And if that isgenerally true, why don’t we want to be in the mode where we areprocessing information more with our eyes rather than with our earssince we'll be more effective?
Tanous: Well, let me answer that. When I have meetings with people,the face-to-face aspect conveys other things that are important tohuman beings, like emotion, degree of conviction, sincerity, forceful-ness, and confidence. Things like that that are hard to put down onpaper or on the computer.
Friess: That’s well put, and that is part of our strategy. The timesthat you should have meetings is when what you want to transfer is
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emotion. In our research process, when we ask a company about whatthey’re telling everybody about future pricing of a product, we wouldmuch rather ask the question face-to-face. That way, we can get anunderstanding of body language. That’s valid. But in terms of theday-to-day transfer of information like, “I’d like to go to dinner at6:30 at Sugarloaf,” that is better conveyed in written form.
You make a good point about the times you ought to have meetings.The meetings we have are to encourage people, to exhort people, torecognize people, and to build those relationships as part of thebonding process. Because we have this “fax vs. talk” culture, wetherefore have the situation we’re going to have next week, wherewe're taking 103 people to the Cayman Islands. We think by doingthis, we also demonstrate that everybody in the firm is important. Wedon’t just take the top ten hotshots. We take our company driverswho, although part time, are an important part of our success. We goto great efforts to make sure that people feel that everybody contrib-utes. So everybody goes on the trip.
Tanous:! hesitate to tell you this, Foster, but I’ve been told thatwhen you’re flying somewhere on a trip, you'll often get up and starttalking to your fellow passengers, asking them what they do and howtheir company and industry are getting along. Forgive me for sayingthis, but do you realize that that sort of behavior could make you afrequent flyer’s worst nightmare?
Friess:[Laughs] I think I am! But, you know if a person keepsglancing back at his laptop to see if his battery is running low, you’dbetter move on to somebody else!
Tanous: What do you get out of that?
Friess: I get exactly what I want all our people to get. That is, tohave their antennae tuned to companies that are coming up out ofthe weeds, that maybe haven’t surfaced to become a Wall Streetbuzzword yet. You might be talking to some fellow in Minneapoliswho you could ask about the significance of the Minnesota Miningrestructuring, or what they were doing on some other things. Whatyou get out of it is an insight from the day-to-day business personin the trenches about the trends that he sees evolving. It may be allkinds of things that may not have investment significance for 6, 8,9, months, or a year. But you put that in your databank and you'realert to it when those opportunities do present themselves, because
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you know the background, and the context, and can judge whetheror not it is important.
Tanous:One thing you know, because you're in this business, isthat the efficient market theorists say that everything that is knownby your fellow passengers on the plane, or anybody else for that matter,is already reflected in today’s price of the stock.
Friess: That’s what they believe, but think about it. If you think ofsome of the people who own IBM, they include a little lady in DesMoines, Iowa who doesn’t read The Wall Street Journal. She’s 82years old. Does she know what’s happening with the new memoryproducts and if they are delayed or not? Does she know the plans forLotus Notes?
Tanous:The theory is that she, in particular, doesn’t have to knowit. The market in aggregate knows it, and all of that information isreflected in the price of the stock.
Friess: If that’s the case, why is Compaq Computer down 7 pointstoday? Somebody didn’t know that the PC market was slowing untiltoday. That information was out there. These are things that can bediscerned, if you talk to the supplier and talk to various people in theindustry. They can tell you who is gaining market share. They cantell you that the pricing for Apple Computers in Japan is brutallyawful. They can tell you that the new NEC computer is selling betterin stores than the Hewlett-Packard computer. You go to lunch withsome guy who is a clerk at a computer store and ask him, what’sselling? Can you imagine if you owned a portfolio in an index fundand one of the stocks dropped 20% one day, and the client asks youwhy did you own that stock? And you say the reason I own it is be-cause there’s a group of young folks over at Standard &€ Poor’s whodecided to put it in the S&P index!
Tanous: You and I are about the same age. I think about this andI expect you do too. Let’s say you have another decade or two of veryactive involvement. What are the mountains that Foster Friess stillwants to climb?
Friess: Well, | want to continually work on becoming a betterfather and a better husband. Period.
