William Smead
Chief Executive Officer
Chief Investment Officer

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Dear Fellow Investors:

At Smead Capital Management we have made it a high priority to pay attention to the investors who have proven over decades that their work proves worthy of great respect and admiration. In baseball, you can make the All-Star team with one great season, but to make the Hall of Fame, you need a long career at very high levels of success to be inducted. Our industry is wonderful because we can look very closely at the investments and writing of these people we have great respect for.

All great money managers reach a point in their career where adulation and self confidence detracts from their better judgment. This interruption in judgment usually coincides with the discipline in use becoming the most popular discipline in the marketplace or the investing style being overdue for a three to five-year correction. Studies of the equity managers with the best long term records show that the best underperform the S&P 500 Index 35% of the time. The pride associated with multi-decade success and the reinforcement of an army of folks enjoying your work is probably the most dangerous thing that can happen in the money management business.

To understand these phenomena, we will review the work of Warren Buffett, Bill Miller and Kenneth Heebner on a backward-looking basis. Then we will examine Jeremy Grantham and Bill Gross looking forward. Our supposition is the following. These men make up a short list of five of the best money managers of all time! However, there is a point in their career when their pride can get in the way of their better judgment and capital can get destroyed.

Warren Buffett is the most successful money manager of all time, in our opinion. His long-term compounding of book value at a rate in excess of 20% is legendary. To this day, I’d rather be a fly on the wall in his office than one in anybody else’s office in money management. In 1998, he was uniformly admired by the media, by a slew of book writers and by a huge army of professional and individual investors. He wrote in his 1996 annual shareholder letter that stocks like Coke (KO) and Gillette (now part of Proctor and Gamble) were the “inevitables”. In Buffett’s eyes, these companies had such dominant moats, sustainable profit margins, strong balance sheets and other strengths that he could ignore the fact that they reached PE multiples of as high as 57 times trailing earnings. These stocks were “maniacal” and were trading at PE multiples which doomed their stock prices for ten years. Coke peaked at around $88 in 1998 and bottomed in 2009 around $38 per share. Warren’s big mistake list is so small that you need a magnifying glass to read it. I believe that everything going on around him in 1998, the adulation and the uninterrupted success got the better of him. His popularity dropped in 1999 as the Tech Bubble went into its highest gear. By early 2000, many writers were asking if Warren Buffett’s investment discipline was old-fashioned and out-dated.

Bill Miller beat the S & P 500 Index for 15 years from 1991-2005. He has the unusual ability to recognize deeply out of favor stocks in widely diverse industries and then has the constitution to hold his winners for many years. He specializes in high reward and volatile positions and is unafraid to average down far longer than most admirable money managers. By the end of those 15 years his streak was followed heavily by the media, his parent company (Legg Mason) boomed and financial advisors nationwide poured billions of dollars into the two funds that he manages. We at SCM believe that he is as brilliant a thinker and money manager today as he was in 2005. He’s only out-performed the market once since 2005 in the year 2009. His five-year numbers are 99th percentile in his category. We assume that the circumstances brought pride into the picture and that these last five years have been incredibly humbling.

Kenneth Heebner manages money in a way that is unfathomable to this writer. He takes concentrated positions based on strong opinions and analysis. He had the best 15-year track record among mutual fund managers in 2008. He produced stunning results in the first eight years of the decade of the 2000’s. However, he turns his portfolio over aggressively and constantly. In May of 2008, he was called “the best money manager around” and featured on the cover of Fortune magazine. Enormous adulation was heaped on him by the media and billions flowed into his mutual funds. At the top of the commodity markets in the late spring of 2008, Ken Heebner was massively over-weighted in energy, basic materials and heavy industrial companies. He immediately went from there to an aggressive over-weighted position in financials. His performance over the three years since the overwhelming adulation has been dismal. He is one of the most talented managers of money, but pride temporarily got the best of him.

Jeremy Grantham and Bill Gross are Hall of Fame money managers. Grantham leads the firm of Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo (GMO) which is a leading strategic wide-asset allocation firm. He has been unusually accurate in his long-term predictions in everything from lumber to large caps and emerging markets to energy. His firm is drowning in new money and his specialty area, asset allocation, is the darling of institutions, registered investment advisors, consulting firms and financial advisors. Even stock pickers like us pay attention to Grantham’s thoughts on asset allocation and GMO’s 7-year prediction for inflation-adjusted forward performance expectations. He has been spot on and his research director, Ben Inker, has done some of the best investment research in the marketplace. Grantham is currently known for his “7 lean years” thesis and in his latest quarterly letter titled “Danger: Children at Play” he nearly exhausted himself taking victory laps around the nine pages and an addendum. This comes just three months after Grantham boldly predicted that commodities were in a “paradigm shift” and had , in effect, reached a “permanently” higher plateau!

