On the short term activist shaking the ARIS tree

It is an interesting observation that when one types the word "SEVEN" into google search function, it autofills "Seven Deadly Sins" a reflection I suppose on the frequency with which the people check for behavioral affirmations.

In a way, the stock market has a similar effect. Every tick in the market can be a behavioral affirmation of one kind or another that can heighten the tension between greed and charity, or diligence and sloth.

I write here however, of the tension between "wrath" (less formally known as "impatience") and its more virtuous partner "patience". I find the latter to be a stellar principle for sound investing but it can be so difficult in practice that even those who speak of "long-term value-oriented investments" find it hard to back up with actions.

This all comes to mind because of the impatience recently expressed by the investor filing a DFAN14A with the SEC on ARI Network Services (ARIS), indicating a desire to solicit the sale of the company, an action that strikes me less as the endeavor of an activist than an expression of impatience and idiocy.

What we know about ARIS need not be rehashed because I've written about it elsewhere, but I'll summarize in three bullets:

• It is an $85M market cap company whose CEO Roy Oliver, since taking the reins in 2008, has grown shareholder equity 33% CAGR. 

• In stewardship with his capable CFO Bill Nurthen, who joined the company in 2013, Oliver now runs a cash flow generating business that has reinvested in high return acquisitions, an attribute of a "compounding" company

• By increasing the availability of and access to debt, the company should be able to continue to fund what has hitherto been a successful acquisition strategy into the future.

In my ~15 years in institutional finance, I've rarely seen such strong capabilities in companies above $10B market cap and here I am a shareholder of one that is still below $100M, and with a potentially long runway of growth ahead.

Taken all in, I believe the C-suite team is unusually strong and capable for a company so small (though they are not perfect). 

Yet, were the company to sell, we would lose our ownership rights to the company just as the going-got-good and we would lose the benefits of investing in a C-suite team that has performed so admirably. To break up the band, so to speak, seems premature; to nip such success in the bud seems stupid. 

Obviously, once a company has gone public it is in principle already sold; shareholders are the owners and the executives are the managers.

This missive is therefore addressed to my fellow owners who like me can see the long road ahead under present management, who don't want to pay taxes on their growth in capital to date and who know how hard it is to find well run companies that can compound growth over time, for what are well run companies but good mgmt teams allocating capital - labor, time and financial - wisely?

When we find them good companies well managed, we should hold onto them for long periods b/c they are few and far between.

I imagine all shareholders know as much as I do and see the same attributes as I see in ARIS,  but what do we know about the owner advocating for the sale? I aim here to briefly fill in that gap based on available information so we can judge for ourselves whether his suggestions reflect temperance or gluttony.

This appears to be the third activist endeavor for the owner ...

1. AdCare Health (ADK). Period of activism: 2013 until Present (he is now on the board).

Initial statement from April 2013 says he owns 750k shares at $4.01.

In July 2013 he's advocating they sell the real estate to generate $4 / share cash that they pay as a dividend to shareholders and that the remaining business would be worth $9 / share. In August 2013 he says they should split into a REIT and an operating company. July 2014, the company announces it will end operations and convert into a holding company that would make it attractive to be acquired by a REIT. In November 2015, the Vice Chair has fraud charges filed against him. (I can't keep up!).

ADK now sells for under $2 and is the subject of an activist campaign by Echo Lake Capital / Ephraim Fields. Value investors appear to like the opportunity from the NOL's and the property.

2. Resonant Inc (RESN).

Initial statement of ownership of 300,000 shares in Feb 2015 at $15.47.

Continued to buy through the spring of 2015 such that ownership stake reflects 700,000 shares and the stock is trading at $4.75. In February 2016 he's given a board seat with the stock at $1.80. As of 4/27/16 he owns 1.035M shares.

3. ARI Network Services (ARIS)

1M shares bought b/t October and December 2014 @ $3.67 / share. In December 2015 files letter that company should seek potential sale. In Oct 2016, files proxy that company should consider a sale and that he is nominating himself and some investment banker to the board.

... I dare not speak ill of other investors for it is undoubtedly a function of hubris to think that one is smarter than another.

We all see in companies values - the more divergent the value the greater the opportunity - and I hope the value this investor sees in the shares he owns can be realized. I know nothing about two of them. However, I have experienced two things in life that I can say with certainty:

1. People tend to repeat their patterns of behaviors. Conclusion: Someone who has a prior history of buying small cap companies, getting on the board and overseeing value destruction is likely to do that again. We should aim to keep those with a frequency of such behaviors from coming to near to managing the capital that investors, company employees and managers have worked so hard to produce.

