2006年度Canada\'s best small investors之一:Bengt Kaus,一個在20年內由35K到2M

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今日,From the October 2006 issue of MoneySense magazine 上,偶爾讀到一篇文章-Canada's best small investors

Duncan Hood,上麵介紹了一個在20年內由35K到2MIL的故事,他的名字叫Bengt Kaus.

Bengt Kaus 在21年前,即1986年在他將近40歲時辭職,拿著單位給的$35,000 severance package,加上$25,000 line of credit ,開始全職在家抄股,20年後,他的PORTFOLIO成長為2百萬.其增長幅度為5614.3%(5.6倍),折合複式年平均增長:22.42%. Bengt Kaus有什麽奧秘能把35K抄成2MIL?讓我們來看看他的股市:

A year ago MoneySense set out to find Canada's Best Small Investors. Our ambitions were humble: we hoped to find a couple of people with long track records of consistently doing a little bit better than the market. Much to our surprise, we found four investors who had not only beaten the market, but had left it black and blue. All were regular folks who worked (or had worked) at regular jobs, but two were multi-millionaires, one retired at age 34, and all had grown their wealth at an astonishing rate.

We thought that settled the matter — obviously amateur investors can beat the market. But some of you were skeptical. You pointed out that perhaps our small investors were just lucky. So this year we're taking a closer look at exactly how Canada's best small investors do it. First, we'll introduce you to a new investing genius, Bengt Kaus. He retired at 40 with just $35,000 in the bank, and today, 20 years later, he's worth more than $2 million.

Bengt Kaus was only 40 when he decided to get out of the workforce — for good. His employer, Richardson Greenshields, was moving from Winnipeg to Toronto, and Kaus, who doesn't like big cities, couldn't see himself being happy in the gritty streets of Hogtown. So he resolved to quit his job, take his $35,000 severance package from Richardson, and turn it into a fortune he could live off for the rest of his life.

It was a crazy plan. Among other things, Kaus was married with two kids. But he carried through on his audacious scheme — and to say that things have worked out well is an understatement. He's supported himself for 20 years with his investing profits, while growing his $35,000 grubstake into a $2 million portfolio.

How did he accomplish this amazing feat? Kaus seems bewildered by the question. "It's dedication," he says, as if the answer were as obvious as the bristling beard on his ruddy face. "If you really want something, you'll achieve it. But you can't do it by spending a couple of hours a week on your portfolio and picking stocks you read about in the newspaper."

That's why Kaus devotes 40 hours a week to tending his portfolio. In the early days he saw himself as an entrepreneur trying to start a business, and like any entrepreneur, he put in long hours and borrowed big to get his enterprise off the ground. "There are a lot of entrepreneurs out there who start their own companies and fly by the seat of their pants for the first few years," he says. "And going out on your own in the investing world is no different."

Before he launched his solo attack on the investing world, Kaus had already learned a couple of important lessons. He began his working life as a geologist, and as a 23-year-old exploring for ore deposits in the Manitoba bush, he made the mistake of pouring money into a few penny mining stocks. "When you're working in the field, you think you have a bit of an edge," he says, "but timing your buying and selling is never easy." The lesson he took away? "Don't invest in speculative stocks. It's a good lesson to learn when you're young. Many people never learn it."

Kaus had also been an apt pupil when it came to saving a buck. Growing up on a rural prairie homestead, he learned the value of a dollar early in life. When he and his wife, Caroline, bought their first house in 1973, four years after graduating from university, they paid more than a third of the purchase price in cash. "We used bed sheets for curtains on the windows," he remembers, "because every spare dime I had went towards paying off the mortgage."

After working as a geologist for 10 years, Kaus landed a job as a securities analyst at Richardson Securities, which later became Richardson Greenshields, before it was swallowed by RBC Dominion Securities. "I had absolutely no training as an analyst," he recalls, "but as a geologist, you assess projects, and it's not difficult to go from doing an analysis on a project to doing an analysis on a junior oil and gas company." It was at Richardson that he mastered the accounting ratios that he still uses today to appraise investments. He also learned the most important lesson of his youth: how to spot stocks trading below their intrinsic value, a technique commonly referred to as value investing. "It's different now, but stock analysis was value investing back in the early 1980s," he says. "At least it was where I worked."

As he neared his 40th birthday, all of the key elements of Kaus's investing strategy were in place — but he wasn't doing much investing because he didn't have the money. Then he got his $35,000 severance package, took out a $25,000 line of credit and became a full-time investor. It was 1986 and time to put his stock-market lessons to the test.

The early days were rough, he admits: "It requires an understanding family, when you don't have a paycheque coming in every two weeks." Caroline brought in some money from her job with the Manitoba government, but "sometimes we had to live on my line of credit for a while." It didn't help that his portfolio returns were all over the place. He'd double his money one year, then lose half of it the next. Finally, after five years, his results became more dependable. His portfolio had grown to the point where he could diversify, and he managed to lower his investing costs and gain more control of his portfolio by opening a BMO InvestorLine discount brokerage account, which he's still using to this day.

Kaus's investing strategy starts with the big picture. He looks at different asset classes and sectors, then puts his money into the sectors that he believes are primed for growth, while avoiding those that face slow growth or challenges. "Right now I'm doing some research into the shipping sector, the big tankers that carry oil and iron ore and things like that," he says.

When a sector catches his eye, he researches it for several days or longer, devouring hundred-page SEC filings and scouring the Internet for tidbits. He wants to know if the sector has unrecognized growth potential, or whether it's simply a hot industry at a cyclical peak that will soon fade. Perhaps because of his early training as a geologist, he knows that you must do a lot of exploration to turn up one significant discovery. "Ninety-nine times out of 100, I end up rejecting an idea for one reason or another," he says. "But I do look into a lot of prospects."

On those rare occasions when he's convinced of a sector's potential, Kaus performs a careful comparison of the leading companies in the industry. He is looking for the best deal. Sometimes he'll invest in just one company, other times he spreads his risk among several. He wants to find companies that are trading at low multiples of their earnings, but also have strong growth prospects that aren't reflected in their share price. In addition, he wants to see strong cash flow and low debt. "I'm nervous about companies with high debt levels, but there's no magic number," he says. "If an oil and gas company had a high level of debt it would scare me off, but if a real estate company had the same level, backed by commercial real estate, then I'm not so easily scared."

Kaus's strategy has led him to an odd grab bag of stocks, many of which he's owned for years. ING Group, the Dutch-based banking and insurance conglomerate, makes up 20% of his portfolio and is his biggest single holding. He started buying the American depositary shares several years ago when analysts were worried about troubles in ING's insurance subsidiaries. He paid an average of $18 or $19 a share. Today it's worth more than $40 a share "yet it continues to have a price-earnings ratio of less than 11, and ING's growth prospects are decent, in line with the rest of the financial sector, perhaps a little better," says Kaus. "Plus, it pays good dividends, and if it looks like we're going into a bit of an economic downturn, I think the financial services sector is a good place to hide. Nothing is perfectly safe, but in that sector you'll rebound quicker and lose less."