Yearly Archives: 2018

Carta da Parceria de Investimentos – 2018


Caros parceiros,

o retorno da nossa parceria em 2018 foi de 11,51%. A cota encerrou o ano a R$1,08264.

Nossa parceria ficou aquém do índice Bovespa, que subiu 15,03% no ano, por 3,52 pontos percentuais.

Ano Nosso Fundo Ibovespa
2017 29,44% 26,86%
2018 11,51% 15,03%
Acumulado 44,34% 45,93%

Em 2018, descontando leituras de livros e artigos sobre investimentos, dediquei 144 horas à análise de empresas — um aumento de 27,43% em relação a 2017.

Um outro número de menor importância, porém digno de menção, foi o aumento de 49,18% nos ativos sob administração, ou seja, o total de reais no fundo. Vale lembrá-los de que toda a minha poupança vai para este fundo, e se isso porventura mudar algum dia, vocês serão informados com antecedência. O princípio é simples: objetivos compartilhados e a certeza de que estou cuidando da parceria com o mesmo zelo com que cuido do futuro da minha família.

Ao longo deste ano não vendemos nenhuma das ações que tínhamos no dia 1º de janeiro. Nosso portfólio consistia em 4 empresas: Cyrela, Hering, Metisa e Tarpon. A participação na Cyrela, que em janeiro era “nova e relativamente menor”, recebeu acréscimos e, junto com alguma apreciação, hoje representa um quarto do portfólio. O ano foi fértil em ideias de investimento, num total de duas: inauguramos participações, ambas também muito novas e relativamente menores, na Construtora Trisul e na Cielo, empresa de meio de pagamentos.

Os parceiros que prestaram atenção às atualizações trimestrais deste ano certamente observaram a grande volatilidade nas cotações do fundo, e em menor medida no mercado como um todo. É mesmo de se esperar que nosso fundo, que teve de 4 a 6 empresas ao longo de 2018, exiba variações muito mais amplas de cotação do que índices com dezenas de empresas. Desta forma, eu não me sentirei um investidor fracassado se em determinado trimestre, semestre ou ano formos pior do que determinado índice, e da mesma forma não me sentirei um gênio se o oposto acontecer. Ao longo de mais tempo, por exemplo blocos de 5 anos, o objetivo continua sendo superar consistentemente o índice Bovespa.

Uma pergunta que veio de parceiros este ano foi sobre expectativas quanto ao trimestre subsequente a cada atualização que envio, talvez uma espécie de “guidance”. A verdade é que admitir que não temos poderes de clarividência já é uma vantagem competitiva: muitas pessoas extrapolam precedentes ou apostam em repetições duvidosas de fatos para alocar capital, com consequências muitas vezes desastrosas para suas economias.

Felizmente, com um prazo maior podemos vislumbrar o futuro de modo bastante útil. É possível, por exemplo, dizer que a saúde financeira atual de algumas empresas brasileiras e a sua capacidade de ganhos, comparadas aos seus preços de hoje, nos dão grande confiança de retornos expressivos em um horizonte de 10 anos para investidores pacientes e cautelosos.

E já que estamos falando de cautela, é hora da parte mais importante das nossas cartas: os erros do ano. Em 2018 tivemos algo que tem toda a cara de erro e de qualquer modo nos custou bastante: a Tarpon Investimentos.

Comprei participação na Tarpon nos primeiros meses de 2017. Naquele momento muitas empresas brasileiras estavam à venda por preço equivalente a menos de 10 anos da média dos seus lucros recentes, mas o caso da Tarpon era mais extremo, girando em torno de 3 anos.

Não é de se esperar que empresa alguma chegue a este preço sem um gatilho negativo. Mais de 4 anos antes, a Tarpon havia tomado a arrojada decisão de, fugindo de seu histórico de investidores passivos, controlar e operar suas investidas. Não só isso: pouco tempo depois ela concentrou a maior parte de seu capital em uma só empresa: a BRF de Sadia e Perdigão.

