Healthcare and biotech interest Wymer. What with the government getting more involved in the sector through Obamacare, companies need to differentiate themselves, he says. It’s the commoditized, “me-too” products that will have difficulty. He particularly likes small and mid-sized companies that are researching new drugs.
Nygren says he’d “love to buy” large pharmaceutical companies, but that they’ve become overvalued as people seek yield. In the hunt for yield, some investors have missed buying companies that are repurchasing shares, which is just as important for a value investor, Nygren says. “It’s better for the business,” he says, since the company won’t spend the money foolishly, such as by overspending on acquisitions.
Even with the hunt for yield pushing up valuations on dividend-paying stocks, Nygren says it’s easier to be a value-focused investor now than when he started. Many analysts are focused much more on the short term, while Oakmark focuses on longer-term performance, he says. That’s particularly true of more junior analysts, he says.
“I’ve seen sell-side reports [that say] it might take more than two quarters for the good news to come out. [Our timeline] is five to seven years,” he says.
That means there’s less competition for the type of stocks he prefers. “Indexing, the percentage of momentum investors, [the focus on] very short-term events, I think is higher than ever,” Nygren says.
Both men say there were important lessons to learn from the 2008 credit crisis.
Wymer says keeping proper asset allocation with a long-term view was a key lesson. Within a year of the market collapse, many equities were higher or at least at the same level, he notes.
Nygren says the financial crisis proved that investors need to stay disciplined. Moreover, he says, it’s important to not take the wrong lesson from the crisis. Value investors, for instance, took the wrong lesson if they never invested in financial stocks again, he says. Financial stocks were pummeled during that time, but last year saw great gains.
One of the scars from the 2008 crisis is fear of risk, but people have the wrong view of risk, Nygren says. Many think risk is measured by a tracking error or how different the fund is from the benchmark.
“We think about risk as losing money,” Nygren says.