This is the Value Investor podcast with Tracy Rinek, all things value all the time. Welcome back value investors. So I'm reading a new book on value investing. It actually came out last year in 2022, but I'm now getting to it.
And it's called the Case for Long-Term Value Investing. Well, that seems basic, right? The subtitle is a guide to the data and strategies that drive stock market success. And it's by Jim Cullen, it's C-U-L-L-E-N.
And he's the chairman and CEO of Shafer Cullen Capital Management. So the book has 38 short chapters and a lot of charts and graphs. And it's not very long, wait, let me see how many pages. Oh, if you're reading all the way through to the acknowledgments, it's 250 pages.
So very doable. And Jim, in his bio, it said he started on Wall Street in 1965, and he started with Merrill Lynch. He founded his own management company in 1984. That's the Shafer Cullen Capital Management.
And his firm now manages more than $20 billion. He's got almost 60 years of experience. And that's great because the more experience you have in investing, the better it is, basically. Because we all learn from our mistakes.
And we all live through various cycles, right? We all do, if you're in it long enough, live through the bulls, which we just had. And maybe now we're in another bear. There is a chapter in the book on the secular bulls and bears.
I haven't gotten to that yet, but that's in there. And it's great that he's written this book to share his experience because, again, not many have 60 years experience in investing, and especially with value. So this book can easily be read by the individual chapters. It's not necessarily the type where you have to start at the beginning and go all the way to the end, which is working for me right now.
And I was kind of skimming through the book and halted immediately on chapter 23. And I halted because it's called Small Cap Value, which, as you know, is one of my favorite topics as a value investor. So I read it. It didn't take long because it is three pages.
That's a small cap value chapter. I said, there's like many small chapters. That's what makes this book easy. And it's like a good resource to just kind of be like, I'm wondering about dividends.
What does he have to say about that? And you can just kind of jump in. It does actually give like a history of the stock market kind of in the beginning. And kind of, and then it talks about the value strategy.
Some of that is a little bit more in depth. Oh, you know, I haven't read those chapters yet. I'm gonna read those and maybe I'll do an overview on what his strategy is. And then he has these like kind of individual chapters on these more like subtopics, like small cap value.
So of course, I read the three pages. He uses small cap as three billion or less. Sometimes I've used two billion. Some people use the one billion.
I noticed on the Zex small cap screen on zex.com on the screening tool. That's one of the premium screenings screens on there. That one uses one billion or less. So that's really small.
So I kind of like it that he does choose the three billion because it does open up the universe a little bit more. So what is it about small cap value? You know, he talks about how our instincts, well, that's me. My instincts tell me that small cap growth should be where the best returns are, right?
Those are usually where the hot stocks are. You want that growth. But the book sites some Morningstar study done in 2005 that shows that $1 invested in 1927 in small cap growth was $1,723 by 2005. So that's 78 years.
But the $1 invested in small cap value was $20,920 by 2005. So the growth was 1,723. The value was 20,092 over 78 years. So then he goes on to argue that the reason the value outperforms is in the small caps is because of takeovers.
And the companies are on sale. They're value stocks. They tend to get acquired. We see this a lot with like small cap banks.
He talks about that. But we see it a lot, actually, with some of the companies I'm going to talk about today. They're getting slightly bigger because they are acquiring other even smaller small cap companies. But that's how a lot of small cap companies can grow.
And the acquisitions and or being taken over and absorbed by a larger company is a way that a lot of investors can do real well with a lot of these. The book also talks about a study on the S&P 500 that showed that the smallest 20% of the S&P 500 by market cap, because we know that there's like these huge mega caps like the Microsofts. And then there's some in the S&P 500 that are just way smaller, that are like 7 billion, 10 billion. They're just much, much smaller.
And that those smaller ones tend to outperform the overall S&P 500. So they had a study from 1968 to 2020. And the compounded annualized return of the S&P 500 was 10.1% during that time period. But the smallest 20% by market cap was 14.6.