A história é longa e até, para um livro, interessante. Hoje sabemos que ela culminou na Operação Carne Fraca e até mesmo na prisão preventiva de Pedro Faria (sócio da Tarpon que foi CEO da BRF) e no indiciamento dele, do então CEO Zeca Magalhães e de Abílio Diniz, presidente do conselho da BRF trazido ao cargo pela Tarpon.

A intersecção entre “histórias interessantes” e “bons investimentos no longo prazo” é bastante pequena, e acredito que seja mais útil compartilhar os aprendizados deste investimento para prevenir a repetição de erros:

  1. Aplicar o mesmo nível de exigência quanto a baixo nível de dívidas ao analisar as subsidiárias. A Tarpon em si não tinha dívida nenhuma, mas suas subsidiárias tinham níveis de dívidas que me fariam pensar mais de duas vezes antes de investir diretamente.
  2. Preferir muita clareza, transparência e facilidade de entender o negócio. Desvendar o portfolio da Tarpon demandou esforço. Hoje eu encaro isso como um sinal de perigo. Minhas tentativas de contato com a empresa para fazer perguntas nunca tiveram resposta. Na época eu racionalizei que, por ser um investidor pequeno, talvez não merecesse a atenção. Hoje eu racionalizaria que eles é que não merecem o nosso investimento.

O ano terminou com a notícia da intenção da Tarpon de fechar seu capital, horas após o último pregão de 2018. Mesmo ressaltando que até agora não foi divulgada nenhuma evidência de atuação criminosa por parte dos executivos da Tarpon, o fato de a empresa ter vendido ações no meio do ano a R$2,58 para cobrir folha de pagamento e, tão pouco tempo depois, anunciar a intenção de recomprar as mesmas ações por R$2,25 é um sinal muito forte, talvez até para os investidores mais pacientes, de que o melhor a fazer é agradecer ao milagre da diversificação e buscar outras ideias.

Entramos em 2019 com quase 35% do nosso portfolio em duas empresas de construção de imóveis: a Cyrela e a Trisul. São companhias de tamanhos muito diferentes, mas que têm em comum o fato de estarem passando pela grave crise no setor com as finanças equilibradas. Também aqui o fim do ano trouxe notícias que podem afetar, desta vez positivamente, nossos resultados: a mudança na Lei do Distrato. Até a semana passada, um comprador de imóvel na planta que desistisse da compra conseguiria 50% do seu dinheiro de volta. A boa intenção de proteger o consumidor acabou desencorajando as empresas de assumir o risco de oferecer novos imóveis. Com a mudança, esse percentual de restituição em caso de desistência tende a ser muito reduzido, e as empresas contarão também com um tempo de carência de 6 meses para entregar os imóveis sem sofrer multas.

Nosso investimento em Cyrela e Trisul não foi pautado em mudanças na legislação, e sim em acreditar que as administrações são competentes e que, o setor superando o momento de dificuldade, ambas estarão muito bem preparadas para dar ótimos resultados nos próximos anos.

Se já admiti que a Tarpon é dúvida em nossa carteira para o futuro, digo também que acredito que teremos longa parceria com nossas demais empresas. Acredito também que deveremos ter uma diversificação um pouco maior do que 5 ou 6 empresas, e trabalharei bastante para encontrar as próximas ideias de investimento para a parceria.

Na carta do ano passado mencionei a intenção de converter esta parceria ainda bastante informal em algo formalizado, permitindo que tenhamos valores mais significativos no portfolio. A intenção continua firme e forte. Não tenho um cronograma para isso, mas me comunicarei com cada um de vocês no momento oportuno.

Terei prazer em responder a quaisquer perguntas, em qualquer momento. Se eu não tiver deixado algo claro na carta, por gentileza não hesitem em me avisar para que eu possa esclarecer para todos.

Um ótimo 2019 para você, seus familiares e amigos!

My Year In: Books

In 2018 I read 28 books. The number means little but this is probably the lowest for me in many years.

