Category Archives: Industry Analysis

investing in tech (ii)

May 16, 2017 By in Technology, Uncategorized Tags: , , , Leave a comment

other tech characteristics

–unlike areas like, say, fossil fuels, tech will likely continue to experience strong growth for a long period of time

–tech is also an area where the US has a comparative advantage, due to the presence of  strong tech-oriented universities, the large size of the existing tech community and the easy availability of capital to finance new tech ventures

a French scholar as tech banker

Early in my career, I had an acquaintance who had spent her life to that point studying for a PhD in French literature, intending to teach at a university somewhere.  She should have studied at least some economics in addition, because, like me, she finished here degree just as the Baby Boom finished college and universities stopped hiring new faculty.  I’d become an equity securities analyst; she’d become a banker to tech companies.  Initially, she was worried that her lack of a science background would be a severe negative.  She found, however–as I did–that electrical engineering was far less important than being able to figure out whether there was any demand for the stuff a given tech company made, at what price, and whether there was any competition.

I think this is still true today–meaning that most people can be successful tech investors, provided they’re willing to put in time and effort.  While a technical background (or access to a friend or relative who has one) is a plus, common sense and a little supply/demand economics is much more crucial.

active or passive/individual stock or fund

The simplest, and lowest risk, way for any of us to increase the tech component of our equity exposure is to replace an S&P 500 index fund/ETF with a tech sector index fund/ETF .

There are also subsector funds/ETFs that allow a narrower focus on, to name a few popular subsectors, internet or cypersecurity or semiconductor stocks.  There are even a few actively managed tech ETFs, although it’s not clear that these outperform passive vehicles.

The largest rewards, and the greatest risks, come with buying individual stocks.  My approach to holding an individual tech stock is pretty much the same as for holding any other type of individual stock.

More tomorrow.

 

investing in tech

May 15, 2017 By in Technology, Uncategorized Tags: , , , 2 Comments

A reader asked me to write about how I approach investing in tech stocks, an area I like and one which I think I’ve acquired some competence in over the years.

IT as a component of the S&P 500

Let’s start with the structure of the S&P 500, which, as of yesterday’s market close, looked like this:

Information Technology          22.5% of the index

Financials          14.1%

Healthcare          14.0%

Consumer discretionary          12.5%

Industrials          10.2%

Staples          9.3%

Energy          6.3%

Utilities          3.2%

Real estate          2.9%

Materials          2.9%

Telecom          2.3%.

Source:  Standard and Poors

Yes, the numbers add up to 100.2% but that’s just rounding and doesn’t affect analysis.

 

An obvious conclusion from this list is that when we buy an S&P index fund, almost a quarter of what we get is already tech.

A second observation is that 22.5% is a big number.  But if we look back to the end of 2009, when the current bull market was in its earliest stage, IT represented 19.8% of the index.  In other words, by far the largest determinant of IT sector performance in the bull market has been the upward movement of stocks in general.  (For what it’s worth, by far the largest losing sector has been Energy, which comprised 11.6% of the S&P 500 back then.)

Still, there have been spectacular winners, both individual stocks and subsectors, in IT.  So taking the time and effort to study IT stocks can pay big dividends.

placing IT in a business cycle context

Let’s group stocks by the sensitivity of their profits to the ups and downs of the business cycle, starting with the most aggressive (meaning most sensitive) and ending with the most defensive.  This is my list:

most aggressive

Materials

Energy

IT

Industrials  (this would be #3, except US industrials make mostly consumer            products)

less aggressive 

Consumer discretionary

Real Estate (this would be #4, except that a lot of the publicly traded vehicles are income-                            oriented REITs)

Financials

defensive

Healthcare

Staples

more defensive

Telecom

Utilities.

I’m sure that the lists others would come up with would rank the sectors differently.  Try it yourself and see.

What I make of my list is that IT will likely outperform anything lower on the list during an economic upturn and underperform during a downturn.

Two reasons:

–most consumer IT purchases, like a new smartphone or a new PC/tablet, are discretionary and can easily be postponed when times are tough, and

–for many modern corporations, capital spending means software.  And, in my experience, no matter how they say they maintain steady investment in their business, companies rarely outspend their cash flow.  When bad times lessen cash flow, companies–despite their promises–cut capex (i.e., software) spending.  Consumers, on the other hand, are much less draconian in their cutbacks, at least in the US.

 

Tomorrow, secular trends.

 

 

 

professional investment advice (ii)

May 10, 2017 By in investment advice, Investment firms, paying for investment advice, Uncategorized Tags: , , , 3 Comments

Yesterday, I wrote about the problems a Wall Street Journal reporter had in discovering how much she paid in fees to the professionals she hired to invest her money.  The task, which we’d think should be a piece of cake, turned out to be very difficult.  Although the reporter didn’t identify the firm in question, the corporate philosophy seems to be the usual one for active managers of emphasizing service rather than fees.  This decision, which is hard to fault in itself, has been transmuted into two courses of action–bury fee information as deeply as possible, and keep the fees (1.4% of assets per year, in this case) very high, in the hope no one notices.

Oddly enough, this strategy has been relatively effective for decades.

It seems to me, though, that being aware of what one is paying for professional investment advice is only part of the assessment process.  A second important criterion is what the gains in investment performance are that come from having an investment adviser.  The relevant metric is how effective the adviser’s asset allocation and portfolio management efforts are in keeping the client at least even with the appropriate benchmark after subtracting fees.  

