Have You Looked At The Heady Hundred?

As a contrarian investor, Allan Gray’s offshore partner, Orbis, prefers to invest in businesses that are overlooked or hated, rather than in ‘exciting’ businesses whose prices are racing ahead of fundamentals. John Christy from Orbis discusses.

- John Christy

Imagine you are at a cocktail party in May 2012. The conversation turns to the stock market, and your friend mentions that she bought Facebook at its initial public offering (IPO) that month. You tell everyone that you just invested in a trucking business. While your friend instantly becomes the life of the party, you spend the rest of the evening staring into your drink.

Your friend made a good call — Facebook’s share price has risen almost sevenfold since the IPO. But your investment in XPO Logistics was also pretty exciting. Its share price performance was even with Facebook’s as recently as this January, and both companies delivered similarly strong revenue per share growth through the end of 2019. Since then, the pandemic has been considerably more painful for XPO’s shares than Facebook’s, so you “only” made about 400% overall. But both stocks trounced the S&P 500’s 200% return.

Great investments come in different forms