I’ve noticed a trend this year of enthusiastic book readers becoming less so, and praising blogs and other media instead. That was not really the case for me: this year my family and I spent another two months in Italy, and again, why read books if you’re living inside one. More importantly, my wife had twins.

This year I continued to read in Italian, and I was able to read much more advanced texts like Diario Minimo by Umberto Eco, Mark Twain’s Following the Equator and Elisabeth Roudinesco’s biography of Jacques Lacan. Out of the 28 books, 5 were in Italian.

Last year I mentioned I had taken up audiobooks, and this year I continued to listen to them, 11 in total. I think I have gotten better as a listener of books, and the main thing I’ve been doing more often is re-listening to sections of books. This seems to compensate for the lower rate of absorption I seem to be capable of in audio form.

The book I liked reading the most this year was “Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes”, by Daniel Everett. In it, Everett recounts his experiences living with the Piraha tribe in the Amazon jungle. His initial mission was to translate the Bible to their language as a Christian missionary. What he comes across, however, changes his own life. It’s a profound encounter of two cultures that could not be more different from one another, in the midst of another culture, that of Northern Brazil. On top of it all, Everett, also a linguist, discovers a language unlike any other in the world, and picks a fight with Noam Chomsky about what even constitutes human language. It’s all so amazing you wonder how much of it is really true. Incidentally, this one was in audio book format and it was great to hear the author reading it, warts, emotion and all.

This year I doubled down on a practice I had started, but not mentioned, last year: that of translating/transcribing books. In 2017 I went to Berlin while living in Italy and really loved it. It was my first time in Germany, and it made me want to learn some German. While in Rome I had learned of Goethe’s experience living there, and of a book recounting his life in Italy. So I started translating “Italienische Reise” from German to Portuguese, and that has been my introduction to German. One year and a half later, I’m still in page 20 of the book. I may go entire weeks without doing it, but I have fun when I translate a paragraph or two. And the links between the German language and the others I know are always deeply touching. Languages are among my favorite things in the world.

So by doubling down I meant I started doing something similar with another book. This time I am not translating but transcribing Security Analysis, by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd. It’s one of the most important books about investing of all time, I had read it before but it’s such a dense book that I thought I should do this to slow it down and spend more time with each paragraph. Almost every weekday I dedicate 10 minutes to it. At the current pace I will need several more years to complete the book. I have no idea if I want to do the whole thing, but I can say it’s been a great experience so far.

If you’d like to see all the books I’ve read in 2018, please take a look at my Goodreads year list and do friend me there if you wish.

My Year in: Software Development

The year of 2018 has been a wild ride for me. It started at EmCasa.com, the startup I described a year ago. We were in the process of putting out a successful MVP, engaging clients, becoming accelerated by Harvard University and closing out an excellent seed round with important investors. All this in just a few months.

Very quickly my job morphed from do-it-all (think product and CTO duties, plus co-founder responsibilities) to team-building. This was a highlight as I was lucky to bring in great people like Gabriela Seabra, Nathan Queija and Rodrigo Nonose, each respectively owning mobile, web frontend and backend. On the design side, Plau.co did great work.

For the first time I felt fully ready to create a digital company in style. The Elixir-React stack worked beautifully, we rolled out features fast and the development team became a cohesive unit very quickly.

Towards the middle of the year, as the company reached 14 people, it had become clear to me that there wasn’t a good cultural fit among the founders. It was one of those very painful decisions but ultimately not difficult to make when visions don’t intersect well enough: we parted ways amicably at the end of July and I went looking for a new job.

That month was tense for me. I knew I had a deadline to basically stop getting paid, my wife was 6 months pregnant with twins and I had nothing lined up as far as work.

I am part of Toptal’s network of freelancers and that was one of the main ways I tried to find the next thing. I found something that really interested me: they had posted an opening to join their Core Team. I applied, passed, and joined the team as a freelancer in August. 

The first few weeks were hard in a sense: I and two other developers coming from Toptal’s talent network had a kind of secondary status, without access to many tools. Luckily our teammates were extremely helpful and welcoming. In a few weeks we became official team members and got access to what the other engineers see.

