Monthly Archives: April 2020

warts becoming visible (i)

April 7, 2020 By in Accounting, factoring receivables, reverse factoring aka supply chain finance, Uncategorized, working capital Tags: , , , Leave a comment

receivables vs. payables

I’ve always been a fan of analyzing working capital, which shows the flow of cash in the inventory cycle, from the bank account to raw materials to finished goods to sales and getting paid.

There are lots of standard ratios, but my favorite has always been receivables vs. payables.  Taken in its simplest form this shows how eager people are to obtain the company’s goods (small receivables, which means little financing provided by the company) vs. how eager suppliers are to have the company as a customer (large receivables, which means easy payment terms).

Whenever markets go south, some limitation or other–or some abuse–of financial reporting rules invariably comes to the fore.   This time, for me at least, the culprit is payables.

factoring

I’ve known for a long time about factoring receivables, meaning the company sells them to a third party, getting them off the balance sheet.  Whatever the motivations of management, factoring makes the demand from customers and the company’s need for cash look better.

Until the financial crisis of 2008, financial accounting standards did not require that this activity be disclosed to shareholders.  Since then, as I read the FASB rules, big changes in the level of factoring, up or down, must be disclosed   …but nothing else.

reverse factoring

Something I’m just learning about during the current downturn is reverse factoring aka supply chain finance.  It’s the cousin of factoring, but on the liabilities side of the balance sheet.

This one’s a little more complicated, but there’s a bad case where a company arranges for a bank credit line.  A supplier essentially takes his payable to the bank for payment, creating a loan balance for the arranging company.  But this debt either doesn’t appear, or doesn’t appear in an easily understandable way, in the company financial statements.

This esoteric financing ploy only came to the market’s attention in the bankruptcy of Carillon in the UK in early 2018.   But the recent call by the big four accounting firms for the SEC to clarify what disclosure of reverse factoring must be made suggests that
Carillon is not an isolated case.

My sense is that this is not an issue for most companies but that highly financially leveraged firms may be in considerably worse shape than the reported financials show.  This presents a problem for anyone wanting to speculate on a turnaround in world economies or world stock markets.  The most aggressive strategy would be to bet on the companies that have been pummeled on fears they won’t survive the pandemic-related downturn.  To my mind, however, these are precisely the firms where risk of large “hidden” debt is the greatest.

 

 

 

what Monday’s market action is saying

April 6, 2020 By in Current Market Thoughts, Strategy, Uncategorized Tags: , , Leave a comment

Over the weekend Governor Cuomo of New York said that new coronavirus hospitalizations (that is new patients admitted minus patients discharged) may be plateauing.  Similar news came from Italy and Spain this morning.

While this doesn’t imply that more negative consequences of the pandemic won’t continue to build up, it suggests that the doomsday scenario of the creaky national health care apparatus imploding won’t occur.

 

Wall Street took this news as the occasion for a rally, which continues to strengthen as I write this.  (Is the worst in stock market terms over?   ,,,I have no idea.)

A day like this is chock full of information, most of it general concept stuff rather than specific buy/sell signals.

Stocks are up by 5% plus.  One should expect that the most heavily beaten down stocks should be rebounding the most and that the relative outperformers should be lagging.  No news there.  But where are the outliers?  For example:

–hotels and resorts seem to be up close to 15%, cruise lines, too, but airlines aren’t moving

–the Russell 2000 is leading the major indices up, but even though the NASDAQ has significantly outperformed on the way down, it’s even with the S&P 500 so far today

–Zoom (ZM) continues to play its contrary role–the worse the virus news, the better ZM has been performing.  But the stock is down today, and way off its high of $160+ a short while ago.  I haven’t paid much attention to ZM but it seems to me a holder (I was one but no longer) should be figuring out how much valuation support there is for it

–oils are flat to down, despite Mr. Trump’s (dubious, in my mind) claim to have brokered a production reduction deal between Russia and Saudi Arabia (more on this tomorrow)

 

What to do?  I look for two things:  individual holdings that aren’t acting the way I think they should, and changes in market leadership, which often come when the market begins to heal itself after a sharp decline.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

looking for a bottom

April 2, 2020 By in Strategy, Uncategorized Tags: , Leave a comment

A reader asked about my Monday comment on a possible “double bottom” in the US stock market.  I thought I’d elaborate.