2. When my children ask for things they've done nothing to deserve, I say "no". Conclusion: When your unsolicited proxy arrives, shareholders should do the same here.

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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS IS NOT A SOLICITATION FOR BUSINESS OR RECOMMENDATION TO BUY OR SELL SECURITIES.

The Half Truths Told About Passive Accounts, And the Whole Truth on Concentrated Patient Investing

Peter Thiel apparently likes to ask an interview question: "Tell me something that's true, that almost nobody agrees with you on."

I prefer the question "Tell me something that's false that everyone believes" and as I've grown older I've gained more confidence in those things that come to mind.

At the top of that list right now is the idea of diversification, (followed closely by Vikings not actually wearing horns on their helmets).

Diversification makes sense b/c it follows the common principle, "don't put all your eggs in one basket".

Ironically however, that principle conflicts with every single one of life's most important decisions; who you marry, what you do as a career, who you work with, etc.

In all the major commitments in life, we by nature put all your eggs in one basket.

I think everyone would do well practicing at least once in awhile putting all their eggs into one basket so they better understand the inputs to and tolerate the consequences of those actions.

Anything else is laziness.

***

This relates to the half truth that we should invest our savings in the market through a diversified basket of low cost index funds as an alternative to buying and selecting individual businesses for investment.

The whole truth is that when asset returns are correlated the presumed benefits of diversification disappear, so why is it better than individual stock selection?

***

I reckon most people don't think about the markets as individual companies. I reckon they think about it more like a flock of starlings in murmuration but those of us who analyze individual companies are like ornithologists who can pick out individual birds.

When you dig deeper into "the market" and look at its components it becomes apparent that sometimes "the market" is really just a few stocks overweighted in an index, impacting the whole.

***

There are a lot of ways to invest in the stock market beyond undifferentiated passive investing. I buy and hold small companies for long periods and limit my portfolio to a handful of what I think are terrific businesses trading at reasonable prices (or better still, unreasonably low prices).

There are plenty of other people who do what I do up and down the market cap spectrum (ie large and small companies) and then there are others who buy bankruptcies, debt, risk / arb, options. There's no lack of variety of investors. Some are more consistent and successfull than others.

Regardless of who those people are, I think I speak for all of them -

every single investor that buys individual securities 

- that the underlying trend towards blanket diversification reflects two forms of laziness - intellectual and professional - that has become nearly universally accepted but is just plain wrong.

By intellectual laziness I mean the inherent incongruency that we should prefer market exposure with market risk over business exposure with business risk.

A well researched, thoroughly analyzed, cash flow generating, under-levered and growing business acquired inexpensively should - at any point in time - be a safer investment than a basket of companies arbitrarily selected by their size or industry or valuation, especially when that basket overlaps so many others. And if properly selected it can generate a more meaningful return than that basket.

But finding those companies takes time and effort and its stressful and difficult and it gets in the way of making money that comes from accumulating assets, which is how all money managers get paid regardless of performance.

By professional laziness I mean the things that happen when people ...

1) accept intellectual laziness and call it a service.

2) do what everyone else does and call it "unique" or "proprietary"

3) take vast sums of money from endowments, pension funds, retirement funds, government entities, etc and put it into instruments that behave like index funds simply b/c it's too hard to allocate them otherwise, and with no consideration of or responsibility for those whose retirement depends on the wise allocation of said capital.

... the alternative in all cases involves work that is difficult and differentiated but could be more meaningful to clients; identifying a handful of undervalued securities and owning them.

***

I've been investing personally since the late-1990's, starting with 10 to 100 share lots when it was easy and you could read Buffett at night and still buy www.something.com during the day and be up 10x the next and none of it made sense, but it was fun.

The investing structure of Graham and Buffett resonated with me nonetheless and I fell in love with it, slowly transitioning from my prior work as a writer / reporter to institutional research (with stints as a PI and in PE in between) then working for nearly 15 years on the sell side (with an MBA squeezed in) covering mostly industrials and services related companies up until I was laid off in 2012.

Here's a small collection of books I used to teach myself about investing ...

... I have a whole other shelf of text books from my MBA plus it's incredible what's available online now (and at the library).

