Bill Nygren Quotes
102 Bill Nygren Quotes
1 2 3
[In April 2007] The hardest thing is to predict when the market will change…
Bill Nygren
[In April 2007] You cannot generate good long-term returns by thinking short term.
Bill Nygren
[In July 2007] There is more risk through concentration.
Bill Nygren
[In August 2007] I believe the most critical part of value investing is following a disciplined buy and sell process.
Bill Nygren
[In August 2007] To me, value investing is a way of making sense of the world, not just investing.
Bill Nygren
[In December 2007] When the media and the market become so focused on recent negative trends, we often see an opportunity to invest.
Bill Nygren
[In December 2008] Bad news sells more newspapers, and creates more TV news viewers… Investors have learned to approach positive news with a healthy dose of skepticism and correctly judge much of what they hear as ‘too good to be true.’ But I believe investors have been slow to apply that thinking to the negative, and should also consider the possibility that what they hear is ‘too bad to be true.’
Bill Nygren
[In December 2008] The only investors who belong in the stock market are investors who can take a long-term time horizon.
Bill Nygren
[In December 2008 on Washington Mutual shares.] Selling was the right decision, but by the time we sold, the damage had been done.
Bill Nygren
[In December 2008 on what will happen in the US stock markets.] I think it’s very hard to predict what is going to happen in the short run; the longer you stretch your horizon, the easier it becomes to forecast.
Bill Nygren
[In December 2008] Investors who worry about day-to-day price fluctuations should stay away.
Bill Nygren
[In December 2008] I find the S&P 500 attractive across the board. To me, this is not a time when only one or two sectors are cheap and the rest of the markets are fairly valued. This is a time when most large-cap US stocks appear to be selling well below business value.
Bill Nygren
[In December 2008] I would say the characteristic that is most overvalued in today’s market is safety: look at treasury bills that yield almost nothing and how large the premium is for holding long-term corporate bonds instead of long-term treasury bonds.
Bill Nygren
[In December 2008] There are three things that we look for when considering investing in any company. First, the stock price should be at a significant discount to the intrinsic business value… The second criterion is that a company’s growth plus dividend should at least match the figure for the market… The third thing that we look for is companies that view their shareholders as partners. We like them to think as owners and not professional managers…
Bill Nygren
[In December 2008] We don’t care in what form our returns come, via growth or capital gains, but we want the combination between dividend yield and expected growth in business value to at least match what we receive in the S&P 500.
Bill Nygren
[In December 2008] It’s only when we have all these things – a discounted value, a value that is growing over time and a shareholder-oriented management – that we can take a long-term time horizon that gives value investors a significant advantage, because the longer it takes for the stock price to catch up with the business value, the higher the business value will be.
Bill Nygren
[In December 2008] Value estimation has to be an ongoing process, and always requires estimating the value of each asset a company owns, subtracting claims that are senior to equity against those assets, and dividing what remains by the share base.
Bill Nygren
[On Discounted Cash Flow – (DCF)] DCF is definitely not an exercise in precision, that’s why we demand such a high gap versus our business value estimates.
Bill Nygren
[In December 2008] If you see radically different figures of business value with different methods, that’s a good indicator that some of your assumptions are inconsistent between models.
Bill Nygren
[In December 2008] By looking at multiple models and forcing them to come to similar conclusions, I think we probably decrease the probability of having one minor error influencing our business value estimates too strongly.
Bill Nygren
[In December 2008] A company that has a good track record earns a substantial premium to its cost of capital. Before we forecast that to continue, we have to be assured that there is a sustainable competitive advantage. The easiest example of that would be branded consumer products. A brand is a very valuable asset, but is usually not on the balance sheet.
Bill Nygren
[In December 2008] We look for companies that try to maximise business value for shareholders.
Bill Nygren
[In December 2008] Competitive advantages can arise in many different areas. The most frequent kind is a proprietary product, which is demonstrated by patent protection. A strong brand name is another obvious advantage. Less obvious, and harder to maintain, are corporate cultures or low-cost production. None of these appear as assets on the balance sheet…
Bill Nygren
[In December 2008] I think it is important for investors to have the discipline to sell.
Bill Nygren
[In December 2008] A value trap is a stock that looks cheap today, but as time marches on, the value declines and the stock remains at a discount.
Bill Nygren
[On avoiding value traps.] One way we try to avoid such traps is to pick investments that are expected to grow in value at least as fast as the average stock.
Bill Nygren
[In December 2008] Many times, value managers are attracted purely by statistical cheapness (such as low P/E, low price-to-book or low price-to-sales). More often than not, businesses selling at the lowest valuations are structurally disadvantaged, and their best days are behind them (often demonstrated by persistent declines in market share). Such businesses are unlikely to pass our hurdle of achieving at least average expected value growth.
Bill Nygren
[In December 2008] Washington Mutual was held in all the three funds I co-manage. We sold our position during the quarter when it appeared that regulators were increasingly looking at mark-to-market implied losses, which eliminated the chance that Washing Mutual could, over time, earn back its mortgage losses. Selling was the right decision but by the time we sold, the damage had been done. Owning Washing Mutual was a big mistake for which I fully accept responsibility.
Bill Nygren
[In December 2008] I took too much comfort in the fact that the overwhelming majority of mortgages Washington Mutual owned had balances of less than 80 percent of appraised value. Believing that the collateral was so valuable, I wasn’t as concerned as I should have been with softening underwriting standards. After all, if the borrower defaulted, the house could still be sold for more than the mortgage debt.
Bill Nygren
[In December 2008] In today’s economic climate, we need to consider a broader array of outcomes than we previously considered, especially for companies that employ financial leverage.
Bill Nygren
[In December 2008] The people who defaulted on their single-family homes still need a place to live – it’s just that they will probably end up renting a house rather than owning one. The market will continue to stabilise and from that level, it will continue to grow.
Bill Nygren
[In December 2008] When you start making long-term forecasts, that’s when you have the laws of economics working in your favour…
Bill Nygren
[In December 2008] As a value investor, I’m drawn to anything written by Warren Buffett. I find his thinking to be clearer than that of almost any other investor.
Bill Nygren
[In February 2011] A value investor needs to be able to assess the value of many business characteristics, such as balance sheet strength, cash-generating ability, franchise durability, and so on... Growth is also one of those factors.
Bill Nygren
[In February 2011] I see value investing as applying a consistent discipline to a changing marketplace.
Bill Nygren
[In February 2011] We are always buying what we believe is cheap and selling what we believe is expensive. As the price investors pay for growth becomes excessive, applying our price discipline moves us away from growth. As the price for growth declines, our discipline moves us toward higher-growth businesses.
Bill Nygren
[In March 2012] You really can't hold equities unless you are willing to accept the volatility that comes with it.
Bill Nygren
[In March 2012] When you tell people how attractive the equity market is right now, they tell you: 'I want the upside, but I can't accept any loss.' They want long-term certainty of the outcome, and they aren't willing to accept that, most of the time, your fund is not going to be at an all-time high.
Bill Nygren
[In March 2012] Highly acclaimed long-term value investors... all go through some time period where they are wrong on their research thoughts and their returns are poor, and we have not been immune to that.
Bill Nygren
[In March 2012] There isn't a recipe for creating consistent outperformance of the market.
Bill Nygren
1 2 3
Return from Bill Nygren Quotes to Quoteswise.com