Investing and Valuation Lessons from the Renaissance

I just got back a few days ago from a two-week family holiday in Italy, where we spent the bulk of the second week in Florence, which we used as a springboard to see Tuscany. I kept away from work through much of the period, though I did check my emails once in a while and even tried answering a few on my iPhone, where my awful typing skills restricted me to one-sentence responses. So, if you were one of those people that I responded to, I apologize if I seemed brusque. That said, I am also afflicted with a disease of seeing connections between everything I see around me and investing, and this vacation was no exception. Thus, in Florence, as I gazed at Brunelleschi’s magnificent Duomo on the Cathedral and marveled at the beauty of Michelangelo’s David, I could not help but think about how much we (as investors) can learn from those renaissance geniuses.

The Story of Brunelleschi’s Dome

If you have visited Florence or even read about the dome on its cathedral, I am sure that you have heard its story. The construction of the cathedral was begun in 1296 and continued in fits and starts through much of the next few decades with the Plague bringing it to a standstill in the second half of the fourteenth century. The centerpiece of the cathedral was to be its freestanding dome, but since architects of the age lacked the capacity to build one large enough to cover the church, it was left for another generation to complete. In 1418, two goldsmiths in Florence, Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi, competed in a contest for designing the dome, with Brunelleschi winning by a hair. Brunelleschi spent time studying the Pantheon in Rome, a concrete dome built more than a thousand years prior, but one where all records of its construction had long been destroyed. He started work on his Duomo in 1420 and completed it by 1436, and the result speaks for itself:

Brunelleschi was an artist, skilled in its many forms, but to build the dome, he not only drew on science but actively used it to solve practical problems. To allow the huge dome to stay standing without visible supports, Brunelleschi came up with the ingenious concept of a dome within a dome (a double shell) and stone ribs designed to defend against the spreading created by the weight of the dome. He had to construct hoisting machines to lift the almost four million bricks and large stones and structural innovations to let workers complete the construct. The dome, once completed, was as much an engineering feat as it was an artistic triumph and it remains so today.

Investing and Valuation Lessons

I can think of at least three big lessons that investors can learn from the Renaissance masters. The first is the meaning of faith, a scarce resource in today's markets, as we eagerly seek confirmation that we are right in market movements and are quick to give up, when things don't go our way. The second is the need for humility, an acceptance that much of what we claim to be new and innovative in investing is neither, and that we can learn from looking at the past. The third is that just as the best of the Renaissance required a melding of art and science, the best of investing is built on a combination of story telling and number crunching. 

Lesson 1: The Importance of Faith

Investing is as much about faith as it is about mechanics. As our access to data and models increases, I will borrow words that Tom Friedman used in a different context, and argue that the investing world is becoming flatter. It is not getting any easier to make money from investing and one reason may be that we have no faith in either our ability to attach values to companies, in the face of uncertainty, or in the market’s capacity to correct its mistakes. As a consequence, even those investors who are well versed in valuation mechanics are generally unwilling to act on the valuations that they generate, or when they do, to hold on to them in the face of adversity.  Like many of you, I find myself getting impatient when the stock price does not correct quickly towards my estimated value on my investments and growing uncertain with my own judgment, if the divergence persists for months. As I looked up at the Florence skyline and pondered the patience of those who were willing to build a church first and then wait almost a hundred for someone to come along with its dome, I understood the meaning of faith and how far I have to go to get there.

Lesson 2: There are no new investment lessons, just old ones to relearn

With superior resources and better investment education, we tend to think that we are not only more sophisticated than investors in prior generations but less likely to make the same errors in judgment. If only that were true! Just as the skills that allowed the Romans to build the Pantheon were forgotten for a thousand years and had to be rediscovered by Brunelleschi, there are simple lessons that investors learned in past markets that we seem to forget in new markets. Each time we make collective mistakes as investors and there is a market correction, we are quick to say "never again" only to repeat the same mistakes a few years later. 

