Category Archives: Recent Market Action

The March 2012 Employment Situation report: hiring slowdown?

April 9, 2012 By in economics, employment, Employment Situation report, Recent Market Action, Strategy Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

the report

The Bureau of Labor Statistics of the Labor Department released its March 2012 Employment Situation report last Friday, while virtually all the stock markets of the world were closed for Good Friday.  The US bond and derivative markets weren’t, however, and both reacted to the news.

The report said the US economy added 120,000 jobs during the month–about half the gains posted in each of the prior three.   The main areas of difference were in:  temporary help, which recorded 54,900 new positions in February and a loss of -7,500 in March; and in healthcare, which added 26,100 jobs in March vs. 52,800 in February.

revisions weren’t any help, either

February job additions, in their first of two monthly revisions, went up from 227,000 new positions to 240,000.  January additions, first reported at +243,000 and revised up last month to +284,000, were revised down in the March report to +275,000.   So net upward revisions of past months totaled only +4,000 extra jobs.

market reaction was swift, and negative

S&P 500 stock index futures dropped a bit more than 1% last Friday.  Government bond prices regains much of the ground they had been losing over the past month.

Two reasons for the reaction:  the March BLS figures showed only about half the gains of the prior three months, casting doubt on investor belief that economic growth in the US had reached a permanently stronger stage of recovery;  also, the March job additions are at or below the level needed to absorb new entrants into the workforce, so they do nothing to help reduce the number of unemployed.

what significance do one month’s figures have?

Not a lot.  Last August’s Employment Situation, for example, initially showed zero job growth in the economy–a figure subsequently revised up to +104,000 new positions.

Currently, other indicators–like consumer confidence and retail sales–have been rising, adding support to the idea that the strong ES figures from December-February are valid signs of an improving domestic economy and broadening economic recovery.  The evidence I’ve seen from individual company reports tends to support this view.  And the ADP employment report last Wednesday, quirky as it may be, showed +209,000 new jobs.

But, I think, the market has maintained an underlying suspicion that somehow the mild winter in the most heavily populated parts of the US has messed up the BLS’s seasonal adjustment mechanism,  and that, as a result, the apparent economic strength is just work that usually must wait until March or April being done in January of February.  So it’s very willing to believe the December-February ES reports overstate the job situation.  On this view, March is just a return to reality.

my thoughts

I don’t think the current ES report is enough evidence to warrant changing an equity portfolio orientation away from the idea that 2012 will be a year of broadening recovery.  We need more evidence.

If seasonal adjustment factors are responsible for skewing the ES numbers, it’s possible that March is the victim–not Dec-Feb.

The S&P 500 has moved up so sharply so far in 2012 that backing and filling for a while wouldn’t be surprising.

Stock price movements today will be interesting to analyze–especially to find economically sensitive stocks that outperform the market.

Typically, a strong economy with rising interest rates means weak bonds but a flat to up stock market.  Will this rule of thumb hold in 2012?   …by showing the other side of the coin, today may provide a valuable clue.

 

 

 

 

playing the Japanese stock market today is harder than it seems

March 22, 2012 By in Current Market Thoughts, Japanese development, Recent Market Action, Strategy Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

how so?

No, it isn’t the frequent market holidays.

It isn’t the semi-visible, semi-not, zaibatsu/keiretsu business links that tie firms together with amazingly strong (to me, anyway) emotional bonds that foreigners find difficult to assess.

It isn’t the fact that for many Japanese company managements–to say nothing of institutional investors–one foot remains in the samurai world.

None of this helps a foreign investor.  But learning a market’s quirks is arguably part of the price of entry a newbie pays everywhere he goes.

the market structure…

No, the biggest problem for a foreigner today is the structure of the market–the selection of stocks available on the Tokyo Exchange.  Despite the fact that Japan is a wealthy nation and the second-largest advanced economy in the world, its market is dominated by the export-oriented manufacturers, plus the suppliers and distributors that support them, whose heyday (ex the autos) was thirty years ago.

…makes Japan look like an emerging country

The market structure is more like what you’d expect from China or India.  It’s also a little like the US circa 1980.  In the US since then, however, junk bond and private equity barons have taken many older, low growth firms private.  Conglomerates have broken up, or spun off their more glamorous parts, in strategies calculated to maximize their value.  Venture capital has brought a host of new firms into the public arena.  Not so Japan.  There are counterculture exceptions:  Uniqlo and the social networking firms come to mind.  But still…

None of this is exactly news.  But it’s the genesis of the dilemma foreigners now face in the Japanese stock market.

today’s problem:  a weakening yen

Newly initiated quantitative easing in Japan is weakening the yen.  That’s making life more difficult for domestic firms that use imported materials.  And it’s also a lifeline for exporters, who use yen-denominated inputs and sell their products abroad.  So Japanese institutions have been selling the former to buy the latter.  Again, no surprise.  It’s what they always do.

