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Comment by danielmarkbruce | Hacker News Reader

No, they aren't. The explanations are based on different estimates of cashflows. As a concrete example - people didn't miss GOOG when it went public because of "valuation methods". People missed it because they didn't imagine that in 2022 a search engine company would be doing $75 bill a qtr of high margin revenue. People didn't miss AAPL in the late 90s because of "valuation methods", they missed it because they didn't see AAPL doing $90 bill a qtr of pretty high margin revenue.

Understanding the future cashflows of a business is really difficult stuff. Playing with numbers in a spreadsheet is really easy stuff.

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I enjoy the definition of investing as an act of thorough analysis promising safety of principal and an adequate return, and all other behaviors otherwise bring speculative.

If you’re paying $42.14 per dollar of earnings there is a likelihood that more often than not you’re overpaying.

If you can’t pass simple mechanical litmus tests you’d better be damn sure, and frankly there just aren’t many exceptional companies where I feel damn sure about them.

Thorough analysis isn't what you are doing, it's simplistic analysis. That's the very problem with it. It sounds like you are dying for the Ben Graham era - when simplistic analysis based on financial statements was all that is required because the competition in investing was... not much. It's a very different game now, and you actually have to have deep insight into the companies and the industries they are in.

You can't just do a simplistic extrapolation of the last couple years in a spreadsheet.

Google couldn't pass your "simple mechanical litmus tests" when it went public. Apple couldn't pass it in the late 90s. Amazon couldn't pass it most of it's life. IBM could for a good number of years (just look at the numbers when Buffett was buying it...) Most of the banks could in 2005/6/7.

The mathematics of investing haven't changed, but if you have some literature to suggest otherwise, I'd be very interested in reading it.

You seem to think that I use these mechanical estimates as the primary method for purchase, but they are not.

I'm not sure what your point is about IPOs: they're historically a terrible time to invest, which is common knowledge.

And actually all of the companies you have mentioned have easily passed such litmus tests over their life time at different times. Sometimes they're overbought, some times they're oversold. If you buy when they're overbought, you'll end up with a lower IRR than if you hadn't.

The math hasn't changed - the competition has. All the insanely obvious stuff is gone. You need real insight now.

I didn't make a point about IPOs. I made a point about companies where real insight was required, both to see good investments and not make bad ones. Simple rules like "IPOs are bad", "dont pay x times earnings" etc, they haven't worked in years.

We are certainly reading two different types of literature on the matter.

Same literature, different assumptions on how easy it is to predict cashflows or how to even go about it. A DCF is after all, discounting future cashflows.

If it's all as simple as you say - really - just go start a hedge fund. You can start an LLC in a day, throw some money into a brokerage account and be up and running. There are still plenty of LPs who will invest in a simple long only fund, even with vol, as long as the performance is good.

Exactly true the rise in the cost of next-generation fabs has completely changed the business model so that only foundries can survive. Benjamin Graham analysis is not capable of detecting this inflection point in industry strategy nor can it detect Intel's stubborn refusal to adapt and change!

Yup. And by all reports Ben Graham was a brilliant dude. If he were in the game today, I doubt he'd be playing the way he played back in the day. He'd get in there and figure it out.

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