Category Archives: Recent Market Action

bye bye, QE

October 30, 2014 By in Constructing a Portfolio, Current Market Thoughts, economics, Portfolio management, Recent Market Action, securities markets Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Yesterday the Fed made public its current assessment of the US economy, something it does on a regular basis.  It its press release, the agency said it had “decided to conclude its asset purchase program this month.”  In other words, the third round of quantitative easing (QE) by the Fed since the economy turned down in 2008 will end tomorrow.

what QE is

The Fed’s job is to foster maximum sustainable economic growth and employment, without creating inflation.  Its usual tool is short-term interest rates: it raises them when the economy is starting to overheat and lowers them during a slowdown.

The recession that began six years ago was so bad, however, that even lowering short rates to zero wasn’t enough to put the economy back on an even keel.  So the Fed also began to add extra stimulus,  pushing down long-term interest rates as well by buying Treasury bonds and government agency debt (especially mortgage-related).  QE is the long-term bond purchasing program.

The weird name apparently comes from a UK economist who lives near the shipyards where the Queen Elizabeth was built and likes the initials.

what its end means

The Fed thinks the economy is strong enough to be weaned off QE.  The labor market is improving; the economy is stronger; inflation is right around the Fed’s 2% target.

The next step, sometime next year (April?, June?), will be to start raising short-term interest rates back to normal.

The move up to normalcy is important for two reasons:

–at some point–not any time soon, but at some point–very strong money stimulus becomes bad for the economy.  It doesn’t boost output any more and starts to create runaway inflation.

–the Fed would like to be in a position to respond to a new emergency by lowering rates.  At present, other than more QE, whose effectiveness is a matter of debate, the Fed has no tools.

how high?  how fast?

Members of the Fed’s Open Market Committee periodically publish their views on, among other things, the course of short-term interest rates.  Their median projection for the Fed Funds rate is:

2014      0 – 1/4%

2015     1 1/4% – 1 1/2%

2016     2 3/4% – 3.0%

2017     3 5/8% – 3 7/8%.

FOMC members think that the end-2017 rate of around 3.75% is normal.

So: the process of normalization will take three years, and will have short rates rising by close to 400 basis points.

how right?

The current target normal Fed Funds rate of 3.75% is 50 basis points lower than when the Fed began publishing projections like this a while ago.

My sense is that financial markets think the figure is still too high.  If we were to assume, for example, that inflation would run at 2% and a short-term lender should get a 1% real annual return for the use of his money, then short rates should be at 3%, not 3.75%.

what should an equity investor think?

We know for sure only that interest rates will be going up next year.  That can’t enhance short-term economic activity.

In the past, in periods of rising interest rates stocks have gone sideways and bonds have gone down.  Maybe things won’t play out the same way this time, but past experience suggests it will.

The period of greatest uncertainty about rates will likely come before the process begins.

Positive economic energy in the US can play out either through higher stock prices or currency appreciation, or some combination of the two.  We’ve already had recent substantial appreciation of the dollar vs. the euro.  If the dollar continues to rise, it will be important not to have exposure to euro earners.  Users of euro-denominated inputs will benefit, though.

Because a higher dollar acts somewhat like a rise in interest rates, continuing dollar strength seems to me to suggest slower Fed action.

 

More about this when I write about strategy for 2015.

 

 

 

Tesco, Coke and IBM, three Buffett blowups

October 23, 2014 By in Current Market Thoughts, growth vs value, Portfolio management, Recent Market Action, stock market Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway fame is perhaps the best-known equity investor in the United States.

What made his reputation is that Buffett was the first to understand the investment value of intangible assets like brand names, distribution networks, training that develops a distinctive corporate culture.

Take a soft drinks company (I’m thinking Coca-Cola (KO), but don’t want to dig the actual numbers out of past annual reports).  Such a company doubtless has a secret formula for making tasty drinks.  More important, it controls a wide distribution network that has agreements that allow it to deliver products directly to supermarkets and stacks them on shelves.  The company has also surely developed distinctive packaging and has spent, say, 10% of pretax income on advertising and other marketing in each of the past twenty (or more) years to make its name an icon.  (My quick Google search says KO spent $4 billion on worldwide marketing in 2010.  Think about twenty years of spending like that!!!)