Bill Gross is the most successful bond mutual fund manager in history. His company, PIMCO, manages over $1 trillion for institutions and individual investors. During the bull market in bonds from 1981 to today, he has handled every environment well and produced a market beating track record. His monthly missives are followed closely by the same crowd which feasts on Grantham’s quarterly letter. The bond bull market in the US has culminated the last three years in an avalanche of money drowning bond managers like Bill Gross. Those investors, advisors and institutions will recite statistics about how much better bonds have done than stocks the last 10 and 20-year periods. Bill Gross even has a very similar forward thesis to Grantham’s which he calls the “New Normal”. It is a relatively negative belief that the US has more than a decade of penance to pay for the financial and real estate sins of the decade from 1998-2008. His firm travels around the world explaining how they are looking for bonds in countries which benefit from emerging market growth to protect against both currency declines and to get a decent rate of interest. When Bill Gross and other major players at PIMCO are on CNBC, the world seems to stop to find out what the markets wisest players have to say. The adulation from all corners is thick enough to cut with a knife and the pride in PIMCO’s opinion continues to rise.

If this piece were a trial rather than a missive, it is safe to say that Jeremy Grantham and Bill Gross are in a very similar and guilty position compared to the Hall of Famers we mentioned in the beginning. Buffett stumbled when his favorite kind of stocks (large-cap/wide moat/strong balance sheet/powerful brands) were wildly popular. Bill Miller became the most respected equity mutual fund manager at the height of eclectic stock picking. Kenneth Heebner headed into the tank right after he got unusual media attention and his “go anywhere” discipline squeezed every dollar out of the marketplace it could. They have been in Jeremy and Bill’s shoes.

Therefore, what could happen to ruin the party for these two great money managers? They would have to have a very rough three to five years of performance and the thesis they are operating on would have to be wrong. We believe bonds will never be more popular in the next thirty years than they are now. We believe that so many people are practicing wide asset allocation that it will be a “nightmare” the next five to ten years. We believe that a bear market has started in oil and commodity indexes which will embarrass today’s bulls. Lastly, we believe that the ability of the US economy to heal itself is being badly underestimated by these two great money managers.

As contrarians, we can’t run away from the opinion of these great money managers fast enough. This is not because they aren’t deserving of Hall of Fame status, but because they are trapped in today’s two most popular disciplines with all the same adulation and pride that our other great managers had before them. Both favor emerging markets over the US, have confidence in commodities, assume China’s economy will grow uninterrupted; both think the US consumer is dead for years and both think that the US is a political disaster area. We will still admire them when those who fawn over them today no longer have respect for them. This will be after the “pride that leads to destruction” turns into humility in the marketplace.

Best Wishes,

William Smead

The information contained in this missive represents SCM’s opinions, and should not be construed as personalized or individualized investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Some of the securities identified and described in this missive are a sample of issuers being currently recommended for suitable clients as of the date of this missive and 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

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Dear Fellow Investors:

You have to love the GEICO commercials that run on television. Whether it is the little piggy going “wee, wee all the way home” or Randy Johnson throwing snowballs, they seem to strike our funny bone. A recent one is a spoof of the popular antique show from PBS where folks bring collectibles and have them valued. A lady brings a ceramic hand with a bird in it. The gentleman looks at her in all seriousness and announces that it is worth “two in the bush”. The lady that owns it is very happy to get that premium valuation.

The US stock market has been handing out some very tough lessons to investors over the last ten years and, in our opinion, most participants are missing one of the more important of these lessons. Are you ready? A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. For the owners of a business or partial ownership through publicly traded common stock, it is better to receive cash each year from the company over and above the cash flow that is reinvested into future company growth. In an article titled, “A Reality Check”, Marketwatch columnist Mark Hulbert draws on research which proves this point very accurately. His article refuted a popular theory which states that low dividend payout ratios should contribute to higher corporate growth rates.