***

Ironically, b/c I worked on the sell side, I had little time to spend thinking about my own investments and b/c of Eliot Spitzer I couldn't own the stocks I covered, so my personal accounts (I managed three) were fairly haphazard.

I had three primary accounts: One mostly held companies where friends of ours worked (a quasi Lynchian approach), one was concentrated in micro caps I'd read about in trade journals or found on screens, and one was diversified with large companies.

I tracked returns extensively on Quicken on an early generation Macbook but i gave that up when i started working in the industry. It was okay for me that some stocks went up more than others went down.

When I was let go, and looking for work on the buying side, I figured I should start reflecting on my personal returns. I could only go back as far as the end of 2007 since E*Trade only kept returns for a certain period and here's what I did over that time period.

Nothing earth shattering ... but it dawned on me that owning a handful of random micro-caps in concentrated positions for long periods led to 2x outperformance of the major indices, and with a pretty a low correlation.

What if I just focused on that area of the market, not buying "random micro caps that sounded interesting" but fully understanding the businesses, the managers and executives, the customers, analyzing these tiny companies as I'd analyzed mid- and large-cap companies in my coverage sector, and making big bets in the best ones I could find, while saying "no" a whole lot more?

I decided that's my business, not just b/c of the outperformance over an arbitrary time period, but b/c I liked finding gems overlooked by others and most importantly b/c it would be easier to compound a small sum of money in smaller companies than it would be in larger companies.

Since that time, noting the end dates for the other two accounts which have been moved, that small cap concentrated account is up 18% CAGR. It seems to validate the thesis.

The downside of focus on small caps, which I've talked about with a few institutional PM's who run small cap funds, is that the strategy maxes out at a certain AUM, which caps compensation.

That's fine. That's why so few people do it. It is good enough for now to experience the ego gratification of investing in deliciously inexpensive well run company employing great people doing interesting work satisfying the needs of hungry customers, and doing it with integrity for myself, my clients and the companies I own.

***

This the most differentiated approach to investing requires patience. It is sometimes quick and exciting, sometimes slow and frustrating, but its always enervating and enlightening way engage the world around me.

The opposite end of the investing is the most undifferentiated mass marketed passive movement. They will charge you the least fees but you get the mass strategy. Someday this institutional passive investing will resemble the equivalent of cheap protein, including i fear, even the slaughterhouse.

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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS IS NOT A SOLICITATION FOR BUSINESS. ALL OPINIONS ARE MINE ALONE, EVEN THE ONES I SAID WERE EVERYONE ELSE'S. THESE ARE UNAUDITED TIME WEIGHTED RETURNS OF A PERSONAL INVESTOR BASED ON MONTHLY STATEMENTS AND CALCULATED IN EXCEL.

A Brief Description of the Kinds of Stocks I'm Wary Of

Here's one type at least: The "heroic / satanic savior"

That's where "BNI's" (ie "brand name investors") with terrific financial backgrounds but no industry experience swoop-in heroically with the imprimatur of "financial stewardship" ... and destroy value.

I speak specifically in this case on $CDI, now trading near net / net valuation, but there are so many examples I've seen where this happens. 

In this case, some ex-Eddie Lampert / Sears / Lehman folks joined the company in Oct 2014, and since that time, shareholder equity is down 25% and total debt is up 10-fold.

I imagine their compensation reflects the skills required to achieve such a distinction. In fact the word "compensation" shows up a quite astounding 385 times in the most recent proxy statement, though you'd have to scroll to page 24 to see the actual discussion on executive compensation (by that point, they've already mentioned the term 107 times).

From there on, you'd see there a quite intense amount of description of a comp plan that focuses on "shareholder value," which is mentioned only eight times in the report. (Perhaps a new investment analysis is the ratio of "compensation" to "shareholder value" in the proxy statement).

As for what drives "shareholder value": The company believes "... that if CDI consistently attains or exceeds its target levels of operating profit and RONA, shareholder value will increase over the long term. Our targets are intended to be challenging, yet realistic and achievable at the time they are established."

Since RONA excludes goodwill, that comp plan essentially incentivizes management to lever up and make acquisitions in order to grow operating profit. You can imagine that's the plan. Scorpions gonna do what scorpions do.

But this is a business where the assets walk out the door every night and I can cite many more levered acquisitions in the people business that have not worked than those that have. (My experiences are in the investment banking world where it never works).