That sounds okay, and it’s a rather typical and predictable FosterFriess answer. The interview says it all. Here is a man who is notonly uninfluenced by his success, he seems intent on bettering thelives of his employees and all those with whom he is associated. I
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think that Foster would have been just as content to spend the entireinterview talking about Judeo-Christian teachings and the need foreffective moral behavior in our daily lives. I was tempted to do thattoo, but we do have a mission, after all.
What did we learn from Foster Friess, who has one of the very bestlong-term records of success using the growth style? We learned thatthere is not just one way to select stocks in a portfolio. There is aninherent curiosity in his approach. Witness his seemingly peculiarbehavior on airplanes, which is really very telling. You and I probablyhide in our seats on a long flight, hoping that our seatmate wouldn’tdare strike up a conversation. Not Foster. His behavior is driven byan intense curiosity, which is, no doubt, a principal ingredient to hissuccess. Ask the right questions; you'll get the right answers.
Another memorable point: the pigs-in-the-trough theory is kind ofcute in the telling, but let’s not miss the wisdom of this tale. The“forced displacement” discipline creates a culture in which you arenot just looking for new stocks to buy, you have to pick stocks to sellthat you might not want to sell. Remember what he said: Friess mightwell sell a stock with a 20% or 30% growth rate, because it’s goingto be replaced by one with a 60% or 70% growth rate. That is anunusual approach for portfolio managers. Whatever you think of it,the evidence suggests that it works.
Another thing: Foster Friess spends most of his time at his homein Jackson Hole, Wyoming, another not-so-obvious financial capital.I mention this just in case you thought to be good at this business itwas helpful to live within walking distance of Wall Street.
220VAN SCHREIBER
Van Schreiber spent the bulk of his long career in money manage-ment at C. J. Lawrence, which is now part of Deutsche MorganGrenfell. C. J. Lawrence was an old line Wall Street firm, the kindwe used to call “research boutiques.” The firm was founded in 1864.Not long after our interview, Van left his old firm to start his owncompany, Bennett/Lawrence Management LLC, also in New York City.(His former colleagues, W. David Wister and Robert Harris, remainedat C. J. Lawrence and plan to continue managing money using thesame general style and procedures at Deutsche Morgan Grenfell.)
Van Schreiber comes across as a no-nonsense, let’s-get-down-to-business individual. I fully expect he seeks similar attributes amongthe executives of companies he buys. If he were a doctor, he wouldnot score points for his bedside manner. A graduate of Williams Col-lege with an MBA from New York University, Schreiber has beenmanaging money for over 30 years. We met in his mid-town Manhat-tan office.
Over the years Schreiber’s performance has been remarkable. Hisstyle is exclusively growth, and his approach is disciplined. His record,is computed back to 1987, shows gross annualized returns of 34.1%through the end of 1995. Moreover, there were no down years in theinterim, although a few intervening quarters were real scary. This isthe kind of long term performance that most of us can only dream of.
Tanous:Tell us how you first got interested in stocks.
Schreiber: I was eighteen years old. I was riding home in the carwith my father, who was a cartoonist. I asked him what this stockmarket table in the paper was about. Incidentally, my job at thatmoment was unloading boxcars of heavy furniture, which came fromthe west coast. It was hot and hard work. I asked my father, whatdoes this mean - IBM up 1/2? He replied that it meant that if youowned a share of IBM stock, you had made 50 cents that day. Ithought about that for a second or two and I said: you mean thisstock is worth 50 cents more today than it was yesterday, and youdidn’t have to unload a boxcar, or dig a ditch, or anything? He said,yeah, that’s right. I decided this was the business for me. That is, lit-erally, a true story.PETER J. TANOUS
Tanous:Great story.
Schreiber: Shortly after, I went to C.J. Lawrence and met with themanaging partner. I had $1,000 and told him I wanted to invest it inCurtis Wright. Curtis Wright was developing a car that could fly. It’strue; a car that could fly! What a great thing that would be, I said tothis fellow, Alex Johnson. What a wonderful guy to put up with anaive kid like me. He dissuaded me from that so I bought some otherstocks. A few years later, CJL hired me, after I finished graduateschool. The point is that, I became an investor at a very young ageand have always loved it. ] became an analyst in the research depart-ment, visited companies, watched what was going on, invested act-ively, and made at least my share of mistakes.
