Partially true. I agree AAPL is grossly overvalued, and that bubble will likely pop sometime in the next couple years. However, I disagree on your assessment of what an "investment strategy" should be. The most important thing an investor can do is diversify, not just across multiple companies, but across multiple markets as well, the idea being that markets increase in value over time. So if you invest in a dozen markets and hold onto that stock for 50 years, you're safer and likely to net a reasonable sum when you cash in. Dumping all your money into one company, as one poster claims he did, is too risky, no matter how well performing that company is/you expect it to be.
I agree with diversification, but there are other components to that. You could be in 25 different industries and have used all the worst metrics to identify buying prices... Listening to what the market says would be a big mistake. People in groups tend to behave stupidly. Ignore them.
What I haven't really jumped into is the strict fundamentals of arriving at a sensible business valuation. One other poster here gave a gut feeling response of "if you have the money, go for it" or something to that effect... but that isn't really an investment strategy either.
"Buy low, sell high" isn't either... Sounds catchy, but what's it mean? Buy "low" relative to what? Relative to what the idiots on the market had been paying for the past year, three years?
If you approach every business valuation conservatively, you'll minimize your risk whether you're in 5 industries or 200. What I'm saying isn't, for example, that Apple is never a good investment. I'm more or less saying "At $385 per share, Apple was underpriced. That would have been a shrewd acquisition at the time, given all the other factors."
There are a number of other factors that play a part, including but not limited to, the competitive moat, soundness of management, and consistency of operating cash flows... Even the nature of the underlying business isn't all that important if the other bases are covered, as Walter Schloss can tell you. It doesn't matter that Berkshire is in a different business than Apple. They have the right ingredients to be successful in their industry, and to continue doing so for quite some time.
After that analysis, the only question that remains is your degree of risk aversion, which is covered by what Graham calls a "Margin of Safety". If I estimate a company's value to be x, and it's priced at 1.5x, I'll wait... maybe until it's 0.9x, or 0.7x, by way of some general market momentum that incorrectly priced the asset below their intrinsic value even though operating results haven't declined... THAT's an opportunity, and that, combined with sector diversification, competent research and weighting the volume of investments in accordance with minimizing exposure of principal to risk of loss are all components of a sound investment strategy.
And it's not rocket science... the chartists love to make it rocket science, overcomplicating it with bogus formulae, so they can sell you ideas that don't actually work (all with the fine print that says, in effect, that there's no guarantee their formulas work... which tells you they don't). But true business valuation is not rocket science. It's some work... and I think that ultimately is what scares people who have only been living since the bubbles of the 80s and 90s and not really seen the broader behavior of the indices over longer periods of time.
MAC