Still, the horse is out of the barn. They've already made their first purchase paying $35M cash for "EdgeRock Technologies" a company that supplies project managers for ERP rollouts. Plus, they have a new $100M credit facility to borrow for future transactions and given that they're under levered relative to other staffing firms, they have plenty of borrowing capacity available.

But if they can't maintain or grow the operations, it potentially leaves long term investors holding the proverbial bag.

Staffing is not a complicated business: manage your bill / pay spread, keep overhead as low as possible, and hire high energy, terrific salespeople. But it is also a brutal business characterized by:

- Cyclicality. Staffed employees are first in and first out.
- Low barriers to entry. All you need is an internet connection.
- Incredible competitiveness
- Disintermediated by technology

This is the second staffing company I've looked at recently trading at or near net / net valuation ($HSON is the other one) where some BNI's have come in to "turn it around" ... and they haven't.

The good news is, these are just two of the tens of thousands of companies that  trade everyday in the public market, with a bid on all of them.

If I wanted to own a services rollup, I'd be more keen on companies run by managers with a rabid dog mentality towards selling and collecting vs financial mgmt. I'm just not the type of deep value investor that can step in front of a business unless success is paved with operating excellence.

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THIS IS NOT A RECOMMENDATION TO BUY / SELL SECURITIES NOR A SOLICITATION FOR BUSINESS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 

A Comparison b/t C&I loan growth and the ratio of multi family to single family housing permits

Been looking at a lighting company that gets half its revenues from multi-family residential new construction.

Though a different company than TAYD, both are exposed in some way to institutional or commercial construction.

This chart shows changes in C&I loan growth (commercial and industrial loans) - the blue area graph - via FRB layered on top of housing permit data, specifically, the ratio of multifamily permits (five or more units) to single family permits.

I think the takeaway is that multi family construction permits really ramp relative to single family later in a cycle, and that there was a period of under building of multi-family units during the housing bubble.

My sense is that business is passed the peak, at least for the current cycle (yes Virginia, there is a business cycle, no matter how skewed it may be by interest rate policy).

Or maybe slowing C&I loan growth is from uncertainty about future policy and rates, due to the election.

I'm not a macro-investor I just love comparing things.

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THIS IS NOT A SOLICITATION FOR BUSINESS OR A RECOMMENDATION TO BUY OR SELL SECURITIES.

Happy Birthday Vanguard (I got you a Spotify account as a gift!)

This morning, the Marketplace Morning Report  had a story on Vanguard's 40th birthday and a piece on revenue growth in music streaming. 

It dawned on me that Spotify and Vanguard shared similar dynamics - they are both disruptive innovations - and if that's the case, then it follows that stock pickers are the equivalent of hifi-enthusiasts in an ETF-dominated world; a shrinking community of music perfectionists that think they do it "better" than everyone else. 

Through the lens of convenience, "better" isn't about sound quality and imaging but about pervasiveness and availability. 

There are countless places we've accepted - for the sake of convenience - "lower quality experiences" in our lives. That's a key aspect of disruptive innovation that Vanguard brought to the investment world (the program starts at 3:40)

Vanguard's innovation? At a time when people were trying to beat the market with exceptional results, Vanguard offered a way to be ... unexceptional ... and now its S&P 500 mutual fund and Total Stock Markets Fund are the two largest funds in the country. 

What an incredible experience for the average person who doesn't follow the markets, who doesn't know how to tell a good investment from a bad investment - or even a good investment manager from a bad one - and who has no financial education to not have to make a decision and concurrently be freed from the bonds of snake oil salesmen with the ease and convenience of buying something that's simply good enough. 

What - if anything - are those people missing? And what can I learn from this as a startup RIA focused on small cap investing? 

I don't think people know what they're missing. Many treat their investment and retirement savings with little thought - and much hope - probably b/c they don't know how to think about it, or they've never entertained the notion of "I can invest." So they outsource it.

On the latter - what can I learn? - how do I reach people who don't know what they're missing? I guess I could start a fund and focus on the small market of other hifi enthusiasts who don't want to listen to a compressed version of Eine Alpensinfonie or won't watch "Lawrence of Arabia" on a cellphone. 

I'm passionate about trying to reach a wider audience to help them understand the choices they face, provide some education and service, and, potentially, deliver returns on capital that exceed the market, with less risk, less tumult, and also while avoiding companies whose missions are opposed by my clients. (When you own the S&P, you own companies that build guns, burns coal, promote addictions, etc. Why should someone opposed to those endeavors accept them in their investment portfolios?)

