Prof Greenwald's valueinvesting talk

Prof Bakshi co-hosted a valueinvesting talk by Prof greenwald and has uploaded the presentation on his website here

I have read prof greenwald’s book on competitive analysis twice and have found his book very useful. You can see the usage of the concepts in my valuation templates too.

My notes on the presentation

- A lot of analysts consider only equity value in the valuation. Debt is also important
- On valuation basis a number of companies especially midcaps are priced at or below asset value. The market assumes these companies are worth more dead than as a going concern
- Most valuation approaches for PE are based on growth. As prof greenwald rightly points out, PE depends on multiple factors such as cost of capital, cyclical position, management etc too. Important to adopt multiple valuation approaches rather than a single simplistic approach based on PE alone.
- Looking back, my most successful investments were in companies selling below asset value, but having a moderate growth and a certain amount of competitive advantage. The returns were realised when the market revalued the company to reflect the true value (for ex : asian paints, blue star, concor, Guj gas, pidilite, ICICI bank etc)
- Great section on barriers to entry (see here for academic understanding of demand supply curves). I had an idea of the demand supply curves and other concepts of competitive advantage. This is the first time I have been able to get an understanding of how these two concepts interact – great learning.
- Slide 27-33 has great explaination of how competitive advantage concepts can be combined with basic micro-economic theory.
- Slide 36 should be an eyeopener if you expect as a lot of market participants do, that the market should give an average of 25% returns per annum or higher. Even with the drop and shrinkage in PE, the prospective returns look like 10-11%.
- Slide 40 – A number of indian companies such real estate, capital goods are showing high ROE, high growth and hence high valuations. Is the growth and ROE sustainable? The high valuation will be justified only if they are sustainable. With competitive pressures, difficult to see how all companies in a sector can maintain high returns and high growth rates.
- Not able to understand the slide 42 completely. But it is interesting to apply the calculations to companies which are selling at PE’s of 40 or higher. Clearly lot of expectations from such companies.