So that's significant. That's almost 4.5% better. And that's huge in your returns. If you're compounding that year over year, it's just enormous.
So even in the large cap stocks, it's the smaller of the large caps that kind of goes against what we've been thinking the last couple of years, right? Because it's been these mega caps that have outperformed the Microsofts, Apple, the trillion dollar market caps. But since 1968, that really hasn't been the case. And the years after Sharp Correction, he shows us in like a chart in the book.
So we had the dot-com bust in 2000 to 2002, where the S&P 500 was down all three of those years. But in 2003, it finally rebounded, had a big rally. So the S&P 500 was up 28.7% in 2003. But the smallest components by market cap were up 67.9%.
Then it looks at 2009s. That rebounds. So 2008 was the correction, although it hit bottom in 2009. But then 2009, it rebounded.
The S&P was up 26.5%. But the smallest components in it were up 85.5. So huge difference. And even just the S&P 500.
So I know what you're thinking. The small cap value, that has really underperformed, right? I've been saying this for years. Oh, it's so terrible.
Small cap growth has been so much better. And a lot of that reason is because of the financials that have been in small cap value. It's over 20% right now of the small cap value. Most of the small cap value funds or indexes and things are over 20% in the value is in the financials.
And that's mostly banks. There's some insurance companies and some other things in there. But it's mostly the smaller community and regional banks. And that's just struggled over the last 14, 15 years now.
But I took a look to see what's happening now after we had the big sell off in 2022, especially in the growth side. That was a big sell off even among small caps, not just big cap. Fang Man's stock sold off in 2022. It was small caps too.
And now there's been an interesting development, right? Very interesting. So I used Vanguard's small cap value fund. That's ticker VBR.
And I used their small cap growth fund. Sticker V as in Victor B as in boy K. So the value is V as in Victor B as in boy R. And the growth is K.
And the interesting thing about both of these funds, they were started on the same day. So it's very easy to compare what the performance has been because they launched them on the exact same day. And that day was January 26, 2004. So Vanguard small cap value, sense inception now, annualized return from January 26, 2004 is 8.46%.
But the small cap growth now is from the same day. January 26, 2004 is 8.23%. So suddenly small cap value is now outperforming the growth. Over the 10 year, small cap value, I'm thinking, now that's probably well under what growth was.
But 10 years, 10.27% for small cap value, small cap growth, 10 year, 9.26%. So almost a percent below now for small cap growth. Now what's happened over the last year, this is where it's been rough. And this is as of the end of 2022.
So January 31, 2022 is this data. So the one year, 4, 2022, small cap growth down 28.4%. As you might expect, it's growth. Everything was down on the growth side.
But small cap value, it was down too, but down just 9.3%. So that's a huge difference in that last year. And that plays into the 10 year returns in a dramatic fashion. So suddenly value isn't looking too shabby compared to the small cap growth, which was outperforming it year after year for many years in there.
Also, the small cap growth fund, BBK, it does pay a dividend, it's yielding 0.6% as of the end of last year. And now the value is yielding 2.2 in that same time period. So again, might not seem like it's that big a deal, 0.6 and 2.2, but it's well over a percent difference. And when you're compounding year after year, it makes a huge difference.
It's gonna matter big in the returns. So those little dividends matter. And there is a chapter in the book on the dividends, but I haven't gotten to that yet, because I might wanna do another episode on just the dividends and what he feels really makes those important for value investing. So the differences in the funds, small cap growth has 698 stocks as of November 30th, 2022.
Value was bigger, it had 882. The PE ratios, growth was at 21.6 times, as you might expect. It's the growth fund, nobody cares about the PEs. You want growth and you're willing to pay more for it.
But the value was at 10.6. So when the market turned in 2022 and it turned its back on growth, and what the earnings were like became more important for investors, suddenly that PE of 10.6 was looking pretty good. And it was better to buy the cheaper stocks than these others where growth is gonna be hit as the Fed is raising interest rates. Now, what's the difference between these in terms of industries?
