Monthly Archives: May 2019

more tariffs?

May 31, 2019 By in Current Market Thoughts, securities markets, stock market, Strategy, tariff protection, tariffs, Uncategorized Tags: , , 1 Comment

Wall Street woke up today to an announcement from Mr. Trump that he intends to place a tariff on all goods coming into the US from Mexico.  The levy will be in effect until that country prevents immigrants/asylum seekers from reaching its border with the US.  The initial rate will be 5%, escalating to 25% by October.

As an American, I think I can understand the issues the administration wants to address.  But I find it more than a little unsettling that there seems to be no coherent, well-reasoned plan being implemented.  I’m pretty sure tariffs are not the way to go.  Also, both sides of the aisle in Congress appear to be eerily content to watch from the sidelines, rather than make it clear that Mr. Trump does not have authority to levy tariffs without legislative consent (my personal view, for what it’s worth) or limit/revoke that authority if the president does have it now.

 

As an investor, however, my main concern is the much narrower question of how Washington will affect my portfolio.

As to Mexico:  let’s say the US sells $300 billion yearly to Mexico and buys $350 billion.  Most of that is food and car parts.  Even if we sell less to Mexico because of retaliatory tariffs and if imported goods are 15% more expensive–to pluck a figure out of the air–the total direct negative impact on the US + Mexican economies would probably be a loss of around $100 billion in GDP.  How that would be split between the two isn’t clear, but the aggregate figure is 8% of Mexican GDP and 0.5% of US GDP.  So, potentially much worse for Mexico than for the US.

Given the nature of US-Mexico trade, the negative economic impact in the US will be concentrated on lower-income Americans.  If earnings reports from Walmart and the dollar stores are to be believed (I think they are), these are people whose fortunes have finally, and only recently, begun to turn up post-recession.

From a US stock market point of view, neither autos nor food has large index representation.  My guess is the negative impact will be roughly equally divided between negative pressure on directly-affected stocks, including names that cater to the less affluent, and mild downward pressure on stocks in general from slower domestic growth.  Because small caps are more domestically focused than the S&P 500, only half of whose earnings come from the US, the Russell 2000 will likely suffer more than large caps.

 

There are deeper, long-term questions that Washington is raising–about whether the US is an attractive place to establish manufacturing businesses and whether it can be relied on as a supplier to buy from.  In addition, it’s hard to figure out what government policy today is–for example, how new tariffs on Mexican imports square with just-reworked NAFTA, or how imposing tariffs that hurt domestic car manufacturers square with the threat of tariffs on imported vehicles, which do the opposite.

Neither of these concerns are likely to have a significant impact on near-term trading.  But heightened Washington dysfunction must even now be becoming a red flag in multinationals’ planning.

 

 

comment from a long-time reader

May 24, 2019 By in Uncategorized 4 Comments

Hi Alan,

You always have interesting questions/comments.

“Is putting an embargo on selling electronic components to Huawei very different than China deciding to embargo rare earths?”

My short answer is “No.”  In both cases, a country is seeking a strategic advantage by denying a rival an essential material used in making a key product.

To my mind, there is a difference, though.  In the Huawei case, the US is not just trying to make it harder for the Chinese company to make telecom equipment by denying it raw materials.  We are also threatening other OECD countries with reprisals if they buy Huawei products, whether they contain US-made components or not.  The ostensible reason is the worry that programs buried deep in the Huawei network software will give Beijing the ability to monitor communications or even shut the networks down if it so chooses.  I have no idea whether this fear is well-grounded or whether the attack is designed mostly to buy time for US competitors to catch up with Huawei technology.

Also, adding Huawei to the “entity list” effectively cuts off access to all technology from US companies, including the Google Android operating system which drives Huawei phones.  UK-based ARM Technology has also withdrawn the use of its chip design cores, which seems to me to be at least as damaging as the Google action.  (The ARM decision is not the clear-cut condemnation of Huawei it might seem.  ARM is owned by Softbank, which has been aggressively, and so far unsuccessfully, lobbying Mr. Trump to green-light the merger of T-Mobile with Sprint, which Softbank owns and which has been an albatross around its neck because of its lack of scale.)

 

As to Mr. Trump himself, I personally think history will regard him as an important transformational figure, not only for American national policy but also for the structure of both major political parties.  For good or ill, he’s laid bare how inadequate and dysfunctional the status quo is.

 

My main question about Huawei is whether this action is part of an overall government plan or whether it’s a more or less random event.  I really don’t see any overarching strategy in the changes the US wants to make in the relationship with China, so my guess is the latter.

We can look into Mr. Trump’s business career for evidence of his strategic acumen and business savvy.  The case we have the most information on is his foray into Atlantic City casino gambling, which to my eye shows neither:

–By 1985, eight years after the first Atlantic City casino opened, the limitations of this market–lack of road, rail and air infrastructure to deliver gamblers to the city; lack of hotel rooms to allow more than day trips; the beach in the summer as the only non-casino attraction (meaning that the resort was half-empty for maybe 40% of the year)–were very well-know.  The savviest operators had already begun to withdraw from AC in favor of redeveloping Las Vegas.  That’s when Donald Trump bought in.

