Monthly Archives: August 2015

capital raising by Tesla (TSLA)

August 17, 2015 By in Autos, battery power, bond market, securities markets, Stock ideas, stock market, Technology Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

the offering

Last Friday, TSLA filed a final prospectus with the SEC, indicating that it is selling up to 3.099 million new shares of common stock (including underwriters’ over-allotment) at $242 a share.   This will net the company close to three-quarters of a billion dollars, which it needs to fund ambitious expansion plans–the Gigafactory to make batteries the chief among them.

I presume the precipitous decline of TSLA shares over the past ten days or so was triggered by underwriters soliciting indications of interest in this offering from hedge funds and other institutional investors.  Two bullish signs:  the offering was initially pitched as being 2.1 million shares, but raised to 2.7 million on Friday (not counting the underwriters’ allotment, which will have been bumped up as well).  As I’m writing this prior to Monday’s open, TSLA shares are trading at around $255 each.

my thoughts, (somewhat) randomly presented

  1.  TSLA made what I consider a firm-transforming offering of $3 billion in convertible bonds (at a conversion price of $350 (!!!) a share) last year.  This says something about how professional fixed income investors feel about the attractiveness of straight bonds.  More important for TSLA, the successful offering took talk of building the Gigafactory out of the realm of fantasy and placed it solidly into reality.
  2. The automobile world has changed significantly over the past year, with the plunge in oil prices and the rise of ride-sharing services like Uber.  The former may mess up the economics of electic vehicles; the latter calls into question the highly operationally leveraged corporate structure of traditional car companies (translation into English:  if they need to run at, say, 80% of plant capacity to break even, will that be possible if Millennials en masse use Uber instead of buying a car themselves.  Will the car industry be a replay of the current commodities debacle).
  3. My guess is that these shifts: (i) increase TSLA’s attractiveness to stock market investors vs. conventional car companies, and (ii) make Teslas relatively more attractive abroad, where petroleum products are more expensive than in the US.
  4. It seemed clear to me from the outset that the 2014 bond offering didn’t totally solve TSLA’s need for capital.  Another offering had to happen in 2015.  I’d expected more bonds.  Why stock instead?  Market etiquette says that a new offering should be at a higher price–here meaning a higher conversion price–than previous ones (otherwise last year’s buyers look like idiots).  Also, potential lenders periodically want companies to prove that they still have enthusiastic equity backers.  This is a combination of lenders not wanting financial leverage to be too high, their not wanting to be the only ones holding the bag if things go sour, and their knowledge that bonds are going to be under pressure as interest rates begin to rise.
  5. Last year’s offering signaled a near-term top for TSLA shares.   My instinct is to think that this offering establishes a near-term bottom.  I own a small position in the stock, however, so I may have an interest in thinking this is the case.

 

a strange story involving the business cycle and being wrong

August 14, 2015 By in confirmation bias, Constructing a Portfolio, fast death vs. slow death, Fixing mistakes, Portfolio management, securities markets, selling a stock, stock market, taking out a clean sheet of paper Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

I once had a young colleague with lots of potential, whom I liked very much and who was an excellent securities analyst  …but who had only limited stock market success despite loads of potential.

Ass an apprentice portfolio manager, this person came to me with the idea of building a significant position in a company that made carpets.  The firm was well run, apparently had sustainable earnings growth momentum and was trading at a low price earnings multiple.   In this instance, I didn’t do my job as a supervisor well, more or less rubber-stamped the idea and okayed the purchase.

Soon after that (this was 1993), the Fed began to raise interest rates.  This is something I had been anticipating but–maybe because this wasn’t crucial to the structure of my own portfolio–was information I failed to bring to bear on the carpet company idea.  Higher interest rates slow down both residential and commercial construction, something which is bad for, among other things, sales of carpets.  Replacement demand slows down, too.

I went to my colleague, explained the situation–including the source of my mistake, and urged selling the stock.  We did, with a modest loss.  The issue ended up losing almost two-thirds of its value in subsequent months.

Now the weird part.

Eight years or so later, my colleague came into my office to rehash this trade–which I had long since forgotten.  The point was not to suggest that we buy the stock again–which would have been a fabulous idea, since business cycle conditions were finally very favorable.  Instead, it was to say that my colleague had in fact been 100% correct in recommending the stock all those years ago (apparently the stock has finally reached the point where its cumulative performance matched that of the S&P 500.

I didn’t know what to say.  This was somewhat akin to my aunt Agnes explaining that she was switching from natural gas to oil because the gas burner in the basement was really a malevolent space alien.

Why am I recalling this strange story–much less writing about it–now?

