The recent action in the stock market seems to be governed by crowd psychology and reminds us of a theory we created in college called the “coat theory.” Back in the 1970s, the fraternities and sororities at my alma mater hosted several mixers so the students could get to know each other better.

The U.S. government must determine how to deal with the negative consequences of some of the last decade’s most successful internet-based businesses. Alphabet, Facebook and Amazon grew up as strangers and have developed monopolies in search, social media and in e-commerce.

At Smead Capital Management, we want to avoid excitement and expense in the marketplace. When a sector of the stock market gets white hot, there are usually a few stocks which dominate the market activity and see explosive price appreciation. We like to think that one of them becomes the thermometer of the market, in effect showing the temperature of the stock market.

It is no secret that the U.S. stock market has been completely addicted to discounting the future success of the most popular technology stocks. Momentum-based growth investing has had many bouts of success in the past, but this is the first episode in an era where indexed mutual funds and exchange traded funds (ETFs) were the largest aggregate owners of the largest capitalization companies.

We make every effort to understand the way that investors go to extremes over what we call the “well-known fact” in the stock market. A “well-known fact” is a body of economic information which is known to virtually everyone in the marketplace and has been acted on by anyone with capital.

We believe the math of common stock investing is pretty simple. When you buy a stock without leverage, you can only lose your original investment. Your gains can be unlimited over the longest term (long duration). Most of the benefit (90%) of diversification is reached by owning a twelve-to-eighteen stock portfolio...

Massive investor popularity can produce some pretty strange circumstances in the U.S. stock market. Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes!” Today’s strange occurrence has been called a “zero cost of capital” and it rhymes with what happened in 1999-2000.

What will the next ten years look like in the U.S. stock market? As we often do, we refer you to one of our favorite songs, “I Can Only Imagine,” and a book by George Friedman, The Next 100 Years. We believe the best performing securities of the next ten years will be very different from the securities and the sectors which currently capture the “popular imagination” of investors.

Much like the 1975 Billboard top ten hit song, Feelings, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger laid out their feelings on a variety of issues in Omaha at the Berkshire Hathaway (BRKB) Annual Meeting. We believe even the greatest investors of all time are being influenced by a mirage.

We are reminded of Ben Graham’s Mr. Market analogy. In his analogy, the stock market is like having a business partner (Mr. Market) who offers to either buy or sell his half of the business to you, based on how the business is doing.

David was the King of Israel and the writer of many of the Psalms. He spent his formative years as a shepherd and framed his life’s work around the key concepts from his profession. Herds were the primary form of wealth back then, while common stocks are a primary form today.

Healthcare companies overcome great risks to succeed, but can gain incredibly profitable businesses in the process.

In the 2017 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Letter, Warren Buffett told us what he is doing, and, in as quiet a voice as he could use, what he says to do. Our readers will not be surprised at our summation of Buffett’s letter, but here we go anyway.

In the movie, Minority Report, Tom Cruise plays a policeman in a world where crimes are predicted ahead of time. Cruise’s character gets accused of a future murder and he is forced to work incredibly hard to acquit himself of the anticipated crime.

Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos and Jamie Dimon recently announced that their three companies will form a non-profit entity to attempt to drive down healthcare costs for them and possibly other companies. In the process of making the announcement, Buffett called the healthcare sector of the U.S. a “hungry tapeworm” in the economy.

Is the underperformance by most large-cap value investing strategies in this lengthy bull market the “darkest hour” for value investors? This is the longest underperformance stretch of four relatively poor stretches for value in the last 80 years.

Long term success in common stock ownership is much more about patience and discipline than it is about mathematics. There is no better arena for discussing this truism than in how investors measure risk. It is the opinion of our firm that measuring a portfolio’s variability to an index is ridiculous, because it is impossible to beat the index without variability.

As we enter 2018, numerous uncertainties are dominating the minds of American citizens and investors. We are happy to weigh in on what we consider to be both un-useful and useful uncertainties as they pertain to long duration ownership of common stocks.

It is hard to think about 1981, my first full year in the investment business. Three-month Treasury bills were paying 18%, longer-term Treasury bonds yielded 15% to maturity and cheap stocks got 20% cheaper. In the summer of 1981, we saw a stock market decline from an already depressed market trading at eight-times after-tax profits down closer to six times.

Over the weekend I stopped to watch the last part of a James Stewart Western called, The Far Country. It was the story of two cattle drivers who took their cattle all the way to the Yukon to get a piece of the late 1890’s Klondike gold rush.

A massive amount of stock market capitalization is tied up in companies based on both their potential market share and hypothetical future profits. The popular arguments in their favor come from looking at a company’s total addressable market (TAM). Sky high price-to-earnings ratios and massive capitalizations are common in companies with a large TAM as we finish up 2017.

As famed market strategist Richard Bernstein has pointed out, investors should pattern common stock selection after the investment style of the Mafia. What causes the Mafia to get such good returns? How do they spot opportunities? Why should we as investors in publicly-traded common stocks emulate their behavior near the end of 2017?

All major financial euphoria episodes hold aspects in common. Among our favorite books on investing is John Kenneth Galbraith’s A Short History of Financial Euphoria. More than any other economist, we admire his understanding of the connection between the securities markets and the economy.

The first time I read Forbes magazine was in 1980 as a brokerage trainee in New York City. I was fascinated by the company stories and the way the top investment disciplines were analyzed. In the 100th Anniversary Issue—published in September 2017—over 100 successful business and investment people wrote a short essay.

