Análisis de Massif Capital sobre su posición en Barrick Gold
Barrick Gold: We entered Barrick Gold at an average price of roughly $10 a share in late 2018, and on the Friday before the firm announced its transformational merger with Randgold. Over the approximately two years that we held the position, not only did the price of gold rally dramatically, but the business itself produced excellent returns under a superior (dare we say the best?) management team in the gold industry.
The position returned roughly 125% or 6.6% to the portfolio. Although this is a good return, the position was not without its challenges. The first challenge was sizing. We started the position small, with a roughly 3% portfolio weighting. We intended to add to the position, but we proved behaviorally incapable of adding to a position that had appreciated significantly. This is a behavioral shortcoming that should not be dismissed simply because we made money and is without question a mark against us as investors.
We are aware of it, though, and awareness will hopefully help us avoid making similar mistakes in the future. The second challenge came at the time of closing out the position. Although we remain highly constructive on gold in general, we believed we needed to exit the position as our valuation for the company was between $20 and $25 per share at gold prices of around $1,500 to $1,600 an ounce. At our exit, the company was trading between 125% and 150% of the low end of our intrinsic value estimate. So although constructive on gold, and thus open to the possibility that a continued run in gold might take the stock higher on sentiment and momentum, we were concerned that the additional price appreciation was exposing us to the risk of needing to find a greater fool to sell the position to, if and when we wanted to exit.
This was one of the more difficult decisions we made this quarter, but hopefully represents a situation we will find ourselves frequently. Our valuation of Barrick was based on a fundamental mine by mine model supported and informed by a qualitative assessment of the companies' possible paths forward. The model, by its nature, was static and did not consider sentiment or market action, but we, as portfolio managers, must. Barrick had reached its fundamental intrinsic value by our measure and was trading on some combination of momentum and positive sentiment around the price of gold.
The positive momentum is undoubtedly something we aim to capture and will always be present in commodityrelated businesses, especially when the commodity starts to move. The judgment calls around capturing that momentum are not easy, and the call is more about a qualitative feel for the market being made in the stock then they are about facts and figures. When confronted with challenges such as this, we often try to create a process that allows us to think through the strengths and weaknesses of any given decision systematically, so we can keep clear what we know, what we don't, and most importantly, why we are making a decision.
Unfortunately, despite some valiant efforts by quantitatively driven investors, the decision about when to sell a winner that has positive momentum remains elusive.