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The Dividend Dilemma: Payouts, Buybacks, or Neither?
+ Michael Mauboussin, Aswath Damodaran, Aileen Lee, Jon Gray, Marc Rowan, Ricky Sandler, Grant Williams, Ben Hunt & More!
The Idea Farm
December 01, 2024
Together With
“The typical experience of the speculator is one of temporary profit and ultimate loss.”
Research
Morgan Stanley - Measuring the Moat (76 pages)
Mauboussin’s latest report provides a framework for evaluating a company's moat by assessing the sustainability and magnitude of its value creation over time.
This emerging markets report covers India’s rapidly evolving equity market, whether China will remain an key investment story in the coming decade, America’s relevance to EM going forward, and more.
The Cyclically-Adjusted Price Earnings ratio (CAPE) is used for estimating the long-term expected real return of the stock market. However, it doesn’t take account of the fact that, in general, companies don’t pay out all their earnings as dividends each year. This paper makes an adjustment to the CAPE ratio to account for just that.
Verdad’s deep dive on shareholder yield finds it “does a relatively good job of spreading returns in a linear fashion, both in the US and abroad.”
As of October 15, 2024
Bonus Content
Is the best dividend strategy to avoid them altogether? Link
Professor Aswath Damodaran shares his take on the wisdom and madness of crowds in the context of the recent election and prediction markets. Link
Aileen Lee explains that in historical platform shifts, tech incumbents and the best funded startups initially benefited, but startups grew to match and surpass them later on. Link
Traders who got a peek at dozens of real Wall Street Journal front pages mostly couldn’t make money. Link
Altimiter’s Jamin Ball wrote about the misalignment of incentives in venture capital between GPs, LPs and founders. You can also listen to him discuss the post on This Week in Startups. Read; Listen
BlackStone’s Jon Gray discusses the evolution of the firm, lessons learned from deal making, and the state of the real estate market (35 minutes). Link
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Podcasts
 11/13/24 - 53 minutes | Rowan discusses discuss the shifting dynamics of public and private markets, emphasizing value-based strategies and the impact of geopolitical and economic trends. |
 10/28/24 - 65 minutes | Sandler covers the evolution of long-short investing over the past three decades, how he’s adapted his investment process, and why he created investment products to meet the needs of allocators. |
 11/14/24 - 69 minutes | Williams and Hunt discuss how trust, or lack thereof, shapes both political and market narratives and how "number go up" has become the prevailing faith in markets. |
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