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Published · transcript-backedSpeaker unverified: belief
30 Aug 2022 Acquired Howard Marks & Andrew Marks: Something of Value
“I think I just got exposure incrementally to different sorts of things that traverse that spectrum.”
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- Speaker
- Speaker unverified
- Attribution
- Not verified from this transcript
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 30 Aug 2022
- Publisher
- Acquired
Transcript context
…Andrew, do you recall in your journey, over the course of your life, the first time where you saw what you felt was a really attractive investment opportunity in what people would consider growth investing, high growth investing, or tech investing, that felt counter to some principles that you had internalized from your dad from reading the Buffet letters from your style of investing earlier in life? I can't remember a specific one. I think the evolution happened a little bit gradually. A value investor, you would look at what the current cash flows of the business are, and valuing it on that, and not making much assumption for growth. There's a cohort of growth companies that weren't exactly tech companies in the way that tech companies look today. You could look at things like we're rolling out stores is a big thing, Starbucks, the auto parts companies, Walmart, or Costco, all that type of stuff. Also, things were really attractive. Acquisitions and synergies were attractive or were a huge part of the story. John Malone's cable roll-ups and things like that. What's interesting is you learn that, instead of looking at cash flows, there's this concept of maintenance cash flow, and then you could think about where to reinvest that. If you can reinvest that at really high rates, really attractive rates, that's a better thing to do than just hoarding the cash or whatever. By the way, Buffett talks about this when he talks about the concept of owner earnings and things like that. It's not too far to then say, well, those same sorts of investments, you can make them out of the cash flow statement, but you can also make them out of the income statement, things like high return sales or talented engineering teams, and R&D, and things like that. I think I just got exposure incrementally to different sorts of things that traverse that spectrum. That's where I found what made sense to me. I have to ask both because it's fresh on our minds, given recent Acquired activity, but also you write about it in the memo. I can think of no better example of a company than Amazon. What have been two of your journeys with Amazon? Did you discuss that? Was that part of this thinking about value and growth, perhaps not being two different things?…
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