Thursday, December 14, 2017

The Acquirer's Multiple

Any book by Tobias Carlisle goes to the top of my reading list, as I find the content about which he writes is usually extremely relevant to how I try to invest. For me, the main idea behind this line of thinking is to identify market anomalies (e.g. stocks with lower multiples outperform) and then play in that space, so as to benefit from a statistical advantage. Carlisle has done a lot of work identifying and discussing perhaps the most useful anomaly today, the outperformance of low EV/EBIT multiples, or a variant of what he calls The Acquirer's Multiple.

This book reminded me a lot of his previous book, Deep Value. The Acquirer's Multiple felt like a summary of Deep Value at times. I preferred the depth provided by Deep Value, but because this is a newer book, the charts are newer/updated and take you all the way to 2017.

The book also reminded me a little bit of Dear Chairman, another favourite. The latter part of the book contains a bunch of interesting tales that I either wasn't familiar with or had forgotten.

If you're looking for an edge when investing, understanding what The Acquirer's Multiple is about is a must, in my opinion.