Monthly Archives: April 2014

security monitoring services–another thought on Amazon (AMZN)

April 30, 2014 By in Industry Analysis, secuirty monitoring firms Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

Security monitoring services have an interesting financial structure.  They wire up your home with anti-intrusion devices, which they monitor from a remote location.  They may charge an installation fee, which typically covers half or less of the actual installation cost.  And they charge a periodic, usually monthly, monitoring fee.

These companies have operating leverage in two ways:  a few employees can equally well monitor one or thousands of homes; and the company can charge for add-on services (like fire or medical monitoring) that cost almost nothing to provide.

A contract with a homeowner will work something like this (I’m making these numbers up):

–installation costs $2,000, of which the client pays $1,000

–the client signs a three-year contract to pay a monitoring fee of $50 a month

–monitoring expense (rent + equipment + salaries) is $10 a month.

On these figures, it takes the monitoring company about two years to recover its initial investment.  After that, a waterfall of money rains down into the monitoring company’s bank account.

This is a fabulous business to own, even though the initial negative cash flow may be daunting.

For the stock of a company like this,  however, it may not be the dream investment it may seem.

How so?

It isn’t that the early years look ugly from a profit and cash flow perspective.  It isn’t the issue of how to finance the initial investment in monitoring equipment.  Liberal accounting technique can pretty up the financials a bit, but–I believe–most holders see through this to understand the actual cash in/cash out relatively clearly.

Instead, investors concentrate on the asset value created by each new customer.  Let’s say a typical customer retains the monitoring service for 15 years (again, a made up number).  If so, and if both revenues and costs remain constant, each new customer adds something like $6,000 to the firm’s asset value.

For investors, then, the more new customers who sign up, the better.  The more existing customers who sign up for new services, increasing their asset value, the better.  That’s even though the more new customers, the uglier the near-term losses and negative cash flow will get.

Here’s the kicker:

–the fastest way for a company like this to show stellar earnings growth is to stop signing up new customers.  But that’s also the kiss of death–because it means the firm has gone ex-growth!!

…the stock fall apart.  Maybe it doesn’t go down in flames all at once.  But it suddenly looks an awful lot like a bond.  So PE contraction offsets the better earnings.

This is not how a startup works.  Usually incremental customers are profitable right out of the gate; the issue is getting enough of them to cover infrastructure costs.

It isn’t quite AMZN, either, which seems to require massive infrastructure spending just to tread water.  But I think holders take the large amount of spending on infrastructure as a proxy for future growth–just as holders of alarm companies do.

I wonder what would happen if AMZN suddenly entered the waterfall-of-money phase of its life that presumably owners are waiting for.  My guess is they wouldn’t find it as enjoyable as they thing they would.

 

 

 

 

 

thinking about Amazon (AMZN)–and concept stocks in general

April 29, 2014 By in Current Market Thoughts, Portfolio management, Recent Market Action Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I’ve watched AMZN since its inception, although I’ve never owned the stock.  What I find especially fascinating is that it has been a “concept” stock–one where the possibility of spectacular earnings growth is always there, but the reality seems to somehow always be just around the next bend–for close to two decades.

I think the stock has particular significance for investors in general–owners or not–at present, for two reasons:

–Yesterday afternoon I happened to be home and noticed a small crossover SUV I didn’t recognize parked outside our house.  After a while, an unmarked white panel truck drove up.  The driver came to our door, rang the bell and left.  It was a package from AMZN, containing–unusually for AMZN–a bunch of different stuff (gummi bears and two kinds of SD card, if you have to know) in one box.

The driver then opened up the back of the truck and began transferring packages to the crossover.  Welcome to  the newest wrinkle in AMZN’s logistics system.  No uniforms, no big trucks, no handheld package control computers.  Just guys with cars stitched together into a (low-cost) delivery network.  I’d been seeing the panel truck for months.  This is the first on-the-fly transfer I witnessed, though.

I read this as AMZN’s response to the successful campaign by bricks-and-mortar retailers to have states enforce the sales tax laws with AMZN.  I don’t think this has helped the b&m people at all.  I think it’s been a windfall for smaller online retailers, though, and for companies that use AMZN for distribution, two groups that are so far flying under the sales tax radar.

AMZN’s competitive response has been to reduce delivery costs, with (presumably negative, if it’s successful) implications for the post office, Fedex and UPS.

