Walter Hayes
“The Value Hunter” · Value (fundamentals) · Omaha
“Price is what you pay, value is what you get. I buy good businesses when they're cheap and ignore the noise.”
He buys good businesses when they’re cheap, and ignores the noise.
Owns good businesses at cheap prices — quality and value ranked together.
The approach
Schooled in old-fashioned value investing — the Omaha tradition of buying businesses, not tickers.
Walter ranks the market on two questions at once: is the business cheap relative to the profits it earns, and is it a genuinely good business that earns high returns on the capital it puts to work? He owns the names that score well on both — cheap and good — and ignores the day-to-day noise in between. It’s a disciplined, mechanical version of what value investors have always done: pay less than something is worth, and let the gap close.
Strengths
- Buys quality and cheapness together
- Mechanical, unemotional discipline
- Ignores market noise by design
- Grounded in real business economics
Worth knowing
Value can stay unloved for a long time. Walter can lag through a momentum-led, growth-obsessed market, and is only vindicated when prices eventually reconnect with fundamentals — which can take more patience than most investors have.
Built on
Greenblatt’s Magic Formula
Rank the market on cheapness and quality at the same time.
Graham & Dodd value
Buy a business for less than it’s worth; insist on a margin of safety.
Novy-Marx, the other side of value
The modern evidence for the quality half of the formula: gross profitability predicts returns.
The literature
Joel Greenblatt, The Little Book That Beats the Market (2005)
The cheap-and-good ranking Walter is built on.
Graham & Dodd, Security Analysis
The original case for buying value with a margin of safety.
Risk level 2–3 of 5
Conservative to moderate. Value investing runs on patience — cheap, good businesses can stay cheap for a while before the market agrees.
Worst stretch in the 3-year backtest: a US$10,000 allocation would have fallen by US$1,645 (-16.4%) before recovering.
Form guide
PatientTrades rarely — a handful of times a year.
Counted from the manager’s own decision log. Activity is temperament, not skill — a patient manager isn’t worse than a busy one.
In the book right now: CTSH · ACN · IT · LDOS · ADBE +15 more — a few examples, without weights; every change they make is logged in plain English below.
Decision scorecard
Every buy and sell is graded once, 14 days later, against S&P 500 over the same window — a buy scores well if it beat the benchmark, a sell if the symbol then trailed it. 16 buys, 8 sells graded so far.
Grades measure decisions; they never change the rules. Rule changes only happen through the published spec process — see the transparency page.
Hire Walter to run part of your own brokerage account — $9.99 a month, cancel any time. Every order they propose waits for your approval; the deepest historical loss of this method is shown above before you commit anything.
Hire Walter →Backtest honesty
Survivorship bias
This universe list holds today's constituents, so the backtest carries survivorship bias: companies that left the index along the way are not in the test.
Same code, both records
Backtests and live trading run the same strategy code — there is no separate marketing backtest. Past performance does not predict future results.
The live record inherits a portfolio — it doesn't start from cash
On its first live day (12.06.2026) this manager took over the exact positions its backtest ended holding, rather than buying a fresh book from cash. That keeps the two records one continuous portfolio instead of two disconnected ones — but it means the earliest live weeks are driven by holdings chosen before the live record began, and you will find no purchase entries for them in the decision log below. The first live entries are that portfolio's next scheduled review.
Interview Walter
Ask about their approach, their recent decisions, what could go wrong — anything. They answer in plain language; the exact rules stay in the engine.
How Walter invests
A plain-English summary of the approach. Every decision this manager makes is logged below in the same plain language, so you can always see exactly what happened and why.
Hunts for solid businesses trading at a bargain — strong profits relative to their price — and holds a basket of the best he can find, refreshed each quarter.
Track record
- CAGR
- +13.9%
- Sharpe
- 0.87
- Max drawdown
- -16.4%
- Worst month
- -11.0%
Compounded over the window, US$10,000 would have become US$14,756 — hypothetical, and only for someone who sat through the -16.4% fall above without selling.
Backtest 08.08.2023 – 07.08.2026 · config 57ed57e623f922f4
Live paper-trading record
Live since 12.06.2026: a US$10,000 allocation would now be US$11,655 — up US$1,655 (+16.6%) over 59 trading days.
Marked at the last completed close, 04.09.2026 · NAV 185.54.
Crisis stress test
No 2008 or 2020 stress test for Walter— and that's deliberate.
Walter ranks companies on point-in-time fundamentals (earnings yield, return on capital) — data we can’t reconstruct survivorship-free back to 2008.
We only publish a crisis chart when we can reproduce it honestly — we won't fake one. The managers whose instruments existed back then show their full 2008 & 2020 panels.
Decision log
Every action — and every deliberate non-action — in plain language, straight from the engine. Days the market was shut are listed separately, so they never bury a trade.
- pause
Engine paused before trading: SPY: missing or non-positive prices in series — no orders were placed; the admin has been flagged.
- pause
Engine paused before trading: can't mark NAV — no recent price for held position(s) CAG (delisted or dropped from the universe); needs an operator to resolve the position — no orders were placed; the admin has been flagged.
- pause
Engine paused before trading: can't mark NAV — no recent price for held position(s) CAG (delisted or dropped from the universe); needs an operator to resolve the position — no orders were placed; the admin has been flagged.