In the process, I have come to certain points of view regardingwhat, at least, works for me. I have also come to the view that thereare some people who invest in completely different ways than I doand are wonderful at it. To say that their way is a good way, or myway is a better way, is not the point. You have to know what you aregood at and do it. If you are a great rug merchant then be a great rugmerchant. If you’re a wonderful aerospace engineer, then be that. Itis the same thing with the stock market. There are certain people whoare great at it and that’s what they should do.
Unfortunately, there are a great many impostors around who aren’tgood at anything but who like to wear the mantle of “I’m a growthguy,” or “I’m a value guy,” or whatever else because that sector hasbeen on a roll in recent years. So they decide to be whatever it isthat’s hot. That’s one of the tricks investors have to watch out for.Counterfeit people will hurt you worse than a bear market.
Tanous: You know, Van, that there is a body of academic work thatholds that the chances you, or anyone else, are going to beat themarket over time are very slim. I don’t expect you to agree with that,but it is an historical fact that a vast majority of portfolio managersdon’t beat the market. My analysis suggests you do, in fact, consist-ently beat the market, so the question is, quite bluntly, how and why?
Schreiber: Your question is: Why have we been able to out-distancethe market, when others haven’t? I think the answer is, that we havea philosophy that is particularly appropriate for today’s world. It isa philosophy we assiduously follow, and which is both pertinent totoday’s times, but is disciplined and adaptable. So, appropriatenessand adaptability, | think, are essential elements. That’s why I think
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the philosophy works. The end result is that we invest only in com-panies with extraordinarily high rates of earnings growth. But wedon’t always outperform the market. There are quarters when wedon’t. There have been six-month periods when we don’t performwell, but, thankfully, they have been infrequent, and there haven’tbeen any entire years so far, although one might always occur.
Tanous:Could we talk a little about your growth investment philo-sophy, since this is the foundation of your management style.
Schreiber: Yes. It’s really so critical and so simple that a lot oftimes, people will say to me after they hear it, why doesn’t everyoneelse do that? My answer is, I don’t know why everyone else doesn’t,but it sure works. The approach has two foundations. First is the ideathat we are in an uneven and imbalanced economy in the UnitedStates. There are certain new trends, and forces which are having anextraordinary impact, and are spurring very substantial growth rates.These trends are literally changing the way we work and changingthe way we live. These forces are going to propel high growth rateswhether real GNP is up 1.8% or 2.1% or 2.6%; it simply doesn’tmatter. I think that our economy has been subject to this kind ofchange since the first energy crisis. I think we are in the middle of atechnology revolution that future historians will label as significantas the industrial revolution. For now, it is a technology revolution,with technology permeating our lives and creating all sorts of trendsand influences in its wake. Technology is not the only trend. Majorchanges are occurring in consumer spending patterns, and in the waybusinesses and governments conduct their affairs. We are very orientedtoward finding those trends, and investing singly in those trends.Sure, they change over time. One must always be on the lookout forwhat’s new and upcoming.
We don’t believe in a diversified portfolio. If the aluminum stocksare bad, and the aluminum industry is adverse, we don’t underweightaluminum, we have no weight in aluminum. Conversely, if telecom-munications equipment is a strong market, because phone companieshave to renovate 90 years worth of equipment to provide voice, dataand video quickly and efficiently, that means the telephone companiesare going to have to spend $100 billion to do the job. So, we’re goingto own a lot of telecommunications equipment companies. In termsof these trends, we really do get the wind at our back. It has been ourexperience that these trends - if you can get them right - really do
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have far greater impact than one would ever have thought at theirinception. At any one time, we could be involved with 12-15 distinctthemes. And they will change as the economy and world around uschange. That’s point number one.
The second idea is that of competition. We think that Americanbusinessmen are among the best and the brightest in the world. Wethink that United States industry at-large is intensely competitive.Our companies really battle it out, not just with foreign companies,but also with their domestic foes. We think that investors underestim-ate the payoffs for being with the competitively advantaged compan-ies. They also underestimate the losses for being with the competitivelydisadvantaged companies. Big rewards accrue to the winner. Nogreater example exists than the Wal-Mart/Kmart matter. If an analystfor the last fifteen years had been recommending Kmart, becauseKmart stock was cheap, the price-earnings ratio was low, and thereforeKmart was a buy, this analyst, for whatever reason didn’t grasp thereason for Kmart’s cheapness: Wal-Mart had Kmart in its sights andKmart was a dead duck. I repeat, a dead duck! And it’s been a deadduck for fifteen years. All it’s been doing is wiggling around.
