Expectations Investing: Reading Stock Prices for Better Returns [Hardcover]

Alfred Rappaport (Author), Michael J. Mauboussin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2001

About 75 percent of active investors consistently deliver returns below those of passive index funds. Why? In part, it's because proven methods for valuing assets are too complex to apply-causing investors to rely on commonly used benchmarks such as current earnings and price-earnings multiples that simply don't reflect how the market prices stocks. Now, leading valuation experts Alfred Rappaport and Michael J. Mauboussin argue that the secret to beating the market stands in plain sight. Embedded in the stock price-the most accessible piece of information in the investment arena-lies all investors need to know about how the market expects a company to perform. By correctly decoding that information, say the authors, investors are on the way to anticipating changes in a company's competitive position that the current stock price doesn't reflect-and making informed buy, hold, or sell decisions before the rest of the crowd. This proven approach, expectations investing, holds the potential to change the rules and improve the odds of the stock selection game forever. The beauty of expectations investing is that it harnesses the power of the market's own tried-and-true pricing model-discounted cash flow-without requiring difficult and often dubious long-term forecasting. Highly practical, the book provides a strategic framework and corresponding tools for using price-implied expectations (PIE) to: Interpret current prices and anticipate revisions in expectations; Monitor signals from managerial actions such as mergers and acquisitions and share buybacks and estimate their impact on shareholder value; and, Devise, adjust, and communicate management strategy in light of shareholder expectations. In addition, a unique expectations infrastructure helps track value creation from the initial triggers that shape performance to the resulting impact on sales, operating profit margins, and investment efficiency. Universally applicable to public companies across the economic landscape, "Expectations Investing" will enable professional investors, analysts, and executives to translate heightened uncertainty into lucrative opportunity. Alfred Rappaport is the Leonard Spacek Professor Emeritus at Northwestern's Kellogg School and is Shareholder Value Adviser to L.E.K. Consulting. He originated the Shareholder Scoreboard for "The Wall Street Journal". Michael J. Mauboussin is a Managing Director and Chief U.S. Investment Strategist at Credit Suisse First Boston. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School. Visit the book's dedicated Web site at: our associated website.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Instead of focusing on the short term--earnings per share, price-earnings multiples--Rappaport (Creating Shareholder Value), formerly a professor at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, and Mauboussin, chief investment strategist at Credit Suisse First Boston, recommend "expectations investing," which "starts with the current stock price and uses the discounted cash-flow model to `read' what the market implies about a company's future performance." They discuss sample companies (Gateway), historical patterns, competitive strategies and share value. Though they expertly simplify a complex topic, beginners may find the book overly technical. However, the authors' credentials, a national interview campaign and author appearances should attract deserved attention. Tables.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Alfred Rappaport is the Leonard Spacek Professor Emeritus at Northwestern's Kellogg School and is Shareholder Value Adviser to L.E.K. Consulting. He originated the Shareholder Scoreboard for the Wall Street Journal.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press; 1ST edition (September 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1578512522
• ISBN-13: 978-1578512522
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,072,529 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Investing Bible, April 5, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Expectations Investing: Reading Stock Prices for Better Returns (Hardcover)

When I started working on Wall Street ten years ago, I thought my colleagues would be fantastic stockpickers who used intelligence, foresight, and brilliant paradigms to pick great stocks.

The last decade has taught me that most Wall Street analysts are very intelligent. However, I must report that as a whole, they have *no idea* what they're doing. I'm not sure how it happened, but most investors have come to believe in a hodge-podge of rules-of-thumb that "everyone knows" but nobody can explain. Arbitarily, "growth" investors tell us to "Buy stocks that grow their earnings faster than their P/E multiples!" Just as randomly, "value" investors tell us to "Only buy stocks with low P/E's with lots of book value!" If you try to integrate all these rules of thumbs into a single mental model, you have to make so many exceptions to every rule that your mind feels like Swiss cheese.

In contrast, this book offers a clean, intelligent FRAMEWORK for thinking about investing in anything that produces a stream of future cash flows (including stocks, of course). It's the investing Bible I wish I had when I started my career. It would have shaved years from my investing education, and saved me from numerous migraines.

The book starts with the same first principles you read in your Corporate Finance textbook, makes relevant the practical arcana you learned in Accounting class, and incorporates Porter's and other strategy frameworks into valuation. The book presents a CLEAN and FLEXIBLE way of thinking about stocks. For example, you can apply their approach to Dell from its IPO to today -- and get useful data that would help with a Buy/Sell decision. Traditional value investing would have had you out of the stock way before it was a ten-bagger, and momentum investing would have whipsawed you in and out of the stock with no rhyme or reason.

Don't get me wrong, though. Rappaport and Mauboussin haven't invented a new Theory of Investing tabula rasa. What they've done is integrate the best of academic research and practical finance into a single framework. And they've written great additional material, like the chapter on M&A (which is better than the entire Sirower "Synergy Trap" book) that presents an approach to analyzing deals sensibly. And the chapter on Employee Stock Options is critical to valuing tech companies, but isn't even covered in the McKinsey Valuation book, Quest for Value, and other books I've read.

If you want a confusing investing book full of fun (but useless) war stories, read the fictional Reminiscences of a Stock Operator or 99.9% of nonfiction investing screeds. Until Warren Buffet writes his book, if you want something that can help you invest intelligently and avoid headaches, this is the book to buy.