The growth fund, the largest industry is tech, not a surprise. That's probably why you were buying it. Tech is 25.14%, health care is at 21, and then the industrial is at 15.6. In value, it is the financials, as I mentioned.
21.18, industrials number two at 20.03, so bigger than in the growth, but also a huge percentage of the value. And then consumer cyclicals, 11.74. So you're not even getting any tech there in the top three. So that's one of the big differences as well.
So maybe the last year has really turned the tide for small cap value, because we're getting that 10 year of 10.27%, that's not too bad, especially considering that it was underperforming until the last year. What happens when it really outperforms? And there are these certain time periods when it tends to do that. So right now, it is down much less than the growth, and you are getting the bigger dividend.
And as I mentioned, the dividend will really compound over the next several years or decades, and that's where you're really gonna see the outperformance as well. So I decided to screen to find the small cap value again. We've done small cap value screens pretty often on the podcast, you can go back and look at the old ones, because those are good to look at too. But this is one here for 2023.
And I created it on my own. I did not use a predefined screen that's on Zacks.com, although there is a small cap, one that has growth and value that's on there. But this time I wanted to create my own because his book uses the three billion level, and I wanted to use that too. So I wanted to create my own.
And so for the value part of it, I decided to use the price to sales ratio under one. And I wanted some growth in there. So I used the peg ratio also under one, which really does get you a PE component to it because the peg has the PE in there. But I originally thought, oh, maybe I'll put a PE in there too, but then I was getting much fewer stocks, so I got rid of it.
I just kept it at peg and priced to sales. And then since we have access to the Zacks rank, and he didn't, I added on the Zacks rank, why wouldn't I? Number one is a number two. So those are the strong buys and the buys.
And remember what the Zacks rank does indicate? It should indicate that the analysts are raising estimates or something good is happening with the estimates. They're not cutting. They're raising it, which is somewhat rare right now, but we are in earnings season.
So there's a lot of adjustments being made now to the earnings and we're getting some pre-announcements, and earnings get adjusted there too. So right now there's 970 stocks that are Zacks number ones or number twos. So I thought, oh, for sure, I should be able to get like plenty of value amongst these, we just had this big sell up, wouldn't there be? So I added in the peg, the price of sales, and I only got 21 stocks.
And that's before I added in the market cap component. So just 21 are like super dirt cheap out of that huge group with a good rank. So then I added on the market cap of three billion or less, and then I only got eight stocks. So clearly a bunch of the highly ranked cheap stocks are actually small caps because it's eight out of 21.
The rest would be mids and bigs, obviously, but I am kind of surprised, surprised that it's not more given that stocks have pulled back so much, but I guess I'm not surprised as the Fed continues to raise rates, it's gonna be difficult to get that growth component, which I threw in there with the peg. And so these are a little bit more rare stocks here on small cap, rare small cap value stocks. Let's tell them that. I do have to warn you, you probably never heard of most of these stocks because I haven't, there is one that we all know, I'm gonna talk about it at the end of the podcast, but most of them a few, if you have heard of them, it's only because I covered them on other podcasts.
So occasionally on our other small cap, or just even like dirt cheap value stock podcasts, some of these names did show up and we have talked about them in the past, but you probably don't remember them. So it's good to get them again. I tried to pick some that were completely new so that we get some new blood in there. And I'm only gonna do three stocks, and then I'm gonna talk about the fourth one we all know kind of at the end there because I wanted to look a little bit deeper into what's going on with some of these.
What do they do? Why are they are things so good? Why are they cheap? Why is it while still paying any attention?
Are these hidden gems, all this good stuff? So let's jump in and see what's on here. So the first stock I picked, I've never looked at before, it is in retail, it's A period, K period, A period. And it's all lowercase letters, AKA brands.