Lesson 3: Art and Science

Are you an artist or a scientist? An engineer or a poet? We live in an age where we are asked to pick sides and told that the two cannot co-exist. In the context of valuation, the battle is fought out between the story tellers and the number crunchers, with each claiming the high ground. In the last few years, I have argued not just for a truce between the two sides but also for more engagement,  a marriage of numbers and narrative in valuation and investing. Even my best efforts pale in comparison to one look at Brunelleschi’s dome, since he understood that there was no divide between art and science. It is a lesson that we seem to have forgotten over time, as we force people to choose sides in a battle where there are no winners.

An Investment Renaissance

We live in an age of specialists, and in investments, this has taken the form of experts who operate in silos, option traders who act as if their derivative securities can exist without their underlying assets, fixed income investors who function as if bonds are the only game in town and equity investors who can only talk about stocks. This specialization comes with consequences and one of them is that we tend to operate in echo chambers, talking to people who think like us, act like us and not surprisingly, agree with us. If the words "Renaissance man (or woman)" are used to describe someone whose expertise spans different subject areas, in the context of investing, I would use those words to refer to those investors who can move with ease across markets and are just as comfortable with stories as they are with numbers. This is my subjective judgment but I think that there used to be more of them three decades ago, when I started in investing, and they seem to become rarer by the day.  In corporations, banks, money management units, consulting firms and even in academia, we could use more Renaissance thinking.

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No Mas, No Mas! The Vale Chronicles (Continued)!

Some of my Brazilian readers seem to be upset that I used "No Mas", Spanish words, rather than Portuguese ones, in the title. To be honest I was not thinking about language, but instead about a boxing match from decades ago, where Roberto Duran used these words to give up in his bout with Sugar Ray Leonard. 

I have used Vale as an illustrative example in my applied corporate finance book, and as a global mining company, with Brazilian roots, it allows me to talk about how financial decisions (on where to invest, how much to borrow and how dividend payout) are affected by the ups and downs of the commodity business and the government’s presence as the governance table. In November 2014, I used it as one of two companies (Lukoil was the other one) that were trapped in a risk trifecta, with commodity, currency and country risk all spiraling out of control. In that post, I made a judgment that Vale looked significantly under valued and followed through on that judgment by buying its shares at $8.53/share. I revisited the company in April 2015, with the stock down to $6.15, revalued it, and concluded that while the value had dropped, it looked under valued at its prevailing price. The months since that post have not been good ones for the investment, either, and with the stock down to about $5.05, I think it is time to reassess the company again.

Vale: A Valuation Retrospective

In November 2014, in a post titled “Go where it is darkest”, I repeated a theme that has become a mantra in my valuation classes. While it easiest to value mature, money-making companies in stable markets, I argue that the payoff to doing valuation is greatest when uncertainty is most intense, whether that uncertainty comes from the company being a young, start-up without a business model or from macroeconomic forces. The argument is based on the simple premise that your payoff is determined not by how precisely you value a company but how precisely you value it, relative to other people valuing the same company. When faced with boatloads of uncertainty, investors shrink from even trying to do valuation, and even an imprecise valuation is better than none at all.

It is to illustrate this point that I chose Vale and Lukoil as my candidates of doom, assaulted by dropping commodity prices (oil for Lukoil and iron ore prices for Vale), surging country risk (Russia for Lukoil and Brazil for Vale) and plummeting currencies (Rubles for Lukoil and Reais for Vale). I valued both companies, but it is the valuation of Vale that is the focus of this post and it yielded a value of $19.40/share for a stock, that was trading at $8.53 on that day. The narrative that drovemy valuation was a simple one, i.e., that iron ore prices and country risk would stabilize at November 2014 levels, that the earnings over the last twelve months (leading into November 2014), which were down 40% from the previous year’s numbers, incorporated the drop in iron ore prices that had happened and that eventually Vale would be able to continue generating the mild excess returns it had as a mature mining company.

Spreadsheet: http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pc/blog/ValeNov2014.xls

I did buy Vale shares after this analysis, arguing that there was a buffer built into earnings for further commodity price decline.

