Category Archives: Securities regulation

public utilities and California wildfires

November 7, 2019 By in public utilities, securities analysis, securities markets, Securities regulation, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

public utilities

The idea behind public utilities is that society is far worse off if a municipality has, say, ten companies vying to provide essential services like power and water to citizens, tearing up streets to install infrastructure and then maybe going out of business because they can’t get enough customers.  Better to give one (or some other small number) a monopoly on providing service, with government supervising and regulating what the utility can charge.

The general idea of this government price-setting is to permit a maximum annual profit return, say 5% per year, on the utility company’s net investment in plant and equipment (net meaning after accumulated depreciation).  The precise language and formula used to translate this into unit prices will vary from place to place.

The ideal situation for a public utility is one where the population of the service area is expanding and new capacity is continually needed.  If so, regulators are happy to authorize a generous return on plant, to make it easier for the utility to raise money for expansion in bond and stock markets.

mature service areas

Once the service area matures, which is the case in most of the US, the situation changes significantly.  Customers are no longer clamoring to get more electric power or water.  They have them already.  What they want now is lower rates.  At the same time, premium returns are no longer needed to raise new money in the capital markets.  The result is that public service commissions begin to reduce the allowable return on plant–downward pressure that there’s no obvious reason to stop.

In turn, utility company managements typically respond in two ways:  invest cash flow in higher-potential return non-utility areas, and/or reduce operating costs.  In fact, doing the second can generate extra money to do the first.

How does a utility reduce costs?

One way is to merge with a utility in another area, to cut administrative expenses–the combined entity only needs one chairman, for example, one president, one personnel department…

Also, if each utility has a hundred employees on call to respond to emergencies, arguably the combined utility only needs one hundred, not two.    In the New York area, where I live, let’s say a hundred maintenance people come from Ohio during a blackout and another hundred from Pennsylvania to join a hundred local maintenance workers in New York.  Heroic-sounding, and for the workers in question heroic in fact.  But a generation ago each utility would each have employed three hundred maintenance workers locally, most of whom have since been laid off in cost-cutting drives.

Of course, this also means fewer workers available to do routine maintenance, like making sure power lines won’t get tangles up in trees.

the California example

I don’t know all the details, but the bare bones of the situation are what I’ve described above:

–the political imperative shifts from making it easier for the utility to raise new funds (i.e., allowing a generous return on plant) to keeping voters’ utility bills from increasing (i.e., lowering the permitted return).

–the utility tries to maintain profits by spending less, including on repair and maintenance

The utility sees no use in complaining about the lower return; the utility commission sees no advantage in pointing out that maintenance spending is declining (since a major cause is the commission lowering the allowable return).   So both sides ignore the worry that repair and maintenance will eventually be reduced to a level where there’s a significant risk of power failure–or in California’s case, of fires.  When a costly failure does occur, neither side has any incentive to reveal the political bargain that has brought it on.

utilities as an investment

In the old days, it was almost enough to look at the dividend yield of a given utility, on the assumption that all but the highest would be relatively stable.  So utilities were viewed more or less as bond proxies.  Because of the character of mature utilities, no longer.

In addition, in today’s world a lot more is happening in this once-staid industry, virtually all of it, as I see things, to the disadvantage of the traditional utility.  Renewables like wind and solar are now in the picture and made competitive with traditional power through government subsidies.  Utilities are being broken up into separate transmission and generation companies, with transmission firms compelled to allow independent power generators to use their lines to deliver output to customers.

While the California experience may be a once-in-a-lifetime extreme, to my mind utilities are no longer the boring, but safe bond proxies they were a generation or more ago.

Quite the opposite.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Snap (SNAP) and Tencent (0700:HK)

November 8, 2017 By in Securities regulation, the SEC, Uncategorized Tags: , , , 1 Comment

Yesterday, as part of its disappointing quarterly earnings announcement, SNAP revealed that Chinese internet giant Tencent has acquired a 12% stake in the company.

This is considerably less than it seems, however, for three reasons:

–US securities law requires that an acquirer make a filing–called a 13D–declaring its intentions once it has built a 5% voting interest in a publicly traded company.  It must also report every +/- 0.5% change in its ownership interest as long as the total holding remains at 5% or above.  Based on this rule, a quick reading of the Tencent headline suggests the Tencent move up came in at least one large chunk and fairly recently.  Not in this case, however.  SNAP has issued only non-voting shares.  So the SEC filing requirement doesn’t apply.  In fact, Tencent says it has acquired the stock in the open market over a lengthy period.  Therefore, the 12% stake is not a this-week vote of confidence by Tencent in the SNAP management.

