What type of an investor are you? | Difference between Growth Investor and Value Investor

Hi Pals, if you are new here, so just
let me introduce you to “The Finance Magic” which is all about spreading financial
knowledge. If you are new to the world of finance, then this is a place where
you could rely without any doubt. So before moving on lets first understand a
little bit about valuation and what type of an investor are you?

Do you like to buy cheap stuff right or
do you like to buy expensive stuff? 

I’ll cover that right now quickly,
let’s kick it off by talking briefly about General Electric and Tesla two
radically different companies because General Electric stock is very cheap
compared to Tesla which is very expensive. However, Tesla is growing at a much
faster rate than General Electric.

So, in most cases you either like to
buy companies on the right side of the spectrum, meaning expensive stocks that
are growing quickly or cheap stocks on the left side of the spectrum, meaning
companies that are not growing quickly but the valuations are more attractive of
the companies which are growing quickly?

So, we call investors on the left side
of this spectrum as “Value investors” and the high investors that like
growth stuff are called “Growth investors” on the other end.

“Warren Buffett is really the father of
value investing. He loves to buy stuff that’s cheap and not drawing too fast.”

On the other side of the spectrum we
have got growth investors, they like to buy stuff that are expensive but
growing very quickly and the reason it’s expensive is because those companies
are focused on growing revenue as fast as possible and they’re not worrying
about profitability yet until some point in the future. For example: Amazon
Inc.

Eventually that stock and all growth
stocks become value stocks. A great example of this is Microsoft. You know
Microsoft is a Wall Street darling, and then growth slowed a lot and growth
investors didn’t want to buy it and so for 10 to 20 years it had to transition
from a growth stock to a value stock and now value investors like it. Same
thing with Tesla, it is a growth stock now but one day it will be a value stock

So, let’s talk about Value Investors
and Growth Investors in a bit more detail:

So, value investors again like cheap
stocks that aren’t really growing. Growth Investors love stocks that are
growing quickly. And value investors love looking at companies on a price to
earnings basis meaning, how many dollars you’re going to pay for every $1 in
earnings and Growth Investors also like looking at price to earnings, that is the
price to earnings ratio but they like to invest in companies that have higher
price to earnings ratio which means that are growing fast. And so, what they do
is they take the “P/E divide by growth” that’s called the PEG ratio. And they
like to buy companies that are growing at a relatively low PEG ratio and I’ll
explain this in more detail very soon.

Growth Investors like cash flow a
little bit but they want the company to grow faster. They are one, that will be
saving money today i.e. just grow.

Value investors love companies that
are cheap on a DCF basis (discounted cash flow) and don’t worry we will cover
that in our next post very soon. Basically, they want to understand how much
cash that company can make today and value investors also like high dividend yielding
companies as well. But growth investors don’t like using discounted cash flow. They
evaluate using vision methodology, they like to look at price to revenue. And
the reason they like to look at the price divide by revenue is because a lot of
times companies that are investing don’t have earnings yet, as they are in their
initial phase.

Again, value investors love to buy
companies based on Discounted Cashflow basis. Both growth and value investors love
valuing companies on an earnings basis and only growth investors like to buy
companies on a price to revenue basis. Now DCF is a little bit complicated, I’m
not a big fan of it at all but it’s about discounting your cash in the future
and as said by investors “Cash is King”

And as I mentioned before we look at PEG
ratios or Price earnings to growth mainly for growth investors and price to
revenue mainly for Growth investors as well because they like investing in
companies that aren’t too profitable yet but they’re growing really fast. And
everybody is either a growth investor or a value investor and you might not
know what you are at this point of time.

When I was an undergraduate, I was a
value investor because I was a little bit more theoretical and I didn’t have
much work experience as to what it actually is. And I thought, well you got to
buy stuff that’s cheap. Well now I’m a little bit different.

I don’t want to bias you with my
outlook here I want to kind of give you a menu of every type of investment you
can make. But if your company is growing fast, I don’t think you should be
making a lot of money yet.

I’ll give you an example let’s just
say Amazon is growing earnings at 100 percent year over year. They can give you
that money or they can invest and grow faster and then give you more money
later.

Summary:

I have tried to cover the topic at a
very basic level, I hope you understood the difference between Growth v/s Value
investors and have also known what type of an investor are you?

Stay tuned for more upcoming concepts

Cheers

The Finance Magic

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