 

What often seems to happen at market lows in the US is that stocks plummet sharply in a frightening way and then for no apparent reason other than that panic selling stops reverse course almost as sharply.

double bottom

Many times the selling stops at, or maybe slightly below a point where stocks bottomed before or where they have meandered around without much net movement for a considerable period of time.  For us, the two possible stopping points seem to be the point where stocks reversed themselves in December 2019 (just below 2400) and the period in 2015-16 when the S&P meandered around 2100.

Typically, the initial rebound lasts for about six weeks.   The market  then returns to–or somewhat below–the past lows before starting back up for good.

My observation Monday was that I’ve heard so many commentators predicting that we’re in a double bottom situation now that it may have become the consensus view.  That itself is a worry.  In my experience, the consensus view rarely comes to pass.  Sometimes everybody is wrong; more often by the time the news has passed down to TV talking heads, it has already been fully factored into stock prices and stocks will be influenced by something else.  I have no idea what the something else might be.

This shouldn’t be our most important concern as investors.

what we should be looking at/for, in my opinion anyway

The reality is that predicting the ups and downs of the US stock market accurately is very hard to do.  In 28 years as a professional investor, I never met anyone who could do it consistently–and plenty of people who lost their shirts–and their clients money–trying.

Market timing is riskier that it might seem, as well.  If I remember the number correctly, 40% of the gains in a market cycle come in 10% of the days–the lion’s share of that in the early stages of a bull market (which is just when the conventional wisdom is most bearish).

At a scary time like this, we all are getting a check on our risk tolerances.  If you can’t get to sleep at night, you now know you’ve taken on too much risk.  Not necessarily all at once, but over time you should readjust your holdings.

Everybody has stocks that blow up on them.  This is a good time to analyze clunkers you may have among your holdings, look for patterns in your decision-making that caused them and make changes.  This is harder to do than it sounds.  But it’s crucial.

If you own non-index funds, look at how well they’ve done versus the market.  Don’t just look at the past six months, look back at the fund record for as long as it has been around.  Be careful, though, to make sure that the long-term record isn’t just from a big bet that paid off a decade ago.

When I was training new analysts, I’d ask–“Suppose you bought a stock at $50 that you thought could go to $65 and it has fallen to $40 instead.  You’ve just found another stock with the same risk profile that you have the same level of conviction in.  It’s selling for $50 and you think it could go to $100.  But you have no extra money.  What do you do?”  Invariably the answer would be–“I’ll wait for the first stock to go back to $50.  Then I’ll sell it and buy the second one.”

That’s crazy.  Stock A can go up 60% and Stock B can double.  Why wouldn’t you sell some or all of A now to buy B?  The reason is that newbies don’t want to take a loss.  Their ego gets in the way of making money.  If your portfolio needs to be reshaped, in my experience the sooner you start the better off you will be.  Another reality is that the best professionals aspire to be right 60% of the time   …and they spend a lot of time trying to minimize the damage from the inevitable land mines.

the stock market now

The only thing I can see to hang my hat on is time.  I have no idea about the level at which stocks stabilize.  I think it’s reasonable to figure that the worst of the pandemic will be at least in sight by the end of June, particularly as China seems to be going back to work now.  Presumably the oil price war will still be on, which is bad for oil companies of all kinds, though particularly so for frackers, but probably a net plus for everyone else.

Three key questions:  will tech firms continue to lead the market during any recovery?  how will consumer behavior change in response to the fact of quarantine?  what struggling companies will be unable to survive a several-month shutdown?