–More important for me, AMZN shares fall into the group of “story” stocks that have been sold off very heavily since February.  So I think we can draw conclusions about the whole group by examining AMZN (not a rock solid premise, but, I think, the best we’re going to be able to do).

Two features stand out to me.

First, nothing much has changed with the company, even though the stock has lost a quarter of its value in the selloff.

Second, the list of major holders consists of the most prominent institutional money managers in the country. So the selloff is not being induced by a small bunch of crazy, risk-prone hedge funds.  In addition, most of the big names (ex Fidelity) had already been lightening their positions late last year.

As far as trying to figure out how far the selloff might go, we can look at a fundamental component and an emotional one.  On the fundamental side, pre-Great Recession AMZN shares tended to trade at about 30x cash flow.  In recent years, that figure has been closer to 50x.  A return to 30x cash flow would imply a price of around $300, or about where we are now.  Personally, I don’t see why I should pay 30x cash flow for anything but a startup.  But arguably most of the air has already been taken out of the AMZN balloon.

The emotional side is where looking at price charts and volumes traded comes in.  In the case of AMZN, there has been a sharp pickup in volume over the past couple of days,  That’s usually an indicator of the panicky selling that marks a bottom.

From my own perspective, the selloff has gone on longer, and has been deeper, than I would have thought.  But that’s par for the course for me.  And I’m not feeling very uneasy about stocks in general–which is my go-to indicator that I should be starting to buy.  Of course, this may be because the overall market has been holding up very well. Selling has been confined to a relatively small subset of stocks.

For now, my strategy remains to ride out the storm, not buying in a big way but not selling either.  To my mind, it’s way too late for me to do the latter.  But I’d like more confirmation before becoming more aggressive.

 

 

Fidelity’s dark pool proposal–why?

April 28, 2014 By in dark pools, the SEC, Trading Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

Recently, Fidelity, one of the largest money managers in the world, has been sending feelers out to its peers to form a private “dark pool” in which they could all trade anonymously.

What’s this all about?

I’m not sure who made up the name “dark pool.”  But it glamorizes a pretty mundane operation.  A dark pool is a computer-driven trading network where professional investors buy and sell securities with each other in a low-cost anonymous way.

They’re meant to solve two problems that every large investor like Fidelity who’s subject to SEC regulation in the US has:

–in trading securities for their clients,money managers are required to obtain the lowest cost in making any trade as well as the best execution of the order.  Best execution, which I take to mean the most favorable price, given the circumstances at the time of the trade, is a rather vague and contentious concept.  But lowest cost, meaning the lowest commission or bid/ask spread paid to get the trade accomplished, is relatively clear.

It’s also very clear that dealing with a third-party broker isn’t the lowest cost way of doing business.  Dealing directly with another institution through a computer trading network may cut commission/spread costs in half.  As a result, increasing amounts of trade is being done through dark pools so institutions can establish that they’re working to fulfil the lowest-cost legal mandate.

–any money manager wants to keep his trading activity as secret as possible.  After all, no one wants others to be freeriding on investment ideas that a manager has developed after long and expensive research efforts.

This is a particularly pressing issue for managers with large amounts of money under management, since such a manager will often have orders that are so big they can take, say, a month to execute–sometimes longer.  The trickiest part of such trading is keeping the manager’s activity secret for as long as possible.

Again, brokerage house trading operations for third parties are not a great way to go.  They tend to leak like sieves.  Part of this is a function of order size.  The broker may approach potentially interested parties.  As/when the size of the order becomes apparent, the other party may be able to guess the identity of the institution the broker represents.

There’s mre than that, however.  Information is also a valuable resource.  In my experience, most important clients of a broker–and the broker’s own proprietary trading desk–would know the general outlines of a Fidelity order within minutes of its being placed.  The broker might not use the Fidelity name, but the description ” a large institution in Boston” would leave little to the imagination.  The idea is that smaller clients will regard this as valuable information and will compensate the broker with increased trading commissions in return for continuing access.  (My tendency would be to do less business with a broker who acts this way, but apparently I’m in the minority.)

Dark pools, though sometimes illiquid, are one solution to this problem.

It turns out, though, that the dark pools also have their issues.  One that I find interesting is that to obtain liquidity dark pools may allow high frequency traders to participate.  And, it turns out, they have found “big data” ways to figure out which orders are Fidelity’s–and to use this information to trade against them.

Fidelity’s response is to try to form a dark pool that will consist only of institutional investors, without high frequency traders.  Such a setup might have issues of its own.  If there are only, say, four major members it may be that the trading intentions of the others will be obvious to all.  But, in Fidelity’s view at least, that would be better than the current situation.

