Artisan Canvas

The “higher for longer” interest rate environment is nearing its end. The Federal Reserve is widely expected this week to join other central banks, including the European Central Bank and the Bank of England, in cutting rates after generational high US inflation has receded back toward the Fed’s 2% target.

Narratives have always had the power to drive markets. For stocks, few narratives are more compelling than those about new technologies, innovations or business models that can produce tremendous profits growth for the foreseeable future.

Dan, happy 16-year Artisan anniversary. You joined Artisan during the ’08-’09 financial crisis. I’m sure you have some great stories to tell from those days. What was it like to start your Artisan career at that time?

Did you hear that sound? That was the sound of Vroom’s engine shutting down. If you’re not familiar with the name, Vroom, was, an online-only used car retailer, which along with Carvana and several other upstarts, aimed to disrupt the incumbent “old-school” auto retailing model. With the announcement that Vroom is winding down its e-commerce operations, we looked back at our Q2 2021 portfolio letter. In it, we compared the business of Vroom to one of the incumbents, AutoNation, through the lens of our three margin of safety investment criteria: business economics, financial condition and valuation.

At the time, both businesses were valued at roughly the same market value, approximately $5.5bn, so we posed the question: if you had to pick one of these two businesses to buy, which would you choose?

In our previous blog post “Narrow Leadership Creates Opportunity”, we highlighted the attractive valuations of US mid-cap stocks, which are at their cheapest levels relative to large caps in over 20 years. As value investors, we distinctly understand the importance of starting-point valuations for forward returns, however you don’t have to be a value investor to appreciate the asset class’s appeal.

Since 1979, the Russell Midcap® Index has outperformed both the Russell 1000® and 2000® indices (Exhibit 1) on an annualized basis by 0.8 percentage points and 1.9 percentage points, respectively. While that may seem small, the power of compounding can result in large differences as one’s time horizon expands.

The US equity market’s narrow leadership in 2023 is well chronicled, but it’s nearly impossible to overstate.  The “Magnificent Seven”, as the largest seven US stocks have been dubbed, have dominated YTD equity returns—contributing, in effect, 100% of the S&P 500 Index’s total return (through October).

These seven stocks have returned on average 84%, compared to -3% for the “S&P 493”, and more than half of S&P 500 stocks have generated negative returns. In fact, the equal-weight S&P 500® Index is lagging the market-cap weighted S&P 500 by the most since 1998 as the S&P 500 Index is up over 10%, while the equal-weighted S&P 500 was down ~2% through October.

Craig, happy 11-year Artisan anniversary. To commemorate your time at Artisan Partners and with the U.S. Value team, we have a few questions to better get to know you personally and professionally. To break the ice, please tell us a bit about yourself.

I grew up in South Carolina and have lived in the southern US my entire life. One thing that is interesting about my childhood is my dad was a professional golfer on the PGA Tour (he also played the Senior PGA Tour later in life).

Researchers, investors, the occasional interviewees[1] and even the CEO of Artisan are often incredulous when I say my undergraduate anthropology major is a cornerstone of my daily investment process. Occasionally I get feisty and defend myself, but I often defuse the situation with what passes for humor in the investment world and move on. No more! Gillian Tett’s 2021 book Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life will be my public defender.

I was recently asked to speak about investing to a group of undergraduate students at the University of Florida who manage a university student fund. I was initially stumped regarding what we would discuss, but upon speaking with one of the students, it became clear they were eager to discuss a real-world example in relation to our approach to investment research.

“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future”
—Yogi Berra

Given it’s that time of year when Wall Street’s market strategists trot out their year ahead outlooks, we thought we might share our thoughts on the value of forecasting or perhaps the lack thereof. If the following sampling of prior year outlooks for CY2022 are any gauge, we doubt next year’s predictions are worth the paper they’re printed on.