C-Suite Buys of the Week: November 14,2024

Every quarter, I track the 13F filings at the SEC. These are the reports filed by money managers of all stripes that show what the funds owned during the most recent quarter. When you compare the current list to the prior quarter, you come away with a clear picture of what institutions are buying for their customers and themselves.

When I started in the business, it took several days past the deadline to get a copy of the filings. I would go through the current and previous filings with a ruler and a yellow highlighter to track the changes. It was laborious but profitable. Today, the filings are made available instantly, and the portfolios and changes are posted to the internet instantly.

The Thundering Herd of Wall Street and the Instant Experts of the Internet will flock to read the filings of the best-known money managers and investors. Obviously, Warren Buffett gets a lot of attention. So do Carl Icahn and Cathie Wood. Bill Ackman also garners some attention. The number of people who dig deeper to find managers that are doing business away from the spotlights and consistently delivering high returns is small.

The famous investors are famous because they did well over time. However, they now manage billions of dollars, and their opportunity set is limited to large-cap stocks. You can do okay with their stocks, but if you want better than okay, you have to dig deeper.

If you joined the circus of Buffettology and just owned the top 20 holdings of Berkshire Hathaway for the last 10 years, you have earned about half the return of the S&P 500. You did much worse as an Icahn clone investor. A very small portion of Klarman’s fund is invested in stocks these days as he finds bargains in other asset classes like debt and real estate. The stocks Baupost Fund has purchased have not been big winners for the most part.

If you could make the same derivatives bets Bill Ackman made when he made them, you would have done pretty well. If you just bought the stocks he did, you would have lagged the indexes. If you bought the top 20 stocks held by Donald Smith and Company, you would have crushed the market over the last decade. You would have crushed the market for over 20 years cloning this unknown investment firm.

You would have never owned the most exciting stocks. About half the time, you would have trailed the index in a given calendar year. In the years you outperformed, you outperformed by a massive margin.

This approach is incredibly boring.

Donald Smith and Company focuses on the bottom 10% of the stock market as measured by price-to-book value. They narrow the universe down to the cheapest ones and buy the ones they think have the highest potential for recovery. They have done that for over 40 years with exceptional results. Elections, crashes, melt-ups, and meltdowns have come and gone, and this firm just keeps its head down and buys cheap stocks.

As it turns out, boring is profitable.

Founder Donald Smith passed away in 2019, but his associates have kept the firm going with the same mission. The top 20 holdings contain no tech stocks. They do not even own a single tech stock or uranium miner. Donald Smith and Company owns some insurance companies, energy firms, homebuilders, REITs, and even steel companies.

Using their 13F filings to manage your portfolio or find ideas would have delivered market-beating returns that grew your wealth at a much faster pace than owning an index fund. $10,000 invested in the index with dividends reinvested would have piled up to a total of about $67,300. Shamelessly cloning the Donald Smith and Company portfolio would have given you over $151,000.

Today is the deadline for 13F filings covering holdings on September 30, 2024. The Instant Experts and talking heads will be out discussing what the famous investors have been doing. The key is to focus on what the investors who are still crushing the market are doing. We will talk more about this idea over the next week. For now, here are the top 20 stocks owned by Donald Smith and Company as of the end of the third quarter:

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