–the stake was acquired in the open market, not from SNAP directly.  Therefore, the large amount of money Tencent spent on SNAP shares did not go into the company’s coffers.  It went to third-party holders exiting their positions.  So, yes, Tencent took out sellers who might otherwise have put downward pressure on SNAP’s share price.  But SNAP did not receive the benefit of a substantial cash injection.

–also, the fact that these were open market transactions does not signal the strong commitment to SNAP that a direct purchase of a block of shares from SNAP would have.  Tencent could disappear from the share register just as easily as it appeared.

selling: average cost or specific shares?

August 9, 2017 By in ordinary income vs. capital gains, securities markets, Securities regulation, taxes, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve had a Fidelity brokerage account for a long time.  I’ve been relatively happy, with only two complaints:

–The first is a “just me” concern.  The Hong Kong stocks I own are always mispriced, except during Hong Kong trading hours.  Other than when that market is live, prices are typically two days old.

I’ve discussed this numerous times with Fidelity representatives (who probably think:  “Oh, him again!”);  I’ve also mentioned this in many surveys I’ve filled out over the years.  Apparently, it isn’t important enough to fix.  Every once in a while a Fidelity trader will advise me to trade these shares on the OTC market in the US, where they will be priced in my account, if accurate quotes are so important.  I don’t see the advantage for me, since my experience is that in times of stress US volumes for stocks like these evaporates.   In such circumstances, my observation is that prices can easily be 5% -10% less favorable in the US than in Hong Kong.  They’re also cheaper to trade in Hong Kong, too, but that’s a lesser issue.

 

–The second is more serious.  For some years, brokers have been required to report gains an losses from trading in taxable accounts to the IRS.  Determining selling price is straightforward.  The default option Fidelity uses for the cost of the shares sold, however, is the average price paid for all the shares in the position.

This is apparently the easiest thing for Fidelity to deliver.  But it’s not always the best for the client.  And the layout of the Fidelity online trade ticket doesn’t really highlight this important issue.  Unless you click on the expanded ticket link at the bottom of the form, you won’t be able to specify the tax lots that will be sold.

What is this about?

Two considerations:

–gains from stocks held for a year or less are taxed as ordinary income;  gains on stocks held longer than that are taxed at the (lower) long-term gains rate (more information from Turbotax).  So all other things being equal, it’s better to recognize a long-term gain than a short-term one.

–I generally try to sell my highest-cost shares first.  This results in recognizing the largest loss or smallest gain.  A net loss can have a tax value (see the Turbotax link above); subject to the holding period rules, the smallest gain should also mean the smallest income tax payment.

An example:

Suppose I hold 100 shares of JPM that I’ve bought at $50 and another 100 at $80.  Both lots are short-term.

I decide to sell 100 shares and net $9000 for them.

If at the time of sale I specify the shares with the $80 cost, my taxable gain is $1000.

If I specify the $50 shares, my gain is $4000. (I would probably only do this if I expected to offset this gain with a loss from other stock sales or from losses carried forward from prior years.)

If I let the Fidelity computer do the work, my capital gain is $2500.

 

If I’m in the 25% tax bracket, my income tax on the sale will be $250, $625 or $1000–depending on how I handle my cost basis.

 

Yes, I’ll likely sell the remainder of the position eventually, so I’m only postponing tax by choosing the highest cost shares.  Even so, in the meantime I have more money to put back to work today if I minimize current taxes.

 

 

 

technical analysis in the 21st century

March 28, 2017 By in securities markets, Securities regulation, Technical Analysis, Uncategorized Tags: , , 1 Comment

A reader asked last week what I think about technical analysis.  This is my answer.

what it is

Technical analysis in the stock market is the attempt to predict future stock prices by studying current and past patterns in the buying and selling of stocks, stock indices and associated derivatives.  The primary focus is on price and trading volume data.

Technical analysis is typically contrasted with fundamental analysis, the attempt to predict future stock prices by studying macro- and microeconomic data relevant to publicly traded companies.  The primary sources of these data are SEC-mandated disclosure of publicly traded company operating results and government and industry economic statistics.

what the market is

The stock market as the intersection of the objective financial/economic characteristics of publicly traded companies with the hopes and fears of the investors who buy and sell shares.  Fundamental analysis addresses primarily the companies; technical analysis primarily addresses the hopes and fears.

ebbing and flowing

To be clear, I think there’s an awful lot of ridiculous stuff passing itself off as technical “wisdom.”  The technical analyst’s bible (which I actually read a long time ago), the 1948 Technical Analysis of Stock Trends by Edwards and Magee, is now somewhere in my basement.  I’ve never been able to make heads nor tails of most of it.

On the other hand, in the US a century ago–and in markets today where reliable company financials aren’t available–individual investors had little else to guide them.

the old days–technicals rule (by default)

What individual investors looked for back then was unusual, pattern-breaking behavior in stock prices–because they had little else to alert them to positive/negative company developments.