To anyone who thinks investing is hard, I tell them that picking stocks is just a concentrated form of the same decisions people make all the time: what shoes to wear, what fruit to buy, what to eat for dinner. Once you lay out the parameters, it's easier to make a decision. Not easy, but easier.

As an avid investor, I balance the difficulty of decision making with the alternative, and I can't fathom why someone would want to risk capital on an undifferentiated mass of companies whose value - on whole - tracks GDP growth +/- people's attitudes (ie multiples). Why would I want to outsource mine and my clients' capital to other people's attitudes when knowledge and experience can do better? Instead, I prefer to make decisions, and as few as possible. 

Finally, I firmly believe that we lose things when we accept unexceptional, in the investment world and in the real world. 

What we lose in the process of making undifferentiated investments, is, I think a key point in that Sanford Bernstein piece from awhile back, that if we're no longer allocating capital to its best and highest use but simply spreading it around, we disrupt price signals and outsource returns simply to a function of interest rates and money supply. 

And in the personal world, there maybe even worse consequences. Music, art, movies, conversations with people, travel, real adventures - not 3D replicas - these experiences create emotions. Video games create emotions too, that's why they're so much fun. But when we dial down the experiences to a virtual one, I think we limit our emotional selves. We can't possibly experience the same catharsis at a 160 kbps bit rate as we do in real life. 

In both the investment world and the world around us, when the effort at reproduction isn't towards replicating the best experience but only about convenience and accessibility - yeah, it's good enough - something is lost. We shrink the world to a bunch of correlated experiences, rather than expand it to a variety of global ones. 

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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS IS NOT A SOLICITATION FOR BUSINESS OR A RECOMMENDATION TO BUY OR SELL SECURITIES. 

$EVI Acquisition: Brief Readthrough on WSD Deal + 8x ProForma Valuation

I first wrote about EVI here when I believed it to be the kind of well run company that I wanted to own forever; niche business that generates cash, functions in a kind of protected duopoly and doesn't dilute shareholders. I had behind me decades of financial statements as evidence that the business was a lock box for cash. It was a $16M mkt cap company.

Then, Henry Nahmad acquired a controlling interest in the company and he was pretty upfront that nothing / everything would change.

He'd keep the core business roughly the same but roll up the industry the way his uncle / father rolled up the HVAC industry ~40 years ago to create $WSO. Not a bad pedigree; WSO has returned +12,000% over the last 30 years.

And then nothing happened ...

... until the first week of Labor Day 2016 when the company announced its first deal to acquire Western State Design, a primarily West Coast distributor of industrial and coin/op laundry equipment, for $28M. WSD was privately held and owned by Dennis Mack and Tom Marks. With this first deal done, Nahmad can now be judged on his actions not his pedigree. 

This is a short summary of my reading on the deal.

Price / Structure / Value 

The deal has a headline $28M purchase price split between $18M in cash and $10M in stock. But there's more to the story than the headline ...

The $18M in cash comes from 1.29M shares sold to Nahmad's investment vehicle Symmetric LLC in a PIPE @ $4.65 / share (the close price before the deal closed) + $12M from a newly announced credit facility. The total size of the credit facility is $20M.

Of this cash, $15.2M is paid at the close and $2.8M will be escrowed until 18-mos after deal; this appears to be related to and contingent on collection of AR's at the time of the deal

The purchase price includes 2.04M shares of stock worth $10M based on the average closing price of the stock for the 10-days prior to the Asset Purchase Agreement. Mssrs Mack and Marks - the sellers - will own just south of 20% of the combined company after the deal.

+/- what appears to be standard working capital adjustments from the baseline $4.8M working capital at time of the deal.

Western State Design did $60M in sales last year vs $30M for the core EVI. The company, it should be noted, is tripling in size. Operationally, WSD appears to be more heavily weighted towards coin op than the commercial laundry equipment / boilers that EVI distributes. Also, there appears to be no overlap in regions as WSD is mostly out West and EVI in Florida / Caribbean / Central America.

WSD has more gov't contract / federal work than EVI and apparently has security clearances related to that work that will be transferred in the deal; (what kind of security clearance is required to do laundry?). Very little information is available though it at they are at least savvy enough to protest an award (FWIW).

