Bill Miller's Market Commentary

Bill Miller's market commentary is a must read for investors looking for perspective on market events. You can read his commentary at the lmcm website. Bill gives a great synopsis of the current market environment and then follows it with his value equity commentary:

One of the enduring features of the findings in behavioral psychology as it applies to finance, a subject I have discussed many times over the years, is the almost complete inability of those who are aware of them to actually apply them. You can attend Richard Zeckhauser’s seminars at Harvard, read lots of articles and case studies, be reminded of how recency bias, or anchoring, or the representative fallacy, or myopic loss aversion impair clear thinking and skew decision making, and still fall prey to them and others of their ilk the moment you are confronted with real world situations.

The recent precipitous decline in financial stocks, especially those related to housing, which sent Countrywide Financial (CFC) to $12 last week, and led to 20 to 30% drops in financial guarantors in a day or so—after they had already dropped between 25 and 50% this year—is a case in point. After falling 20% in only a few days on no news, and this after being down 50% for the year, CFC rallied over 30% in one day once they reported their results and indicated they would be profitable for the 4th quarter and expect to earn a reasonable return on equity of 10-15% for all of 2008. The price action on both sides was driven by emotion – first fear, then relief – and was hardly the result of a careful analysis of Countrywide’s long term business value. That, by the way, we think is in the $40’s compared to its current price of about $14-15.

This is not unusual. Warren Buffett has often noted how any knowledgeable analyst would have pegged the value of the Washington Post at about 5x what it traded at in the 1974 bear market, yet no one wanted it at that price. The 2002 bear market saw some similarly amazing prices. AES traded under $1. It will generate over $1 of free cash flow this year and is up 20 times from the lows of 2002. Yet fear set its price, as it did those of Nextel, Tyco, Corning, Amazon, and a host of other companies at that time.

Today fear dominates the pricing of housing stocks, of mortgage related securities, of financials, and of many consumer stocks. Confidence and optimism underlay the pricing of energy, materials, industrials, and non-US stocks, especially those of emerging markets, and China in particular.

I am reminded once again of the quote that sits in the front of Ben Graham’s Security Analysis, from Horace’s Ars Poetica: “Many shall be restored that now are fallen and many shall fall that now are in honor.” (The quote does not say “all” by the way, just “many”).

So what do you think, is it time to start buying Citigroup and housing stocks?