“In fact, as I mentioned in my column earlier this week when discussing Cisco’s decision to initiate a dividend, there is some evidence that companies with higher payout ratios also have higher earnings growth rates. One of the first studies in this regard appeared in the January/February 2003 issue of Financial Analysts Journal: “Surprise! Higher Dividends = Higher Earnings Growth,” by Cliff Asness of AQR Capital Management, and Robert Arnott of Research Affiliates.

This finding ran directly counter to the long-standing theory, and has subsequently been subjected to additional scrutiny. Yet the result has been replicated. Another study, for example, which appeared in the January/February 2006 issue of Financial Analysts Journal, looked at 11 foreign countries’ stock markets and found that, just as had been found to be the case in the U.S., “higher payout ratios do indeed lead to higher real earnings growth.”

At Smead Capital Management (SCM), we have many reasons for believing that stacking up cash on the balance sheet of companies is not a contributor to faster growth or intelligent acquisitions. The first reason is obvious to us. How many executives of major corporations would be hired for their skills at common stock analysis or as economists? We would like to think that they are great leaders and quite possibly most have the gifts of administration. However, it is unlikely that they have asset allocation skills like Warren Buffett or Jack Welch. Secondly, consider basic human motivation. When a company is fat and happy are they more or less likely to make good capital allocation decisions. Lastly, when resources are scarce, folks have a tendency to be way more motivated. I trained young stockbrokers in the 1980’s at Drexel Burnham Lambert and we were glad when the young brokers took out a mortgage. Remember, necessity is the mother of invention.

In his prior column on the Cisco Systems dividend announcement, Hulbert wrote the following:

“I base this counter-intuitive claim on a famous 1986 article by Michael Jensen, who now is an emeritus professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Writing in the May 1986 issue of the prestigious American Economic Review, Jensen predicted that companies would be less efficient to the degree they hoarded cash above and beyond what was needed for current operations.

The reason? That cash too often burns a hole in managers’ pockets, and they end up doing a poor job of investing that cash — engaging instead in foolish pursuits like empire building. These perverse incentives exist, according to Jensen, because “growth increases managers’ power by increasing the resources under their control.”

With the thought in mind that dividends have made up as much as 46% of very long-term returns in US common stock investing, let’s put our view of current circumstances together.

1. The balance sheets of US public corporations are loaded with cash
2. As the economy slowly recovers over the next five years, free cash flow will grow
3. Dividend payout ratios have room to rise
4. As demonstrated in the bond market, investors are hungry for income
5. Aging developed country populations need income

We believe companies which grow their dividends the most could very well attract a great deal of capital. To grow your dividends you need growing levels of free cash flow and plenty of room to raise your payout ratio. You also need the humility at the top and in the corporate boardroom to realize that the other shareholders of your business are better at figuring out what to do with their “bird in the hand” than you are. It is likely significantly better than the “two in the bush” expected from earning paltry interest or paying ridiculous premiums for acquisitions. At SCM, free-cash flow is one of our main criteria and we think you will rarely see our portfolio with a lower current payout ratio than now.

Best Wishes,

William Smead

The information contained in this missive represents SCM’s opinions, and should not be construed as personalized or individualized investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Some of the securities identified and described in this missive are a sample of issuers being currently recommended for suitable clients as of the date of this missive and 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

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Dear Fellow Investors:

Last week those of us at Smead Capital Management got to listen to the wisdom of Warren Buffett and Hank Paulson. We also read some terrific economic history from Joel Kotkin in a column called “America on the Rise”. I’d like to share some of their thoughts and connect them. In this way we can help folks understand why we think this is one of the best times to own US high quality common stocks by looking for Hall of Fame Companies and use long-term holding periods.

Mr. Buffett interviewed Hank Paulson in Omaha at a big Chamber of Commerce gathering. They spent most of their time talking about the tough decisions which Paulson spearheaded in the fall of 2008 as US Treasury Secretary in the Bush administration to avert an economic catastrophe. In the second half of the talk, Hank shared some thoughts which really solidified our feelings about the “group think” which has a tendency to dominate investment decisions in the short run. He said, “Every other economy, including China, has more significant problems than we do.” You might need to read what he said again. Paulson was Treasury Secretary from June of 2006 to January of 2009 and had been the leader of Goldman Sachs in the years just prior. We have just spent the last two years hearing from a wide variety of economic pundits. Almost all of them have told us that the cleansing of 2007 through 2009 and the overhanging debt of the past 15 years is ushering in the decline of American economic glory. Whether it is “seven lean years” or the “new normal”, we’ve heard it and seen most of the people who manage money adopt it as the foundation of what drives their investments and asset allocation.