AKA brands holding, and the ticker is AKA. So that's easy to remember. And what they say they do is we spot, scale, and grow next generation fashion brands. So they're a brand accelerator.
Most of it is direct to consumer, so it's online, but one of their brands just opened up its first US flagship brick and mortar store in Las Vegas in November, 2022. That was a big deal because it's all online, but now they're going in the brick and mortar because brick and mortar still does matter. And the names of the brands are, maybe you know some of these, Princess Polly, Culture Kings. That's the one that opened the flagship in Las Vegas.
Pedal and pup, Reb Dolls and M-N-M-L. It's all capitals, M-N-N-C-M is Mary L. And so a lot is going on with these brands. In the third quarter, which we heard from them, I think it was like November, their active customers were up 23%.
Gross margins did go up year over year to 55.7 from 53.2. And like in those gross margins, actually, they have cash on the end of 31.3 million, but they do have debt of 129.9 million. They have a lot of inventory, as you might expect, with apparel and accessories, these kinds of brands. They just, everybody got too much inventory in 2022, and they're trying to get rid of it.
So it is good to see those gross margins a little elevated at least year over year. So we'll see what happened in the holiday quarter coming up soon. They did have to draw down 25 million on the revolving credit line in the first quarter of 2022 that's added to the debt levels there. This stock has been all over the place, so I'm not gonna lie.
So it's market cap is only 193 million. So very few people know it, very few people following it. It's only when IPO in October 2021, during the kind of the big IPO frenzy. And now it is definitely getting punished, but it is cheap.
So 52-week high is $8.37, but I think it went IPO in 2021 around $10, but it's way down, the low is $1.12, and it's now trading around $1.50. So it's come way down, peg is at 0.92, price to sales is 0.3, and it does have a PE, it's PE is 14, because in 2021 it made 15 cents, that's when it went IPO. So it was profitable. 2022, the analysts, and there are a few analysts covering it, are at zero, so not negative, but zero, but we'll see what happens in the fourth quarter with that one.
They're a little more bullish again at 11 cents. So back to profitability, hopefully in 2023, but who knows? Because if we get a recession, consumer might pull back on some of their items. So I'm not a big fan of the retail or apparel or any of that, right here, depending on what category it's in.
And some of this is a lot of apparel and things, but I am encouraged that they opened up this flagship in Las Vegas, travel is back, Las Vegas stores for retailers are back to doing very good business. So that could be a big boost here, but we'll see, this is a ZX number two by stock. And that's AKA brands, it's AKA. So now you can kind of see where we're going with small cap value.
And remember small cap value is gonna be these hidden gems. It's not a thing, it's gonna be companies that are new or newer, that are less known and they're small. So it's just much more volatile and less covered. So keep that in mind.
Okay, the number two company is one we've talked about at least one other time in the past. It's Veritiv, Veritiv, Veritiv. I'm probably saying it wrong, tell me what it is, Veritiv. V as in Victor, R as in Robert, T as in Tom, V as in Victor is the ticker.
And you might remember these guys, they're headquartered in Atlanta. They're a full service provider of packaging. They have a Yansan and Hygiene products, services and solutions. They also do print and publishing.
They also have logistics and supply chain management with distribution centers throughout the US and Mexico. So they're kind of all over with the packaging, logistics, supply chain. And then they have these Hygiene products that also make go to those kind of businesses. But interesting thing for them, in the third quarter net sales were up 2.1%, but organic sales up 14.9.
And they have great free cash flow. So the last nine months of the year 2022, it was 140.8 million. And they had record earnings in the third quarter. They did have a big share repurchase plan going on.
It was $200 million. They completed it as of the third quarter and that bought back about 20% of the shares outstanding. So that's a big deal. And then the board decided, and we've had enough with the share buybacks, we feel good enough about our free cash flow in the business.
We're gonna initiate a dividend. So they did, it's now paying a dividend as of the fourth quarter and the dividend is yielding 2%. So that's not too shabby either. It's very rare, somewhat rare to have a small cap company that is paying a dividend.
