In this week's Five Good Questions, we're interviewing Kenneth Jeffrey Marshall about his book Good Stocks Cheap.
Kenneth Jeffrey Marshall teaches value investing at the Stockholm School of Economics in Sweden, and at Stanford University. He also teaches asset management at UC Berkeley. A longtime value investor, he wrote the book Good Stocks Cheap: Value Investing with Confidence for a Lifetime of Stock Market Outperformance. He holds a BA in Economics from UCLA; and an MBA from Harvard.
Five Good Questions:
1. Can you walk us through how you built your investing model? I especially liked your ideas that organize efforts around “Know what to do,” “Do it,” and “Don’t do anything else.”
2. Your book demonstrates a clear understanding of accounting. Has the rise of intangibles changed how you use and interpret financial statements?
3. There have been some great studies and white papers on reversion to the mean on returns on invested capital. Do those influence your evaluation of strategic assessment? Are we ever going to see profit margins mean revert again?
4. One of the biases you identify is called “miscontrast.” Can you explain what that is? Do you consider yourself an absolute or relative value investor? (It feels like a lot of the 13F ideas I’ve kicked the tires on the last few years during an expensive market suffer from this biases.)
5. What are the ancillary, non-monetary benefits you’ve found to being an investor?
And make sure you pick up your copy of the Rebel Allocator, available now on Amazon in both digital and physical formats!