My team works on Toptal’s public pages, from home to skill pages, basically everything a logged out user can access in the website. 

It’s been a tremendous experience for me so far, as it’s the largest organization I’ve been a part of in technology. Toptal is in fact the largest fully distributed company in the world today. As such, I work with people from all over the world, and that’s the part I like best. To do it from home is the cherry on the cake as my children are very young and being close to the family is priceless at this moment.

At my team I’ve experienced the most well-developed set of processes I’ve ever come across. The firm has reached a level of maturity that allows for very well written task tickets, a proper retrospective at the end of each sprint, interesting strategic discussions among executives, and work that has large-scale, immediate impact. On the other hand, I am very far from top strategic decisions and information, and this feels weird to me having run my own company for so many years.

To a very large extent, this was the year when, for me, technical concerns became secondary to human concerns. Sure, if you’re starting a product alongside just one other person, what tech stack exactly to choose is of paramount importance. In a team of 200 that’s much less important, as each person can focus on a narrower part of the work, and the human interactions can catalyze or hinder progress.

Thus, I gave myself the chance of observing all the teams in the organization: dialogs, processes and rituals. Whatever was visible to me, I tried to learn from. It wasn’t long before I got the opportunity to onboard newcomers, help interview candidates, conduct daily standups and interface with other companies. That’s not to say I didn’t study programming this year: I continued my deep-dive into the Elixir codebase, studied GraphQL, some more Elm, algorithms, some Python and a little bit of Natural Language Processing.

It’s much easier to paste some code or links to a framework and illustrate what goes on as a programmer. Human interactions seem to me much harder to communicate. A book that does a great job of explaining management applied to software is The Manager’s Path, by Camille Fournier. I read it this year and it very neatly sums up many things we learn the hard way, plus many others I simply did not know.

So this year was one in which I started out as CTO and ended-up as an individual contributor. But each experience has taught me a lot about management and leadership, which will be my way forward in technology.

 

Naive Investor, Episode 400

Today Naive Investor has hit episode 400.

If anything, a good excuse to post about it here.

Initially I went for posting every single episode in this blog, but pretty quickly the blog would become just a mirror of the YouTube channel.

A lot of learning has indeed taken place. That was the main goal. Along the way, people have sent me corrections, suggestions and encouraging messages.

At year end I will publish the update to the little (but growing) investing partnership I’ve been running rather informally for now, and which incorporates the knowledge gathered from the Naive Investor videos.

If you don’t yet subscribe to the channel, please consider doing so: https://www.youtube.com/c/NaiveInvestor

And here’s the 400th episode:

On Learning How to Learn

These past few weeks I took Coursera’s Learning How to Learn, thanks to Toptal’s advancement program.

My main takeaways from this course were the Memory Palace technique and the Hard Start-Jump to Easy technique.

The course is about much more than just those two tips, but I should admit that to a large extent I already knew and practiced them: chunking, diffuse and focused modes of studying, using visual analogies for memorization, the importance of sleep in learning, how apparently unrelated interests help propel deep learning, motivation-procrastination-blocks, focus on process rather than final product. If anything, it was nice to get something of a more scientific basis for things that we learn in life by trial-and-error or by imitation.

The Memory Palace Technique is useful for when we need to memorize unrelated items, for example a shopping list. It’s a seemingly bizarre strategy: you mentally place each item in, say, rooms in your home. Cheese goes on top of the fridge, detergent goes inside the oven, toilet paper on your bed, and somehow, they say, your visual brain helps you recall the items much better.

I was not aware of this technique, and so far I used it for small lists of things, and they seemed to work. We’ll see for challenging, longer lists. And also it remains to be seen in what situations this is better than just writing it down.

The Hard Start-Jump to Easy technique is a test-taking approach I was also unaware of. My best strategy when taking exams and tests was to find the easiest questions and tackle those first, leaving the hard ones for later. The course offers another idea: you start by taking a hard question. Once you feel you got stuck in it and can’t progress, you leave it unfinished and then move to the easy questions. The rationale is this warms up your brain, or sets it in focus, so you gain some performance. 