Market cap for this one is a little bit bigger, 1.67 billion. So it's not near the three, but it is bigger than AKA that we just talked about, considerably bigger. And this one, what does the earnings look like? So in 2021, they made $9.01.
In 2022, this is the record year 2350. It is expected to go down next year to 1680, down 28.5%, but coming off that record, not a surprise. Shares are still really cheap. So even as it comes down, it still remains a value.
Peg Ratio is 0.47, price to sales is 0.23. It does also as the PE, obviously PE is 7.4. So very cheap on the PE level. And it's just X number one, strong buy right here.
It's very lightly covered. I think we just have one estimate on it. What is the stock doing? So the 52B Kai on Veritiv is $161.10.
The low was at 85.57. So huge pullback on this small cap company. Now it's at 122.21. So a big rebound.
And it's up 17% in just the last month. So this is the type of stock. It's still dirt cheap, but it was oversold. Buyers have come back in and bought it up a bit.
I would like to get it even cheaper if I could. So I might wait for the earnings and see if, you know, what happens there, if there's some kind of sell off the shares or even the overall market sells off again, this will probably fall again because the small caps, you know, they're just not widely followed. And as the market sells off, the small caps will too. So I could get this cheaper.
I'd be happy, but on a classic valuation level, it still is dirt cheap. And now I'm getting the dividend. So I like this company a lot. VR TV is the ticker there again.
And the third company I don't think I've ever talked about. So this is an interesting one too. It's Sterling infrastructure. ticker is S as a Sam, T as in Tom, R as in Robert, L as in Larry, S-T-R-L.
And I picked it out of the list of eight because I saw infrastructure in there. And I was like, yeah, I want to see what this company's all about because we just passed a trillion dollar infrastructure plan. And so who's going to benefit Sterling infrastructure, right? But the business is a little bit different than what I thought, just based on the name.
And it's even more intriguing once I dug in. So they say on their website that we build, we create, we facilitate change. That's their tagline. In 2005, they announced, or in 2015, they announced a new strategy to try to grow the business.
So at that time, they were 95% in heavy civil type of infrastructure building. Their margins in 2016 were at 6.1%. They wanted to reduce the heavy civil because that's low margin business, introduce more higher margin business, grow the business that way and provide more value to the shareholders, basically, and try to transform their business from kind of the slow growth company to bigger growth. So now they operate in three different categories.
So they specialize in e infrastructure. And what that means is large scale site development for data centers, e-commerce distribution centers, just commercial buildings, warehousing, transportation energy, and things like that. So that's a big growth segment of their business. We know everybody was building distribution centers during the pandemic that will probably slow, but the data centers are still pretty hot and in demand.
And now we have these other categories, including energy that are picking up steam. Their second category is called Building Solutions. And that includes residential and commercial concrete foundations for single family homes and multi-family homes and parking structures, elevated slabs, and other concrete projects. So I was not expecting them to be in residential building and doing the foundations.
The third category is transportation solutions. This is where the heavy civil infrastructure part is. And they do that and rehab projects for highways, roads, bridges, airports, ports, light rail, water, wastewater, and storm drainage systems. So that was a slow growth area.
And they've been reducing that, increasing their exposure to these other two areas, e infrastructure and building solutions and growing the business that way. Their customers included, people you might imagine, government agencies, Fortune 100 companies, people building the data centers, obviously. And then top home builders as well, as you might imagine, with those concrete foundations. What have earnings been doing?
So in 2021, they made $2.15. 2022, expected to make 314, 2023 up 9.9% to 345. They are still cheap, peg 0.5, price to sales 0.5. They're both gonna be under one, obviously.
If they made the screen, it is small cap, obviously, but a little bit smaller than the company we just talked about at 981 million. So almost a billion market cap for them. It is exact number two. By stock, they do not pay a dividend.