The issue for a foreigner is this:

Ex the autos, the exporters are not a particularly attractive picture.  Historically, they’re a pretty sorry lot in terms of making money.  They face intensifying competition from lower-cost rivals in emerging economies.  By and large, managements are hide-bound and unable to commercialize higher tech products they have.  Law and custom defend dysfunctional incumbents against any shareholder attempts at change .  (Think:  Olympus …or Sharp  …or Pioneer  …or Sanyo   …or Casio   …or Sony).

In addition, for a dollar-oriented investor, at least a part–and probably most–of any yen-denominated gains will be offset by currency losses.  Although my general rule is not to get involved in forex hedging, this is an exception.  Whether you like or not, you probably won’t make much money on your Japanese stocks unless you sell the yen.

…which brings up another potential worry.  Exporters usually run substantial currency hedging operations.  In my experience, they’re pretty good at it.  Nevertheless, it’s always possible that exporters have zigged when they should have zagged.

my bottom line

For a long time, I’ve regarded Japan as a special situations market.  Find an outstanding company; buy and hold.  Enduring the current flight from quality is just a cost of doing business.  I have no desire to chase export-oriented names, although while the yen is softening I think exporters will continue to be market stars.  If I were managing dedicated Japanese money, however, I’m sure I’d find myself under performance pressure to do just that.

AAPL’s dividend: implications

March 20, 2012 By in earnings conference calls, Recent Market Action, Stock ideas Tags: , , , , , , 3 Comments

the AAPL announcement

Yesterday morning, AAPL announced that it will initiate a $2.65/ share quarterly dividend, starting during the July accounting period.  The company says it will also repurchase $10 billion in stock over the coming three fiscal years.  Together, the two moves will absorb $45 billion in domestic cash.

my thoughts:

the stock buyback

The dividend is a more important signal about future earnings.  But the description of the stock buyback also says something important, and admirable, about the company’s management.

Most firms try to describe stock buybacks an altruistic move on their part, as “returning cash to shareholders.”  They argue that dividend payments create a tax liability for recipients while stock buybacks do not, and intimate that this is the main reason for their action.

The tax stuff is true. But the rest is, at best, nonsense.

Companies pay their employees, and particularly their executives, in two ways:  with cash; and with stock options.  The latter gradually transfer ownership of the firm from portfolio investors to employees.  In fact, many companies in the tech world have target percentages for this transfer in mind when they issue stock options.  The main–unspoken–purpose of stock repurchases is to keep the total number of shares outstanding stable, and thereby disguise the change in ownership that is taking place.

APPL is the first company I’ve seen that’s completely honest with shareholders.  AAPL says its share repurchases have “the primary objective of neutralizing the impact of dilution from future employee equity grants and employee stock purchase programs.”  The asset transfer effect, by the way, is a miniscule .5% or so per year in AAPL’s case.

the dividend

The initial payment level of $10.60/year implies to me that AAPL management thinks profits will be a lot better than the market now expects.  Here’s why:

Two basic rules about dividends are:

–they’re supposed to be paid out of profits, and

–they should be set at a level that’s easily sustainable, and that can rise.  Very little is worse for a company than having to cut, or eliminate, a dividend.  A prudent firm–and AAPL is one–would have already thought carefully about a pattern of future dividend increases when setting the initial payment amount.

AAPL’s situation

At the end of the December 2011 quarter, AAPL had 932 million shares outstanding.  Let’s say that rises to 940 million by the time it begins paying dividends.  $2.65/quarter x 4 quarters x 940 million shares = $9.96 billion in annual dividend payments.

AAPL will most likely have chosen the current dividend payment based solely on its estimate of  sustainable US earnings.  Why?  Dividend payments from a US corporation have to use US-domiciled cash.   Yes, AAPL has $33 billion in the bank in the US already–enough to pay the current dividend for over three years or supplement a payout that exceeds US-generated funds for far longer than that.  But what would AAPL do after the US cash runs out?  …cut the payout?  No way.  …repatriate funds from abroad, losing 35%  to federal taxes?  Probably not.

Therefore, it’s a reasonable assumption that AAPL considers a recurring $10.60 a share from the US each year as “in the bag.”  If it were me making the decision, I wouldn’t want to set the payout at 100% of US earnings.  I’d like a cushion.  Arguably, the US cash on the balance sheet is enough of a safety margin, but why take the risk?  I’m thinking the payout is being set at more like 75% of US earnings–which also leaves room for a dividend increase next year.

doing some arithmetic

Let’s try to use the $10.60 a year to calculate what AAPL must be thinking about its total earnings.