Tanous:How does this Wal-Mart/Kmart example fit into your in-vestment philosophy?
Schreiber: What I’m saying is, we will buy the company that weidentify as being the one with the skills that will enable it to emergeas the competitive winner. We want the best-of-breed because wethink the best-of-breed ultimately wins major league, and the leastbest-of-breed loses. Wal-Mart has pounded Kmart practically to death,and much money was made by those who saw this coming 10-15years ago. This is going on throughout American business. There arecountless other examples of this.
Tanous:This sounds very bottom-up to me.
Schreiber: It is bottom-up. What we’re doing in this approach iscombining both of these ideas. That’s the beauty of it. We’re takingthe most fertile and powerful trends. We figure out the companiesinvolved in those trends, and buy the company in the trend that canreally capitalize on it. No kidding around. So, when you put both ofthose ideas together, it is certainly no miracle that what you end upwith is companies that can grow very fast. That is what we do. Wemake no exceptions. It has to be both together.
Tanous:Let’s go through the selection process. How do you get from
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here to there? How do you identify those companies which are goingto turn out to be your Wal-Marts?
Schreiber: Good question. Sometimes we’re wrong about that. Wemeet with the managements. We talk to the managements...
Tanous:Every company you own?
Schreiber: Yes. We've met every one.
Tanous: You personally?
Schreiber: Me personally or my associate, Robert Deaton. I’ve metthem, talked to them, sometimes alone, sometimes in a group. But Ihave met the people who run the companies and made judgmentsabout their adequacy. Sometimes those judgments are wrong, but atleast we have made a judgment that these people are good, can betrusted, are innovative, have their own money at stake, that they aredetermined, and that they are not just playing games out there. Theprocess starts with our assessment of management and then moveson to whatever it is that is important for that particular business.Sometimes it’s customer service, sometimes it’s being the most efficientor the lowest cost producer, sometimes it’s having the best distribution.Most of the time, however, it is the ability to come up with significantnew products. Not always, of course, but if you had to pick one, itwould be this, the ability to come up with new things that layer onchunks of additional revenue in future years.
Specifically, we try to judge whether the company has got what ittakes in that particular business. We have not invested in airlines,but were we to, we would want the one with the most efficient fleet.If you're a credit card processor, you’ve got to make sure you have alickety-split computer system that can do the job in milliseconds, notone that creeps along. So whatever it takes in that particular business,we try to make sure that our company has it.
Tanous:I presume you start with industries you’re interested in.Take aluminums. You mentioned that you don’t want the most efficientproducer in the aluminum industry, for example, presumably becauseyou just don’t like that industry.
Schreiber: Other people might be able to successfully invest in thealuminum industry. By buying a turnaround situation, it might work.Other stocks, besides ours, do go up. It’s just not what we do. But ifwe wanted to be in the aluminum industry, we would find the com-pany in that business that we thought was the most efficient. It’s beenour experience that, as time passes, they’re the one in that business
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that is going to come through with the biggest numbers. Some day,we might want to invest in aluminum, although it’s a little hard tosee now, and that’s how we would go about it.
Tanous:Let’s talk about your sell discipline.
Schreiber: Okay. But before we start talking about selling ourstocks, let me say first that the way we make money in stocks is byidentifying the themes, and the companies that can capitalize on thethemes, then giving the companies a chance to do it. So our successfulinvestments will be held for a year, or two, or three, or four. Whatwill happen as these companies capitalize on these trends, and thetrends themselves grow deeper, is that you'll get three or four years’worth of just absolutely supercharged earnings growth piling up ontop of one another. That makes for magnificent stocks. We’re talkingdoubles and triples. We don’t buy a stock today and sell it if it goesup 15%. That’s not how we make money. That’s a prelude to the sellside. Now let’s talk about the sell discipline.
There are three elements to our sell decision. The first is the notionthat stocks do become over-owned, over-loved, even over-adored.When you invest the way we do, you can reach a condition wherepopularity breeds a crowd. Then the stocks become so successful thateverybody owns them and loves them. When we sense that happening,it’s time to move on.
