We are value investors. We take both of those terms seriously: we value businesses, and not just stocks, and we invest in them for the long term. Our portfolios often don’t look like the market and may not behave like it, as we believe that differentiated performance requires differentiation from the benchmark. Systematic outperformance requires variant perception: one must believe something different from what the market believes, and one must be right. This usually involves weighting publicly available information differently from the market, either as to its magnitude or its duration. More simply, the market is either wrong about how important something is, or wrong about when that something occurs, or both.

Valuation

We value businesses by looking at a combination of fundamentals, strategy, peers, management and capital allocation to determine what a business is worth. We then compare our assessment of intrinsic value to the current price and invest when we believe the intrinsic value is significantly higher than the current price. We also translate observable market prices into embedded expectations for specific fundamentals and determine whether those expectations are reasonable.

Time Arbitrage

We believe that investors are increasingly taking a short-term view and trading stocks from quarter to quarter. We focus on factors that we believe are central to long-term performance throughout our process.  Investing with a longer time horizon plays a significant role in what we view as our competitive edge.

Contrarian

We look for investment opportunities during periods of uncertainty, typically investing in businesses, industries and sectors that are out of favor with current market sentiment. We think there are three sources of edge in markets — informational, analytical and behavioral. The most enduring of these three is behavioral, as humans tend to react emotionally, especially during abnormal and volatile times. As a result, we tend to see the greatest investment opportunities when markets are in a state of panic.

Nontraditional

Intellectual curiosity, adaptive thinking and creativity are important parts of our investment process. Our team stays current with numerous nontraditional resources, such as academic and literary journals in the sciences. We have also been involved in the Santa Fe Institute for more than 20 years and recently became involved with the London Mathematical Laboratory. Incorporating nontraditional inputs into our research and process allows us to view businesses and situations from perspectives that others may not.

Flexibility

Constraints almost always, by definition, impede solutions to optimization problems. Our strategies are characterized by their unconstrained formats, and each attempts to maximize the long-term risk-adjusted returns for our investors through a its primary objective.

A market trading close to fair value usually implies that a cadre of stocks are overvalued, most stocks hover around fair value, and another group are undervalued. … As patient, contrarian value investors, we focus on the latter group. Bill Miller, CFA September 2013

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