AAPL presently earns a little more than a third of its revenues in the US.  As Asia increases in importance to the company, the domestic percentage will likely fall. Assume that the US is 30% of the AAPL total for fiscal 2012 and 28% in fiscal 2013, with overall earnings growing, say, by 15%.

Case 1:  low-balling      AAPL has decided to pay out 100% of its current US earnings in dividends.

That would imply AAPL earns $35.33 this fiscal year and $43.50 next.

I think this is would be, in AAPL’s view, for all practical purposes the worst possible case.

Case 2: realistic     AAPL has decided to pay out 75% of its current US earnings.

That would mean $47 in eps for this fiscal year and $58 next.

This compares with the current analyst consensus eps of $43.14 for fiscal 2012 and $48.44 for fiscal 2013.

AAPL insiders more bullish than Wall Street?  I think so

Case 1 yields no useful information, since consensus estimates are already substantially higher.  Case 2, which I think is considerably more probable, would imply that AAPL’s board and management are both noticeably more bullish on company prospects than Wall Street.  AAPL insiders can be as wrong as anyone else.  In this case, however, they have a ton more pertinent information to work with than you and I do.

Macau gambling: leading indicator for China?

March 14, 2012 By in Casinos, Current Market Thoughts, Entertainment, Hong Kong, Industry Analysis, Portfolio management, Recent Market Action, Stock ideas Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

yesterday’s Hong Kong trading

In Hong Kong trading Tuesday, the major Macau gambling stocks moved sharply upward.  Wynn Macau, a recent market laggard, was the star, gaining 8.6%.  But even China Sands, which is up by over 40% since the Hang Seng peaked last August, rose by almost 6%.

Why?

the Karen Tang effect

According to Bloomberg, Karen Tang, a prominent Hong Kong-based leisure analyst who works at Deutsche Bank, reversed her relatively negative view on casinos in the SAR after meeting with company managements.

Ms. Tang sent these same stocks into a tailspin last August.  That’s when she issued a report arguing that a falloff in demand for high-end luxury cars that was then being experienced in China presaged an almost complete evaporation of growth in the VIP baccarat market in Macau.  Since high-stakes baccarat is the mainstay of the casinos there, this was an especially dire forecast.

Her idea was that the market would begin to slow in the autumn.  Economizing high rollers would make trips already planned–and possibly paid for–but wouldn’t book further visits.  The market wouldn’t contract.  But growth would nosedive, troughing late in the first half of 2012 at a year-on-year rate of, say, +15%, before beginning to rebound.

too pessimistic

I didn’t see the Tang report.  But it was extensively covered in the Asian press.  From those accounts, it seemed the evidence was flimsy and the conclusion much too pessimistic.  As it turns out, Ms. Tang was wrong.  That’s not the important thing (although I’ve been unable to refrain from inserting this conclusion in this post).

rebound already!

What is important is that after a mild slowdown to a “mere” 25% growth rate last December, Chinese high roller gambling in Macau is beginning to accelerate again.  That’s what Ms.Tang found out on her research trip to Macau and published in a note yesterday.

While I was looking at yesterday’s stock prices in Hong Kong while writing this post, I noticed an article from Forbes.com.  It reports the results of a research trip to Macau by a Citibank (never to be mistaken for a research powerhouse) analyst, who says the casinos indicate gambling in the SAR grew by about 40% year on year during the first 11 days of March. That’s substantially ahead of the 28% year on year growth of the market during January-February.  And it’s not that far below the 42% gain the market put up for full-year 2011.

According to Forbes, Nomura Securities (which makes Citi look good) thinks March gaming win will be up by about the same rate as the average of January/February (a two month average corrects for variable timing of the New Year holiday).

The bottom line, though, is that the market is a lot better than the consensus had thought–and is looking up.

stock market implications

casino stocks?…

Given all the lawsuits flying around, this may not be the time to load up on the Las Vegas gambling companies.  Personally, the litigation bothers me enough that I won’t buy more, but not enough to sell what I have.  It seems to me that the Macau subsidiaries are relatively insulated.  I like Steve Wynn.  And Las Vegas Sands is still cheap.

…or indirect plays?

The most important aspect of yesterday’s trading may be the signal that corporate magnates in China are starting to feel a lot better about themselves and their businesses.  The safer way to go is probably to look for sold-off US firms that have a lot of Chinese exposure.

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