Category Archives: stock market

Snap (SNAP): non-voting shares (ii)

February 24, 2017 By in Investment firms, public offering, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Two potentially important issues arise with non-voting shares.  The underwriters and prospective investors in SNAP are clearly not worried about them.  Granted, they’re unlikely to emerge as actual issues in the near future, but here they are:

–value investors often buy shares in companies they believe are undervalued by virtue of  having bad management.  Their rationale is that management will change in one of several ways:  existing managers will learn from past mistakes and improve;  the board of directors will replace existing managers with better ones; shareholders will vote out current directors and replace them with better ones; the company will be taken over by a third party, which will toss out the incumbents and replace all of them with more competent individuals.

In the case of SNAP, management, the board and the voting shareholders are basically one and the same.  The likelihood of them firing themselves is pretty small.  And the chances of a hostile takeover are zero.  So the value investor argument for eventually buying SNAP shares that there’s a level below which they can’t go without triggering change of control doesn’t apply here.  So if things turn south with SNAP, the chances of rescue are small.

The results of this situation are plain to see in the Japanese stock market, where disenfranchised shareholders have had to watch their investment in family-owned company shares lie dormant for decades.

–change of control can happen voluntarily.  But does an acquirer have to buy non-voting shares in order to take the reins?  I don’t know.  But I don’t think the answer is clearly “Yes.”  Say Amazon decided to bid for the voting shares of SNAP at double the price of the publicly traded, non-voting ones.  AMZN could presumably then replace management and the board of directors and guide the company in any direction it chose–without buying a single non-voting share.  If this were to happen, my guess is that non-voting shares would plunge in value.  Years of expensive legal wrangling  would decide the issue one way or the other.

A third musing:   Can SNAP declare dividends for voting shares but not for non-voting?  The answer should be in the prospectus, which I haven’t read carefully enough to have found out.  But then I’m not interested in taking part in the IPO.

Warren Buffett’s bid for Unilever (ULVR)

February 21, 2017 By in economics, mergers and acquisitions, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

(Note:  ULVR is an Anglo-Dutch conglomerate with what is for Americans a very unusual corporate structure.  I’m using the London ticker.)

Late last week word leaked of a takeover offer Kraft Heinz (KHZ)–controlled by Warren Buffett and private equity investor 3G Capital–made for Unilever.  Within a day, KHZ withdrew its offer, supposedly because of a frosty reception from the UK government.  Not much further information is available.  In fact, when I checked on Monday evening as I was writing this, there’s no mention of the offer or its retraction among the investor releases on the KHZ website.  Press reports don’t even seem to acknowledge that Unilever is one set of assets controlled by two publicly traded companies.

In any event, two aspects of this situation seem clear to me:

–Buffett’s initial foray with 3G was Heinz, where the Brazilian private equity group quickly established that something like one out of every four people on the Heinz payroll did absolutely no productive work.  Profits rose enormously as the workforce was trimmed to fit the actual needs of the company.

Buffett subsequently joined with 3G in the same rationalization process with Kraft.

For some time, achieving stock market outperformance through portfolio investing has proved difficult for Berkshire Hathaway.  Tech companies are basically excluded from the investment universe; everyone nowadays understands the value of intangibles, the area where Buffett made his reputation.

The bid for ULVR shows, I think, the Sage of Omaha’s new strategy–acquire and rationalize long-established, now-bloated firms in the food and consumer products industries.

Expect a lot more of this, with any needed extra financing likely coming from Berkshire Hathaway.

–the sitting pro-Brexit UK government is showing itself to be extremely sensitive to evidence that contradicts its (questionable) narrative that Brexit is good for the UK.  That seems to me to not be true in the case of UVLR.

Sterling has fallen by 15% or so since the Brexit vote, creating problems for firms, like UVLR, which have revenues in sterling + euros but costs in dollars.  Since the Brexit vote, and before the revelation of the bid, UVLR ADRs in the US had underperformed the S&P 500 since last June by about 20 percentage points.  Yes, UVLR has been a serial laggard, but most of the recent stock price decline can be attributed, I think, to the currency decline brought about by Brexit.

The idea that a venerable British firm would fall into American hands, with layoffs following close behind, appears to have been more than #10 Downing Street could tolerate.

That attitude is probably also going to remain, meaning that weak management teams in the UK need not fear being replaced–and that Buffett will likely have to look elsewhere for his next conquest.

 

 

stocks in a 4% T-bond world

December 8, 2016 By in interest rates, stock market, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

There are two questions here:

–what happens to stocks as interest rates rise? and

–what should the PE on the S&P 500 be if the main investment alternative for US investors, Treasury bonds, yield something around 4%?

On the first, over my 38+ year investment career stocks have gone mostly sideways when the Fed is raising short-term interest rates.  The standard explanation for this, which I think is correct, is that while stocks can show rising earnings to counter the effect of better yields on newly-issued bonds, existing bonds have no defense.

Put a different way, the market’s PE multiple should contract as rates rise, but rising earnings counter at least part of that effect.

The second question, which is not about how we get there but what it looks like when we arrive, is the subject of this post.

in a 4% world

The arithmetic solution to the question is straightforward.  Imagining that stocks are quasi-bonds, in the way traditional finance academics do, the equivalent of a bond coupon payment is the earnings yield. It’s the portion of a company’s profits that each share has a claim on ÷ the share price.  For example, if a stock is trading at $50 a share and eps are $2, the earnings yield is $2/$50 = 4%.  This is also 1/PE.

