Dear friends,
As Investor notes, below, the November site update went live on Halloween night. A handful of highlights:
a profile of Pinnacle Value (PVFIX) - this is a microcap value fund that does act like it. The manager, John Deysher, is very conscious of valuations and volatility and tends to hold lots of cash. He also experimented, with about 5% of the portfolio, with what he saw as a few attractively-priced alternative investments. Some of those have worked out quite well, some didn't. What you end up with is a microcap fund with strong returns and the volatility of a mid-cap one.
a profile of Manning & Napier Dividend Focus (MNDFX) - this is a megacap value fund that was designed by M&N to test the hypothesis that it's possible to have an attractive, actively-managed alternative to indexing. In addition to a first-rate management team, the fund is attractive because it offers M&N's lowest expense ratio (0.6%) which means that you're buying the management team at a 50% discount.
the Observer's Honor Roll of funds - the behavioral finance research suggests that it's more important to look at the downside of an investment, rather than the upside because investors are a lot more sensitive to the pain of losses than to the pleasure of gains. We might think that we're Ken Heebner and Tom ("Tom Terrific") Thurlow type investors. (Do you even remember Thurlow Growth? Nine stocks, 900% turnover, 200%+ returns until ...) Mostly we're kidding ourselves, so we've screened for funds that have never bombed. Not a perfect strategy, but an interesting start since the simple criterion "never in the bottom third" leads to a lot of funds whose long-term returns are in the top third.
a warning on fund data on the web - the portfolio reports for MNDFX were so freakishly, irrationally inconsistent from one site to the next that I had to use them as a cautionary tale. Jason Zweig, of the Wall Street Journal, found the story interesting enough that he did a follow-up of it online:
http://blogs.wsj.com/totalreturn/2011/11/03/fund-data-gone-wild/a couple intriguing funds in registration - Miller Tabak, a behind-the-scenes powerhouse whose services enable hedge funds and institutional investors to execute their strategies, is launched a low-minimum arbitrage fund. It's wildly overpriced (2.7%) but intriguing on principle.
And a couple other neat little pieces and fund updates as well.
Hope you enjoy them.
David
Comments
I'm working on a story about the three big IPOs (Artisan, M&N, Oak Value). As a sort of public service, I've converted about six pages of each filing document into a tidy Word file, and I'll post them with the story. The IPO prospectuses strike me as fascinating because they contain a bunch of information about the firm that's nowhere else public. For example, M&N never suffered substantial outflows during the bear market and Artisan has hardly any sales directly to the public.
In any case, my best read is that Mr. Manning is 74 and they're trying to restructure things to distribute equity within the firm at his retirement and to get out of some earlier provisions that would have made substantial cash payments to him. Since he's still firmly in charge, I assume that compensation/payout changes have his blessed.
I'll keep reading on it, and really do appreciate the heads-up!
David
Not much. Gundlach's success seems driven by two factors. First, he plows money into the types of securities that other managers buy just dribbles of. Because there are few buyers, the prices are low and yields are high. Which is to say, he's not getting a free lunch here. Second, he tries to hold negatively correlated assets so that the forces that cause one sleeve to bomb would cause another to skyrocket. Which works if you've guessed (almost) exactly right on triggers of a sell-off and on what assets would benefit from it.
He's really good at what he does. Folks I respect - for example, Patrick Galley at RiverNorth Core - trust his investing judgment. The reminder is just this: outsized returns come with outsized risks. The fact that they haven't bit him in the butt (yet) doesn't mean that they're not present.
David
Paul