Note: People who already know (or are willing to learn) how to analyze a company's financial statements will get the most from reading this book.

49 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Should be called "Foundations of Investing", October 31, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Expectations Investing: Reading Stock Prices for Better Returns (Hardcover)

You can read this book in a number of ways:

1. TAKE JUST WHAT YOU NEED. Even though I'm a valuation expert, I thought some chapters of this book stood out as just plain useful. Chapters with great standalone value include: (A) Chapter 8 on Real Options, which develops the only framework for applying real options that I've seen that's intuitive; (B) Chapter 10 on M&A analysis which gives a solid treatment of all deals including often-ignored fixed-value stock deals; and (C) Chapter 5 Appendix on Employee Stock Options which explains how ESOs affect valuation (this is ignored by every other book on valuation). Moreover, I found the tutorials and spreadsheets at the expectationsinvesting.com web site made it easy to apply these ideas without hours of tedious spreadsheet work.

Some chapters may be more or less applicable to various readers. For example, investors may find Chapter 11 on incentive compensation to be more applicable to managers. Also, Chapter 4 is most beneficial to those who haven't read the strategy frameworks of Michael Porter, Clayton Christensen of INNOVATOR'S DILEMMA, and Varian/Shapiro of INFORMATION RULES.

2. USE "EI" TO PICK STOCKS. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 lay out the "EI approach" to investing. Namely, the authors suggest that investors use a DCF approach to reverse engineer consensus expectations from a company's current stock price. Then, the authors suggest you compare YOUR expectations to CONSENSUS/MARKET expectations. If you think market expectations are low, buy the stock. If you think market expectations are too high, sell or short the stock.

At first glance, it might seem that this material has already been covered in McKinsey's VALUATION or Damodaran's valuation library. But those books don't deal with two things: (A) the importance of the "forecast period" and its relation to strategy and competition, and (B) the importance of figuring out market expectations. Thus, even though I've read those and other books, I learned a lot in this section.

3. TO LEARN HOW TO THINK ABOUT INVESTING. I'd also recommend this book to someone who had a smattering of financial knowledge, but was confused by the contradictory smorgasbord of investing theories out there. Any MBA -- or any determined individual investor who can read a balance sheet -- would find this to be a great foundation book. You could use other more detailed books to fill in the cracks, but this is the best place to start.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An interesting read, September 27, 2006

By 

Befragt (Midwest USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Expectations Investing: Reading Stock Prices for Better Returns (Paperback)

An interesting read for the serious investor. The central tenet of the book might be stated as "investors do not earn superior rates of return on stocks that are priced fully to reflect future performance - even for the best value-creating companies - which is why great companies are not great stocks." This book posits that investors can read market expectations contained in a stock's price and anticipate revisions in those expectations to achieve superior returns. It book provides a detailed, step-by-step way to accomplish this process.

"Expectations Investing" is divided into three parts. Part I details how to determine the expectations for a stock based upon its current market price. Interestingly, rather than determine a "fair price" based upon a company's free cash flow, the book turns this process upside down, using a company's stock price to determine the market's expectations for free cash flow going forward. Next, the book helps identify "expectations opportunities" - places where revisions in the stock market's expectations are likely to take place. By focusing on key areas where expectations opportunities may take place (so-called "turbo triggers"), the skilled investor can modify their discounted cash flow projections to determine the appropriate price. This section further provides a framework to determine when to apply buy, sell, and hold decisions. Lastly, Part III of the book explains how certain, specific corporate events (mergers, share buybacks, and incentive compensation) may signal that expectations revisions are in order.

Within the book itself, I found the chapter on "Analyzing Competitive Strategy" to be an outstanding, investor-focused distillation of many of the points contained in Porter's "Competitive Strategy." Moreover, the chapters on specific corporate events were interesting insofar as they explain, in greater detail than I had read before, the quantitative analysis that underlies decisions related to mergers, share buybacks, and incentive compensation.

Potential readers should be aware that the authors of this book, like many stock analysts, adhere to the so-called "Capital Asset Pricing Model" school of thought (that the value of a security equals the rate on a risk-free security plus a premium, beta, which is determined based upon the volatility of the security in question). This model is just one of many that investors may use. Moreover, although stock analysts may have access to customers, creditors, competitors, and company insiders, many individual investors will lack those contacts, and thus face some difficulty in determining possible expectations revisions. Even if an investor had access to such information, the developing field of behavioral finance (see Belsky and Gilovich, "Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes" as but one example) would caution that investors seeking to implement the methods set forth in this book need to be careful of confirmation bias (tending to view information in a way that supports their pre-determined preferences) and information cascade (too much information), among others.

Lastly, readers should be aware that modeling out the process described by this book requires some math, and the ability to create spreadsheets of middling-level complexity. This is not a "buy low P/E" book - readers will have to do their homework to use these methods. Anyone who isn't looking to put several hours into investigating each stock they are interested in should look elsewhere.

In all, this is a well-written book that makes a very complicated process relatively simple. It is not designed for the casual reader, and implementing the expectations investing process certainly takes considerable work. However, the book provides valuable insights into how analysts function and how stocks are priced by public markets.

However, if forced to pick a well-written, fairly sophisticated book on investing, I'd recommend a few other books ahead of this one, including "Security Analysis" by Benjamin Graham and either of Martin Whitman's books ("The Aggressive Conservative Investor" or "Value Investing").