Presumably if we wanted to compete with KO, we would have to spend on advertising and distribution, as well.  Maybe all the best warehouse locations are already taken.  Maybe the best distributors already have exclusive relationships with KO.  Maybe supermarkets won’t make shelf space available (why should they?).  And then there’s having to advertise enough to rise above the din KO is already creating.

 

What Buffett saw before his rivals of the 1960s was that none of this positive stuff appears as an asset on the balance sheet.  Advertising, training, distribution payments only appear on the financials as expenses, lowering current income, and, in consequence, the company’s net worth, even though they’re powerful competitive weapons and formidable barriers to entry into the industry by newcomers.

Because investors of his day were focused almost totally on book value–and because this spending depressed book value–they found these brand icons unattractive.  Buffett had the field to himself for a while, and made a mint.

 

This week two of Mr.Buffett’s biggest holdings, IBM and KO, have blown up.  They’re not the first.  Tesco, the UK supermarket operator, another firm right in the Buffett wheelhouse, also recently fell apart.

what I find interesting

Every professional investor makes lots of mistakes, and all of the time.  My first boss used to say that it takes three good stocks to make up for one mistake.  Therefore, she concluded, a portfolio manager has to spend the majority of his attention on finding potential blowups in his portfolio and getting rid of them before the worst news struck.  So mistakes are in themselves part of the territory.

Schadenfreude isn’t it, either.

Rather, I think

1.  Mr. Buffett’s recent bad luck illustrates that in an Internet world structural change is taking place at a much more rapid pace than even investing legends understand

2.  others have (long since, in my view) caught up with Mr. Buffett’s thinking.  Brand icons now trade at premium prices, not discounts, making them more vulnerable to bad news, and

3.  I sense a counterculture, Millennials vs. Baby Boom element in this relative performance, one that I believe is just in its infancy.

 

 

 

why the oil price will continue to be weak

October 22, 2014 By in Energy, Industry Analysis, Mining, oil and natural gas, Recent Market Action, shale oil and gas, Strategy Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

supply and demand

In the short term (read:  for now and for some vague time into the future), demand for oil is pretty constant, no matter what the price (i.e., demand is inelastic).   People need to fuel their cars and heat their homes.  Industry needs to generate electric power and keep factories humming.

The supply of oil is similarly inelastic, for two reasons:

–major oilfields are mammoth, expensive, multi-year capital projects.  Engineers get underground oil flowing toward wells at what they calculate to be the optimal rate to drain the entire deposit.  Changing that rate once the oil is moving can mess things up so that lots of oil gets left behind–meaning having to do expensive and time-consuming extra drilling to recover it.

–a macroeconomic look at OPEC’s oil-producing countries, especially in the Middle East, is a real eye-opener.  These nations typically have large young populations and more or less no economic activity other than oil.  In my cartoon-like view, they have tons of high school graduates entering the workforce each year and nothing to offer them but make-work “jobs” funded by oil money.  Keeping the political status quo ultimately requires that the oil keep flowing.  According to the Wall Street Journal, the budget breakeven oil price for Iran, for instance, is $140 a barrel and Saudi Arabia’s is $93.  (This isn’t an immediate do-or-die thing, though.  Countries can use savings, borrow or sell assets to bridge a budget gap for a while.)

recent history

Over the past decade or more, supply and demand have been close to being in balance, with China’s strong economic growth giving prices an upward bias.

China is now trying to halt the proliferation of low value-added, energy-wasting industry, so this source of extra demand is fading.  More important, the advent of oil extraction from shale in the US has raised world oil supplies by about 6%, or 5 million barrels a day over the past five years.

Given that demand is relatively constant, the only way to get buyers for this extra oil is to cut prices.  This is what’s happening now.

revisiting the 1980s

There’s lots of ugly history of colonial exploitation of Middle Eastern oil producers in the 1970s and before.  Let’s skip over that, in this post at least.

During the 1970s, OPEC pushed the price of a barrel of oil from under $2 to around $25.  By the start of the 1980s, the association was clearly divided in to two camps.  One wanted to maintain the highest possible current price (which had risen to around $35 for the easiest oil to refine).  The other, led by Saudi Arabia, the largest OPEC producer, feared users would find substitutes for oil, diminishing the long-term value of their vast untapped reserves.  It wanted prices at, say, $15 – $20 a barrel.

Saudi Arabia decided to force its will on the other camp by unilaterally raising production to stabilize prices.  However, a long and deep global recession soon began (partly caused by higher oil prices, mostly by the Fed’s decision to raise interest rates sharply to choke off runaway inflation in the US).