Tanous:There’s nobody left to buy?
Schreiber: Absolutely right. There’s nobody left to buy. That’s selltule number one for us. Granted, it’s very qualitative. There’s nothingquantitative about it. It’s just the sense one gets that there’s no longera discovery potential here. You must sell when the news is good, butthe stock seems to be losing its responsiveness to good news. Thesecond aspect to the sell decision is when the industry we’re investingin, or the theme we’re investing in, begins to develop some blemishes- in terms of the competitors within the theme. We like it when thecompetitors to our company are doing great. Most investors dislikethat. They want to have the only one that’s doing well. I disagreewith that. I think it’s a wonderful, healthy thing to be in a trend whereeverybody’s doing well.
Tanous:How about some examples of this.
Schreiber: Sure. First, let me go on to say that when everybody isdoing well, it breeds a healthy industry with happy investors whowant to invest. We like more money coming into our trends because
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it makes the stocks go up. Generally, it requires that industry condi-tions are good which, of course, increases the odds that your companyis going to do well, too. The reverse also happens. If individual com-panies start to do poorly, it’s telling you that the industry is beginningto deteriorate. Investor attitudes will not be far behind. Beyond that,something is beginning to happen in the business that is going tomake earnings harder to come by. In all likelihood, it will come andget your company too. So we like a healthy industry.
The third sell decision is when we’re just wrong - about the indi-vidual company we're investing in, when we’ve misjudged it, forwhatever reason. Then we get out. We do not spend any time sittingaround looking at our mistakes. How many successful businessmendo you know who sit around holding on to some product or inventorythat the market didn’t want? The smart ones put their mistakes behindthem and get on with it. So do we.
Tanous:Can you give me examples of the second point, companiesthat attracted a lot of healthy competitors with lots of them doingwell for awhile before deterioration set in?
Schreiber: Let’s take the client-server computing area. It’s been awonderful area for us. We owned Sybase and we owned Oracle. Wesold Sybase because it had violated rule number one. Amidst goodnews, the stock just would not go up any more, so we sold it. We keptour position in Oracle. Two months later, Sybase reported terribleearnings. At that point, we began to sell Oracle. Oracle’s stock hassubsequently gone up some, but other technology companies, in lesscrowded markets, have done better.
Tanous: You’ve been in the business a long time. What is differentnow from the way you approached the business of investing ten ortwenty years ago? If we were here talking twenty years ago, wouldyour answers be the same?
Schreiber: I don’t think so. Fifteen years ago, I was not as discip-lined as now, and I was a lot more psyched about price-earnings ratios.The virtuous way was the whole idea of value, and never paying up,etc. Sort of the Calvinist theory of investing - you have to suffer forawhile before you are allowed to make money. I spent time thinkingthat I was smart enough to see companies that were going to turnaround, that I could anticipate this kind of thing much more than, infact, I could. Back then, I wasn’t nearly as wedded to these principlesas I am today. I think my investing record has been much better than
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it was back then. Of course, we have been in a bull market, for thelast six or seven years, so it’s easy to look good when the market isstrong.
There’s a lot more to making money in the stock market than justfiguring P/Es. We learned to divide when we were eight years old!We could have started making money then, if that was the wholedeal, and someone had just told us about it. That would have beatenselling lemonade!
Tanous: You know that we consultants often go crazy with statisticsthat analyze manager performances. Your Sharpe ratio [a measure ofexcess return per unit of risk], for example, is off the charts, indicatingthat you give the investor tremendous value-added for the risk theyare taking. But in terms of our classic risk measurements, likestandard deviation, you’re way up there. Your standard deviation isat least twice the market’s, which means that your portfolio has doublethe risk of the market as a whole. But, so far, the investor who hasbeen willing to accept that risk has been amply rewarded. What is itabout what you do that makes your portfolio so volatile?Schreiber:It’s just that we own very few stocks. In a typical portfolio, we onlyown 25 companies or so, which is peanuts compared to other man-agers. We get portfolios that come into us all the time where theprevious manager will have owned 70, 80, or 90 companies. From acapital gains point of view - and capital gains are our objective -owning that many companies doesn’t work. People who come withus have to accept the volatility to get the capital gains. We tell peopletight from the beginning, don’t give us every penny. We want theinvestor to be comfortable with this style and be able to take the re-versals that, inevitably, we will have. We don’t want you to flip outwhen we have a bad month, because we’re going to have bad months.