In April 2015, I revisited my valuations, as the stock prices of both companies dropped from the November 2014 levels, and I labeled the post “In search of Investment Serenity”. The post reflected the turmoil that I felt watching the market deliver a negative judgment on my initial thesis, and I wanted to check to see if the substantial changes on the ground (in commodity prices, country risk and currency levels) had not changed unalterably changed my thesis. Updating my Vale valuation, the big shifts were two fold. First, the trailing 12-month earnings that formed the basis for my expected value dropped a third from their already depressed levels six months earlier. Second, the implosion in Petrobras, the other large Brazilian commodity company, caused by a toxic combination of poor investments, large debt load and unsustainable dividends, raised my concern that Vale, a company that shares some of the same characteristics, might be Petrobrased. Again, I made the assumption that the trailing 12-month numbers reflected updated iron ore prices and revalued the company, this time removing the excess returns that I assumed in perpetuity in my earlier valuation, to arrive at a value per share of $10.71. 

Spreadsheet: http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pc/blog/ValeApril2015.xls

I concluded, with a nod towards the possibility that my conclusions were driven by my desire for confirmation bias (confirming my earlier judgment on Vale being under valued), that while I might not have been inclined to buy Vale in April 2015, I would continue to hold the stock.

Vale: The September 2015 Version

The months since my last valuation (in April 2015) have not been good for Vale, on any of the macro dimensions. The price of iron ore has continued to decline, albeit at a slower rate, over the last few months. That commodity price decline has been partially driven by the turmoil in China, a country whose massive infrastructure investments have been responsible for elevating iron ore prices over the last decade.  The political risk in Brazil not only shows no signs of abating, but is feeding into concerns about economic growth and the capacity of the country to repay its debt. The run-up that we saw in Brazilian sovereign CDS prices in April 2015 has continued, with the sovereign CDS spread rising above 4.50% this week. 

Source: Bloomberg

The ratings agencies, as always late to the party, have woken up (finally) to reassess the sovereign ratings for Brazil and have downgraded the country, Moody’s from Baa2 to Baa3 and S&P from BBB to BB+, on both a foreign and local currency basis. While both ratings changes represent only a notch in the ratings scale, the significance is that Brazil has been downgraded from investment grade status by both agencies.

Finally, Vale has updated its earnings yet again, and there seems to be no bottom in sight, with operating income dropping to $2.9 billion, a drop of more than 50% from the prior estimates.  While it is true that some of the write offs that have lowered earnings are reflections of iron ore prices in the past, it is undeniable that the earnings effect of the iron ore price effect has been much larger than I estimated to be in November 2014 or April 2015. Updating my numbers, and using the sovereign CDS spread as my measure of the country default spread (since the ratings are not only in flux but don’t seem to reflect the assessment of the country today), the value per share that I get is $4.29.

Spreadsheet: http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pc/blog/ValeSept2015.xls

I was taken aback at the changes in value over the three valuations, separated by less than a year, and attempted to look at the drivers of these changes in the chart below:

The biggest reason for the shift in value from November 2014 to April 2015 was the reassessment of earnings (accounting for 81% of my value drop), but looking at the difference between my April 2015 and September 2015 valuations, the primary culprit is the uptick in country risk, accounting for almost 61% of my loss in value.

Vale: Time to Move on?

If I stay true to my investment philosophy of investing in an asset, only if its price is less than its value, the line of no return has been passed with Vale. I am selling the stock, but I do have to tell you that it was not a decision that I made easily or without fighting through my biases. In particular, I was sorely tempted by two games:

1. The “if only” game: My first instinct is to play the blame game and look for excuses for my losses. If only the Brazilian government had behaved more rationally, if only China had not collapsed, if only Vale’s earnings had been more resilient to iron ore prices, my thesis would have been right. Not only is this game completely pointless, but it eliminates any lessons that I might be extract from this fiasco.
2. The “what if” game: As I worked through my valuation, I had to constantly fight the urge to pick numbers that would let me stay with my original thesis and continue to hold the stock. For instance, if I continue to use the rating to assess default spreads for Brazil, as I did in my first two valuations, the value that I get for the company is $6.65. I could have then covered up this choice with the argument that CDS markets are notorious for over reacting and that using a normalized value (either a rating-based approach or an average CDS spread over time) gives me a better estimate.