I seldom take tests these days but I can suppose this is applicable to our own day: start by tackling a hard task, use it to jumpstart our focus, and then move on to easy tasks. Maybe some fine-tuning on this idea can improve performance. I do know that I start my day, whenever possible, by studying, usually things with very long-term goals.

I wish the course went in deeper with practical examples instead of overvarnishing each concept. Still it was enjoyable and it seems likely that it’s going to add to my repertoire for learning.

A Personal Review of Task Trackers

tl;dr: My favorite is Pivotal Tracker.

Last night a friend of mine asked me about task trackers. This text is my response.

Trackers I know off the top of my head:

  • Pivotal
  • Asana
  • Jira
  • sprint.ly
  • clubhouse.io
  • Trello
  • YouTrack
  • Github Projects

Trackers I’ve used for at least a couple of months:

  • Pivotal
  • Jira
  • Trello

Trello has very low support for any kind of “point system”.

The “point system”, which consists of assigning “points” to estimate task complexity or time to finish, is a little contentious. It’s difficult to agree upon the criteria for one “point”. I learned from the folks at CodeMiner 42 to give one point to each task estimated to take from 1 minute to one morning (half a day). Simple as that. The idea is just to try and have all tasks simplified into one point. After a while the results start to show the overall performance, with almost no time wasted estimating tasks.

About 2 years ago I used Trello with a kind of plugin for points. It was very rudimentary and did not generate reports later, so it was not very useful. I am not aware of improvements to this in Trello.

Jira is very complete, and can even be installed in your server. The version I used the longest was installed that way. Consequently, it was and looked very out-of-date. You can choose many variations of Kanban and others, but the interface is bloated and visually confusing. I was unhappy with Jira.

Pivotal Tracker, as I said, is the one I like the most. I really like the fact that it’s just two lanes: Backlog, for tasks that are estimated and prioritized, and Icebox, where you throw ideas to be thought about later. The app is very powerful, and with Epics and Tags you can really organize and grow a board without going crazy.

It’s very easy to change the status of a task. Instead of dragging-and-dropping to lanes, you click Start-Finish-Deliver-Accept or Reject. It’s a simple improvement but on the aggregate it’s significant.

I’ve heard good things about clubhouse.io, apparently a newcomer to this competitive problem space, but I haven’t tried it yet.

I’ve played with Github Project, but at least at the time it missed many basic project management tools.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been using YouTrack. It resembles Jira but seems more well finished, and I haven’t seen the analytics part in detail yet.

So this is a summed up version of my feelings for task trackers.

Even if you work alone, a task tracker is an amazing stress reducer. As the team grows, it becomes more and more fundamental. If you don’t use one, I encourage you to try as many of the above as you can and see which you prefer.

A [WIP] checklist for interviewing (or getting onboarded) for new jobs or projects

After a year at EmCasa.com, I’m getting ready for a new job or project (let me know of a good one by the way: gustavo@poe.ma). At this point it’s clear that there are questions I should ask the people hiring me, probably before agreeing on the engagement.

Here’s a list of them:

  • What do you expect me to accomplish in 1 week?
  • What do you expect me to accomplish in 1 month?
  • What do you expect me to accomplish in 3 months (if the above two are met with responses)?
  • Who’s the team I’ll initially be working with, and what does each of the people do?
  • Is there a designated project manager in place?
  • Do you use methodologies such as Scrum, Agile?
  • Do you have daily standups, weeklies or recurring meetings?
  • Do you have a project board? Can I look at it?
  • Do you use Slack or some similar tool?

It’s ongoing at this point. I’m also agnostic about the order. Of course, in a conversation, it’s hard to stick to a script and that’s not the main idea anyway. But asking a few of these, I feel, will increase the likelihood of initiating better work relationships.

