Dealing With Some Personal Underperformance

Over the past seven years, my broad market strategy has done well against the S&P 500. I reach the seven year anniversary at the end of August, and should business prospects require it, I will get the results audited. But since the start of the quarter, the strategy has not done so well, trailing the S&P by a little less than 4%. Why have the results been so bad?

My portfolio has concentrations in a number of areas. I have a slight overweight in financials (though only one company affected by the current crises), a large overweight in energy, and an overweight in cyclicals, though cyclicals targeted at foreign demand, not US demand. These areas have underperformed, and so have I. Industries are 60% of the performance of the market in my opinion, so when you run a portfolio that concentrates industries, there will be periods of underperformance.

Value is out of favor at present as well. My approach is “all cap” value; I don’t care about the size of companies that I buy. I’m only 2% or so behind the Russell 1000 Value, but I am more than 4% ahead of the Russell 2000 Value. Small cap value has gotten smashed, and I am a partial casualty along with it.

So, maybe I’m not doing that badly. What I do at times like this is to try to identify the factors leading to underperformance and ask whether those factors are likely to persist for a year or more. Let me go through my major exposures, updating what I wrote previously:

1. Energy — Integrated, Refining, E&P, Services, Synfuels. I am still a bull here; we aren’t finding enough energy supplies to meet the needs of our growing world. (15%)
2. Light Cyclicals — Cement, Trucking, Chemicals, Shipping, Auto Parts. These areas are undervalued, given the way our world is growing. (20%)
3. Odd financials — European banks, an odd mortgage REIT [DFR]. Largely insulated from the credit crises, and cheap. (10%)
4. Insurance — AHL, AIZ, SAFT, and LNC. All of them cheap, and with good earnings prospects. (10%)
5. Latin America — SBS, IBA, GMK. All are plays on the growing buying power in Latin America. (8%)
6. Turnarounds — SLE, JNY. Give them time; Rome wasn’t burnt in a day. (5%)
7. Technology — NTE, VSH. Stuff that is not easily obsoleted. (5%)
8. Auto Retail — LAD, GPI. Out of favor. (5%)
9. Cash (15%) — 5.25%/year is not bad.

That’s 93% of my broad market portfolio. Three other miscellaneous companies make up the rest. You can find the complete portfolio here.

After writing this, my tentative conclusion is that my methods still work, but that I am fighting temporary setbacks from value being out of favor, and from financials getting taken out and shot, even if there is no connection to the current credit crises. Therefore I soldier on, trusting the methods that have brought me this far.

Full disclosure: long LAD GPI NTE VSH SLE JNY SBS IBA GMK AHL AIZ SAFT LNC DFR