Kotkin piggybacks Paulson by demystifying China’s future and rebuts George Will’s recent writing about American “declinism”. He does this by sharing some economic history and by sharing key attributes of long-term economic growth.

“Rarely mentioned in such analyses is China’s own aging problem. The population of the People’s Republic will be considerably older than the U.S. by 2050. It also has far more boys than girls–a rather insidious problem. Among the younger generation there are already an estimated 24 million more men of marrying age than women. This is not going to end well–except perhaps for investors in prostitution and pornography.”

“In the longer term demographic trends actually place the U.S. in a relatively strong position. By the end of the first half of the 21st century, the American population aged 15 to 64–essentially your economically active cohort–are projected to grow by 42%; China’s will shrink by 10%. Comparisons with other competitors are even larger, with the E.U. shrinking by 25%, Korea by 30% and Japan by a remarkable 44%.”

Kotkin goes on to remind us how wrong the punditry has been in past cycles. Remember when Japan was eating our lunch in the 1980’s?

“The Japanese experience best illustrates how wrong punditry can be. Back in the 1970s and 1980s it was commonplace for pundits–particularly on the left–to predict Japan’s ascendance into world leadership. At the time distinguished commentators like George Lodge, Lester Thurow and Robert Reich all pointed to Europe and Japan as the nations slated to beat the U.S. on the economic battlefield. “Japan is replacing America as the world’s strongest economic power,” one prominent scholar told a Joint Economic Committee of Congress in 1986. “It is in everyone’s interest that the transition goes smoothly.”

He (Kotkin) then reminded all of us what could go wrong with China’s economic miracle and then shared his opinion of the future.

“China’s social problems will be further exacerbated by a huge, largely ill-educated restive peasant class still living in poverty. Of course America too has many problems–with stunted upward mobility, the skill levels of its workforce, its fiscal situation. But the U.S., as the Japanese scholar Fuji Kamiya once noted, possesses sokojikara, a self-renewing capacity unmatched by any country.”

“As we enter the next few decades of the new millennium, I would bet on a more youthful, still resource-rich and democratic America to maintain its preeminence even in a world where economic power continues to shift from its historic home in Europe to Asia.”

Are the pessimistic and dour pundits of today right this time? Should we be congregating our investments in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) or dialing down our expectations for investment returns in the US investment markets because the inevitable “declinism” of the US economy has set in? This “group think” robs investors of the urge to concentrate on the strong balance sheet, wide moat and powerful brand companies which weather recessions and have more potential to be “Hall of Fame companies”. We believe anything that stops us from owning some of the best companies in the world this close to the aftermath of a terrible consumer-led recession is robbing us of future success.

Best Wishes,

William Smead

The information contained in this missive represents SCM’s opinions, and should not be construed as personalized or individualized investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Some of the securities identified and described in this missive are a sample of issuers being currently recommended for suitable clients as of the date of this missive and 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

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Dear Fellow Investors:

On November 13th, CNBC writer Jeff Cox shared the findings of a recent survey of major institutional investors put out by Bank of America/Merrill Lynch. These 111 institutional advisors have over $1 trillion in assets under management. Cox wrote, “Even as the US market continues to rally, many institutional investors are trimming their US holdings and putting more money into foreign stocks – especially those in emerging markets.” The primary motivator is a belief among these advisors that economic growth in the US will be anemic going forward. Here is a representative quote from one of the advisors surveyed: “We found a tremendous strategic desire to move away from US equities, particularly large-cap, and toward a more global mandate,” analyst John Haugh wrote in a research note. “Emerging market equities are the most desirable asset class over the next 12 months, with 42% looking to add/increase investment.”

The day before (Nov. 12th), CNBC aired an interview session conducted by Becky Quick at the Columbia Business School where students and faculty asked Bill Gates and Warren Buffett a series of questions. These questions ranged from career advice to visions of the future. In the opinion of those of us at Smead Capital Management, the most important question of the night went to Mr. Buffett as a follow up question from Becky Quick. The student had asked for Buffett’s opinion on the believability of this rally coming off the March lows given that a number of respected market participants were cautious. Buffett reminded everyone in the audience and on television that the best market year of his 67 years in the stock market was 1954. It was a recession year which saw unemployment double and yet saw a 50% gain counting dividends.