These blog posts also have good points-of-view:

http://danabrit.blogspot.com/2017/06/interview-notes-and-questions.html
View at Medium.com

My Current Process for Selecting Developers for Interviews

This year my work has increasingly involved recruiting developers for EmCasa. As I envision the need to involve our team in this crucial part of my job, and to hand over hiring responsibilities in the future, I thought I’d like to put my current process into words to share it and hopefully receive constructive criticism.

The complete hiring process involves more steps than the initial screening itself. Here I will focus on the step going from receiving applications to deciding who are the ones to set up interviews with.

The setting in which the selection process takes place has always been, for me, one in which this is one of many tasks running in parallel: currently I’m also continually reviewing (code and QA) our web frontend client, our mobile clients, our backend, the visual design of the applications, hiring designers, developing macro strategies with my co-founders, building a culture from scratch and the occasional meeting with people from other companies and investors.

Another factor to take into consideration this time around is the relative abundance of candidates, with perhaps 120-150 total this year.

Right now we are 4 developers at EmCasa, working remotely, using Elixir on the backend and React / React Native. We have been emphasizing Brazilian developers since we’re in Brazil.

Oh, and do I need to tell you we are hiring?

Given this scenario, I’ve been using a few heuristics and biases.

1. Good Github page

If the candidate has very few commits over the last 365 days, I move on to the next candidate. A couple of commits a week on average is a bare minimum. It’s ok if it’s clustered recently, it may mean that the person is looking for work.

If no pinned repository uses the technology we’re hiring for, I move on.

If the candidate’s repositories don’t have READMEs, I generally move on.

2. At least one strong public repository

Having found repos using the technologies we’re hiring for, I try to find one that is particularly strong: one where I can understand what it does, how to install and run, is at least a degree above trivial and a glance at the file structure and a few files show care on their part.

I should say that 80-90% of the candidates I review don’t get past this point.

Having installed and run the application, if it does what it needs to do, I take a more detailed look at the code. Perhaps 10 minutes typically.

3. Ability to communicate and think outside code

Having reached this step, and this means only 5-10% of the candidates, I look for evidence of good ability to communicate and think in the broadest terms possible.

This is the moment where I’ll look for the link to their website, blog, Linkedin, and other social media, in decreasing degrees of importance. If I see signs of sloppy writing or thinking, I move on to another candidate.

As you may have noticed, this process is heuristic-heavy and geared toward my specific situation at this moment. Some blind-spots are inevitable, such as the percentage of great developers that don’t use Github all that much. I try to avoid that by taking a quick glance at other possible indications that this is the case. If I can’t see any code, I will move on eventually. If I notice some outlier information, I will bypass my own criteria to some extent, which happens in less than 5% of the cases.

On average the screening of one candidate takes 5 to 10 minutes, but seems to require about as much to clear the mind. For the ones that do well, I will spend between 1 and 4 hours reviewing.

After these screening steps, I send the candidates an email for a quick hangout, which is the beginning of the next step in the hiring process.

Carta da Parceria de Investimentos – 2017

Caros parceiros,

o retorno do nosso fundo (ainda sem nome: note nosso baixo nível de gastos, inclusive em marketing) em 2017 foi de 29,44%. A cota encerrou o ano a R$0,97086.

Lembrando que as primeiras cotas, estabelecidas a R$1,00, foram lançadas em 25 de julho, fica claro que tivemos um ano em que o primeiro semestre foi muito bom e o segundo semestre foi ruim. Movimentos assim não são de surpreender a quem está com um portfolio muito concentrado. Terminamos o ano com 4 empresas no portfolio: Hering, Tarpon, Metisa e uma participação nova e relativamente menor na Cyrela.

Nosso fundo superou o índice Bovespa, que subiu 26,86% no ano, em 2,58% pontos percentuais.

Em 2017, descontando leituras de livros e artigos sobre o assunto, dediquei 113 horas à análise de empresas — mais que o dobro do tempo dedicado em 2016, que tinha sido de 53 horas. Este ano que passou foi o primeiro em que trabalhei ao longo dos 12 meses nas análises.