–Trump added capacity and spent lavishly on decor with an eye to attracting high-end clients, despite accumulated evidence that this strategy didn’t work.  This created overhead that would be impossible to cover during the long off-season. He took out very large loans that he personally guaranteed–an unusual and risky move.  He was saved from personal bankruptcy when his public company, Trump Hotels and Casinos (DJT), collapsed only by his creditors’ decision that loan collateral would be worth less if the Trump myth were shattered.  To give him credit, he survived and ultimately did not lose the money he inherited.  Equity and junk bond holders, however, lost virtually everything.

 

 

 

 

the Huawei questions

May 22, 2019 By in administration economic strategy, economic moats, economics, government economic policy, Huawei, macroeconomics, Uncategorized Tags: , , , 2 Comments

Huawei is a Chinese telecom company.  It makes niftier smartphones than Apple and has 5G technology that’s better than anything US companies can offer.  The company is certainly a competitive threat to US cellphone makers, as well as to manufacturers of telephone equipment worldwide.

The question that arises with a firm like Huawei, also the perennial question raised about dominant US tech companies since WWII, is the degree to which Huawei will act in the national interest of China.  That is, can/will Beijing eavesdrop on conversations or collect/alter data being carried on Huawei networks–maybe even stop them operating, if Beijing so chooses.

The Trump response to Huawei’s technological edge has been two-fold:  to blacklist Huawei, and to aid its US rival, Qualcomm.

Two questions:

1.is this the proper response?   …or is it like Mr. Trump’s invoking national security to price better-performing Asian and European cars to unaffordable levels, forcing citizens to buy US automobiles that three-quarters of the population now shun?

I’m guessing the former.

 

2. does Mr. Trump have a strategy?   Has he thought out the consequences of what he’s doing?

Here my guess is no.  Otherwise, he would have been promoting science education and welcoming skilled foreign scientists, rather than compelling tech firms to relocate their tech hubs to Canada and elsewhere.

(An aside, sort of:  I was recently listening to a podcast which dealt with Mr. Trump’s weak record in real estate by saying that he was rich before he started in the family business and he remained rich after negotiating treacherous waters during the 1980s.  Really?

My read of the president’s career:  he ended (prior to licensing his name and performing in a reality show) with about as much money in real terms as he started with.  So in that highly technical sense what the podcast said is right.  Over the same period, however, a run-of-the-mill real estate developer made, adjusting for risk, four times what Trump did.  A really competent real estate person might have made 10x.  In achieving his result, Mr. Trump was also aided by the public listing, debt refinancing and subsequent bankruptcy declaration of his Atlantic City casinos.  Although Mr. Trump prevailed in the litigation that ensued, as a professional investor I find this an eyebrow-raising episode.

Mr. Trump was “successful” in running a business in the sense that he went fishing during a time when tons of fish were jumping into the boat and he came back with the boat.  Nothing in it …though he was in the area where the most fish were to be had   …and he was soaking wet in a way that suggested he fell out at some point.

I’m also extrapolating from that.)

investment implications?

Throughout my investing career, politics has never made much of a difference.  In fact, to my mind professional investors who based their decisions on reading Washington’s runes simply revealed the poverty of their thought.  I think now is different.  Mr. Trump has exposed the surprising weakness of Congress.  The reality of China as a rival superpower to the US has been made clear.

Unfortunately, Mr. Trump is executing an early twentieth-century strategy to solve a twenty-first century dilemma.  Arguably, but not necessarily, this is a drama where the US is playing the role of post-WWI Britain and China is the 1920s US.  We all know how that worked out. By simultaneously discouraging innovation at home and forcing China to up the pace of its own tech progress, I think the administration is auditioning for the UK part, and thereby potentially doing significant long-term harm to the economy.  Ironically, those hurt most badly will likely be Mr. Trump’s most rabid supporters.  Withdrawal from the Trans Pacific Partnership, for example, is already putting US farms at a disadvantage vs. Australian, Canadian and New Zealand rivals.

What to do?

I’m taking a two-pronged strategy in the US.  I’m looking for companies with worldwide reach and innovative products.  For domestically-oriented companies, I’m taking an approach that might be called, for lack of a better term, “value with a catalyst” (regular readers will likely know that I don’t believe traditional value works any more in the US).  This term usually means a value stock where a turnaround has progressed far enough that the path for the firm to return to health can be identified.  E.g., the stock is trading at 20% of book value in an environment where healthy firms are trading at book.  Only “deep” value investors might be interested.  Then the company recruits a CEO who’s a turnaround expert and the stock begins to trade at 30% of book–this is value with a catalyst.  I’m not so interested in book, though.  I’m looking at price/cash flow.

I’m also looking harder in the Pacific Basin.  I’m even thinking about the EU, although that’s an area where market participants have a thorough value orientation and where lots of local market lore is needed to be successful.  So I find it a bit scary–better said, the rewards not worth the effort.

