By the Loomis Sayles Growth Equity Strategies Team
Beware the catchy nicknames and acronyms feeding the 24/7 news cycle. Pundits like to give nicknames to some of our highest-profile portfolio holdings, emphasizing strong recent share price performance. This can trigger yet more upward price momentum as herd mentality exacerbates short-term thinking. In turn, investors fear that this outperformance now equates to greater downside risk.
This might be the case. But, we believe that basing our investment decisions on short-term factors that have no bearing on long-term business fundamentals creates a far greater risk and, ultimately, negatively impacts our long-term returns. In this article, we highlight a key driver of our Alpha Thesis: focus + conviction.
Whether in up markets or down markets, assigning more weight to recent events – known as recency bias – is one of the key dangers the long-term investor must guard against. When viewed rationally, these reflexive responses to short-term market variables have no impact on long-term value. They do, however, create asset pricing anomalies. Because overcoming these natural tendencies is difficult, asset mispricings persistently recur, creating opportunities for long-term oriented investors with a disciplined process and patient temperament. One of the key ways we do this is by changing the way we think about risk.
Investors often define risk as market volatility. Yet volatility is the nature of markets, largely driven by the reflexive behaviors of short-term investors noted above and when investors overreact to share price volatility, they can end up selling low only to subsequently jump back in seduced by the momentum of rising prices. Defining and managing risk in absolute terms as a permanent loss of capital, on the other hand, can help investors stay focused on the fundamentals driving long-term value creation.
Active, differentiated decision-making leads to differentiated returns
Take Meta Platforms, for example, which we have owned continuously for almost 13 years. In 2022 as the “work from home” bubble burst, there were also questions as to the wisdom of Meta’s decision to allocate billions of dollars to its metaverse and AI innovations. Many growth managers substantially reduced or sold entirely their holdings in Meta – many after shares had already declined over 30%1. For those that defined risk in terms of price volatility, perception became reality as they locked in losses. In contrast, we believe the risk of owning a high-quality, secular-growth company is lower after its share price declines, so we took advantage of price weakness to add to our Meta holdings in every quarter of 2022.
As ChatGPT burst onto the scene, concerns over Meta’s AI and virtual reality innovations flipped to exuberance for all things related to AI. Price momentum in 2023 was a siren song to many growth managers who then bought back their shares in Meta. With many having begun the year with zero exposure to the company, those who repurchased Meta in 2023 are unlikely to have fully benefited from the company’s 194% annual return, which started with a 76% rebound in the first quarter alone. Similarly, because the Russell 1000 Growth Index follows a price momentum strategy, its weight in Meta fell to 0.34% by the end of 2022, down from 3.35% at the start of the year . This also left passive strategies with only a fraction of the contribution from the company’s 2023 rebound. Our 4.99% position in Meta at the end of 2022 was highly differentiated. Because our active and differentiated ownership history – and conviction - stands in stark contrast to that of our peers, so too do our returns. Market volatility, such as we saw in 2022, engenders emotions, and fear can lead investors to make irrational investment decisions. Trading in and out of companies increases trading costs, can create taxable events, and disrupts the benefits of compounding unnecessarily.
It is not simply ‘what’ you own, that matters but ‘how’ you’ve owned it over time
In our experience, even great businesses routinely endure significant downward share price volatility in the course of generating substantial excess returns. For example, in the nearly 19 years we have owned Amazon, the company’s stock experienced price declines between 20% and 60% on 14 different occasions. Often as prices begin to fall, investors rush to sell their positions, hoping to avoid further losses. Yet, despite these nearly annual price shocks, the stock outperformed the Russell 1000 Growth index by over 12x during this period when held continuously. This demonstrates not only the inherent risk of succumbing to behavioral biases but also the opportunities when investors can overcome innate behavioral biases. As a continuous investor in Amazon for nearly 19 years, our returns are demonstrably different from those of many peers who currently invest in Amazon.