Entramos em 2018 sabendo que a grande liquidação de 2015 e 16, em que encontrávamos um número relativamente alto de empresas saudáveis à venda por menos de 10 anos de seus lucros, acabou. Podemos ver uma dispersão grande de preços relativos, porém em sua quase totalidade as empresas ficaram mais caras nos últimos dois anos em que o Ibovespa subiu mais de 73%. Meu trabalho é justamente identificar e comprar as raras exceções onde podemos adquirir um real por cinquenta centavos. Os melhores investidores da história demonstram que basta uma dessas situações por ano – ou menos – para termos ótimos resultados. Isso não torna o trabalho menos difícil, portanto chegamos a um bom momento para revermos os principais erros de 2017.

Nosso maior erro de 2017 começou no meio de 2016: a Eternit. A Eternit vinha dando dividendos excelentes para seus donos alguns anos atrás, e depois suas ações despencaram quando sua principal fonte de receita, os derivados de fibrocimento, ficaram próximos de ser proibidos por evidências sérias de efeitos nocivos à saúde de seus mineradores. Me tornei sócio quando tudo isso já estava claro, faltando apenas a decisão do STF sobre a proibição. Minha hipótese era a de que a Eternit sairia do fibrocimento, hipótese essa reforçada pelos comunicados da empresa enfatizando linhas de louças e metais para banheiros. Meu erro foi muito simples e doloroso de admitir: eu não estudei os percentuais de receitas de cada linha de produto, atraído pela valoração realmente incrível considerando apenas o histórico da empresa. Comprei ações a pouco mais de duas vezes o lucro médio recente (10 anos) da empresa, que praticamente não tem dívidas. Quando o STF sinalizou a proibição da manipulação da cresotila, apenas então fiquei curioso o suficiente para ver a evolução das linhas alternativas de produtos e ficou imediatamente claro, como teria ficado antes mesmo de eu comprar se eu tivesse tido esse cuidado básico, que os produtos novos compunham um percentual baixo demais da empresa, e que tudo leva a crer que ela precisará passar por um processo muito profundo de reinvenção para voltar à proeminência do passado. A perda de 10% que tivemos com a Eternit não reflete o tamanho do erro, que poderia ter sido até mais doloroso já que a ação caiu outros 21% desde o momento da venda.

Nosso segundo maior erro de 2017 foi temperado por uma enorme dose de sorte: Guararapes. A Guararapes, conhecida por ser dona das Lojas Riachuelo, esteve à venda por múltiplos muito atraentes – múltiplos dos seus lucros, que fique claro. Foi o que considerei suficiente para comprar. Apenas alguns meses mais tarde estudei o fluxo de caixa da empresa nos últimos 10 anos, e a história era bastante diferente, com uma média negativa em 10 anos. Pelo visto não fui o único a cometer esse lapso, porque quando finalmente dediquei cerca de 10 minutos a analisar o fluxo de caixa, a ação da empresa já tinha subido mais de 80%. Vendi com um lucro médio de quase 90%, o que não impediu a empresa de subir outros 40% logo após a venda.

É claro que um ano acima da média não pode ter sido feito só de erros, e os principais acertos, ao menos à luz do escopo limitado de apenas um ano, foram a Hering e a Metisa. Dois casos claros de reversão à média, o arroz-com-feijão do que alguns costumam chamar de investimento em valor. Partindo do que podemos enxergar hoje, os fundamentos de longo prazo de todas as empresas que compõem nosso portfolio levam a crer que continuaremos sócios pelos próximos anos.

Venho me informando sobre a possibilidade de criar um “clube de investimento”, modalidade que vai ser um upgrade ao nosso arranjo hoje bem informal para algo mais formal e que permita que tenhamos valores mais significativos no portfolio, inclusive com a entrada de mais pessoas que manifestaram interesse. Volto a falar sobre isso com antecedência se e quando a migração para o clube estiver para acontecer.

Um ótimo ano para você, seus familiares e amigos!

Abraços,
Gustavo Saiani