Warren Buffett’s right-hand man opens up. November 13, 2023 Sign Up | View Online IN THIS ISSUE 8 min read 🏢 Property problems 📈 Earnings excitement 🗣️ Munger monologues Famed investor Charlie Munger loves Costco, only partially because of the improbably low-priced hot dogs. Read why below. | Getty Images THE WEEK IN MARKETS Canada isn’t keeping up First, the good news: over the past few weeks, U.S. stocks have rebounded big and are now within striking distance of their summer highs. The S&P 500 is up 15.5% YTD. Why? Interest-rate optimism, basically, with a little AI peppered in. The bad news is that the TSX hasn’t kept up. After another down week, the index is now flat since Jan. 1. What’s the deal? Well, energy and financial companies make up a full 50% of the TSX, and those sectors haven’t done well this year. The S&P 500 is heavier on tech — the top seven tech companies compose about 28% of the index. So as tech goes, so goes the S&P, which has been good news in 2023 since tech has rallied. If there’s any moral to this story it’s to make sure you understand what sort of companies compose an index before investing in an index fund, because they are not all created equal. THE WEEK IN ONE NUMBER $2.75T Microsoft’s market cap in USD. The company’s value has surged by some US$300 billion over the past few weeks, helping it become the world’s largest company by market cap behind only Apple. WHAT HAPPENED LAST WEEK IMPORTANT Last week on The BoC and the Beautiful: family infighting! The big question among central bankers is whether we’ve hit “peak rates” — that is, are rates high enough to cool inflation or will they have to hike again? The Bank of Canada is bickering (i.e., meeting notes released last week showed its leadership is divided regarding future hikes)! And giant financial firms are feuding, too! (Well, a BofA analyst suspects inflation is going to climb fast next year, necessitating further hikes, while the folks at Goldman are like, Naw, inflation will keep deflating.) Canada’s next inflation print is out Nov. 21, so we’ll see. Tune in! Meanwhile, on As the Fed Turns, J Pow drops the F-bomb! Climate protestors interrupted a speech by Fed chair Jerome Powell (again), and he didn’t appreciate it! In fact, he instructed someone to “just close the f–ing door” on the disrupters. Central bankers don’t often use the hard F in public, so fintwit naturally loved the whole ordeal. An A-OK earnings season. We’re entering the final lap of earnings season, the frice annual (is “frice” a word?) tradition where public companies tell us how much money they raked in during the previous quarter, and the word from U.S. companies is — not too shabby! More than 80% of S&P 500 firms have beaten expectations so far, largely thanks to American shoppers, who are dropping cash on sort of whatever, inflation be damned. Uber, Microsoft, and other big tech companies have found they can raise prices without hurting demand much, which has led analysts to boost their earnings forecasts for the industry. We’ll update you on Canadian companies next week. INTERESTING Pour one out for property developers. Building luxury shoeboxes in Vancouver or Toronto was once a licence to print money. No longer. Canadian mega-developer Westbank is being sued for $25 million by four construction companies that allege they haven’t been paid for their work. Yikes. Westbank has run into money problems in part because high interest rates have driven up building expenses and because — surprise — fewer and fewer people can afford pricey condos in this high-rate environment, which has slowed demand. Last week, real-estate insider Steve Saretsky tweeted that a major (and unspecified) Vancouver developer will soon be insolvent. If he’s right, that probably won’t spell wonderful things for Canada’s housing crisis. Another Chinese exec goes missing. Last week, Chinese media reported that the CEO of a Tencent-backed streaming service has been “unreachable” for months. It’s the latest in a string of disappearances as Beijing cracks down on corruption and tech. (Alibaba’s Jack Ma famously vanished in 2020.) The disappearances have put the business community on edge and played a part in foreign companies yanking US$160 billion out of China this year. Chinese leader Xi Jinping will be in San Francisco this week to address U.S. business leaders, no doubt in a bid to alleviate some of the unease that has spiked during his regime. —Brennan Doherty & Jared Sullivan THE FOMO INDEX by Stacey Woods IMPORTANT 💸 Ottawa paid consultants nearly $670K for advice on how to cut consulting costs. Now there’s nothing left to pay consultant consultants to cut consulting costs. Source ♀️ Famed feminist blog Jezebel shuts down. The patriarchy will have to smash itself for a while. Source 🎈 Now 100% less-combustible! New airship might usher in next era of passenger blimp travel. Source 🧠 Elon Musk looking for volunteers for his new brain-implant surgery. It’s just a small “X,” shouldn’t hurt too much. Source CRASH & BURN TO THE MOON 👀 Severe eye burn reported by people at Bored Ape NFT event. Expected to pass quickly, just like Bored Ape NFTs. Source 🦵 Mark Zuckerberg tears his ACL while training for MMA fight, which still doesn’t prove he’s human. Source 💲 Ontario will now require employers to post salaries in job description. Also must explain what a “Brand Ninja” is. Source 🦕 Tyson recalling 30,000 lbs of dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets