Benjamin Graham is known as the father of value investing and is probably one of the most well read and studied investor of the 20th century. While his most famous work The Intelligent Investor is read in business schools around the word, not much is known about the man behind the writing. Much of this is due to the quite reserved life that Graham lead and some also to the fact that he existed before the era of the celebrity investor to understand any author’s great works requires some back ground so I present to you these 5 facts about Benjamin Graham:
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I am always looking for good high quality companies that are trading at a discount. Finding these companies is both challenging and time consuming. Finding cheap companies isn’t hard- finding cheap good ones is. A professional investor will spend the entire day researching company after company trying to find something the market has overlooked. As an amateur investor I don’t have that kind of time so I needed a method to reduce the number of companies I examine every week to a small handful that merit my further investigations.
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We made it to the final installment of our Graham vs. Greenblatt series. Throughout the series we examined each of the ratios that Greenblatt recommended in his book The Little Book that Beats the Market. The final posting will look at how Greenblatt draws the ratios together and bring this all back around, so lets get into it.
What is it?
Greenblatt says:
It then assigns a rank to those companies, from 1 to 3,500, based on their return on capital. The company whose business had the highest return on capital would be assigned a rank of 1, and the company with the lowest return on capital (probably a company actually losing money) would receive a rank of 3,500…
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In our last post we looked at Greenblatt’s use of Return on Capital as a means of identifying quality companies that know how to turn a small investment into a substantial return. In this posting we will look at his next criteria earnings yield.
What is it?
EBIT
enterprise value
What does it tell us?
EBIT is defined as Earning before Interest and Tax, as we discussed in the last posting that works out to the raw income flowing into the company.
Enterprise Value is defined as market capitalization – cash and cash equivalents + preferred stock + debt
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 Greenblatt in his book The Little Book that Beats the Market advocated a simple method for attaining substantial stock returns. In this series we are looking at the particulars of this investing theory to both understand why he advocated the elements of this theory and what Benjamin Graham would have thought of the approach that Greenblatt was advocating. The next part in this series looks at Return on Capital or ROC.
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 Joel Greenblatt is a modern value investor, his approach as we outlined in our previous post was to find value companies like Graham, but he also wanted a company that has potential for the future. The first set of criteria looks very similar to Graham.
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What is it?
- Establish a minimum market capitalization (greater than $50 million is recommended).
- Exclude utility and financial stocks and any foreign companies (Non US).
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 Graham passed away in September 21, 1976 well before Joel Greenblatt graduated from Wharton in 1979 but a linkage between the two men’s investment theories is not difficult to find. Greenblatt during his time at Wharton went to great lengths to study the value approach that Graham had devised (there are stories that Greenblatt entered vast amounts of stock data by hand into a mainframe and then ran tests on it using Graham’s system). He saw the benefit that could be returned from purchasing companies that were inexpensive.
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 I did a search and could not for the life of me find a link to a prebuilt Google screener for Graham’s value investing system. So lets quickly build one:
Through the Graham series we said we would only consider companies that:
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- Had a P/E of less than or equal to 15.
- A book value of greater than or equal to 0.01.
- A price to book value of less than or equal to 1.5.
- A current ratio of more than or equal to 2.
- Earnings Per Share Growth rate on average of greater than or equal to 33% over 10 years.
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The final page in our series on Graham’s investment theory is dedicated to dividends. I saved the best, and most contentious for last. Investors love to split themselves into groups- technical analysts, fundamental analysts, value investors, growth investors. In the same vein there are dividend investors and growth investors. Without further adieu let’s get into it.
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 The ratios we have looked at so far tend to be a snapshot of the current condition of the company and don’t really explore a company’s history. Graham didn’t believe in investing in the next hot company, he was about buying companies with history and tangible revenues; companies where the paint on the sign out front is dry- basically boring companies. Graham also wanted a company that had proved that it understood its business and was on a path to continued success.
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Current ratio is an important one; it shows us how the company will survive in the short term. As I mentioned earlier there are reasons why the company is currently cheap our job is to figure out why and also to build in a safety margin to make sure they are going to survive the reason they are so cheap.
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If you made it through price to earnings ratio, price to book ratio will be a piece of cake.
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 Book Value is a pretty easy one as compared to Price to Earnings. So let’s get into it we will need it for other calculations.
What is it?
(Total Assets – Intangible Assets (Goodwill) – Total Liabilities)
What does it tell us?
As with price to earnings ratio imagine if you will that you are buying a company but instead of running the company you are closing it out and selling off all the equipment. To do that you have to pay off the debts of course no one is going to let you walk out the door without paying the bills.
So if you have $1,300M in current assets, Current and long term Liabilities of $600M and preferred shares of $450M. Then you have a book value of:
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 To follow up our Graham intro we will investigate Graham’s first insurance technique of buying on the cheap. Graham used a number of ratios to determine if a company is cheap. The first ratio we need to look at is the Price/Earnings ratio.
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Benjamin Graham had a great investment philosophy. Find great companies determine their intrinsic value and then only buy them when they are cheap. Or as Graham puts it:
apply a set of standards to each purchase, to make sure that he obtains (1) a minimum of quality in the past performance and current financial position of the company, and also (2) a minimum of quantity in terms of earnings and assets per dollar of price.
The Intelligent Investor P347-348 Harper Collins Edition 2003
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