Category Archives: Vocabulary

paying for brokerage research

August 14, 2017 By in investment advice, Investment firms, paying for investment advice, soft dollars, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

As part of an EU overhaul of the financial industry, the UK has recently concluded an inquiry into pricing practices for mutual fund and other products offered to individual investors.  Press commentary is that the good luck for an industry with a bewildering array of prices (much higher than in the US) and little link between cost and value is not having been referred to the law enforcement authorities for criminal prosecution.

One big issue has been “soft dollars,” that is, paying brokers higher than usual commissions in return for their research, or for trading machines, or even newspapers–items that customers generally believe (and rightly suppose, in my view) they are paying for through management fees.   …but no!

Asset managers have been proclaiming that this is a weighty and complex issue, that the don’t know how to proceed.  They’ve generally been gnashing their teeth.

To me, this is all somewhat comical.  For decades, firms that do business in the US have been following an SEC mandate to keep meticulous records of the amount of their soft dollar expenses and what is being paid for.   The general rule was that if you stayed in line with industry practice, meaning doing whatever Fidelity did, you’d be ok legally.  They know exactly what they’ve been doing.  Also, the EU inquiry (see the link above) has been going on for three years.

There are two real issues:

–there’s a lot of money at stake, and

–handling the potential outcry from customers when they realize they’ve been paying twice (management fee + soft dollars) for research expenses.

An example:

A mutual fund has $50 billion in assets.  It turns those assets over at the industry average of 50% per year.  That means $50 billion in buys and $50 billion in sells.

Let’s say: the average stock trades for $40; the soft-dollar markup is $.02 per share; and the markup is taken on 20% of all shares traded (maybe slightly high, but the math is easier).

So, the fund “service” includes giving up $10 million a year of customer money on brokerage commissions in order to get the management company free goods and services.  That’s even though they’re collecting something like $250 million in management fees from the same customers.

disclosure vs. restructuring

Internally, I think disclosure is the lesser of the two issues.  The more difficult one is that industry revenues are stagnant or falling and by far the largest expense of any investment manager is salaries.  So, whose pocket does the lost soft dollar revenue come out of?

Vanguard, this decade’s Fidelity

Just prior to the 2007 financial crisis, Fidelity decided to turn up the competitive heat on fund management rivals by declaring it was unilaterally going to stop using soft dollars.  This time around, it’s silent so far.

Last week, Vanguard made a similar announcement.

 

Disney (DIS) and ESPN: a lesson in analyzing conglomerates

May 25, 2017 By in conglomerates, earnings surprise, securities markets, strong earnings, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

DIS shares went on a fabulous run after the company acquired Marvel in late 2009, moving from $26 a share to $120 in early 2015.  Since then, however, the stock has been moving sideways to down–despite rising, consensus estimate-beating earnings reports in a stock market that has generally been rising.

What’s going on?

The basic thing to understand about analyzing a conglomerate like DIS is that aggregate earnings and earnings growth matter far less than evaluating each business in the conglomerate by itself and assembling a sum of the parts valuation, including synergies, of course.

In the case of DIS, the company consists of ESPN + television; theme parks; movies; merchandising related mostly to parks and movies; and odds and ends–which analysts typically ignore.

In late 2009, something like 2/3 of the company’s overall earnings and, in my view, 80%+ of the DIS market value came from ESPN.

How so?

At that time, ex Pixar, the movie business was hit and miss; the theme parks, always very sensitive to the business cycle, were at their lows; because of this, merchandise sales were similarly in the doldrums.  ESPN, on the other hand, was a secular growth business, with expanding reach in the global sports world and, consequently, dependably expanding profits.

ESPN profits not only made up the majority of the DIS conglomerate’s earnings, the market also awarded those profits the highest PE multiple among the DIS businesses.

At the time, I thought that if truth in labeling were an issue, the company should rename itself ESPN–although that would probably have detracted from the value of the remaining, Disney-branded, business lines.

Then 2012 rolled around.

More tomorrow.

 

the death of research commissions?

February 15, 2017 By in Investment firms, soft dollars, Uncategorized Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Investors in actively managed funds pay a management fee, usually something between 0.5% – 1.0% of the assets under management yearly, to the investment management company.  This is disclosed in advance.  It is supposed to cover all costs, which are principally salaries and expenses for portfolio managers, securities analysts, traders and support staff.

What is not disclosed, however, is the fact that around the world in their buying and selling securities through brokerage houses, regulators have allowed managers to pay substantially higher commissions for a certain percentage of their transactions.  The “extra” amount in these commissions, termed soft dollars or research commissions, is used to pay for services the broker provides, either directly or by paying the bills to third parties.  Typical services can include written research from brokerage house analysts or arranging private meetings with officials of publicly traded companies.  But they can also include paying for third-party news devices like Bloomberg machines–or even daily financial newspapers.

Over the last twenty years, management companies have realized that instead of supplementing their in-house research with brokerage input, they could also “save” money by substituting brokerage analysts for their own.  So they began to fire in-house researchers and depend on the third-party analysis provided to them by brokers   …and funded by soft dollars rather than their management fee.

For large organizations, these extra commissions can reach into millions of dollars.  Yes, the investment management firm keeps track of these amounts.  But they are simply deducted from client returns without comment.

 

This practice is now being banned in Europe.  About time, in my view.  Strictly speaking, management companies may still use soft dollars, but they are being required to fully disclose these extra charges to clients.  Knowing that clients would be shocked and angered if they understood what has been going on, the result is that European investment managers are abandon soft dollars and starting to rebuild their in-house research departments.

