The Fall 2010 edition of the Graham and Doddsville Newsletter, Columbia Business School‘s student-led investment newsletter co-sponsored by the Heilbrunn Center for Graham & Dodd Investing and the Columbia Investment Management Association, has a fascinating interview with Donald G. Smith. Smith, who volunteered for Benjamin Graham at UCLA, concentrates on the bottom decile of price to tangible book stocks and has compounded at 15.3% over 30 years:

G&D: Briefly describe the history of your firm and how you got started?

DS: Donald Smith & Co. was founded in 1980 and now has $3.6 billion under management. Over 30 years since inception our compounded annualized return is 15.3%. Over the last 10 years our annualized return is 12.1% versus −0.4% for the S&P 500.

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Our investment philosophy goes back to when I was going to UCLA Law School and Benjamin Graham was teaching in the UCLA Business School. In one of his lectures he discussed a Drexel Firestone study which analyzed the performance of a portfolio of the lowest P/E third of the Dow Jones (which was the beginning of ―Dogs of the Dow 30). Graham wanted to update that study but he didn‘t have access to a database in those days, so he asked for volunteers to manually calculate the data. I was curious about this whole approach so I decided to volunteer. There was no question that this approach beat the market. However, doing the analysis, especially by hand, you could see some of the flaws in the P/E based approach. Based on the system you would buy Chrysler every time the earnings boomed and it was selling at only a 5x P/E, but the next year or two they would go into a down cycle, the P/E would expand and you were forced to sell it. So in effect, you were often buying high and selling low. So it dawned on me that P/E and earnings were too volatile to base an investment philosophy on. That‘s why I started playing with book value to develop a better investment approach based on a more stable metric.

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G&D: There are plenty of studies suggesting that the lowest price to book stocks outperform. However, only 1/10 of 1% of all money managers focus on the lowest decile of price to book stocks. Why do you think that‘s so, and how do people ignore all of this evidence?

DS: They haven‘t totally ignored it. There are periods of time when quant funds, in particular, use this strategy. However a lot of the purely quant funds buying low price to book stocks have blown up, as was the case in the summer of 2007. Now not as many funds are using the approach. Low price to book stocks tend to be out-of-favor companies. Often their earnings are really depressed, and when earnings are going down and stock prices are going down, it‘s a tough sell.

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G&D: Would you mind talking about how the composition of that bottom decile has changed over time? Is it typically composed of firms in particular out of favor industries or companies dealing with specific issues unique to them?

DS: The bulk is companies with specific issues unique to them, but often there is a sector theme. Back in the early 1980‘s small stocks were all the rage and big slow-growing companies were very depressed. At that time we loaded up on a lot of these large companies. Then the KKR‘s of the world started buying them because of their stable cash flow and the stocks went up. About six years ago, a lot of the energy-related stocks were very cheap. We owned oil shipping, oil services and coal companies trading below book and liquidation value. When oil went up they became the darlings of Wall Street. Over the years we have consistently owned electric utilities because there always seem to be stocks that are temporarily depressed because of a bad rate decision by the public service commission. Also, cyclicals have been a staple for us over the years because, by definition, they go up and down a lot which gives us buying opportunities. We‘ve been in and out of the hotel group, homebuilders, airlines, and tech stocks.