 

 

my take on Apple (AAPL)

April 25, 2014 By in earnings conference calls, Stock ideas Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

In a comment on yesterday’s post, my friend Bruce asked for my take on AAPL. That’s my subject today.

The stock looks cheap to me.  Investors have had two big worries, I think.  One has been lack of recent earnings growth.  The other is the perception that the post-Jobs management of AAPL is completely at sea, cowed by the memory of Jobs and therefore unable to make decisions– as well as completely uninterested in whether the stock goes up or down.

However,

–growth appears to be resuming.  Yes, modest growth, but Wall Street has understood for years that the heady days of the last decade are gone forever.

–AAPL has a stellar brand name and many rabid fans.  New products may re-energize them.

–the recent announcement of a 7-for-1 split offers the hope that management is more the simply caretaker of the Steve Jobs museum.

–in addition, conditions are right for investors to look at AAPL again.  I think 2014 is going to be a sideways year from here for the US stock market.  So a big, low-multiple, cash generative company where earnings growth is resuming and where management practices may be taking a turn for the better has a great chance to be an outperformer.  A 2.3% dividend yield doesn’t hurt, either.

To me, AAPL feels like the MSFT story, only in an earlier chapter.  MSFT has a stronger business.  But Tim Cook arguably has greater freedom to act, since he’s dealing only with the legend of Steve Jobs and not the physical presence of Steve Ballmer.  (Also, to give him credit, Cook has already fixed one of SJ’s mistaken pronouncements–that 10″ is the only tablet size anyone will/should want.  He appears to be in the process of fixing another, similar one–that the original iPhone screen size is the only choice anyone will want/need.)

Personally, I prefer MSFT.  But that may be because AAPL has historically been so uncommunicative that it’s hard to figure out what’s going on inside management’s heads.  In the strange way investors think, my attitude is arguably an investment plus for AAPL.  Better communication from AAPL would come as a positive surprise to Wall Street–and by itself result in a higher stock price.

 

 

 

 

Apple (AAPL) is splitting its stock, 7 for 1

April 24, 2014 By in earnings conference calls, Recent Market Action, Stock ideas Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

AAPL’s 2Q14 earnings report last night was full of mostly positive surprises:

–earnings per share came in at $11.62.  That’s about 15% more than the Wall Street analyst consensus had expected, and higher, by about the same amount, than results in the same quarter a year ago.  It’s the largest margin AAPL has beaten the consensus by in years.

–the company is raising its dividend and increased its proposed share buyback amount by $30 billion

–AAPL is going to split its stock by 7 to 1.

Of these developments, I think the most important is the stock split.

stock splits

Academics will tell you two things about stock splits:

1.  Stock splits have no direct economic significance.  Its’ simply paper shuffling.  Instead of having one share that trades at, say, $560 you’ll soon have seven shares, each trading at $80.

2.  The stocks of companies that have stock splits tend to underperform for a period after the split occurs.

 

The second comment, while true, is, well, silly.  All the outperformance comes between the period when the stock split is anticipated by the stock market or actually announced and the date when the split takes place.

The first is also true–particularly in the United States (but not in many foreign markets).  But this doesn’t mean that the AAPL split has no relevance.

(See my post on stock splits for more details.)

Two reasons:

–stocks with very high per share prices tend to underperform.  Why?  I don’t know.  I think it’s because retail investors prefer to buy stock in round” lots (usually 100 shares).  This may be an echo from the days a half-century ago when trading costs were very high and when the commission for an “odd” lot (anything that isn’t a round lot) was particularly expensive.  For AAPL, this would be a commitment of over $50,000–too rich for a single position for most people.

Yes, it makes no sense.  But, whatever the reason, retail investors like stock splits and respond positively to them.

–more important, studied management contempt for shareholders, who after all are the owners of the company, has long been a key feature of the AAPL persona.  It’s part of the Steve Jobs legacy.  But it’s not a good one.  To me the stock split is a sign that the current management finally realizes how poisonous the Just-Like-Steve mentality has been and is beginning to shake off its shackles.

I don’t think this means AAPL returns to the super growth of its past.  On the other hand, I do think that, if I’m right about the attitude change, that the JLS discount multiple Wall Street now applies to AAPL stock will gradually disappear.  Just achieving a market multiple would imply a 30% gain in the stock.