The portfolio of businesses that comprise the Mayar Fund is diversified across products, industries and geographies, providing us with resiliency and reducing risk.

These businesses remain largely unchanged from month-to-month, selling a little more product at slightly higher prices, and investing a little bit more in production capacity and marketing. Unlike the wild fluctuations we see in the share prices on the stock market, the real intrinsic values of these businesses will not go up or down by much in any given quarter or year, and the high-quality nature of these businesses will allow them to be both more resilient in downturns and to also grow nicely over time, producing satisfactory results for us owners.

This will be true even if we fast forward ten years. There will be years when sales dip a bit during a downturn, and some companies will fare better than others then, but overall, they will continue to sell and within a year or two they will be back to hitting new sales records. And at the end of the ten years, the intrinsic values of these companies may have doubled.

These are businesses built for the long run, and many are, in fact, more than a hundred years old. They don’t sprint, they run marathons, and we very much prefer the longer game.

The difference between growing at 11% a year and 8% may not sound like much. But compounded over twenty years, it means the difference between an initial investment of $100,000 growing into $806,000 as opposed to a mere $466,000.

We at Mayar aspire to be like these businesses. We are not trying to predict the “next big thing” nor do we claim to have a 300-year “vision”. We want to build a small edge over others and let it compound over time. Some find this investing approach boring, but to us our motto remains boring is beautiful! You probably all remember The Tortoise and the Hare story from your childhood. We want to be the tortoise.