temperament
Dull Is Beautiful
The rule
The best buys are often boring, ignored, plain businesses. Glamour, hype and 'hot' status are warnings, not reasons to buy.
Where it flips
Dull can also mean truly dying. A boring business ignored because it is quietly shrinking is not a bargain. The fix is to insist the boring company still shows growing profits and a healthy balance sheet. Then you are buying neglect, not decline.
Crowds pile into exciting stories. By the time you hear it, the excitement is already in the price. A dull company that makes bottle caps, bearings, or funeral services draws no crowd and gets little coverage. It can quietly grow while nobody is watching. The 'hot' stock that everyone at the family function is talking about is usually where you overpay and arrive last. Boredom is not the reason to buy. But it often means hype has not pushed up the price, leaving room for you to be rewarded when the plain results show up.
A worked example
While relatives chased a buzzy loss-making tech IPO, Haridya bought a plain packaging-materials firm at a P/E of 12. Three years on, the boring one had doubled and the exciting one had halved. [illustrative]
How to spot it
- ·the business is easy to overlook or slightly off-putting
- ·little analyst or media coverage
- ·you feel no urge to brag about owning it
Peter Lynch · One Up on Wall Street