And I couldn't find any share buyback program either. PE is just 9.4 on this one. So dirt cheap there too. And taking it a little bit more, they too had record third quarter results.
They reported at the end of October, and they raised full year guidance. I should have mentioned, Barativ also raised their full year guidance. They only have the fourth quarter still to go, but not many companies are raising still into the end of the year, but they both of these have been. Revenue was up 20% to 556.9 million cash flow from operations over the first nine months, 130.6 million.
Their cash on hand as of September 30th was 146.5 million. That's why I look to see if maybe they were doing a share buyback or something else going on with the cash side. But this amount of cash might be a little bit more than what they were expecting. They do have non-cash expenses.
They laid out at a very clear website, and nice event presentations every quarter. So they have 45 million to 47 million on non-cash expenses for the year. That's stock based compensation, income tax, depreciation, things like that. And then they have two upcoming scheduled term loan payments.
2022, it's 23.2 million for that year. 2023, 31.9 million. So these could be the reasons they're holding on to some of this cash, but they have cash here to pay these things. So that's always the good thing.
The backlog at the end of the third quarter was up 12% to 1.67 billion from the end of 2021. They did increase gross margins again in the third quarter, up 220 basis points to 14.7%. So you can really see this new strategy is working to increase that gross margin, increase profitability, and they're seeing some good results. Now they do a lot of acquisitions.
They acquire a lot of smaller companies, $20, $30, $40 million here and there. So some of this cash is also going to acquisitions, which is growing the business in their select geographic locations. They are in the West. They're headquartered in Texas.
So they're down there, Southeast. I think they said Hawaii, California, almost nothing in the Midwest, however, with them. They have 290 projects underway as of the third quarter. And if you go on their website, you can see some of the announcements of things that are going on, like so they just had, if I didn't write it down or did I, they just had an announcement.
Yeah, in September, they announced they were awarded a $45 million site development contract for Rivians new electric vehicle facility in Georgia. So those are the type of products that they're getting. That's a very nice little contract. They're right for $45 million.
Very excited, I'm sure, to announce that latest project. So there's a lot going on in all these areas. There's a lot of in EVs. There's the semiconductor facilities that are being built.
There's some solar investment that I just saw announced. So this kind of company trying to get in on the action on all of that and is well situated to get in there. So what is the stock doing? We know it's cheap.
The shares over the last year are actually up 15.3%. And over the last three months, gotten a big boost here, probably off that last record earnings, up 32%. 52 week high on the shares are $34.86. $34.86.
The low was at 20.46. It's now at 32.17. So that low was a real buying opportunity here. But again, like with Veritiv, it is still cheap.
But if it pulls back some around a bigger market sell off, then that might be the time to keep it on your watch list and dive in on some of these that have had little rallies here that if we see further declines. Now over the last five years, since they put the strategy into effect, it really has made a difference in the share price. The shares are up 110% in that five year time period. So it has both the growth component and it's still a value and it's a small cap.
So this is the type of stock, small cap value really loves. And it's one of the companies that's acquiring a bunch of smaller companies. And that's where their growth component comes from. So it's ignored by the street because nobody knows it and nobody follows it, but maybe we should be, right?
So that's Sterling Infrastructure, S-T-R-L. And with the other ones I want to talk about, even though those are the three I'm mainly highlighting, I wanted to talk about the one that we all do know that was on the list and it's Urban Outfitters. I've talked about it many times on the Valley Investor Podcast because it is still cheap, it has good rank and it keeps showing up on all these lists. So Urban Outfitters ticker, U-R-B-N, it's not just Urban Outfitters, it's also anthropology and free people, they have terrain, they run some restaurants.
I of course love that aspect of it, they're into the experiences, they're starting to grow that side of the business. It's not their main focus, it still is apparel. And that's again, like AKA a little dubious for me. So it is number two, however, by its cheap, PEG is .88, price to sales is .54.