Two reasons:

–we’re coming very close to another period of Fed-induced interest rate hikes.  This is bad of early business cycle companies, including housing, commercial construction and related industries in the US, and

–it’s a life lesson about investing.  My former colleague had extreme difficulty in recognizing an analysis was wrong or that a stock, for whatever reason, wasn’t working.  But portfolio investors in the stock market are always acting on very imperfect information.  And economic conditions, both overall and in inter-firm competition, are changing all the time.  So having what one thinks is a better analysis than the other guy simply isn’t enough to ensure success.   Recognizing when things aren’t going well, stepping back to regroup and seeking out possible sources of mistakes are all crucial, too.  Denial may salve the ego, but it makes us poorer, not richer.

 

looking at yesterday’s stock market movement

August 13, 2015 By in Analyzing performance, Current Market Thoughts, Portfolio management, Trading Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

on the wheel or off?

Japanese financial institutions have a reputation as being pretty awful stock market investors.  My experience is that this reputation is well-deserved.  Still, there’s an old-time Japanese stock market saying that I like a lot.

It’s that trying to trade based on the daily movement of stocks is like being on a wheel that’s spinning rapidly.  If you stay on the wheel, you won’t be hurt.  If you stay off the wheel, you’re safe, too.  It’s only when you try to be on the wheel sometimes and off the wheel at others, jumping back and forth between the two strategies, that you can do big damage to yourself.

Most of us are (I hope) off the wheel with the bulk of our savings.  We lay long-term plans that we review periodically and mostly own index-like products.  Some of us, though, myself included, like to have a small amount of our assets that we actively managed.  Even so, we don’t want to turn into day traders, who are totally consumed with life on the wheel.

studying the spin

Nevertheless, there are some days where price action can be highly revealing because trading is very emotionally charged.  Sometimes buying and selling are motivated by greed.   More often, fear is the driver.  In either case, however, traders show their most deep-seated beliefs.  Such days are also typically marked by wide swings in the prices of individual stocks, and often by sharp intraday momentum reversals for the market as a whole.

Yesterday was that kind of day, in my opinion.

I think anyone interested in actively managing part of his own holdings should look carefully at how each active position performed yesterday, both in morning trading, when the S&P fell by 1.5%, and in the afternoon, when the index rebounded to close up slightly for the day.

Of course, company fundamentals and price are the key long-term determinants of investment success.  But seeing what the market thinks can’t hurt, either.

what to look for

  1.  The ideal pattern to see in an individual stock would be outperformance during the decline, followed by outperformance during the rebound.

The worst would be underperformance during both phases.  I’d begin to think carefully about my rationale for keeping this latter kind of stock.

2.  Does a day like this signal a purging of market fears–and therefore the end of near-term downward market pressure?  I don’t think so (not enough pain, either in time or in depth of fall).  If it were, however, the strongest stocks during the rebound may well become the leaders during the next market up movement.

3.  At the very least, though, the stocks that led the afternoon rally are probably the ones the market will continue to feel the most comfortable with when it’s feeling bullish.  The ones that fell the least in the morning will likely continue to exhibit a defensive character (I was mildly surprised that Intel was one of these).

4.  Follow-through over the next few days can add more evidence to conclusions drawn from yesterday.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the Chinese currency and the Chinese stock market

August 12, 2015 By in Asian economic development, Balance of Payments, China, currency markets, Current Market Thoughts, economic problems in emerging countries, economics Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Throughout my financial career I’ve found that in sizing up currency markets traders from the big banks have always been ten steps ahead of me.

I’ve hopefully learned to live with this–meaning that because I’m never going to outthink them I believe my best currency strategy should have two parts:

–to avoid making future currency movements a major element in constructing my portfolio, and

–to be a “fast follower” if I can–that is, to figure out from a trend change what the banks must be thinking and to consider getting on board if I think the trend is going to have legs.

 

China has moved the price at which it will buy and sell renminbi down by 1.9% yesterday and by another 1.6% today.  Informed market speculation seems to be that another couple of downward moves of the same magnitude are in the offing.

From a domestic policy perspective, China would prefer a strong currency to a weaker one.  As I mentioned yesterday, the country has run out of cheap labor and must, therefore, transition away from the highly polluting, cheap labor employing, export-oriented basic manufacturing that is the initial staple of any developing country.  This kind of business has been the bread and butter of many Chinese companies, some of them state-owned, for decades.  Many are resisting Beijing’s call to change.  The strong currency is a club Beijing can use to beat them into submission.  In this sense, the fact that the renminbi has appreciated by 10%+ against other developing countries’ currencies over the past year, and by around the same amount against the euro, China’s largest trading partner, is a good thing.