Saudi Arabia then reversed course and began to cut production, again to defend its preferred price level.  Other OPEC nations agreed to reduce production as well, but by and large never did.  Prices eventually bottomed at about $8 a barrel.

The point, though, is that the Saudi attempt to act as the “swing” producer by raising and lowering its output in order to stabilize prices, didn’t work out.  All that happened was that Saudis absorbed a huge amount of the pain of the price decline, allowing its OPEC rivals to prosper, in a relative sense at least.

today

I think Saudi Arabia learned from its experience in the early 1980s that unilaterally reducing production doesn’t work.  Besides, unlike in the early 1980s, it needs its current coil income to balance its budget.

Shale oil production will continue to grow, if nothing else simply from projects begun a few years ago.

As a result, I think the oil price will drift lower, either until a healthier world economy increases demand, or until lower prices force high-cost oil producers to shut down.  We’re a long way from the latter happening.

Bad for oil producers–in fact, energy producers of any stripe, great for everyone else.

looking for patterns

October 21, 2014 By in Constructing a Portfolio, Current Market Thoughts, economics, Portfolio management, Recent Market Action, Stock ideas Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Yesterday I wrote that the recovery that follows a sharp stock market decline is an important time to look for changes in the kinds of stocks that investors are eager to buy and the ones they’re happy to dump overboard.  I’m not sure why take place at these market inflection points, but the very often do.

Step one in trying to detect new patterns is for each of us to examine our own holding to see what’s happening with them.  We’re not just looking for under performance/outperformance during the downdraft.  We’re basically looking for two kinds of outliers:  stocks that underperformed on the downside and are continuing to underperform (bad!); and for stocks that outperformed on the way down and that are continuing to outperfrom now (very good!).

Step two is to widen our search to try to get a feel for what the overall market is thinking.  The way of doing this that I find most useful is to try to imagine the general economic situation the world is in and what kinds of stocks should be winners/losers if my picture is right.  Then I look at the stocks themselves to see whether their price movements confirm my thoughts or not.  Then I adjust if needed and repeat.

The most difficult situation is one where I’m 100% convinced I’m right but the stocks say otherwise.  This is rarely the case, in my experience.  At least someone has already picked up on a major investment theme before me.  But that’s okay.  A trend may last for years.  If I’ve missed the first three months it’s not a big deal.  Besides, being the only one in the restaurant has a kind of eerie feel to it.  If I’m thoroughly convinced I’m right, I’ll probably take a small position and prepare myself to add more quickly as other diners come through the door.

what I’m looking for now

The world is still in a slow recovery from the Great Recession.  The US is doing fine, given dysfunction in Washington.  China has structural change issues that have it growing at a “mere” 6% – 7% or so.  On the other hand, the warts in Abenomics in Japan are showing themselves and the EU is starting to look a lot like Japan of the 1990s.

Four big macro changes over the past, say, six months:

–China has been much more persistent than I had thought possible in trying to steer its economy away from low value-added export-oriented manufacturing toward higher-end businesses aimed at a domestic audience.  This changes the composition of growth, but is good, in my opinion.

–The EU is flirting with recession again.  The biggest culprit is France.  This is bad.

–Energy prices are falling–a lot.  This is bad for energy producers, great for everyone else.

–I had expected world growth developments to express themselves mostly (exclusively?) through changes in stock prices, with the US going up and the rest going sideways.  Instead, the principal expression has been through changes in currency values. This makes a difference.  A higher dollar slows economic gains in the US in much the way an increase in interest rates would; the fall in the euro acts as a (desperately needed) stimulus for the EU.

So, I expect…

1.  Slow GDP growth means secular growth stocks will do well, cyclical value stocks (much) less so.  Long Millennial/short Baby Boom ideas may be the best.

2.  Companies with costs in euros or yen but revenues in dollars stand to be big winners from recent currency moves.  So too companies with assets in the US.  Assets or earnings in the EU or Japan are now worth less in dollars than they were earlier in the year.

3.  The energy situation has a lot of moving parts (more tomorrow).  The clear winners are energy users.  The clear losers are the oil-producing countries where the deposits are controlled by national oil companies (think: Latin America, Africa).

Once I publish this, I’m going back to see if the markets are running with these ideas or not.