Becky followed up by asking about his recent purchases of a company in Israel and in China. She asked, “Are there more opportunities overseas or here in the US?” Buffett’s answer was short and sweet. He said, “I see more opportunity in the United States. We’re the biggest economy and we’re looking for big deals. But I am delighted to find something, you know, whether it’s in China or whether it’s in Israel, like Iscar, or whatever it may be. There are more opportunities in the United States than anyplace else.”

Buffett was not just whistling Dixie with his answer. He had spent $26 billion buying the rest of Burlington Northern the week before and was quoted as saying, “Most important of all, however, it’s an all-in wager on the economic future of the United States,” said Mr. Buffett. “I love these bets.” On November 16th we had learned that Berkshire Hathaway had doubled its position in Walmart and increased its position in Wells Fargo among net stock purchases of $2.3 billion. You probably don’t load your portfolio with the nation’s largest retailer and one of the nation’s biggest real estate lenders if you believe in an “anemic economic recovery”. We don’t know about you, but we have a choice of who we are going to take our economic prognostications from. Is it going to be Warren Buffett, who gets to see and understand as wide a swath of diverse businesses as the Chairman/CEO of one of our nation’s largest conglomerates? Or will it be far less experienced, far less successful and far less informed economic prognosticators who could be a part of a crowded trade?

All this does is make us that much more excited to own our portfolio of Large Cap Value US stocks and continue to enjoy what we believe to be a multi-year and very powerful bull market.

Best Wishes,

William Smead

The information contained in this missive represents SCM’s opinions, and should not be construed as personalized or individualized investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. 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

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Dear Fellow Investors:

The Wall Street Journal reported on Nov. 2nd that non-financial publicly traded companies were holding more cash on their balance sheets than at any time in the last 40 years. The figure is 9.8% of their combined stock market capitalization. A great deal has been written lately about what officers, directors and substantial shareholders (Insiders) have been doing with holdings of their own companies. We at Smead Capital Management would like to give our take.

Since January 1st of this year there have been a number of large company buyouts. It started with Pfizer buying Wyeth and Merck buying Schering-Plough. It has accelerated last week with Stanley Works buying Black and Decker and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway buying the rest of Burlington Northern Railroad for $100 per share in cash and stock. Why are companies so interested in buying competitors? Why is Warren Buffett spending $26 billion to buy the rest of Burlington Northern?

First, we believe they trust that the U.S. economy will make a significant comeback the next three years. Many admired experts have spent the last two years convincing us that the financial sins of the last ten years condemn us to poor economic growth for the next ten years. Here is what Warren Buffett said Tuesday morning about buying Burlington Northern Railroad:

“Our country’s future prosperity depends on its having an efficient and well-maintained rail system,” Buffett said in a press release. “Conversely, America must grow and prosper for railroads to do well.”

“It’s an all-in wager on the economic future of the United States,” he added. “I love these bets.”

Second, these companies’ financial strength allows them to gain market share while prices for common stock are depressed. Trading cash, earning almost nothing, for future corporate profits close to the bottom of the deepest recession since 1982 could look incredibly smart two or three years out. Once what Buffett sees is known to other corporate executives, you could see many buyouts as the 9.8% cash position drops to a more normal reading.

Third, James Grant called low house prices and low stock prices a “shovel-ready stimulus program” back in February. With interest rates low for conducting business and housing the most affordable in my adult lifetime, why can’t the economy do well over the next five to ten years? As we said in our missive called “Pick Your Poison”, what would we rather have, double-digit interest rates/unaffordable homes/less existing debt (1982) or low interest rates/affordable homes/large existing debts (2009)?

Warren Buffett, who we believe is the most successful insider of all time, parted with $26 billion of his company’s stock and cash to bet on future U.S. prosperity on Nov. 3rd. His company is involved in insurance, banking, railroads, food and beverages, credit cards, residential real estate, carpet, jewelry, furniture, manufactured housing, etc. At SCM, we are going to keep our view of the economic future aligned with the insider.

Best Wishes,

William Smead

The information contained in this missive represents SCM’s opinions, and should not be construed as personalized or individualized investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. 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.