Tag Archives: business

last weekend’s “failed” Doha oil meeting

April 21, 2016 By in oil and natural gas, Uncategorized Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Representatives from a large group of national oil companies, both Opec and non-Opec, met in Doha last weekend, ostensibly to see if they could mutually agree not to raise their oil production from current levels.

From a practical economic view, the conclave made little sense.  Because all the countries involved are strapped for cash, they’re already producing flat out.  The only exception is Iran, which declined to participate.  It is ramping up its output for the first time in a long while now that sanctions are being lifted, and has no intention of stopping.

 

It was clear from the outset that the best outcome would be an agreement where the parties said they wouldn’t do what they couldn’t do anyway.  So Doha was all about optics, about satisfying internal political demands that the local oil ministries were leaving no stone unturned.  Weird, maybe, but understandable if you’re an oil functionary who wants to keep his job.

Nevertheless, there was an immediate spike down in the oil price when failure to reach agreement was announced.  To my mind this was more traders playing games in the market than an expression of dismay.

More interestingly:

–crude oil prices are higher today than they were before Doha, and

–Brent crude, a proxy for non-US demand for oil (because it can be used in older refineries), is beginning to establish its traditional premium  over West Texas Intermediate.

my thoughts

We passed the seasonal low point for oil demand in mid-February and are entering the strongest seasonal period now.  So it makes some sense that the price should be strengthening.

The Brent premium suggests US drivers aren’t the only ones consuming more oil products.  The lower price may also be stimulating usage in the rest of the OECD, where petroleum taxes are much higher.

The (crazy) period of securities trading where low oil was thought to be a harbinger of recession appears to be behind us.

My guess is that traders will continue to search for a price ceiling, which I think is around $50 a barrel.

I wonder if the major non-government owned oil companies have been holding back production on the idea that prices are too low, thereby, consciously or not, aiding the recovery process.  This wouldn’t be much different from how these firms acted during the period of oil price controls in the US in the 1970s -1980s.

 

 

 

plusses and minuses of using book value

April 19, 2016 By in book value, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

on the plus side…

–book value is a simple, easy to understand, concept.  Discount to book = cheap, premium to book = a potential red flag.

–it’s very useful for financials, which tend to have huge numbers of often complex, short-lived transactions with hordes of different customers, and where financial disclosure may not be so transparent (financials aren’t my favorite sector, by the way).  So the 30,000 foot view may be the best.

…maybe a plus?…

–in the inflationary world most of us grew up in, and that is still reflected in the financials of older companies, historical cost accounting tends to understate the current value of long-lived assets.  Think:  a piece of land bought in Manhattan or San Francisco in 1950 or an oilfield discovered in 1970–or 1925.  Many of the older retail chain acquisitions of the past twenty years have been motivated by the undervaluation on the balance sheet of owned real estate.

…definitely a minus

–in my experience, accountants tend to be very reluctant to compel managements to write down the value of assets whose worth has been impaired by, say, advanced age or technological obsolescence.

–more important, we are living in a period of rapid change.  The Internet is the most obvious new variable, although I think we tend to underestimate how profound its transformative power is.  In the US, we are also seeing a generational shift in economic power away from Baby Boomers and toward Millennials, who have distinctly non-Boomer preferences and a desire to live a different lifestyle from their parents.

Online shopping undermines the value of an extended physical store network.  Software (which by and large doesn’t appear on the balance sheet) replaces hardware (which does) as a key competitive edge between companies.

intangibles…

Warren Buffett’s key innovation as an investor was to recognize the value of intangibles like this in the 1950s.  In his case, it was that the positive effect of advertising expense and strong sales networks in establishing brand power appeared nowhere on the balance sheet.  In a world where his competitors were focused only on price-to-book, he could buy these very positive company attributes for free.  Price to book was still a solid tool, just not the whole picture.

…vs. structural change

The situation is different today.

The Internet is eroding the value of traditional distribution networks and of other physical assets positioned to serve yesterday’s world.  The shift in economic power to Millennials is likewise calling into question the value of physical assets positioned to serve Boomers.

In more concrete terms:

Tesla doesn’t need a car dealer distribution network to sell its cars.  A retailer can use Amazon, or Etsy or a proprietary website, rather than an owned store network.  A writer can self-publish.  These all represent radical declines in the capital needed to be in many businesses today.

Millennials like organic food and live in cities; Boomers eat processed food and live in the suburbs.

This all calls into question the present economic worth, still expressed on the balance sheet as book value, of past capital spending on what were at the time anti-competition “moats.”

Another issue:   I think that the institutional weight of the status quo has pressured managements of older companies into ignoring the need for substantial repositioning–including writedowns of no-longer viable assets–so they can compete in a 21st century environment.  Arguably, this makes low price to book a warning sign instead of an invitation to purchase.

employment and the March 2016 jobs report

April 4, 2016 By in employment, Employment Situation report, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

Last Friday, as usual, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the Labor Department published its monthly Employment Situation for March 2016.  The report said the economy added 215,00o new positions last month.  Revisions to prior months’ data were insignificant a–a loss of -1,000 jobs.

Despite the continuing strong jobs creation, the unemployment rate ticked up slightly to (a still very favorable) 5% of the workforce.  In the past, that figure would be regarded as full employment. The 5% would be regarded as “frictional” unemployment, meaning it consists either of people who have quit their old job because they have a new one but are not starting right away, or of project workers who routinely have small gaps between jobs.

