Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Henry Ellenbogen
So I actually went into the archives and basically read the shareholder letters and tried to understand what drove the success of this fund over 50 years. At the time, it was the oldest, but also most people would say it was the most successful—from a performance fund—small cap growth fund in the country. And in doing it, I started to realize, wow, it was really only 20 stocks over 50 years that drove the performance. And then coincidentally, Jack or maybe purposely, Jack decided to have a 50th birthday party for the fund. And all the fund managers came except for T. Rowe Price himself who had managed the fund but had passed away. And in doing that, I talked to one of the managers who told the story of meeting Sam Walton on the IPO roadshow, when Walmart first came public. For those of you who don't know, Walmart came public as a super small company, it only had 50 stores. And obviously Walmart became Walmart. And I went back and I looked and I was like, wow, this is definitely one of the 20 stocks that mattered. But actually, unfortunately it was sold. And the math at the time was the retail fund—I think I was managing about $8 billion, which was the largest pool of small cap growth money in the country. And had the stake in Walmart not been sold, the stake in Walmart would've been greater than the sum total of everything that I was managing. And I'm not saying people had made bad decisions before, but actually the math was one bad decision, or maybe you had to make that decision every day because the public markets are open every day, actually wiped out all these other good decisions, mathematically, they had done. And so what that caused me to do was at that point start to really study the history of the US public market. Since then, I think a lot of people talked about the study that came out of Chicago.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: Yeah, the 4% thing?
· Henry Ellenbogen
[00:00:00] S1: Right. And that's true, but at the time when I did this, no one had actually asked the simple question—in the history of the US equity market, which is to me, representative of capitalism—if there's 4,000 average public stock, how many of them truly are great? And the philosophy we have today is predicated that over a rolling 10 year period, you have about 40 stocks that compound well with a 20% a year or go up a little bit over 6x. So about 1% of the stock market are the valedictorians, and that's what we want to go do. Like a lot of things in life, you get through looking at lateral examples, biology, and then you look at anecdotes and then if you like to double click or you're maybe a geek on data, you start to really study it. And then obviously since then we've tried to create an investment philosophy that maximizes the probability of investing in those 40 companies. And the other thing that we have basically found out is that what's interesting is, about 80% of those companies start their compounding journey as small cap companies. And so people always say, Henry, why do you love small cap companies? I was like, well, I love them because I love the people side of the job, but I also love them because 80% of them, of these great companies, start as small caps. That's what we're trying to maximize because we think that's what creates long-term wealth and economic growth. What we have done is basically purpose-built an investment philosophy, and just as importantly, tried to purposely build an investment organization that can go do that.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Henry Ellenbogen
[00:00:00] S0: I want to ask about each. Your firm is literally named as an ode to this concept, Durable. Durable, long-term compounding growth for the companies that you back. Give us one more click of detail on after that original insight. So you've identified that you wanna be in this group of 40 companies as best you can possibly approximate. What are the common elements that you've discovered that fit your personal and your team style that are indicators that you might have one on your hands? And I know you do late stage private investing as well. So you're looking at these companies when they're at or near their IPO. We'll talk about going public later on and why that's valuable, but what have you refined to be the most important signposts of a company that might be one of these 1% valedictorians? [00:00:00] S1: The first is, if you've been one before, you have a higher probability of being one. Again, which just sounds so simple but is actually really interesting. We look at who has actually done it. And if we don't really know the company and we haven't studied it before, we'll go double-click and go essentially study it, see if there's an opportunity. But if not, go do a case study on it. So we want to go learn it. One of my partners, Anouk Dey, basically teaches a class at Columbia Business School on the value analysis program. [00:00:00] S0: She's amazing.
· Henry Ellenbogen
[00:00:00] S1: And partially this is our way of going back to school as an organization and partially is our way of giving back to our community. But the class is based on this, and the students literally do about six case studies a year, but over time you build out a library of them. So I would say you just start by basically studying the ones who've done it and then obviously trying to study the patterns of those who've done it. That's number one on how we do it. Second of all, if you go look at the data, they're diversified across the economy. So look, we're in a period of time where what's going on in AI is so impactful. My view on the impact of this is probably no different than a lot of the other speakers you've had. I would say what I think about when I think about the power of AI and really studying it, I don't only think about the companies that are the first or second derivatives, or maybe people would categorize as technology companies. I also think about the existing diversified companies outside of the technology space that could be huge companies here. So as an example, when you go back and you look at the era of cloud and mobile, for sure, you wanted to go own Amazon in that period of time, but actually if you look at retail, once Walmart and Costco really understood what Amazon was doing but still had relative scale, they leveraged their advantages. And since they basically got on the same curve, 62% of all retail has gone to those three. So for sure one might've been better than the other, but actually all three were good. What was the best Russell 2000 growth, or for your investors who don't know benchmarks small cap company, over that 10 year period in the 2010s? Well actually, it was Domino's Pizza, which was a modest growth company, didn't average 10% growth over the period of time. Why was Domino's so good? Well, it turned out having gone back and studied Domino's from the beginning, but obviously owned the stock for some period of time—if you look at the pizza market in the United States, when Domino's started its run, you basically had a third of the market that was local. So probably like a lot of listeners, I have my favorite local pizza place and I like it because the pizza's great. And then the other third, we know there's the nationals, Domino's, Papa John's, Little Caesar's, others.
· Henry Ellenbogen
And then the middle third, there used to be in DC this place called Armand's, that had about 30 places and they had local or geographic scale, but they didn't have the scale of Domino's and they didn't have great pizza. And what happened was when Domino's started its run, well first of all, it started by basically making the product a little bit better. But if you talk to Patrick Doyle, who was CEO at the time and you really study it, what they started doing was if there's three value equations in pizza, it's quality, value and convenience. And what they realized is if we really, really invest in technology, we can make convenience a lot better. And so they really invested in their app and they built a direct relationship with their customer. Very early on, they could then target that customer more efficiently with couponing, what have you, drive scale through that box. And then when you do something well, you improve the product, probably was slightly above average. You really iterate on convenience and now you have a direct relationship with those customers. All of a sudden the brand halo started getting a little bit better because people thought Domino's was with it, and it started to really help the brand. And you put all that together against a wonderful business model of a franchise business model, which is ROI light, you end up with a great stock. One of the things we think a lot about at Durable is which of the companies that are in distribution, trucking, healthcare; who are already good and maybe investing on a different curve, have the ability to use AI to either substantially lower their relative cost advantage versus their competition, gain more revenue scale and then reinvest that, in a way where you create something that's permanent over the companies that maybe get to this late, if they ever get to it. And often those are the best stocks when you go study the markets because you are already in a physical world business where the technology advantage transitions into a physical mode advantage or a distribution or scale advantage. That's one of the patterns that we've observed. We call that a good-to-great thesis internally.