On the other hand, the developed world has made it clear to China that if it wants to be included in the club that sets world financial policy, and in particular if it wants the renminbi to be a world reserve currency, the renminbi cannot be rigidly controlled by Beijing.  It must float, meaning trade more or less freely against other world currencies.  So China has a long-term interest in doing what it has started to do yesterday–to allow the currency to move as market forces drive it.

Why now, though?

World stock markets seem to be thinking that a severe erosion of China’s GDP growth is behind the move toward a currency float–that it’s backsliding from a committment to structural reform.

I’m not so sure.

I think what currency traders have concluded is that Beijing has enough money to prop up its stock market and enough to keep its currency at the present overvalued level–but not both.  So they’re borrowing renminbi  and selling it in the government-controlled market in the hope of pushing down the currency and buying back at a lower price.  Understanding what’s going on, and realizing the risks in defending a too-high currency level, Beijing is bending in the wind.  Doing so limits the amount of money that can be made this way, effectively short-circuiting the strategy.

Offshore renminbi, which can’t be repatriated into China, trade about 5% cheaper that domestic renminbi.  That’s where we should get the next indication of how far renminbi selling will go.

As far as my personal stock investing goes, my strong inclination is to bet that renminbi-related fears are way overblown.  I’ like to see markets calm down a bit before I stick a toe in the water, though.

 

 

 

 

 

the Chinese renminbi “devaluation”

August 11, 2015 By in Asian economic development, Balance of Payments, China, economic problems in emerging countries, economics, Purchasing power parity (PPP) Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

devaluation?

Every day the Chinese government sets a mid-point for trading of its currency prior to opening.  The renminbi is then allowed to trade within a 2% band on either side of the setting.  At this morning’s setting, Beijing put the mid-point 1.9% lower than it was yesterday.  This is an unusually large amount and can be (is being) read as an effective devaluation of the currency.

What does this really mean?

background

In the late 1970s, when China made its turn away from Mao and toward western economics, it chose the tried-and-true road toward prosperity trod by every other successful post-WWII nation.  It tied its currency to the dollar and offered access to cheap local labor in return for technology transfer.

Late in the last decade, the country ran out of cheap labor.  So it was forced to begin to transform its economy from export-oriented, labor-intensive manufacturing to higher value-added more capital-intensive output and toward domestic rather than foreign demand.  The orthodox, and almost always not so successful, method of kicking off this transition is to encourage a large appreciation of the currency.  That causes low-end production to leave for cheaper labor countries like Vietnam or Afghanistan.

China, armed with a cadre of young, creative economists with PhDs from the best universities in the West, decided to do things slightly  differently–to hold the currency relatively stable and to boost domestic wages by a lot to achieve the same end of making export-oriented manufacturing uneconomic.  The idea is that this doesn’t bring the economy to screeching halt in the way currency appreciation does.  So far this approach seems to be working–although the shift does involve slower growth and a lot of domestic disruption.

At the same time, forewarned by the immense damage done to Asian economies by speculative activity by the currency desks of the major international banks during the 1997-98 Asian economic crisis, China elected not to let its currency trade freely.

what’s changed?

For some years, China has been upset about the fact that despite being the biggest global manufacturing power, and by Purchasing Power Parity measure the largest economy on earth, it has virtually no say in world financial or trade regulatory bodies.  Those are dominated by the US and EU.  The main reason for China’s limited influence is that its financial system isn’t open.  (The other, of course, is that fearing China organizations like the new US-led Pacific trade alliance pointed excludes the Middle Kingdom.)

So China has been gradually lessening state control over the banks, the financial markets and the currency, in hopes of being admitted into the inner sanctums of bodies like the IMF.

In one sense, this is why China is becoming less rigid in its control of renminbi trading.

why now?

There’s no “good” time to let a currency float.  China doesn’t want to cede control over currency movements at a time when the renminbi might appreciate a lot, since that would be a severe contractionary force.  On the other hand, it doesn’t want the currency to fall through the floor either, since that would result in new export plants sprouting up all over the place.

China is growing more slowly than normal and is experiencing currency outflows as a result of that.  Letting the currency slide a bit relieves some of the pressure–although it may simultaneously attract speculators to try to push the renminbi lower.  So, yes, it is a sign of economic weakness.  At the same time, the loosening comes shortly before the IMF will decide on admitting the renminbi as one of its reserve currencies.  And it follows by a few months Beijing allowing banks to issue certificates of deposit at market rates, rather than at yields set by central planners.  So it’s also a step toward a healthier, more economically advanced, future.

my take

I think worries about the stability of the Chinese economy are overblown.  I also think that traders are using the Beijing move as an excuse for selling that they’ve been wanting to do anyway.  Beijing may have been the trigger for this, but it isn’t the cause.