpalatable that they search for any explanation of his change in fortune other than the most plausible one—prices are fair enough that even the smartest students of the market cannot consistently identify mispriced securities.
Where does this leave investors seeking the best strategy to grow their savings?
When asked by a New York Times reporter in 1999 to sum up his legacy, Miller replied, "As William James would say, we can't really draw any final conclusions about anything." Twelve years later, this observation seems more useful than ever. And investors would be wise to treat even the most impressive claims of financial success with a healthy degree of skepticism.
REFERENCES
Weston Wellington, VP, Dimensional
Andy Serwer, "Will the Streak Be Unbroken," Fortune, November 27, 2006.
Edward Wyatt, "To Beat the Market, Hire a Philosopher," New York Times, January 10, 1999.
Tom Sullivan, "It's Miller Time," Barron's, October 12, 2009.
Diana B. Henriques, "Legg Mason Luminary Shifts Role," New York Times, November 18, 2011.
Standard & Poor's
Morningstar Inc.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
What's in Your View Finder?
Below is a very intriguing article written by Weston Wellington, VP, Dimensional. I thought it was worth sharing and I hope you find wisdom in reading it.
A restless college dropout, he founded a wildly successful company whose innovative products touched millions of lives. He was a brilliant, dictatorial, and cantankerous leader, relentlessly pushing his staff to solve one impossible problem after another. He had no use for conventional market research, and trusted his own vision to create products with little detectable demand that flew off the shelves upon introduction. He zealously guarded his personal privacy but reveled in his role as a master magician on stage when introducing his firm's latest innovations to eager crowds of industry followers. Stockholders wore big smiles as the shares vaulted to one new high after another. In many ways, he was the antithesis of the conventional corporate chieftain, and despite his demanding persona, he was revered by employees, customers, and even competitors to a greater extent than almost any other chief executive in recent memory.
A tribute to the late Steve Jobs? No—to Edwin Land of Polaroid.
The son of a scrap metal dealer, Land dropped out of Harvard to pursue his own research at the New York Public Library on polarized light filters. He founded Land-Wheelwright Laboratories in 1934 with his former physics professor, and his low-cost polarizing filters proved useful in products ranging from sunglasses to army tank telescopes and gunsights. After the war, he turned his attention to photography and introduced the Polaroid-Land instant camera in 1948. Despite a stiff price tag of $89.75 the first shipment of 57 cameras sold out in a matter of hours at a Boston department store, and the firm never looked back.
Numerous improvements followed, and sales boomed as the cameras and film became smaller, lighter, easier to use, and less expensive. The stock price did likewise, and Polaroid became a bellwether "glamour" stock during the postwar bull market, soaring tenfold in just five years from 1963 to 1967.
When a cover story in Time appeared in June 1972, Polaroid seemed all but unstoppable. Land's inventive genius had resulted in an astonishing new industry with technology protected by a wall of over 1,000 patents. (Land himself held 535 patents, second only to Thomas Edison.) Eastman Kodak offered only token competition in instant photography, and was eventually vanquished in both the marketplace and the courtroom. Kodak was forced to pay Polaroid nearly $1 billion to settle a patent infringement suit and withdrew from the instant camera business. Polaroid shares reached an all-time high of $149.50 in mid-1972, amid intense excitement over the ingenious new SX-70 single lens reflex color camera and rumors of an instant movie product. Government surveys at the time identified photography as one of the fastest-growing industries in the country, and Polaroid appeared to be a key beneficiary: In the premium category (cameras selling for $50 or more), Polaroid was not only the undisputed leader but outsold all other global competitors combined.
Land was one of Steve Jobs' heroes, and the youthful computer tinkerer from California felt almost a mystical connection with the Cambridge scientist forty-six years his senior. Both were impatient perfectionists, often driving themselves even harder than their overworked employees. Land was infamous for wearing out staff members, who rotated in shifts while he focused on knotty problems. During one marathon research session, Land wore the same clothes for eighteen straight days. When Jobs had the opportunity to meet Land personally, he found that he and Land shared a peculiar characteristic: Both believed that new products were not invented so much as discovered. Both could visualize a product that did not yet exist down to its smallest details, and the task of development was thus akin to Michelangelo's description of sculpture: The artist's task was to remove the unnecessary material to reveal the beauty already contained within the stone.
Alas, Time's cover story marked the beginning of the end. The instant movie project ("Polavision") turned out to be a costly failure and led to Land's resignation in 1980. Jobs was dismayed when Land was pressured to leave the firm he had founded, calling him a "national treasure." Jobs would suffer a similar fate after a losing boardroom battle in 1985.
Although Polaroid products continued to sell well, the shift to digital photography caught the firm unprepared and slowly hollowed out the highly profitable film business. Polaroid filed for bankruptcy in October 2001. The research labs and film factories were shuttered, although the brand name, traded from one sharp-elbowed financier to another, survives as a ghostly reminder of its illustrious past. The years have been kinder to Eastman Kodak, but not by much. Founded long before Polaroid in 1888, it has outlived its former adversary but now struggles to avoid a similar fate.
What is the message for investors?
As we observed in a previous note, the forces of competition are relentless, and today's astonishing innovation may be tomorrow's commodity—or garage sale castoff. We have no reason to believe that Apple has anything but a bright future, but those of us tempted to concentrate our investment capital in a handful of exciting industry leaders should consider the fate of Polaroid before declaring, "It can't happen here."
Securities Research Company, SRC Green Book, 1993 edition.
"Polaroid's Big Gamble on Small Cameras," Time, June 26, 1972.
"The Story of Polaroid Inventor Edwin Land, One of Steve Jobs' Biggest Heroes," 37signals www.37signals.com, accessed October 14, 2011.
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