My investment strategy is to invest in small and often illiquid companies. This is where I have the greatest advantage. I am willing to spend time investigating names that very few others have even heard of. I have my doubts that there are more than a few handfuls of investors in the world that have spent the number of hours I have on Community Bankers Trust (BTC) or Rurban Financial (RBNF).
Investing in micro/nano/nonexistent cap companies gives me the opportunity to take advantage of what can sometimes be large price discrepancies. But it also has its drawbacks. In particular, because the companies are illiquid, I often cannot get out quickly once the tide has turned.
While I try to hedge this risk with due diligence, there is another aspect that cannot be mitigated with company specific research. In particular, when the macro becomes trump, these little stocks can become very difficult to unload.
I am not very good at holding tight through thick and thin. Perhaps I am a child of 2008 where I learned the rather significant lesson that buying and holding because the business is sound is not always a preferable strategy. In addition to the money and time lost by holding on, there is the mental toll that it takes. I hate to use cliches, but the one that fits well here is that it is better to live to fight another day.
I went back and reviewed some of my past posts on the macro-scene. I haven’t written very much about the macro-environment since my post “It’s a bull market“. In that post I outlined that while I remained wary of the long-term conditions in Europe and was concerned that the LTRO was only short-term panacea that would eventually be overcome by a tide of falling economic data, that the bottom-line was liquidity, which was abundant, and as far as stocks go that tends to trump all:
The underlying condition right now is one of liquidity. It is not the intent of this blog to philosophize (too much) on the eventual consequences of such liquidity. There are plenty of folks, like the wonderful Ms. Park, who are already describing those consequences eloquently. The intent here is to try to evaluate those conditions clearly, and to describe how I am acting to capitalize on those conditions.
For the moment anyways, that means that I own stocks. Read more
Reminiscences of a Stockblogger 