What’s particularly interesting about this for Americans is that multinational investment managers with centralized management control computer systems–which means everyone except boutiques–are finding that the easiest way to proceed is to make this change for all their clients, not just European ones.

The bottom line: smaller profits for investment managers and their brokers; much greater scrutiny of soft dollar services (meaning negotiating lower prices or outright cancelling); and higher returns for investors.

Disney (DIS): the valuation issue

February 10, 2017 By in Cable, earnings surprise, Entertainment, securities markets, strong earnings, Uncategorized Tags: , , , 4 Comments

Long-time readers may recall that I became interested in DIS in late 2009, the company acquired Marvel Entertainment, a stock I held, for stock and cash.

corporate structure

I hadn’t looked at DIS for years before that.  I quickly learned that DIS was a conglomerate, that is, a type of company where the most useful analysis comes taking the sum of its constituent parts.

I knew the company’s movie business had been struggling for some time and the theme parks were being hit hard by recession.  Still, I was more than mildly surprised that ESPN (plus other media that we can safely ignore) made up somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 of DIS’s operating earnings.  Why did they still call it Disney?

multiples

Given that the parks are a highly cyclical business and movies moderately so–meaning the PE applied to those earnings should be relatively low–and that ESPN was showing all the characteristics of a secular growth business–meaning high PE–I thought that ESPN represented at least 80% of the market capitalization of DIS.  (That’s despite the fact that the market would apply a higher than normal multiple to cyclically depressed results).

So DIS was basically ESPN with bells and whistles.

ESPN’s turning point

In 2012, ESPN made a major effort to enter the UK sports entertainment market.  To my mind, this wasn’t a particularly good sign, since it implied ESPN believed the domestic market was maturing.  Worse, ESPN lost the bidding, closing out its path to growth through geographic expansion.

It seemed to me that DIS management, which I regard as excellent, understood clearly what was happening.  It began to redirect corporate cash flow away from ESPN and toward the movie and theme park business, which had better growth prospects, and where it has since had unusually good success.

2014-16 results

Over the past two fiscal years (DIS’s accounting year ends in September), the company’s line of business results look like this:

ESPN +        revenues up by +11.9%, operating earnings by +6%

parks           revenues up by +12%, op earnings  +24%

movies        revenues up by +30%, op earnings +74%

merchandise   revenues up by +4.6%, op earnings +33%.

the valuation issue

ESPN has gone ex growth.  This implies these earnings no longer deserve a premium PE multiple.  To me, the fact that ESPN now treats WWE as a sport (!!) just underlines its troubles.

The other businesses are booming.  But they’re also cyclical.  So while improving efficiency implies multiple expansion, earnings approaching a cyclical high note implies at least some multiple contraction.

Because the two businesses are so different, I think Wall Street is making a mistake in treating earnings from the two as more or less equal.

calculating…

DIS will most likely earn $6 a share or so this fiscal year.  That will be something like $3 from ESPN and $3 from the rest.

Take the parks… first.  Let’s say I’d be willing to pay 18x earnings for their earnings.  If that’s the right number, then these businesses make up $54 a share in DIS value.

Now ESPN.  If we assume that the worst is over for ESPN in terms of subscriber and revenue-per-subscriber losses, we can argue that the future earnings stream looks like a bond’s.  If we think that ESPN should yield, say, 5% (a 20x earnings multiple), that would mean ESPN is worth $60 of DIS’s market cap.  If we’d still on the downslope, that figure could be a lot too high.

$54 + $60 = $114.  Current stock price:  $109.

my bottom line

My back of the envelope calculation for the parks… segment may be a bit too low.  I could also be persuaded that my figure for ESPN is too rich, but it would take a lot to make me want to move the needle higher for it.

Yes, most of DIS’s earnings are US-sourced, so the company could be a big winner from domestic income tax reform.

But if I were to be holding a fully valued stock on the idea of a tax reform boost, I’d prefer one with more solid underpinnings.  At $90, maybe the stock is interesting.  But I think ESPN–the multiple as much as the future earnings–remains a significant risk.

 

 

 

 

US corporate tax reform (ii)

December 14, 2016 By in corporate tax reform in the US, deferred taxes, income tax rates, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

There are likely to be losers from corporate income tax reform.  They’re likely to be of two types:

–companies that currently have sweetheart tax deals, which, as things stand now (meaning:  subject to the success of intensive lobbying), will go away as part of reform.  A related group is multinationals who’ve twisted their corporate structures into pretzels to locate taxable income outside the US

–companies making losses currently and/or that have unused tax-loss carryforwards.  The value of those unused losses will likely be reduced by a lot.  This is a somewhat more complicated issue than it seems.  In their reports to public shareholders, money-losing firms can use anticipated future tax benefits to reduce the size of current losses.  The ins-and-outs of this are only important in isolated cases, so I’ll just say that for such firms book value is likely overstated

Another potential consequence of tax reform is that investors may begin to take a harder look at tax-related items on the income and cash flow statements.  Could markets will begin to apply a discount to the stocks of firms that use gimmicks to depress their tax rate?  Thinking some what more broadly, it may mean the markets will take a dimmer view of other sorts of financial engineering (share buybacks are what I personally hope for).  It might also be that companies themselves will reemphasize operation experience rather than financial sleight of hand when choosing their CEOs.