As the year 2022 drew to a close, we wanted to take some time to reflect on our experience investing through the unprecedented turbulence of the pandemic era. We’ve produced a booklet with that goal in mind.
Over the past three years, financial time compressed by an order of magnitude. Crashes came and bubbles went – and then crashes came again. We had a full round-trip cycle in monetary policy, with record easy conditions followed by record tightening. We saw oil trade hands at negative prices, only to see energy prices spike to records across Europe two years later. We watched retail investors worship at the altar of SPAC snake-oil salesmen, and watched cryptocurrency devotees condescendingly tell the rest of us to have fun staying poor, only to see their castles in the sky crumble around them. You can find a PDF of our writing at the link below. If you have a strong preference for a physical copy, we do have a few on hand; please reach out to us directly at [email protected]. Fundamental Value had one of its best quarters to date, returning 34.7% net of fees vs 7.6% for the S&P 500. The strategy has now compounded at 27.4% annualized, besting the market by nearly 16% a year. While it will be almost impossible to maintain this level of absolute or relative performance, we are still very optimistic about the composition of the portfolio relative to the index today.1 Market commentary At current prices around $110 per share, we think Meta Platforms is one of the best investment opportunities we have seen in our careers.
Meta, the parent of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Reality Labs, is down about 75% YTD. It has gotten cut in half since the small initial investment we made in Q1 which we blogged about here. As a result of this precipitous fall, the enterprise value is less than $300 billion today, meaning that the company trades at a record-low valuation. While earnings have been disappointing since Q1, our core thesis remains unchanged, and the valuation is now significantly more attractive. We’ve aggressively added to our position, resulting in an average price around $130. In our Fundamental Value strategy, we generate alpha by identifying scenarios where investors are buying or selling securities for non-economic reasons. We think there are two non-economic reasons investors are overly pessimistic on Meta – one structural, and one behavioral. In Q3, Fundamental Value outperformed the market significantly, up 2.5% net of fees versus -4.9% for the S&P 500. On a YTD basis, this puts the strategy up 1.0% net versus the market at -23.9%. Since inception, FV has returned 22.7% net annually, outperforming the S&P by 12.0% a year.1 Market commentary Over the weekend, we were the lede in a Fortune feature on the Twitter v Musk case. We were honored to be quoted along luminaries including Professors Eric Talley and Ann Lipton (see either the paywalled article, or a PDF version). We are overdue for an update on our biggest position as significant news has come out since we last wrote about Twitter in May.
Fundamental Value dramatically outperformed the market in Q2, returning -1.4% net of fees versus -16.1% for the S&P 500. This outperformance was due primarily to the gains provided on our short positions, which declined on average -38.4% during the quarter and made a +16.9% contribution to the portfolio.1 Market commentary |