Based on WSD's $60M sales figure and assuming roughly the same EBITDA margins as the core business, EVI is acquiring a company twice its size at 5x-6x EBITDA.

Before the deal EVI was trading at ~$4 / share or ~10x trailing EBITDA. Proforma it appears to be trading for ~8x proforma EBITDA.

The $12M in borrowings to fund the deal is part of a larger $20M credit facility with Wells Fargo, so they have access to an additional $8M in borrowings. Perhaps other deals are pending as well ... 

A bit about Western Design and its owners / sellers, Dennis Mack and Tom Marks

Mack and Marks are co-owners of the firm. Not much information available about them, strangely enough in this day and age of social media. Would like to learn more and probably will have a chance to meet them at the shareholder meeting in Nov, as they will both become execs of the company and at least one will serve on the board.

In the standard non-compete provision, there is a carve out for a business run by Dennis Mack: "The foregoing prohibition shall not apply to the involvement in any manner by Dennis Mack with respect to Associated Laundry Management, a commercial laundry  in Reno, Nevada." Maybe he has a lab underneath it.

Another irrelevent tidbit: EVI is not acquiring the facility of WSD's headquarters on Tripaldi Way in Hayward, CA, but rather signing a new lease with the existing landlord. That existing landlord is TylerTown LLC, an entity created in 2012 by the controller of WSD, Marianne Lenci, so like EVI itself, WSD pays rents to its CEO.

It's not an unusual situation - lots of companies do this - and its critical for investors who tend to dismiss such things as "inside dealing" to reflect and consider what's actually important information in making an investment decisions. I don't think this is.

Why am I scraping the Department of State filings to get information on this company? B/c I can't really find anything else material.

But as a sense of what kind of managers are Mssrs Marks and Mack, I found this interesting. In 2010 they had plans to develop on spec a "state-of-the-art commercial laundry for sale or lease to an operator, the company says. The building site encompasses 3.87 acres and includes a 14,000-square-foot enclosed service yard. It is strategically located for effective distribution throughout Northern California."

The risks for building on spec were somewhat offset by their ability to get funding from a state issued bond on the deal.

The point is, we know our new fellow shareholders and managers have a nose for opportunity. And they were willing to take 35% of their comp in stock. This reinforces that assumption and provides some affirmative bias that as with already existing shareholders, they see long term opportunity in the business.

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THIS IS NOT A SOLICITATION FOR BUSINESS OR A RECOMMENDATION TO BUY OR SELL SECURITIES. FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. THIS INFORMATION IS BASED ON MY READING OF PUBLIC FILINGS AND MIGHT BE INCOMPLETE OR JUST PLAIN WRONG.

The Bias of Other Shareholders

When the esteemed fashion / style photographer Bill Cunningham died, the WSJ's Ralph Gardner Jr (a colleague from my first job out of college) wrote a piece with a hed / subhed ...

"Bill Cunningham Leaves a Social Void
The late photographer’s presence at an event told you it was worth attending"

... which struck me as a great analog to an activity popular among many investors, which is to look at what other are doing as a way to confirm that the event they're attending stock they're buying is worth owning.

If you're like me, you probably like to know who the fellow owners are and what other good investors are doing. But even while I peek at owners, I remind myself that a company's ownership composition has absolutely no bearing - zero - on its future cash flows, which is the ultimate arbiter of value.

Yet every quarter there's a flurry of time and effort analyzing 13F filings. It is the 3rd biggest waste of time for a practice "generally accepted" among investors. (The 2nd biggest is reading most sell side notes and the 1st is watching business channels).

At least this tweet, which compiles recent 13F filings has the self awareness that yes, it is probably useless. And yet, like a car accident, it's hard not to peak.

Investing is a most personal enterprise, and in some cases a most lonely one. Stop caring what everyone else is doing! Its fine to find comfort in fellow owners and to know what others are doing, but chasing stocks that other's own is a perversion of what makes investing so interesting.

A far better use of time for investors is finding people who disagree with you, a structural advantage for investors who are married.

Remember that the strike zone isn't the same for all hitters. Figure out an investment style that makes most sense to you, find businesses that fit that style, and be okay not giving a hoot what others are doing. You should be good to go.

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THIS IS NOT A SOLICITATION FOR BUSINESS OR A RECOMMENDATION TO BUY / SELL SECURITIES. BEING MARRIED MAY NOT ACTUALLY MAKE YOU A BETTER INVESTOR.