Andrea Fuller’s case would work out like this:

Let’s say her “moderate” asset allocation ends up being 60% stocks, 40% bonds.  If we take the returns of the S&P 500 and of some broad bond index as proxies, a rough benchmark return for her over a given period is easy to calculate.

In my view, a reasonable expectation would be that one’s portfolio should (at least) keep pace with the index after fees.  I say “reasonable” although knowing less than a quarter of active managers are able to consistently exceed my standard and over half consistently fall short.

In an ideal world, an active manager who is consistently unable to perform in line with the appropriate benchmark after fees has an easy fix–at least a partial one.  Lower fees to the point where the portfolio is at least close to the index.  Her firm’s high fee level and the teeth pulling needed to figure out what they are suggest this is the last thing on its mind.

Given that this is the case, the operative question for Andrea, and for anyone else, is how much the service the firm may be providing–like determining asset allocation or the availability of a knowledgeable account executive to answer questions or handholding during crises–is worth in terms of losses to an index fund strategy that one could easily implement on one’s own.

It also seems to me that if annual returns consistently fall more than 1% below a benchmark after fees it’s worth the time to shop around for a different investment management firm.

 

how much does professional investment advice cost?

May 9, 2017 By in investment advice, Investment firms, paying for investment advice, Uncategorized Tags: , , Leave a comment

the article

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal has a curious article in its monthly “Investing in Funds & EFTs” section.  It’s by Stanford graduate Andrea Fuller, a reporter whose specialty is data analysis.  It’s about her trying to find out how much she pays for professional investment advice/management.

the outcome

As she describes it, her situation is a simple one.  She uses an investment firm that’s “one of the largest in the country,” no name though.  The bottom line for her is that she pays a yearly fee, deducted daily, of 1.40% of the assets under management, which consist entirely of ETFs and mutual funds.

The fees break out in the customary way into two parts–an overall fee, sometimes called a “wrap” fee for the service of determining an appropriate asset allocation and selecting funds/ETFs,  plus providing an interface to discuss investment issues.  In Ms. Fuller’s case, that amounts to 0.85% of the assets.  In addition, she pays an average of 0.55% per year for the portfolio construction and management of the mutual funds and ETFs she owns.

pulling teeth

What’s interesting about the story is that Ms. Fuller (1) didn’t know this information before she decided to write the story, and (2) assumed, as I would have, that the figure would be easily available with a phone call or email.  In Ms. Fuller’s case, that’s wrong.

(a longish, maybe pedantic…sorry) Note:  the article implies that all the products are “in-house,” that is, provided by a single investment firm which is also the client interface.  If so, finding out costs is straightforward–what Ms. Fuller pays in total and what she pays to the firm are the same.  If, however, the investment firm uses a third-party portfolio manager for any portfolio products, it typically demands a portion of the third party’s management fee in return for providing access to “its” client.  This means that the total fees paid consist of two parts:  the fees paid to the client-facing investment firm and amounts paid to third parties.  In my experience, investment firms are very reluctant to disclose what their fee-sharing arrangements are.  A Customer Service hotline or a plain-vanilla investment adviser would never have that information.  In that case, the answer to the fee question Ms. Fuller posed is not so simple.)

Tenaciously, Ms. Fuller made a series of phone call (and email?) attempts to get this basic information from her investment adviser.  On at least two occasions, she answer she got was wrong–and, surprise, surprise, understated fees.  Although she finally verbally received the figures I cited above, she was unable to get anything in writing.  Apparently, this basic data isn’t disclosed on the firm’s website, either.  At one point during her journey, she was told to consult Morningstar and figure the fees out herself.

My thoughts:

–Wow!

–By and large, investment firms are run by professional marketers, not professional investors.  Their emphasis is typically on cultivating a relationship that focuses on client service and peace of mind and which deemphasizes the nuts and bolts of fees and performance vs. an index or competitors’ offerings.

Still, I’ve never encountered a situation where fees haven’t been readily available and disclosed somewhere in the small print.  To me, Ms. Fuller’s firm seems to me to be either stunningly inept or to be deliberately choosing to make fee information virtually impossible to obtain.

 

More tomorrow.

 

economics in the US vs. identity

May 3, 2017 By in robots, Strategy, Uncategorized Tags: , , , Leave a comment

The Financial Times has recently added an interesting new Opinions columnist, Rana Foroohar.  In her column yesterday, she writes that while the Democrats believe that they lost the presidential election because of misogyny and racism, the more likely cause is wage stagnation and job insecurity.  In other words, long-time Democrats voted Republican in the last election in spite of the victors’ abhorrent social views, not because of them.  Further, she implies that by continuing to seek favor from large corporates as well as by taking up the former Republican mantle of mindless legislative obstruction, the Democratic party risks further establishing itself as part of the economic problem, not the solution.

Clearly, the Democratic leadership doesn’t believe this, although personally I think Ms. Foroohar is correct.  Moreover, as Ms. Foroohor notes, the issue of job insecurity and wage stagnation is a dynamic one, not static.  As recent research from the University of Cambridge suggests, and the emergence of self-driving cars illustrates, the range of human tasks subject to replacement by machines is continuing to expand, putting more blue-collar jobs as well as some white-collar occupations as risk.

So this central issue is not going to go away.  It’s going to get bigger.

 

Social issues aside, a stock market investor must, I think, address two questions:

–how to participate through stock selection in the substitution of hardware/software capital for labor, and

–how closely continuing political dysfunction in the US resembles the situation in Japan thirty years or so ago, in which a foolish political defense of the status quo in the face of structural change has resulted in a decades-long impairment of GDP growth there.