after some found with small pieces of period-incorrect metal in them. Source WHO CARES WHAT’S UP THIS WEEK Grocery earnings in aisle five (Wednesday). Supermarket barons are worried the grocer code of conduct will eat into profits. This week we’ll see just how healthy Loblaws’ and Metro’s profits are. DON'T BE A TLDR HOG 🐷 Like TLDR? The first five million people to click this link can share it with a friend for free. (You can share it with enemies too but only if you’re ready for them to love you.) THE BIG IMPORTANT STORY INVESTING Charlie Munger Is on a Talking Tour. Investors Are Listening. Charlie Munger, the vice-chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, is the Keith Richards to Warren Buffett’s Mick Jagger. The 93-year-old Buffett is the undisputed star of the Berkshire band and, as such, gets much of the credit for the company’s market-beating performance. But Munger is also an investing genius in his own right and has become famous for his Twain-like nuggets of wisdom. Munger, who will turn 100 in January, recently spoke with the hosts of Acquired, a business podcast (and a favourite of the TLDR team), for what the show says is his first long-form podcast interview. (He spoke to WSJ recently too.) The entire conversation is worth a listen, but here are five of the most interesting points Munger makes.* Stock picking has gotten harder. Munger says that astute investment ideas are rare; savvy investors have “maybe five or six … in a lifetime” if they’re lucky. Picking stocks has never been easy, Munger explains (he and Buffett have said that most amateur investors would be better off putting money in low-cost index funds), but it is especially challenging now because there’s so much capital sloshing around looking for bargain stocks. “The low-hanging fruit for the idiot — it’s not gone, but it’s very small,” Munger says. Evolve your strategy. For decades, Munger and Buffett specialized in buying undervalued stocks and then selling them for a profit later. But such opportunities are rare now (see #1), so they changed their approach. “What everybody has learned,” Munger explains, “is that everybody needs some significant participation in the 12 companies that do better than everybody else. You need two or three of them, at least.” By that he means the biggest tech companies have been delivering some of the largest returns, which explains why Berkshire has invested US$36 billion into Apple since 2016. That said, Munger clarifies that Berkshire only bought Apple after its shares “got cheap,” because value still matters. Look for trusted brands. Munger says that he tries to invest in respected brands that make beloved products, like Heinz ketchup. “There’s something about the flavour of ketchup on a goddamned fried potato that people are really not willing to change brands over,” he says. “They want Heinz! And so you can raise the price of Heinz to pretty much anything.” (Berkshire owns about 35% of Kraft Heinz.) Munger says shoppers have a similarly strong preference for Coca-Cola, another Berkshire investment. But if you raise the price of Kraft cheese, shoppers rebel: “They don’t care that much about whether cheese is Kraft or not.” So that gives it less pricing power. Be careful with “style companies.” Munger says he avoids investing in “style” companies, like Nike, since they could fall victim to changing fashion trends. He makes one exception, saying he would perhaps invest in Hermès, provided he got it “at a cheap-enough price,” but only because it has spent “a century” building trust with customers. Rich people like saving money. Munger has sat on the board of Costco since 1997, and he clearly enjoys talking about it. It’s a savvy company in all sorts of ways, from its get-you-in-the-door $1.50 hot dogs to its low SKU count. But perhaps Costco’s greatest insight, Munger says, is that rich people like saving money too, not just budget shoppers. Walmart failed to grasp this and missed an opportunity, he says. “It offended [Walmart] to go into the rich suburbs and have to pay for the good locations,” Munger explains, whereas “Costco just [specialized] in the good locations, where the rich people lived. And Walmart just let them do it year after year. It was just a terrible mistake.” —Ben Mathis-Lilley *We don’t give investing advice at TLDR, and we don’t endorse any of Munger’s advice; we just find his points entertaining. As always, research before investing. OTHER VERY GOOD READS 🪧 Revenge of the Renter An inside look at the frontier of a growing class war | Maclean’s 😌 Missing Values What if we measured a country’s worth (and well-being) outside of its GDP | Maisonneuve 🤑 Kim Kardashian’s Money Story From learning to balance her chequebook to running a beauty brand | Wealthsimple THE WISDOM OF TWITTER We’re embarrassed by how effectively pizza pacifies us… THOUGHTS ON TODAY’S ISSUE? Love it Good So so This week’s newsletter contributors: Ben Mathis-Lilley (writer), Devin Gordon (writer), Stacey Woods (writer), Sarah Rieger (news writer), Ambrose Martos (fact checker), Ciara Rickard (copy editor), Nikki Holmes (copy editor), Sara Black McCulloch (fact checker), Mohini Tailor (senior LifeCycle specialist), Jared Sullivan (senior editor), Peter Martin (senior editor), Kat Angus (managing editor), and Devin Friedman (editor-in-chief). Disclosures: Contributors to this newsletter own shares in Microsoft. 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