- pause
Engine paused before trading: SPY: missing or non-positive prices in series — no orders were placed; the admin has been flagged.
- sellADP✗ +8.2% after 2wks
ADP ranks #91 on earnings yield (6.0% EBIT/EV) and #21 on return on capital (192%) — combined rank 112, inside the top 20: a good business at a cheap price.
- sellBKNG✗ +1.6% after 2wks
BKNG fell out of the top 20 combined value ranks this quarter — sold at the next open.
- sellCDW✓ -7.6% after 2wks
CDW ranks #52 on earnings yield (7.1% EBIT/EV) and #54 on return on capital (105%) — combined rank 106, inside the top 20: a good business at a cheap price.
- sellDELL✓ -1.3% after 2wks
DELL fell out of the top 20 combined value ranks this quarter — sold at the next open.
- sellSOLV✓ +1.0% after 2wks
SOLV ranks #14 on earnings yield (11.7% EBIT/EV) and #58 on return on capital (101%) — combined rank 72, inside the top 20: a good business at a cheap price.
- buyACN✓ +8.5% after 2wks
ACN ranks #7 on earnings yield (14.6% EBIT/EV) and #68 on return on capital (84%) — combined rank 75, inside the top 20: a good business at a cheap price.
- buyADBE✓ +6.9% after 2wks
ADBE ranks #21 on earnings yield (10.5% EBIT/EV) and #10 on return on capital (419%) — combined rank 31, inside the top 20: a good business at a cheap price.
- buyAOS✗ -3.5% after 2wks
AOS ranks #35 on earnings yield (8.4% EBIT/EV) and #81 on return on capital (66%) — combined rank 116, inside the top 20: a good business at a cheap price.
- buyBMY✓ +1.8% after 2wks
BMY ranks #48 on earnings yield (7.3% EBIT/EV) and #75 on return on capital (74%) — combined rank 123, inside the top 20: a good business at a cheap price.
- buyBR✓ +8.1% after 2wks
BR ranks #82 on earnings yield (6.3% EBIT/EV) and #12 on return on capital (395%) — combined rank 94, inside the top 20: a good business at a cheap price.
- buyCLX✗ +0.7% after 2wks
CLX ranks #38 on earnings yield (8.1% EBIT/EV) and #66 on return on capital (90%) — combined rank 104, inside the top 20: a good business at a cheap price.
- buyCMCSA✗ -3.6% after 2wks
CMCSA ranks #4 on earnings yield (16.4% EBIT/EV) and #117 on return on capital (49%) — combined rank 121, inside the top 20: a good business at a cheap price.
- buyCTSH✓ +8.7% after 2wks
CTSH ranks #1 on earnings yield (19.7% EBIT/EV) and #91 on return on capital (62%) — combined rank 92, inside the top 20: a good business at a cheap price.
- buyDPZ✓ +3.5% after 2wks
DPZ ranks #74 on earnings yield (6.5% EBIT/EV) and #53 on return on capital (108%) — combined rank 127, inside the top 20: a good business at a cheap price.
- buyGIS✗ -1.4% after 2wks
GIS ranks #23 on earnings yield (10.0% EBIT/EV) and #19 on return on capital (233%) — combined rank 42, inside the top 20: a good business at a cheap price.
- buyIT✓ +1.4% after 2wks
IT ranks #22 on earnings yield (10.1% EBIT/EV) and #18 on return on capital (259%) — combined rank 40, inside the top 20: a good business at a cheap price.
- buyLDOS✓ +4.1% after 2wks
LDOS ranks #11 on earnings yield (12.3% EBIT/EV) and #94 on return on capital (61%) — combined rank 105, inside the top 20: a good business at a cheap price.
- buyMKC✗ -0.4% after 2wks
MKC ranks #83 on earnings yield (6.3% EBIT/EV) and #31 on return on capital (150%) — combined rank 114, inside the top 20: a good business at a cheap price.
- buyOTIS✗ +0.5% after 2wks
OTIS ranks #84 on earnings yield (6.3% EBIT/EV) and #3 on return on capital (1563%) — combined rank 87, inside the top 20: a good business at a cheap price.
- buyPTC✓ +7.4% after 2wks
PTC ranks #64 on earnings yield (6.8% EBIT/EV) and #16 on return on capital (310%) — combined rank 80, inside the top 20: a good business at a cheap price.
- buyCAG✓ +1.3% after 2wks
CAG ranks #17 on earnings yield (10.9% EBIT/EV) and #59 on return on capital (99%) — combined rank 76, inside the top 20: a good business at a cheap price.
- sellKDP✓ -8.7% after 2wks
KDP ranks #99 on earnings yield (5.8% EBIT/EV) and #2 on return on capital (1670%) — combined rank 101, inside the top 20: a good business at a cheap price.
- sellKLAC✓ -21.3% after 2wks
KLAC fell out of the top 20 combined value ranks this quarter — sold at the next open.
- sellQCOM✓ -3.0% after 2wks
QCOM fell out of the top 20 combined value ranks this quarter — sold at the next open.
- rebalance
Quarterly Magic-Formula screen: ranked 361 non-financial, non-utility S&P 500 names by earnings yield + return on capital; buying the top 20 equal-weight and holding until next quarter. 35 name(s) excluded for missing data.