Many well-regarded experts have weighed in on the length and the pricing of common stocks eight and one half years into this bull market. They range from the dire warnings of perma-bears like Marc Faber to more reserved warnings from Howard Marks and Robert Shiller.

In the Bible, Jesus arrives to help his friend Lazarus a few days after he had already died. His friends Mary and Martha were very disappointed because they thought all hope was lost. As the story goes, Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead.

Value investing is very similar to farming. A farmer needs fertile ground, well-planted seeds, unshakable patience, loads of sunshine, watering and weeding, as well as a great deal of courage and faith to succeed in the long run. Today, we believe that investors need to reexamine the benefits of a value investing approach toward the end of an era which has rewarded growth stock investing.

What should long-duration common stock owners like us do with the news of the horrific flood in Texas, the Category 5 hurricane in the Caribbean, the heightened tensions created by North Korea’s Dictator, Kim Jong-un, and the 8.1 magnitude earthquake in Southern Mexico? What is wise behavior in a more volatile stock market environment created by outside events?

As value managers, we are often asked if a company whose stock price is down substantially is a value trap. This is especially true when we are auditioning new holdings. We like to buy a company with a long history of success when it falls deeply out of favor for one reason or another.

We’ve heard Warren Buffett continue to repeat an important phrase, “what the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end.” This begs the question, when does a foregone conclusion become what we call “a well-known fact”?

The stock market is discounting an accelerating rate of technological change in our society. A mad dash by investors is anticipating a world organized like “The Jetsons” cartoon from my childhood. We thought it would be useful to look back at other points in time where great technological change was anticipated and see how that worked out for S&P 500 Index investors.

As we look out into the second half of 2017, it is important to understand that we believe the U.S. stock market has tried to “kill” investor enthusiasm. We would argue this enhances the position of the value-oriented and long-duration equity manager in a way that that doesn’t kill us and makes us “stronger.”

We thought it would be very helpful to review Warren Buffett’s argument in 19991, the last time there was very high expectations attached to technology stocks and to the overall level of common stock prices. We will reference Buffett’s quotes by the year he said them. The sections labeled 2017 offer our current observations on the markets and thoughts from respected experts.

Each year we like to drill down on the wisdom imparted by Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger at the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. This year, we thought there were four key takeaways we can consider in running our portfolio of common stocks at Smead Capital Management.

As many of you know, we admire Warren Buffett and his “sidekick,” Charlie Munger. They seek out quality businesses at bargain prices and have a stunning record of success. Both personally and with stock ownership, they are notorious tightwads with their own money and the money of our common stock holding, Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B).

Like a good attorney, we rarely ask a question for which we don’t have the answer. In the case of looking at sentiment in the economy and in the stock market, we like watching to get a feel for what our professional and individual investor clients are going through to see if it matches what we are hearing and seeing.

The current circumstance in the U.S. stock market reminds us of the mid-1960s. We thought it would be helpful to review what was going on back then and what took place in the following 16 years. It makes us believe that you want to own wonderful businesses and de-emphasize trust in the stock market’s ability to meet the financial goals of long-duration investors.

On a recent business flight, I watched The Beatles documentary (Eight Days a Week) which featured the song “A Hard Day’s Night.” The movie chronicled, via previously unseen footage, the early years of The Beatles and the mania surrounding their tours and albums. This documentary and song could teach us about how to navigate the stock market in the U.S. and what demographics mean to American culture and economic trends.

A number of factors in the U.S. stock market are at historical extremes. We at Smead Capital Management like to look for what we call "well known facts" in the marketplace, also thought of as areas of extreme optimism and pessimism.

In September of 2010, we argued that oil prices were trading on psychology and entrenched beliefs, and could possibly have a real price of $10 per barrel. Investor bullishness was driven by the belief in peak oil theory, the slow transition to electric and hybrid engines, and the use of the commodity oil as an investment in the China boom.

At a recent industry conference, we were confronted by a chart, a presentation and a song. In early 2017, we find ourselves in an investment world where the merit of stock picking and "active" portfolio management are challenged regularly, which has contributed to a mass exodus of assets from "active" funds to low-cost index portfolios.

In a recent TV appearance on CNBC, the legendary portfolio manager, Bill Miller, argued in favor of owning shares of Amazon (AMZN) because of the immensity of their "addressable markets." As contrarian investors, this got us thinking about our three core tenets of investing, what markets we want to address, and how to spot industries which are near what Sir John Templeton called "the point of maximum pessimism."

Every great growth company hopes to make the transition from fast growth pioneer to sustainable growth blue chip. When the transition occurs, a grand divorce happens between the price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio and the future success of the business. What made us think of this was the annual forecasting dinner of the CFA Society of Seattle on the evening of January 19, 2017.

We are great admirers of the writing of the elite business publications like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. They recently stepped into one of our favorite subjects, technology company hegemony, which has developed in the business world in recent years.

Over a three-year time period, stock prices tend to mean revert. This has spawned numerous investment approaches which try to squeeze capital gains out of those reversions.

It was announced on December 15, 2016 that the current Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Thomas Wheeler, would be stepping down as of January 20, 2017. He has been the lead arbitrator and backer of a concept called “Net Neutrality.”

We at Smead Capital Management are in the camp of long-duration investors who believe we’ve entered an extended period of intermittent interest rate increases, a reversal from the 35-year era of intermittent declining rates we have experienced since 1981.

As long-duration common stock pickers we seek to buy meritorious companies which fit our eight criteria for stock selection.

During our discussions with clients in October we were asked repeatedly what the outcome of the Presidential election would do to our investments.

As an observer of ten presidential election cycles while working in the investment business, we thought it would be a good thing to give the current stock market environment some historical context.