Charts for the Curious

Mr. Buffett recently extolled the powerful economic moat of one of the world’s most iconic companies: Apple. Berkshire spent a bit over $30bn to acquire their Apple stake, which now sits at 936 million shares.

“The Fed has shown some mettle over the last year but historically I would not say [Federal Reserve chair] Jay Powell is a profile in courage … one area I’m comfortable is I’m short the US Dollar” -Stanley Druckenmiller “Bitcoin is a store of inflation and a hedge against value.” -Anon

Happy Friday everyone! This piece is going to be brief, brutal, and to the point. Over the past two years, some readers have complained that the cheapest stocks that dotted our top-ranked companies “were at the peak” and destined to collapse. Counter to intuition, some have come to believe expensive stocks are safer than cheap stocks. For many of these names, earnings did not peak, the world did not end, and many of these stocks ran higher. Remarkably, many of these

KCR is not surprised at the amount of Wall Street shills claiming they can predict the Federal Reserve Chairman’s next moves. Equally unsurprising is the market’s overwhelming interest in how market conditions might shift based on a leveling off or outright reduction in interest rates. The thinking goes like this: the stock market bubble that drove low-quality stocks to unsustainable levels could come roaring back to life if only the Fed would pivot. Our piece ARKK vs. QQQ in the Dot.Com Bust a few weeks ago tried to put this idea to rest. In that work, we highlighted the uncanny analog between the low-quality collapse of the dot.com bubble and the collapse today.

We recently posted a year end piece summarizing KCR’s work from 2022. There were so many blistering charts that we broke the recap into two parts. The first, Short Term Stock Speculators Beat a Hasty Retreat, and A Basic Industries Boom & the Return of the Real Economy as the follow-up. When we posted our 2022 year-in-review we highlighted the charts as they were when originally published. We thought it interesting simply because they made the empirically inevitable seem obvious with the benefit of hindsight. We failed to appreciate that our wonderful readers would ask “well where are those charts now?”

Last week’s piece Short Term Stock Speculators Beat a Hasty Retreat, walked through the blizzard of work we did on the continued collapse of speculatively priced stocks in 2022.Today, we present the best charts on the bullish material we highlighted last year.

At the end of last year, we posted a piece reviewing our research from 2021. We explained that after a brutal 2020 where we were bombarded by skeptics, ‘21 had been a terrific year for KCR and we expected more in ‘22 based on the data. Thankfully, fortune favors the patient, disciplined, and empirically inclined.

Our team believes in inefficient markets, behavioral finance, empirical evidence, and common sense. Having penned brutally simple pieces explaining the risks large cap, large-cap, and small cap index fund owners are taking, our recent exchange with an advocate of index funds was inevitable. The caller was upset.

A Quick Peek at the Russell Large Cap Growth Index - Understandably smitten with low fees and a long bull market, index fund promoters appear to have the data on their side. A collection of financial heretics, the authors of this investment newsletter have highlighted what we believe are the defects endemic to index funds today. In the interest of simplicity, we have used single factors to highlight just how these popular and heavily promoted products are ripe for disaster.

This Tool Can Bring Calm to Chaos - Reverse inquiries looking for our Buffett 10-Year Returns Estimation Tool suggested another post was in order. We’ll explain where the tool came from, how to use it and why it is so important.

The Case for Investing in What you Need vs. What you Want Made Simple - Since 2020, this newsletter has used historical data to explain the case for investing in companies that make what you need while shelling overpriced companies that make what you want. KCR’s research has demonstrated that the market’s valuation structure has, and continues to, favor firms that provide popular discretionary goods and novelty technologies over companies that make essentials to human life.

Profiting from the Reckoning with Reality - KCR readers know we have been long-term bulls on energy stocks and have relentlessly panned the high-priced promises of so-called clean-tech energy stocks. While others read the IEAs’ path to net-zero emissions and forecasted the end of oil, we read the work and wrote our piece, Net Zero Emissions: The Possible vs. the Plausible, which explained how their research read, to us, like a powerful bull case for energy.