After wrestling with my own biases for an extended period, I concluded that the assumptions that I would need to make to justify continuing to hold Vale would have to be assumptions about the macro environment: that iron ore prices would stop falling and/or that the market has over reacted to Brazil’s risk woes and will correct itself. If there is anything that I have learned already from my experiences with commodity companies and country risk, it is that my macro forecasting skills are woeful and making a bet on them magically improving is wishful thinking. In fact, if I truly want to make a bet on these macro movements, there are far simpler, more direct and more lucrative ways for me to exploit these views that buying Vale; I could buy iron ore future or sell the Brazil sovereign CDS. I like Vale's management but I think that they have been dealt a bad hand at this stage, and I am not sure that they can do much about the crosswinds that are pummeling them. If you have more faith in your macro forecasting skills than I do, it is entirely possible that Vale could be the play you want to make, if you believe that iron ore prices will recover and that the Brazil's risk will revert back to historic norms. In fact, given my abject failure to get these right over the last few months, you may want to view me as a contrary indicator and buy Vale now.

Investing Lessons

It is said that you can learn more from your losses than from your wins, but the people who like to dish out this advice have either never lost or don’t usually follow their own advice. Learning from my mistakes is hard to do, but let looking back at my Vale valuations, here is what I see:

1. The dangers of implicit normalization: While I was careful to avoid explicit normalization, where I assumed that earnings would return to the average level over the last five or ten years or that iron ore prices would rebound, I implicitly built in an expectation of normalization by taking the last twelve-month earnings as indicative of iron ore prices during that period. At least with Vale, there seems to be a lag between the drop in iron ore prices and the earnings effect, perhaps reflecting pre-contracted prices or accounting lethargy. By the same token, using the default spread based on the sovereign rating provided a false sense of stability, especially when the market's reaction to events on the ground in Brazil has been much more negative.
2. The Stickiness of Political Risk: Political problems need political solutions, and politics does not lend itself easily to either rational solutions or speed in resolution. In fact, the Vale lesson for me should be that when political risk is a big component, it is likely to be persistent and can easily multiply, if politicians are left to their own devices. 
3. The Debt Effect: All of the problems besetting Vale are magnified by its debt load, bloated because of its ambitious growth in the last decade and its large dividend payout (Vale has to pay dividends to its non-voting preferred shareholders). While the threat of default is not looming, Vale's buffer for debt payments has dropped significantly in the last year, with its interest coverage ratio dropping from 10.39 in 2013 to 4.18 in 2015.

There are two lessons that I had already learned (and that I followed) that helped me get through this experienced, relatively unscathed. 

1. Spread your bets: The consequences of the Vale misstep for my portfolio were limited because I followed my rule of never investing more than 5% of my money in any new stock, no matter how alluring and attractive it looks, a rule that I adopted  because of the uncertainty that I feel in my valuation judgments and that the market price moving towards my value. In fact, it is the basis for my post on how much diversification is the right amount.
2. Never take investment risks that are life-style altering (if you fail): Much as I would like to make that life-altering investment, the one whose payoff will release me from ever having to think about investing again, I know it is that search that will lead me to take "bad" risks. Notwithstanding the punishment meted out to me by my Vale investment, I am happy to say that it has not altered my life choices and that I have passed the sleep test with flying colors. (I have not lost any sleep over Vale's travails).

Closing Thoughts

If I had known in November 2014 what I know now, I would obviously have not bought Vale, but since I don’t have that type of hindsight , that is an empty statement. I don’t like losing money any more than any one else, but I have no regrets about my Vale losses. I made the best judgments that I could, with the data that I had available in my earlier valuations. If you disagreed with me at the time of my initial valuation of Vale, you have earned the right to say "I told you so", and if you went along with my assessment, we will have to commiserate with each other.

This is not the first time that I have lost money on an investment, and it will not be the last, and I will continue to go where it is darkest, value companies where uncertainty abounds and hope that my next excursion into that space delivers better results than this one.

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Previous Blog Posts

1. Go where it is darkest (November 2014)
2. In search of Investment Serenity (September 2015)

Vale Valuations

1. Valuation of Vale (November 2014)
2. Valuation of Vale (April 2015)
3. Valuation of Vale (September 2015)

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Another Market Crisis? My Survival Manual/Journal!

