William Smead
Chief Executive Officer
Chief Investment Officer

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Dear Clients and Prospective Clients:

When a market has been strong, there is no limit to the number of people who will tell you how good it is going to be for the foreseeable future. When a market has gone down for a long time, a multitude will tell you how far down it is going and how long the downtrend will last.

At Smead Capital Management we have developed a term for this that we call a “Well-Known Fact”. By definition (Smead Unabridged Dictionary), a “Well-Known Fact” is a body of economic information which is known by all market participants and has been acted upon by nearly everyone who could care or has the financial wherewithal to care to act. It is best understood through the comments of former Intel CEO, Andy Grove, who said that the best advice he ever got in business came from a professor at the City College of New York. The professor said, “When everyone knows that something is so, nobody knows nothin’.” By nothin’ the professor infers nothing that could do you any good. When everyone believes a fact and has acted on it to an extreme, nothing good can come to you from believing it from an investment standpoint.

Here is a series of “Well-Known Facts” from recent history. Also noted are the assets that were purchased to act on the fact and the end result of the extreme:

Fact 1: The Internet will change our lives. — Asset Purchased: Tech Stocks — Result: From the peak of early 2000, tech stocks fell 80% in 2.5 years.

Fact 2: Residential Real Estate only goes up. — Asset Purchased: Homes in sunshine states of Arizona, Florida, Nevada and California. — Result: 40-50% price drops and a majority of the nation’s foreclosures.

Fact 3: Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) will grow faster than the industrialized world. — Assets Purchased: Commodities and Emerging Market Mutual Funds. — Result: Commodities drop 60-80% and Emerging Markets fall 50-70%.

At the extreme, whatever value that is connected to the assets involved with the “well-known fact” doesn’t matter in either direction and there is no shortage of both expert and non-expert opinion on how high or low the asset prices will go. Henry Blodgett saw the moon for Qualcomm and internet stocks in 1999. No shortage of cable shows taught you to “Flip this House” in 2005. And in 2008, Goldman Sachs’ Oil analyst put a $200-250 price possibility on a barrel of oil. Not to mention T. Boone Pickens, who has been attempting to talk oil prices up since it peaked at $147 per barrel last year.

In the opinion of SCM, here is the new “Well-Known Fact”.

Fact 4: The massive amount of borrowing attached to homes and personal finances in the U.S. over the last ten years dooms us to a three to four-year recession/depression which is not treatable by policy makers and could ultimately cause a total collapse of our financial system. — Assets Purchased: U.S. Treasury Bills, Notes and Bonds; Gold and “virtuous non-U.S. currencies”. — Assets Sold: Common Stocks including the finest companies in America. – Experts: Nouriel Roubini, Jimmy Rogers, Marc Faber, etc., etc. etc.

The T-bills and gold are easy for us to see through. There is a bubble of fear and uncertainty. Therefore, any asset which seems to give protection against fear should get way over-priced at the height of the fear. We wonder how people are going to feel about earning little or no interest for years. I drove by a guy on Pima Road in North Scottsdale today selling Safes on the side of the road. Gun sales are through the roof. These actually make more sense to me than the money-market funds, savings accounts, CD’s and T-bills. If the premier U.S. companies don’t survive and prosper, there will be no tax revenue to insure deposits, back money-market funds and redeem government debt. If our Disney, Abbott Labs and WalMart don’t make it, you need a one-acre garden, a nearby water supply and a set of big guns and lots of ammo.

As bad as this decline has beaten our stocks in the short-run, you’d think that we wouldn’t love it just as much as the other “well-known facts”. You’d be wrong. This one is possibly setting up faithful and persevering blue-chip stock investors for the positive ride of their lifetime. First, today’s Wall Street Journal is talking about an additional decline of more than 20% off a stock market which has been pummeled more than any market other than the 1929-32 “Great Depression” decline. Second, sentiment polls from the American Association of Individual Investors and Bespoke Research show that a MAJORITY of market participants believe that the stock market will fall more than 20% from here. Third, our wonderful and well-trained clients have called me more times in the last two weeks to tell me that the market is going down more and is going down for another one to two years. All these prognostications coming from folks we’ve worked for for years and have n ever had an personal opinion about the short-term stock market direction prior to this year.Fourth, there is more cash on the sidelines in money-market funds relative to total U.S. stock market capitalization than any time in the last 60 years.

We could go on all day with additional evidence, but we think you get the picture. We believe there has probably never been a better day to buy quality U.S. stocks (for a two to three-year holding period) in our lifetime than today. The reason is that everyone knows that the opposite is so and, therefore, “nobody knows nothin’.”

BUY-BUY-BUY

Warm Regards,

William Smead

The securities identified and described in this missive do not represent all of the securities purchased or recommended for our clients. It should not be assumed that investing in these securities was or will be profitable. A list of all recommendations made by Smead Capital Management with in the past twelve month period is available upon request.

William Smead
Chief Executive Officer
Chief Investment Officer

Dear Clients and Prospective Clients:

There is an amazing fact in investment analysis. The longer you are right, the greater the amount of intelligence people attribute to you. Along those same lines the more money you make in business, the more intelligent people think you are. It’s like the investment world is perpetually playing the board game LIFE. In the game, if you are lucky enough to get the right roll at the beginning, you become a Doctor. The medical profession had the highest income in the game and made you more likely to win. The game was invented in the 1960’s, when Doctors were the highest paid professionals in town and were also the most educated. Since they had the highest incomes and most years in school, people asked for their opinion on a broad array of subjects under the assumption that their personal success and academic education made their opinion more valuable.
 
At extremes in markets there has usually been someone of stature who felt early on that what has happened would happen. The longer that the trend continued and the longer that the person of stature continued to predict its continuation, the more intelligence investors attached to them. A few historical examples are in order. In the very high interest days of the early 1980’s two economists, Dr. Henry Kaufman and Dr. Albert Wojinalower, correctly predicted that the Federal Reserve and its leader Paul Volcker would tighten credit and raise interest rates high enough to break the back of inflation. They were called Dr. Doom and Dr. Death because of their bearish views on the bond market and the economy. Unfortunately for them (at the time that they were considered the most intelligent form their correct predictions) they were predicting 22 to 25% Prime interest rates at the peak in 1981 and told everyone to stay out of bonds at the single best time to buy them in U.S. history !
 
Mary Meeker and Henry Blodget were technology stock analysts in the late 1990’s and rode the dot-com bubble for everything it was worth. Once again they were idolized and ascribed great intelligence until the bubble burst and they stayed bullish a long way into the crash. They crushed their fan club in the process. More recently, the oil analysts at Goldman Sach’s were riding high from predicting in 2005 that oil would climb immensely in the coming years. They predicted $90 per barrel oil and ratcheted that prediction up as oil exceeded that target in 2007 and 2008. When oil reached $145 per barrel, they were considered total geniuses and flatly predicted a run as high as $200. I haven’t heard a word about them lately as oil is below $50.
 
Today, a banking analyst at Oppenheimer by the name of Meredith Whitney and a New York University Professor by the name of Nouriel Roubini, who correctly predicted much of the difficulty experienced in the banking and financial companies the last two years, move the markets every time they appear on CNBC or Bloomberg. Their intelligence meter is through the roof and the respect the markets pay them matches it. We at SCM assume that they will be singing the same tune all the way through the bottoming process and could be scaring investors away from financial companies at the bottom the same way that Henry Kaufman and Albert Wojinalower did with bonds in 1981! Remember, the longer a trend is in place the more risky it is to bet that it will continue and all of us are human, even the experts you see and hear on television.

Best Wishes in this Holiday Season,

William Smead