Market cap, this was the largest company on the list of eight at 2.54 billion. Over the last five years, it's just been a real struggle to own this stock. The shares are down 18.6%, even though it's had some good quarters, especially during the pandemic. And then it's had a lot of bad.
So it just hasn't ever really gotten traction, like a Lulu Lemon or even an Athletic has done in terms, well, that's gap. So I guess I shouldn't compare to that. But Lulu, in terms of stock price, it just hasn't. But that's why it's cheap and a value, right?
The market's kind of ignoring it. But over the last three months, it has gotten a bid. It's up 18.5% in that time period, as people started buying up the retailers again. Over the last year, however, it's down 3.1%.
But that's not too terrible given the worries over the holiday season and what is happening with inventories, which were just way too high. So what happens when inventory is too high on the retail side? They just mark it down and then they lose more money. Like the margins contract, suddenly it's good for us.
We can get the $200 pair of jeans for some kind of discount at least, 20% or 30% off, or in some cases 50% off. But it's bad for the retailers. But they just have to work through this large inventory issue. And they all are mostly doing it in this year through this fiscal year, which is ending in a couple of weeks here in January, usually.
And then they will wipe out most of that inventory. They don't have anything still held back on the ships because the supply chain has improved and they know a little bit more what the customer demand is going to be looking like here for spring, even into summer. And they're buying to accommodate that now. But we've got to make it through the next couple of weeks here and see what happens and what kind of guidance they give.
So the stock, 52-meter-high is $30.52. The low is at 17.81. So pretty big pool back there, almost 50%. And then currently, they're back up there.
They're at 27.23. They don't pay any dividend they used to, I want to say, maybe even before the pandemic, is that right? I felt like urban outfitters might have paid one back in the day. But not anymore, so no dividend there.
And this one, a little bit rockier. So you might see my pattern here. I'm trying to steer myself away from some of the apparels. They have already caught a bid.
They're all up big. I'm going to wait and kind of see what happens with this next earnings report and what kind of guidance, if any, they're able to give on what they see with the consumer. Because that's where the real unknown is coming. Usually on a recession, the consumer pools back, and certainly on apparel.
And even accessories, that kind of stuff. So that's going to be impacted, possibly, the most out of any of these small cap companies, and certainly out of retail. So let me recap the stocks I did talk about, and just that 1 ETF. I did talk about the Vanguard small cap value.
I used to own it in my own personal portfolio. But I was overweighted in these small cap value funds. I have a maneuver, it's like my retirement portfolio, my personal one. And I was just like, no, I need to cut back.
So I did sell it out of there. But it is among the cheaper of the small cap value that it has been around since 2004. So that's why people also like it. The low expense ratio and the ticker there is V is in Victor, V is in Boy R as in Robert.
Then the stocks we talked about, AKA brands, AKA is a ticker there, the Veritiv, VR TV, Sterling infrastructure play, STRL, and then Urban Outfitters, URBN kind of just put that one out there because everybody does know that one. But keep an eye on the small cap value stocks because there's some interesting things happening there. They are still cheap. And as you can see, just from this podcast, not, it's not all bad news.
It's not all bad things going on with some of these companies on the small cap side. So dig around, see what you can find, and have some exposure to small cap value because historically speaking, it is the best performing asset class over long periods of time, even better than the S&P 500. But you got to really hold onto it for a long period of time to make it happen. So that's the story on the small caps.
I love covering them. That's the story on just the beginning of this book, The Case for Long-Term Value Investing by Jim Cullen. And that was just the short three page chapter. And that was just one podcast on that.
So I will be back with more from that book. You might want to check it out yourself. But it has these kind of interesting little small chapters, which are easy to read and just kind of give you some background on these basic concepts. And I am going to check out the dividends next, see what he has to say about that because that's in favor right now.
And a lot of us like getting some of these dividend payouts here in 2023. So as always, be sure to subscribe so you don't miss any of these episodes. You can get us on Apple, you can get us on Spotify. We're on Amazon Music.
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