Charmed by management Some investors avoid contact with management, while others find conversations with management helpful. It is easy to be charmed by charismatic management. In our experience, it is best to avoid overly charismatic managers. It's helpful to consider how the company's employees feel about the CEO sitting in front of you. Is the company a "one-man show" or is the CEO able to see and acknowledge the company's employees? What kind of culture does the CEO bring to the company? Company culture starts at the top. It is the CEO's values that are passed down through the organization. It's been our experience that CEOs who spend too much time talking about themselves and not the company they lead are a clear red flag. It only takes a few management meetings to understand that you should not necessarily invest in the most charismatic and outgoing CEO in town. We like CEOs who are down to earth, pragmatic, and able to delegate a lot of responsibility to employees. You want to invest in companies that are run by CEOs who you think are very good role models in the company. If you doubt that the CEO is a good role model, you should not invest. Too much focus on numbers At the beginning of our investment journey, we focused mainly on the quantitative aspects of potential investments. Our biggest investment mistakes resulted from investing in the wrong kind of management, the wrong kind of ownership structures, and dysfunctional corporate cultures. In contrast, our most successful investments have been characterized by excellent management teams and ownership structures that increase the chances of creating shareholder value. As a result, we pay more and more attention to qualitative factors. We are increasingly interested in "owner operators" and companies that are management-led rather than board-led and wholly owned by institutions. Because management is part owner, they treat the business as their own. When you rent a car, you rarely, if ever, spend time and money cleaning and maintaining the car. We try to find management teams that are down to earth, pragmatic and understand value creation. We have also concluded that management teams that do not give investors short-term financial guidance to investors and stand by their mistakes in conference calls tend to be more interesting investment opportunities than the opposite. These are all non-financial aspects that are more difficult to evaluate than financial numbers. But these qualitative assessments increase the chances of good shareholder returns. To sum up Learning from our mistakes and avoiding the same mistakes in the future is an important success factor for future performance. We have made a number of mistakes and believe that we have become better investors as a result.
Is timing the market everything? Global stock markets are trading at historically high levels, and many investors are wondering if this is the right time to invest in the stock market. Wall Street fund manager Peter Lynch is known for saying that it does not matter if you time the market perfectly, and that investors have lost more money trying to avoid or prepare for corrections than in the actual correction itself.
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