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The Meb Faber Show

Ready to grow your wealth through smarter investing decisions? With The Meb Faber Show, bestselling author, entrepreneur, and investment fund manager, Meb Faber, brings you insights on today’s markets and the art of investing. Featuring some of the top investment professionals in the world as his guests, Meb will help you interpret global equity, bond, and commodity markets just like the pros. Whether it’s smart beta, trend following, value investing, or any other timely market topic, each week you’ll hear real market wisdom from the smartest minds in investing today. Better investing starts here. For more information on Meb, please visit MebFaber.com. For more on Cambria Investment Management, visit CambriaInvestments.com.
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Feb 21, 2018

In Episode 94, we welcome entrepreneur, author, and SEC filings expert, Michelle Leder.

We start with Michelle’s background. She was a business journalist – a self-professed “document geek.” She wrote the book Financial Fine Print: Uncovering a Company's True Value and decided to launch a website as an accompaniment to the book. Here we are, 15 years later.

Meb asks Michelle to give an overview of what she’s looking for in the various filings. She tells us that changes are important. She doesn’t necessarily look closely at the numbers because it’s more about the language. Also, the forward-looking statements can be big. Michelle mentions an example of one that used a significant amount of extra language.

This dovetails into a discussion about the process – is it a keyword search or is there software? Michelle uses both, as keywords alone don’t always work. She gives the example of when Goldman Sachs was subpoenaed, the language used to describe it in the filings was something like “an invitation to respond to the DOJ.”

Meb asks for examples of red flag behavior in the filings. Michelle looks for unusual compensation or stock grant amounts. Also, lots of extra language used to describe earnings or adjusted EBITDA. She mentions a company called GT Advanced Technology, which used to be an Apple supplier. In one particular filing, they added new disclosure language, identifying their dependence on Apple, and their vulnerability if that relationship soured. Some time thereafter, Apple ended the relationship.

Next, Meb and Michelle discuss the “Friday Night Dump.” This is the 90 minutes after market close on Friday, when there’s no major trading. Companies tend to dump all their bad info here. Michelle mentions recent examples using Tesla and Wynn. But her most memorable disclosure dump was Chesapeake Energy, revealing it had paid over $12M for a map collection.

Meb asks if Michelle has ever been contacted by a company she’s profiled, trying to defend or explain itself. She mentions Dell. Apparently, the company once purchased a company from Dell’s own brother and something seemed a tad off. After Michelle covered it, Dell reached out to tell her she had gotten it all wrong.

This is a fun episode with plenty more in it – what sort of time commitment this would take the average investor… the atmospheric changes Michelle has seen in the last 10-15 years… the story of Meb stealing someone else’s disclosure language for his own blog but forgetting to remove the other company’s name…

There’s even a discussion of something Twitter did recently that grabbed Michelle’s interest. If you’re a Twitter investor, you might want to listen.  

All this and more in Episode 94.

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