I would be lying if I said that I like down markets more than up markets, but I have learned to accept the fact that markets that go up will come down, and that when they do so quickly, you have the makings of a crisis. I find myself getting more popular during these periods, as acquaintances, friends and relatives that I have not heard from in years seem to find me. They are  invariably disappointed by my inability to forecast the future and my unwillingness to tell them what to do next, and I am sure that I move several notches down the Guru scale as a consequence, a development that I welcome. To save myself some repetitions of this already tedious sequence, I think it is best that I pull out my crisis survival journal/manual, a work in progress that I started in the 1980s and that I revisit and rewrite each time markets go into a tailspin. It is more journal than manual, more personal than general, and more about me than it is about markets. So, read on at your own risk!

The Price of Risk

For me, the first casualty in a crisis is perspective, as I find myself getting whipsawed with news stories about financial markets, each more urgent and demanding of attention than the previous one. The second casualty is common sense, as my brain shuts down and my primitive impulses take over. Consequently, I find it useful to step back and look at the big picture, hoping to see patterns that help me make sense of the drivers of market chaos.

It is my view that the key number in understanding any market crisis is the price of risk. In a market crisis, the price of risk increases abruptly, causing the value of all risky assets to drop, with that drop being greater for riskier assets. While the conventional wisdom, prior to 2008, was that the price of risk in mature markets is stable and does not change much over short periods, the last quarter of 2008 changed (or should have changed) that view. I started tracking the price of risk in different markets (equity, bond, real estate) on a monthly basis in September 2008, a practice that I have continued through the present. Getting an a forward-looking, dynamic price of risk in the bond market is simple, since it takes the form of default spreads on bonds, and FRED (the immensely useful Federal Reserve Database) has the market interest rates on a Baa rated (Moody's) bonds going back to 1919, with data available in annual, monthly or daily increments. That default spread is computed by taking the difference between this market interest rate and the US treasury bond rate  on the same date. Getting a forward-looking, dynamic price of risk in the equity markets is more complicated, since the expected cash flows are uncertain (unlike coupons on bonds) and equities don't have a specific maturity date, but I have argued that it can be done, though some may take issue with my approach. Starting with the cumulative cash flow that would have generated by investing in stocks in the most recent twelve months, I estimate expected cash flows (using analysts' top down estimates of earnings growth) and compute the rate of return that is embedded in the current level of the index. That internal rate of return is the expected return on stocks and when the US treasury bond rate is netted out, it yields an implied equity risk premium. The January 2015 equity risk premium is summarized below:

Implied ERP Spreadsheet (January 2015)

That premium had not moved much for most of this year, with a low of 5.67% on March 1, and a high of 6.01% in early February, and the ERP at the start of August was 5.90%, close to the start-of-the-year number. Given the market turmoil in the last weeks, I decided to go back and compute the implied equity risk premium each day, starting on August 1.

ERP By Day

Note that not much changes until August 17, and that almost all of the movement have been in the days between August 17 and August 245 During those seven trading days, the S&P 500 dropped by more than 11% and if you keep cash flows fixed, the expected return (IRR) for stocks increased by 0.68%. During the same period, the US treasury bond rate dropped by 0.06%, playing its usual "flight to safety" role, and the implied equity risk premium (ERP) jumped by 0.74% to 6.56%. 

I did use the trailing 12-month cash flows (from buybacks and dividends) as my base year number, in computing these equity risk premiums, and there is a reasonable argument to be made that these cash flows are too high to sustain, partly because earnings are at historic highs and partly because companies are returning more of that cash than ever before. To counter this problem, I assumed that earnings would drop back to a level that reflects the average earnings over the last 10 years, adjusted for inflation (i.e., the denominator in the Shiller CAPE model) and that the payout would revert back to the average payout over the last decade. That results in lower equity risk premiums, but the last few days have pushed that premium up by 0.53% as well.

