Lee Roach@leevalueroach
The single most reliable trade in public equities, running continuously since the 1930s, is buying companies that own more land and buildings and inventory than their entire market cap, while the market values them based on this quarter’s earnings, which are bad, which is exactly why the stock is cheap, which is exactly why the trade works.
A company with 1,200 acres of industrial land in a Sun Belt county where data center developers are paying $400,000 an acre, a paid-off factory that was built in 1958 and could be reproduced today for $80 million, and $40 million of inventory that turns four times a year, trading at a $52 million market cap, is not a stock. It is a real estate transaction wearing a ticker symbol as a disguise.
The market cannot see the disguise. The market sees a 9% revenue decline and a CEO who is 71 and a customer concentration footnote that scared off the only analyst who ever covered it in 2014. The market does not see the land. The market never sees the land. The land is on the balance sheet at 1962 acquisition cost, which is $340 an acre, which is roughly 0.08% of what a county assessor will tell you the land is worth if you call the county assessor, which takes 11 minutes and almost nobody does.
You can do this. You can pull up the county GIS database, find the parcels, look up the recent comparable sales, and within an hour you will know, with something close to certainty, that the company is trading for less than the breakup value of the dirt it is sitting on, before you give them any credit for the building or the inventory or the actual operating business.
This is not a hidden trade. It has been published in every value investing book written since 1934. It has been working continuously for 90 years. It will work for 90 more, because the gap between what an asset is worth on a 10-K and what it is worth on the open market is not a market inefficiency, it is a feature of the accounting system itself, and the accounting system is not changing, and the people who know how to read around it are dying off faster than they are being replaced, which means the edge is, if anything, getting wider every year, and you can step into it, today, with nothing more than a brokerage account and a willingness to look at companies that almost everyone else has decided are not worth looking at.