 

 

 

Trump, tariffs, trading

May 16, 2019 By in Analyzing performance, Current Market Thoughts, foreign trade, managing in a flat market, market rotation, performance attribution, tariff protection, tariffs, Trump, taxes and trade, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

There’s no solid connection among the three topics above, but the title gives me the chance to write about three only-sort-of connected ideas in one post.

The crazy up-and-down pattern of recent stock market trading in the US is being triggered, I think, by Mr. Trump’s tweets about trade–and about tariffs in particular.  I think a lot of the action is being caused by computers trading on the President’s tweets themselves, or some derivative of them–likes, media mentions, reflexive response to stock movements (or a proxy like trading volume).

my thoughts

–it’s hard to know whether the misinformation Mr. Trump is spewing about tariffs is art or he simply doesn’t know/care.

Tariffs are paid to US Customs by the importer.   In some small number of instances, a Chinese exporter may have a US-based, US-incorporated subsidiary that imports items from the parent for distribution here.  In this case, a Chinese entity is paying tariffs on imported Chinese-made goods.  To that degree. Mr. Trump is correct.  Mostly, however, the entity that pays a tariff on Chinese goods is not itself Chinese.

This is not the end of the story, however.  The importer will attempt to recover the cost of the tariff through a higher price charged to the US consumer and/or through a discount received from the Chinese manufacturer.  In the case of washing machines, which I wrote about recently, for example, all US consumers ended up paying enough extra to cover the entire tariff  …and some paid more than 2x the levy.  The prime beneficiaries of this largesse were Korean companies Samsung and LG.

–one of the oddest parts of the current tariff saga is that Mr. Trump has decided not to work in concert with other consuming nations.  In fact, one of his first actions as president was to withdraw from the international coalition attempting to curb China’s theft of intellectual property worldwide.  The Trump tariffs are only bilateral, so there’s nothing to stop a Chinese company from shipping a partially assembled product to, say, Canada, do some modification there and reexport the now-Canadian item to the US.

The administration has been artful in selecting intermediates rather than consumer end products for its tariffs so far.  This makes it harder to trace price increases back to their source in Trump tariffs.  However, the fact that the administration has taken pains to cover its trail, so to speak, implies it understands that tariff costs will be disproportionately borne by Americans.

 

–in trading controlled by humans, a lot of tariff developments should have been baked in the cake a long time ago.  Continuing volatility implies to me that much of the reacting is being done by AI, which are learning as they go–and which, by the way, may never adopt the discounting conventions humans have employed for decades.

 

–I think it’s important to examine the trading of the past five days (including today as one of them) for clues to the direction in which the market will evolve.  Basically, I think the selling has been relatively indiscriminate.  The rebound, in contrast, has not been.  The S&P and NASDAQ, for example, are back at the highs of last Friday as I’m writing this in the early afternoon.  The Russell 2000, however, is not.  FB is (slightly) below its Friday high; Netflix is about even; Micron is down by 4%.  On the other hand, Microsoft and Disney are 1% higher than their Friday tops, Paycom is 2.5% up, Okta is 5% higher.

No one knows how long the pattern will last, and I’m not so sure about DIS, but I think there’s information about what the market wants to buy in these differences.   And periods of volatility are usually good times for tweaks–large and small–to portfolio strategy.  This is especially so in cases like this, where the movements seem to be excessive.

One thing to do is to confirm one’s conviction level in laggards.  Another is to check position size in winners.  In my case, my largest position at the moment is MSFT, which I’ve held since shortly after Steve Ballmer left (sorry, Clippers).   I’m not sure whether to reduce now.  I’d already trimmed PAYC and OKTA but if I hadn’t before I’d certainly be doing it today.  I’d be happiest finding areas away from tech, because I have a lot already.  On the other hand, I think Mr. Trump is doing considerable economic damage to American families of average or modest means, with no reward visible to me except for his wealthy backers.  Retail would otherwise be my preferred landing spot.

–Even if you do nothing with your holdings now, make some notes about what you might do to rearrange things and see how that would have worked out.  That will likely help you to decide whether to act the next time an AI-driven market decline occurs.

an interesting day

May 6, 2019 By in Current Market Thoughts, Strategy, Uncategorized Tags: , 1 Comment

Mr. Trump’s tweet threatening increased tariffs on products from China came while the US market was closed–but in plenty of time to affect Monday trading in Asia and Europe.

The tweet has been the occasion, if not the reason, for selling stocks worldwide.

I think the most interesting thing about today–and most important for investors to note–is what panicky investors are choosing to sell.

 

My experience is that the stocks being sold on a day like today will not necessarily have anything to do with tariffs per se.  Instead, they’ll be the things that the sellers have the least confidence in–stocks they’ve been wanting to sell but haven’t been able, for one reason or another, to pull the trigger on.  In all likelihood, there’s more behind the amounts being sold now.

On the other hand, stocks that traders leave alone–or stocks that there’s enough buying interest in that they go up–are most likely the crown jewels, and are going to continue to be outperformers.

 

So today may well provide a good roadmap for future relative performance, even if, like me, you don’t choose to participate in either direction.