A complication:  Ex dividends, corporate profits don’t get deposited into our bank accounts; they remain with management.  So they’re somewhat different from an interest payment.  If management is a skillful user of capital, that’s good.  Otherwise…

If we take this proposed equivalence at face value, a 4% earnings yield and 4% T-bond annual interest payment should be more or less the same thing.  In the ivory tower universe, stocks should trade at 25x earnings if T-bonds are yielding 4%.  That’s almost exactly where the S&P 500 is trading now, based on trailing 12-months “as reported” earnings (meaning not factoring out one-time gains/losses).  Why this measure?   It’s the easiest to obtain.

More tomorrow.

 

Brexit vs. the Trump election

November 17, 2016 By in Brexit, Presidential election cycle, Stock ideas, stock market, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Trump and Brexit

Right before election day, Donald Trump predicted his victory by saying that it would be just like Brexit, only more so.

That turned out to be correct, in the sense that in both cases the pre-election polls were incorrect and that the result turned on the votes of older, disaffected, less-educated citizens who came out in large numbers in response to a call to roll back the clock to days of former glory.

post-Brexit

The immediate UK stock market response to the Brexit vote was to drop through the floor, with the multinational-laden large-cap FTSE 100 index faring far better than generally domestic-focused small caps.  The FTSE has rallied since, with the index now sitting about 6% higher than its level when the election results were announced.

That does not mean, however, that the Brexit vote turned out to be a plus for UK stock market participants.  By far the largest amount of damage to their wealth was done in the 15% drop vs. the dollar that the UK currency has experienced since June.

post-Election Day

Despite the voting similarity between UK and US, the currency and stock market outcomes have been very different.  In the week+ since the US presidential election,

–the dollar has risen by about 3% against both the euro and the yen since the election result became known

–the S&P 500 is up by a bit less than 2%, with small caps significantly better than that.  Potential beneficiaries of Trump policies–oil and gas, construction, banks, pharma, prisons–have all done much better than that.

Why the difference?

Brexit

Brexit was a simple, binding in-or-out vote on an economic issue (recent legal action seems to show it’s not so clear-cut as that, however).  Leaving, which is the action voters selected, has immediate, easily predictable, severely negative economic consequences.  Hence, the continuing slide in the currency.

Trump

The Trump vote, on the other hand,  was for a charismatic reality show star with unacceptable social views, very limited economic or policy knowledge/interests and a questionable record of business (other than show business) success.   Not good.

The US vote was for a person, however flawed, not necessarily for policies.  In addition, the  legislative logjam in Washington has potentially been broken, since Republicans will control both houses and the Oval Office.

The general economic tone Trump seems to be setting is for fiscal stimulation through tax reform and deficit spending on infrastructure.  Both would relieve the extraordinary burden that has been placed on the Fed (the only adult in the Washington room).  This will likely mean larger, and faster, interest rate hikes.  Hence the rise in the currency.

knock-on effects

Democrats seem to realize the folly of having a cultural program without an economic one; a substantial restructuring of that party may now be under way.  Bipartisan cooperation in Congress seems to once again be in the air, if for no other reason than to act as a check on Mr. Trump’s more economically questionable impulses.   Trump’s “basket of deplorables” social views may make Americans more vividly aware of the issues at stake, and what progress needs to be made   …and serve as a call to arms for activism, as well.

Another thought:  yesterday’s news showed the Trump brand name being removed from several apartment buildings on the West Side of Manhattan.  Based on feedback from tenants, the owner, who licenses the Trump name, concluded that retaining the buildings’ branding would result in lower rents/higher vacancies.  Given that Trump does not intend to have his business interests run by an independent third party while he is in office, the public would seem to me to have an unusually large ability to influence his presidential actions by its attitude toward Trump-branded products.  I’m not sure whether this is good or bad   …but “good” would be my guess.

All in all, the UK seems to be lost in dreams of the days when it ruled the oceans.  The US is less clear.  We may be in the early days of a renaissance.

 

REITs when interest rates are rising

November 16, 2016 By in bond market, real estate, stock market, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

Finally, to the question of REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts).

A REIT is a specialized type of corporation that accepts restrictions on the kind of business it can do and limits to how concentrated its ownership structure can be.  It must also distribute virtually all its profits to shareholders.  In return it gets an exemption from corporate income tax.  It’s basically the same legal structure as mutual funds or ETFs.

Traditionally, REITs have concentrated on owning income-generating real estate.  But they are also allowed to to develop and manage new projects, provided they do so to hold as part of their portfolios instead of to resell.

Because they must distribute basically all of their profits, and to the degree that their property development efforts are small relative to their overall asset size, REITs look an awful lot like bonds.  That is to say, their main attraction is their relatively steady income.  Yes, they hold tangible assets of a type that should not be badly affected by inflation.  But current holders, I think, view them as bond substitutes.

As I suggested in Monday’s post, that’s bad in a time of rising interest rates.  Both newly-issued bonds–and eventually cash as well–become increasingly attractive as lower-risk substitutes.  This is the reason REITs have underperformed the S&P by about 5 percentage points so far this month, and by 9 points since the end of September.  I don’t think we’ve yet reached the back half of this game.

How can an investor fight the negative influence of interest rate rises in the REIT sector?   …by finding REITs that look as much as they can like stocks.  That is, by finding REITs that are able to achieve earnings–that therefore distributable income–growth.

This means finding REITs that can raise rents steadily or whose development of new properties is large relative to their current asset size.