I think this can still be a very useful thing to do, provided you’ve watched the daily price movements of a lot of stocks over a long enough period of time that you can recognize when something strange is happening.

the rise of fundamental analysis

Starting in the 1930s, federal regulation began to force publicly traded companies to make fuller and more accurate disclosure of financial results.  The Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) of 1974 mandated minimum levels of competence in the management of pension plan assets, laying the foundation for the fundamentals-driven securities analysis and portfolio management professions we have today in the US.

past the peak

The rise of passive investing and the rationalization of investment banking after the financial crisis have together reduced the amount of high-quality fundamental research being done in the US.  Academic investment theory, mostly lost in its wacky dreamworld of efficient markets, has never been a good training ground for analytic talent.

The waning of the profession of fundamental analysis is opening the door, I think, to alternatives.

algorithmic trading

Let’s say it takes three years working under the supervision of a research director or a portfolio manager to become an analyst who can work independently.  That’s expensive.  Plus, good research directors are very hard to find.  And the marketing people who generally run investment organizations have, in my experience, little ability to evaluate younger investment talent.

In addition, traditional investment organizations are in trouble in part because they’ve been unable to keep pace with the markets despite their high-priced talent.

The solution to beefing up research without breaking the bank?  Algorithmic trading.  I imagine investment management companies think that this is like replacing craft workers with the assembly line–more product at lower cost.

Many of the software-engineered trading products will, I think, be based on technical analysis.  Why?  The data are readily available.  Often, also, the simplest relationships are the most powerful.   I don’t think that’s true in the stock market, but it will probably take time for algos to figure this out.

My bottom line:  technical analysis will increase in importance in the coming years for two reasons:  the fading of traditional fundamental analysis, and the likelihood that software engineers hired by investment management companies will emphasize technicals, at least initially.

 

 

 

 

Warren Buffett’s latest portfolio moves: the 4Q14 13-f

February 18, 2015 By in Constructing a Portfolio, earnings conference calls, Portfolio management, securities markets, Securities regulation, stock market Tags: , , , , , , 4 Comments

Investment managers subject to SEC regulation (meaning basically everyone other than hedge funds) must file a quarterly report with the agency detailing significant changes in their portfolios.  It’s called a 13-f.  Today Berkshire Hathaway filed its 13-f for 4Q14.  I can’t find it yet on the Edgar website, but there has been plenty of media coverage.

Mr. Buffett has built up his media and industrial holdings, as well as adding to his IBM.  The more interesting aspect of the report is that it shows him selling off major energy holdings–ExxonMobil, which he had acquired about two years ago, and ConocoPhillips, which he had been selling for some time.  Neither has worked out well.

There’s also a smaller sale of shares in oilfield services firm National Oilwell Varco and a buy of tar sands miner Suncor–both presumably moves made by one of the two prospective heirs working as portfolio managers at the firm (whose portfolios are much smaller than Buffett’s.  Buffett has told investors to figure smaller buys and sells are theirs.)

Three observations:

–the Buffett moves would have been exciting–maybe even daring–in 1980.  Today, they seem more like changing exhibits in a museum.

–if I were interested in Energy and thought it more likely that oil prices would rise than fall, I’d be selling XOM, too.  After all, it’s one of the lowest beta (that is, least sensitive to oil price changes) members of the sector.

But I’d be buying shale oil and tar sands companies that have solid operations and that have been trampled on Wall Street in the rush to the door of the past half-year or so.  That doesn’t appear to be Mr. Buffett’s strategy, however.  His idea seems to be to cut his losses and shift to areas like Consumer discretionary. (A more aggressive stance would be to increase energy holdings by buying the high beta stocks now, with the intention of paring back later by selling things like XOM as prices begin to rise.)  NOTE:  I’m not recommending that anyone actually do this stuff.  I’m just commenting on what the holdings changes imply about what Mr. Buffett’s strategy must be.

–early in my career, I interviewed for a job (which I didn’t get) with a CIO who was building a research department for a new venture.  I was a candidate because I was, at the time, an expert on natural resources.   The CIO said the thought there were three key positions any research department must fill:  technology, finance and natural resources.  All require specialized knowledge.    I’d toss healthcare into the ring, as well.  I’d also observe that stock performance in these more technical areas is influenced much less by the companies’ financial statements than is the case with standard industrial or consumer names.

Mr. Buffett is an expert on financials–he runs a gigantic insurance company, after all.  On tech and resources, not so much, in my opinion.  Financials are the second-largest sector in the S&P 500, making up 16% of the total.  Tech makes up 19.5%; Energy is 8.3%; Healthcare 14.9%.  The latter three total 42.7% of the index.  As a portfolio manager, it’s hard enough to beat the index in the first place.  Being weak in two-fifths of it makes the task even harder.