My computed increases in ERP, using both trailing and normalized earnings, overstate the true change, because the cash flows and growth were left at what they were at the start of August, a patently unrealistic assumption, since this is also an economic crisis, and any slowing of growth in China will make itself felt on the earnings, cash flows and growth at US companies. That effect will take a while to show up, as corporate earnings, buyback plans and analyst growth estimates are adjusted in the months to come, and I am sure that some of the market drop was caused by changes in fundamentals. The argument that a large portion of the drop comes from the repricing of risk is borne out by the rise in the default spread for bonds, with the Baa default spread widening by 0.17%, and the increase in the perceived riskiness (volatility) of stocks, with the VIX posting its largest weekly jump ever, in percentage terms.

The Repricing of Risky Assets
When the price of risk changes, all risky assets will be repriced, but not by the same magnitude. Within mature markets, you should expect to see a bigger drop in stock prices at more risky companies than at safer ones, though how you define risk can affect your conclusions. If you define risk as exposure to the the precipitating factor in the crisis, I would expect the stock prices of  companies that are more dependent on China for their revenues to drop by more than the rest of the market. Since I don't have data on how much revenue individual companies get from China, I will use commodity companies, which have been aided the most by the Chinese growth machine over the last decade and therefore have the most to lose from it slowing down, as my proxy for China exposure. The table below highlights the 20 industry groups (out of 95) that have performed the worst between August 14 and August 24:

Notice that commodity companies comprise one quarter of the group, with a few cyclical and technology sectors thrown into the mix.

Looking across markets geographically, changes in the equity risk premium in mature markets will be magnified as you move into riskier countries and thus it is not surprising to see the carnage in emerging markets over the last week has exceeded that in developed markets, with currency declines adding to local stock market drops.

Percentage Return in US dollar terms

In the picture below, I capture the percentage change in market capitalizations between August 14, 2015, and August 24, 2015 in U.S. $ terms, with the PE ratios as of August 14 and August 24 highlighted for each country:

via chartsbin.com
Note that this phenomenon of emerging markets behaving badly cannot be blamed on China, since it happened in 2008 as well, when it was the banking system in developed markets that triggered the market rout.

A Premium for Liquidity?

There is another dimension, where crises come into play, and that is in the demand for liquidity. While investors always prefer more liquid assets to less liquid ones, that preference for liquidity and the price that they are willing to pay for it varies across time and tends to surge during market crisis. To see if this crisis has had the same effect, I looked at the drop in market capitalization, in US $ terms, between August 14 and 24 for companies classified by trading turnover ratios (computed by dividing the annual dollar trading value by the market capitalization of the company):

Liquidity classes, based on turnover ratio = $ Trading Value/ $ Market Cap

Surprisingly, it is the most liquid firms that have seen the biggest drop in stock prices, though the numbers may be contaminated by the fact that trading halts are often the reactions to market crises in many countries, that are home to the least liquid stocks. If this is the reason for the return divergence, there is more pain waiting for investors in these stocks as the market drop shows up in lagged returns.

To the extent that market crises crimp access to capital markets, the desire for liquidity can also reach deeper into corporate balance sheets, creating premiums for companies that have substantial cash on their balance sheets and fewer debt obligations. To test this proposition, I classified firms globally, based upon the net debt as a percent of enterprise value, and looked at the price drop between August 14 and August 24:

Net Debt/EV = (Total Debt- Cash)/ (Debt + Market Cap - Cash)

The crisis seems to have spared no group of stocks, with the pain divided almost evenly across the net debt classes, with the largest price decline being in the stocks that have cash balances that exceed their debt. Note, however, that the multiples at which these companies trade at both prior and after the drop, reflect the penalty that the market is attaching to extreme leverage, with the most levered companies trading at a PE ratio of 3.11 (at least across the 15.76% of firms in this group that have positive earnings to report). If your contrarian strategy for this market is to screen for and buy low PE stocks, this table suggests caution, since a large portion of the lowest PE stocks will come with high debt ratios.

As the public markets drop, the question of how this crisis will affect private company valuations has risen to the surface, especially given the large valuations commanded by some private companies. Since many of these private businesses are young, risky startups and that investments in them are illiquid, I would guess they will be exposed to a correction,  larger than what we observe in the public marketplace. However, given that venture capitalists and public investors in these companies will be self appraising the value of their holdings, the effect of any markdown in value will take the form of fewer high-profile deals (IPO and VC financing).

