Russ Ramsey Says Stick to Your Investment Plan

By Thomas Heath
Monday, October 6, 2008

I first bumped into Russ Ramsey, a co-founder of investment banking firm Friedman, Billings, Ramsey Group, at the FBR Open golf tournament in Phoenix about five years ago. Russ has been an investor in Washington and its technology scene for two decades, starting with some early home runs with Mark Warner, who went on to become governor of Virginia.

One day at lunch in Tysons Corner we learned that each of us was a big fan of Warren Buffett. We launched into an hour-long exchange on Buffett's investing philosophy, his company Berkshire Hathaway (which owns a part of The Washington Post) and Buffett's plain-spoken annual letters to shareholders.

Russ has left FBR and now runs his own investment company in Northern Virginia called Ramsey Asset Management. A few months ago he sketched out what was happening to the financial markets on the back of a napkin (literally), and told me how there was about $1 trillion or so in bad debt that had to be flushed out of the system.

With the Wall Street meltdown picking up speed over the last two weeks, I wondered if this had something to do with the $1 trillion and the napkin. I phoned Ramsey to ask him what he thinks about all of this, from an investment point of view, and whether I should be buying gold and shoving my cash into a mattress.

First he gave a primer on the current crisis.

"How did we get here? One, we went on a massive credit binge, the biggest ever."

He pointed out how the United States has $10 trillion in loans within its banking system, another $25 trillion in loans outside of the banking system and yet another $68 trillion in "credit swaps" -- basically insurance policies for owners of corporate bonds -- which Buffett has referred to as "financial weapons of mass destruction" because of the way they have spread risk among institutions.

Ramsey said the world's financial plumbing needs a good flushing, which Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson tried to do with his $700 billion bailout plan.

"The water has stopped and the water has to get rolling again, with governments standing behind the underpinnings," Ramsey said.

So what should I do?

"Average people should turn off CNBC. They should stick with their financial plan, pay their mortgage, work hard at their jobs, look after their families and have faith in elected officials," he said.

Ramsey called the meltdown "a short-term crisis of confidence in the credit markets."

Then he gave me a little history lesson.

"In the history of financial markets, people talk about different periods. In the Great Depression, did people make money or lose money?" he asked me.

My answer: Investors lost a ton in the Great Depression.

His answer: Only if they sold.

You would have done pretty well if you just kept investing the same amount of money at regular intervals, a technique known as dollar-cost averaging. He pointed to what would have happened if you had held all the stocks in what was then the S&P 200.

"From 1929, the peak of the crash, to 1939, over that 10 years, if you dollar-cost averaged in the S&P 200 every month, you had a 13 percent return annually," Ramsey said.

During the collapse of Lehman Brothers two weeks ago, "if you did nothing the whole week, the Dow Industrial Average was actually flat for the week."

"In investing you only need to know two things: Is the future of the company knowable, and is it important? Because if it's important people will care, and if its knowable you can value the future cash stream of the business and put an appropriate number on its value."

This next riff is why Ramsey and I could talk all day.

"Right now is investor nirvana," he said. "Lesson number one: staying power. Two, have a plan. Number three: Keep it simple, stupid. Know what you own. And four: Only borrow money when you can repay it and afford the interest."

His last point reminds me of something I read about Peter Lynch, the Fidelity investing legend who ran the Magellan Fund for years. Lynch said of investing: You either believe in the system, or you don't.

Ramsey's point is the same thing: "Bet on America. It has always worked, and I think it will."

Then, of course, he quoted Buffett. If you talk to Russ for more than a few minutes, a Buffett bromide will seep into the conversation.

"Warren Buffett has a great quote where he talks about racing at the Indianapolis 500. And in Indianapolis, they say that 'to finish first, you must first finish.' The point is, you have to have staying power. Anybody who buys a stock who isn't prepared to see it go down by at least 50 percent, hasn't studied market history. Just because a stock goes down by 50 percent doesn't mean the company has lost 50 percent of its value. That's how investors benefit from market hysteria."

Ramsey thinks the equity markets could bounce around for the next one to three years. After that, he said, company earnings streams could be at their lowest multiples in more than a decade.

He said that when stability returns to U.S. Treasurys, Libor, spreads and other financial instruments, many of which I do not totally understand, that's when we'll be past the worst part.

"Watch for normalcy returning," he said. "When you see stability, that will be a sign that the equity markets will function normally, and my guess is you will be able to buy a bunch of great businesses at the lowest levels we have seen in 15 years."

Thomas Heath's "Value Added" column focuses on Washington's entrepreneurial set and runs weekly on the WashBiz Blog at www. washingtonpost.com/washbizblog.