That would, in fact, be quite worrying, since wage inflation acceleration–and therefore overall inflation acceleration–would be imminent.

The financial markets have not been focused on the very low unemployment percentage, however.  They have been, and continue to be, worried about the lack of wage gains–which, they argue, is evidence of continuing slack in the labor market.

Two recent contrarian thoughts:

–some are saying that the uptick in the unemployment rate is (finally) evidence that disheartened workers who have long since left the workforce (by stopping looking for work) are beginning to think that getting a job is now possible and are re-entering the workforce.  So it’s an early sign of a significantly better tone to the labor market.

I think this is possible.  Good news, if so.  The only question I have is how it could have taken over six years since the economy bottomed for this to occur.

–the Fed is beginning to argue that wage gains are actually greater than corporate reporting would lead us to believe.  The idea is that older, higher-paid workers are retiring and effectively being replaced by younger, lower-paid new hires.  This is something that always happens in the early stages of economic recovery.  Again, the question remains why wage-flattening has been going on for well over half a decade.

More on this topic tomorrow.

 

is “tenure voting” the answer?

March 15, 2016 By in activist investing, activist investors, tenure voting, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

tenure voting

The weapon institutions are currently discussing to combat the potentially negative influence of activists on company management plans is called “tenure voting.”

Under a tenure voting scheme, a shareholder accrues more voting power the longer he holds a given stock.  On day one, for example, the shareholder might have one vote to cast on proposals at a shareholder meeting.  This might rise to three votes after three years of continuous ownership and peak, say, at five after five years.

This heavier voting power given to long-term shareholders would, in theory at least, make it much more difficult for an activist investor with a hit-and-run strategy to coerce favorable action from a timid CEO.

the arithmetic of influence

An activist can have leverage over company management at present by buying, say, 3% of the outstanding shares to obtain 3% voting power.  If the typical institutional holder bought his core position five years ago and if institutions overall hold 60% of the outstanding stock, then with tenure voting in place the activist wouldn’t achieve the same amount of clout until he had accumulated at least 10% of the target firm’s stock.  Of course, the activist could also wait for a half-decade for his stake to achieve maximum voting power, but none strike me as having that much patience.

an effective deterrent

So tenure voting would likely insulate many of the large firms potentially under activist attack from such predation.

But…

–there’s a practical issue of implementation.  Instituting tenure voting at a firm would presumably require rewriting corporate bylaws.

–it doesn’t stop activist action.  It just changes the game.  Activists would have to adopt a two-step strategy, the first of which would be to court one or more big long-term institutional holders of a target firm’s stock.  Of course, this is arguably the intent of proponents of tenure voting–the presumption being that professional portfolio investors would rebuff the activists.  Maybe so.  But maybe not.  However, the obvious place to start would be index funds.  It’s not really clear what unintended consequences this might produce.

–tenure voting has been a traditional practice in places in Continental Europe like France.  In my view, it has been a disaster there, cementing in place an elitist old boy network of corporate managements that have had little regard for ordinary shareholders.  More than that, the French government’s move last year to make tenure voting mandatory for all publicly traded firms met with violent opposition from investors who know this system the best.

All in all, although I’m not necessarily a fan of activists, I think in this case the cure is worse than the disease.

institutional investors vs. “activists”

March 14, 2016 By in activist investors, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

As I see it, today’s activist investors are the successors to the corporate raiders/ “greenmailers” of the 1980s.  In some cases–Carl Icahn is an example–they’re the same person.

Greenmailers (a takeoff on blackmailers) would typically attack small cash-rich companies by buying a 5% – 10% equity position and threatening to launch a hostile bid to take over the firm unless they were bought out at a high price.  That price would typically be all the cash in the corporate treasury.

The tactic often worked.  A CEO who had spent thirty years clawing to the top of the heap  so that he could exercise power and reap large cash/stock rewards during a five-year tenure as chief executive, knew he would be out the door if a change of control took place.  So he might be all for acquiescing to the greenmailer.  Sometimes, too, a company might have questionable accounting or other dirty secrets that could scarcely stand to see the light of day.

The issue for other shareholders:  while the greenmailer would make a financial killing, he would leave behind a firm drained of cash and typically worth considerably less than before the greenmailer showed up at the door.

Activists play a slightly different game.  They attack large companies (perhaps because smaller prey has long since been devoured).  They typically invest millions of dollars in buying a company’s shares, but because of the size of the target, may only hold 1% – 3% of the outstanding equity.  Activists typically demand seats on the board of directors and offer “advice,” which may be sound (or may not), and which usually consists in actions like dividend increases, stock buybacks and/or spinoffs of business lines.  These are all levers designed to get the stock price up quickly–so the activist can sell and be on his way.

The threat is the same:  the sitting CEO has run a grueling thirty-year corporate marathon only to see the prize snatched away as he’s crossing the finish line if the activist decides that he’s part of the problem.

The issue for other shareholders:  none of the actions activists recommend may be good for the long-term health of the company (look at what happened to J C Penney).  And unlike the greenmail case, where the attacker’s threat is to take over the firm–meaning a profit for other holders and resolution to the issue–the activist may well tie up management time and energy with proxy fights or other distractions that go on for years.

Tomorrow:  what to do.