What now?

A market crisis bring out my worst instincts as an investor. First out of the pack is fear pushing me to panic, with the voice yelling "Sell everything, sell it now", getting louder with each bad market day. That is followed quickly by denial, where another voice tells me that if I don't check the damage to my portfolio, perhaps it has been magically unaffected. Then, a combination of greed and hubris kicks in, arguing that the market is filled with naive, uninformed investors and that this is my time to trade my way to quick profits. I cannot make these instincts go away, but I have my own set of rules for managing them. (I am not suggesting that these are rules that you should adopt, just that they work for me..)

1. Break the feedback loop: Being able to check your portfolio as often as you want and in real time, with our phones, tablets and computers, is a mixed blessing. I did check my portfolio this morning for the damage that the last week has done, but I don't plan to check again until the end of the week. If I find myself breaking this rule, I will consider sabotaging my wifi connection at home, going back to a flip phone or leaving for the Galapagos on vacation.
2. Turn off the noise: I read the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times each morning, but I generally don't watch financial news channels or visit financial websites. I become religious about this avoidance during market chaos, since much of the advice that I will get is bad, most of the analysis is after-the-fact navel gazing and all of the predictions share only one quality, which is that they will be wrong. 
3. Rediscover your faith: In my book (and class) on investment philosophies, I argue that there is no "best' investment philosophy that works for all investors but that there is one for you, that best fits what you believe about markets and your personality. My investment philosophy is built on faith in two premises, that every business has a value that I can estimate, and that  the market price will move towards that value over time. During a crisis, I find myself returning to the core of that philosophy, to make sense of what is going on.
4. Act proactively and consistently: It is natural to want to act in response to a crisis. I am no exception and I did act on Monday, but I tried to do so consistently with my philosophy. I revisited the valuations that I have done over the past year (and you can find most of them on my website, under my valuation class) and put in limit buy orders on a half a dozen stocks (including Apple, Tesla and Facebook), with the limit prices based on my valuations of the companies. If the crisis eases, none of the limit orders may go through, but I would have protected myself from impulsive actions that will cost me more in the long term. If it worsens, all or most of the of the limit buys will be executed, but at prices that I think are reasonable, given the cash flow potential of these companies.

Will any of these protect me from losing money? Perhaps not, but I did sleep well last night and am more worried about whether the New York Yankees will score some runs tonight than I am about what the Asian markets will do overnight. That, to me, is a sign of health!

The Silver Linings

Just as recessions are a market economy's way of cleansing itself of excesses that build up during boom periods, a market crisis is a financial market's mechanism for getting back into balance. I know that is small consolation for you today, if you have lost 10% or more of your portfolio, but there are seedlings of good news, even in the dreary financial news:

1. Live by momentum, die by it: In trading, momentum is king and investors who play the momentum game make money with ease, but with one caveat. When momentum shifts, the easy profits accumulated over months and years can be wiped out quickly, as commodity and currency traders are discovering.
2. Deal or no deal? If you share my view that slowing down in M&A deals is bad news for deal makers, but good news for stockholders in the deal-making companies, the fact that this crisis may be imperiling deals is positive news.
3. Rediscover fundamentals: My belief that first principles and fundamentals ultimately win out and that there are no easy ways to make money is strengthened when I read that carry traders are losing money, that currency pegs do not work when inflation rates deviate, and mismatching the currencies in which you borrow and generate cash flows is a bad idea.    
4. The Market Guru Handoff: As with prior crises, this one will unmask a lot of economic forecasters and market gurus as fakes, but it will anoint a new group of prognosticators who got the China call right as the new stars of the investment universe. 

If a market crisis is a crucible that tests both the limits of my investment philosophy and my  faith in it, I am being tested and as with any other test, if I pass it, I will come out stronger for the experience. At least, that is what I tell myself as I look at the withered remains of my investments in Vale and Lukoil!

Spreadsheets

1. Implied Equity Risk Premium Spreadsheet (August 2015)
2. Returns (8/14-8/24) and PE ratios (before & after), by Industry Group
3. Returns (8/14-8/24) and PE ratios (before & after), by Country

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