It's not its cover design or its dry title. Rather, it's the investing philosophy laid out by its author, one of the most successful fund managers alive. Billionaire fund manager Seth Klarman's Margin of Safety breaks down the value investing principles used by the most successful and wealthiest investors in the world, including Warren Buffett, the late Charlie Munger and Joel Greenblatt. And with his hedge fund, The Baupost Group, having notched returns of about 20% annually since 1982, Klarman's own track record speaks for itself. He writes on Page 107 of his book: "The entire strategy can be concisely described as 'buy a bargain and wait.' Investors must learn to assess value in order to know a bargain when they see one. Then they must exhibit the patience and discipline to wait until a bargain emerges from their searches and buy it, regardless of the prevailing direction of the market or their own views about the economy at large." In practice, this tends to mean that value investors take the long way around to market outperformance, resisting the allure of popular short-term trends in the market in favor of lower-risk - yet, arguably, higher-reward - alternatives. In today's Value Meter, I want to assess one such opportunity: a stock that's in Klarman's own portfolio. Clarivate (NYSE: CLVT) is hardly a household name. It's an information services company that focuses on providing insights and data analytics tools to businesses and professionals. Most investors would take one look at the stock's price trend and be immediately turned off. It's been badly bruised and battered over the past few years. But the fact that this stock is trading for a mere $9 isn't enough to make this a value play. Nor is it the sole reason Klarman's Baupost Group owns over 25 million shares of the stock. Let's dig deeper. For starters, the company has seen some sizable revenue growth in recent years. From 2017 to 2022, which is the last year for which we have data, revenue rose by an annual clip of 24%. And EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) largely followed suit, growing by nearly 53% a year. But those figures can easily be manipulated. There's a more important measure to consider here that will go a long way toward determining the company's valuation... |
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