Tanous:Do you short stocks?
Schreiber: Not in our separately managed accounts. We do havea private partnership, called Bennett/Lawrence Partners, which is alittle more aggressive than our normal accounts. It can short stocks.When we short stocks, we just flip around the investment philosophywe've been talking about and take the mirror image of it. We shortdecaying companies in lackluster businesses.
Tanous: Van, let’s try to summarize your approach.
Schreiber: When you push together the ideas and the approachwe've talked about, what you end up with is a universe of companies
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for which the gains in earnings are exceptional - far above what theaverage company will achieve. Moreover, the accident level is low.This kind performance in earnings almost always drives share pricesup big.
Tanous:Why do you think you are so successful?
Schreiber: I don’t know why. Maybe because doing what we’vetalked about is appropriate for the world out there. If the world wereto change, and everything were to go flat or become a gray worldwith no color and everything was the same, this approach would bea failure. But we’re not in that kind of world. We’re in a rapidlychanging one. New ideas come quickly. We’re in a world where menand women 23 years old can conceive of ideas that create the internet.Have you heard about the 23-year-old who figured out how to accessthe internet and created this thing Mosaic, which is now part ofNetscape? It is is about to become one of the greatest public stockofferings of all time. The kid figures all this out at the age of 23!Unbelievable! That’s the future in store for us. [Netscape went publicin August 1995 at $14 per share, adjusted for the subsequent split.It immediately rose to over $40. By June 1996, it had attained levelsas high as $80.]
We left Van Schreiber and strolled down Fifth Avenue, thinkingabout what he had said. I thought there were quite a few interestingpoints in that discussion. In essence, his is an earnings-driven ap-proach to investing: Find the best industry, the one which is in theforefront of innovation; then find the best participants in that industryand buy those stocks. There were a few other points he made thatcaught my attention. We will tuck them away for later review, afterwe have analyzed the approaches of all the different managers weinterview. I was particularly struck by his answer to the questionabout how his investing approach had changed over the years. Remem-ber when he said that he was “a lot more psyched by price-earningsratios then.” I think this is particularly revealing of a certain style ofinvesting. In fact, I too remember when the price-earnings ratio wasthe first and last thing you looked at to determine value. How inter-esting that Van downplays that venerable concept now.
One final point about Van Schreiber’s style. Remember his comment:“We don’t believe in a diversified portfolio.” It is this lack of diversi-fication that contributes to the high volatility of Van’s style. By thesame token, the lack of diversification is also what contributes to his
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superior performance. With Van Schreiber, you are buying his abilityto pick stocks using the techniques he described to us. His investorstook a higher risk than the risk of the market, and they have beenwell rewarded.
230REX SINQUEFIELD
Rex Sinquefield works in an ideal environment. His large SantaMonica, California office has an even larger terrace, decked out withtables and chairs and an unobstructed view of the Pacific Ocean.Traffic moves quietly on Ocean Avenue just below, a Riviera-like set-ting with lanes of palm trees which parallel sandy beaches.
Sinquefield is chairman of Dimensional Fund Advisors, a differentkind of money management firm. What they do is rooted in an invest-ment philosophy to which they adhere with religious zeal. This firmmanages $18 billion using proprietary fund vehicles which emulatedifferent style and size attributes of various securities marketsworldwide. What this means is that he might have one fund that be-haves like the S&P 500, another that correlates with just the valuestocks in the S&P 500, and other funds might emulate the performanceof all small-cap stocks, and so forth. The idea is to allocate fundsamong these different vehicles to create an optimal portfolio. No onedoes this better than Rex Sinquefield. Welcome to the world of passiveinvestment.
Passive investment proponents like Sinquefield are passionatepeople. They believe, excathedra, that you simply cannot beat themarket. As you will see, when you confront them with the truth thatthere are managers out there who do beat the market, they revert todistribution charts which show that there will always be some whobeat the market, but you really can’t predict who they are in advance.Thus, active investment is a waste of time. You are far better off, theysay, spending your