Lately, I’ve been doing some back-testing to try and find good answers to the following: (1) What if someone invested a lump sum in 2007 right before the financial crisis, and (2) what if that investor paid an unusually high premium for the stock even during a period of high valuations? It’s been my way of challenging the Benjamin Graham thesis that investors should focus on getting the price above all else. I wanted to test scenarios to see what happens if treated quality as your primary concern, and regarded price as a secondary matter (you can never truly get past “price matters” because paying something like 50x earnings for Coca-Cola in 1998 will take 25 years to burn off, but you can test what happens when you pay 25x earnings for a high-quality stock instead of 20x earnings.)
My testing gave me renewed appreciation for the likes of Hershey, … Read the rest of this article!