Tag Archives: Dividends

Who would ever buy a bond?

November 25, 2013 By in bond market, Current Market Thoughts, securities markets Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

That was my daughter’s question when my wife and I had lunch with her the other day (she paid!).

She certainly wouldn’t.  Even after this year’s rise in yields, a 10-year Treasury still only provides income of 2.7%, or not much more than the dividend on the S&P.  And, although, unlike most bonds, Treasuries are liquid, there’s a good chance that if you buy a 10-year today you’ll lose money if you have to cash in early.  Not an attractive proposition for a twenty-something.

Her question, though, brought home to me how long it has been since we’ve had a normal bond market in the US.  You have to go back to the second half of the 1990s to see a 10-year bond yielding 6% (a real yield of 3%).

It shows what a peculiar world we live in today–and how thoroughly unappealing bonds are at present.

Why doesn’t everyone see this?  We all tend to extrapolate from past experience, and for almost three decades bonds have been a one-way street going up.  In addition, bond management firms are spending tons of money–much of it customers’ money–on advertising and public relations saying their superior investing skills will let them weather the coming rise in interest rates without a hitch.  To my mind, the best you can say is that this is a classic case of confusing brains and a bull market.

bond buyers

To answer my daughter’s question, there are normal buyers of bonds, though.  They include:

1.  senior citizens and the wealthy.

As people get older or become rich, they also become more risk averse.  They shift from wanting to make a fortune to preserving what they have and providing steady income for their retirement.  During economic emergencies–the current one having lasted five years(!) and slated to last another two–the government disadvantages these two groups for the good of everyone else by lowering interest rates sharply.

2.  financial institutions, especially life insurance companies and pension funds.

The former are legally required to invest conservatively so they’ll always have enough to pay off claims.  The latter deal with the same kind of issue, but aren’t as heavily regulated.

3.  governments of countries where there’s more foreign demand for local goods and services than there is local demand for foreign equivalents (think:  China).

The result of this imbalance is that in the foreign exchange market every day there’s more demand for local currency than there is for foreign.  To keep the local currency from rising sharply, the local government prints more currency and exchanges it.  In doing so, the local government accumulates piles of foreign currency (Beijing, for example, has $3 trillion, more or less, in US$).  Rather than let the funds lie idle, the treasury buys foreign government bonds.

 

 

housecleaning at the Dow Industrials

September 11, 2013 By in Dow vs. S&P, index funds, Keeping Score, Portfolio management Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Standard and Poors, the part of the McGraw Hill empire that controls the Dow Jones averages, announced today that the Dow Industrials would be bouncing out three of its thirty components, effective September 20th.

The companies to be shown the door are :  Alcoa (AA), Bank of America (BAC) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ).  Their offense?   …stock prices that are too low, and not enough diversification appeal.

They’re being replaced by:  Goldman Sachs (GS), Visa (V) and Nike (NKE), all of which have higher stock prices and supposedly give the Dow more diversification.

We all know the Dow is a weird index.  That’s because it’s calculated using each stock’s per share price (not the total value of the company’s equity) as the weighting factor.  So a stock that sells for $50 a share has twice the potential impact on the index of a stock that sells for $25–even though the latter may be a much bigger company, with a much larger total market value.

No wonder Alcoa, an $8 stock, and Bank of America ($14.60) are gone.  They’re insignificant!

No surprise, either that Apple ($494) and Google ($888) aren’t in.     …too large.

Why calculate an index this way?  The only answer I can come up with is that in the (computer- and calculator-less) late nineteenth century, when the Dow was invented, the math was simple enough for reporters to get done quickly at the end of the day.

Why does it still exist?   …and why do individual investors still pay attention?  At first blush, the answer is that the Dow is almost all the news media talk about.  But the media would ditch it in a second if the Dow weren’t a surprisingly good mimic of the more sensibly constructed S&P 500, which is what investment professionals use as their benchmark.

Think about it for a minute (something I haven’t done until recently).  What are the chances that a small, wacky index can track the S&P 500 so closely?

As I recall, it wasn’t always this way.  Back in the day, investors tracked the Dow vs. the S&P.  If the Dow was doing better, it meant the ghost of Christmas past was in the room.  If the S&P was outperforming, then smaller stocks in less mature industries were on the relative rise.

Not so much anymore.

It seems to me a tremendous amount of brainpower and computer time has recently gone into–and continues to go into–tuning the Dow Industrials so that they’ll keep on tracking the S&P pretty faithfully.  That’s the really interesting thing about the Dow, to my mind.  And it’s the reason AA, BAC and HPQ had to go–not for diversification, but because they weren’t helping the Dow track the S&P.

Einhorn stops Apple (APPL) shareholder vote on preferred stock

February 25, 2013 By in hedge funds, Preferred Stock, Recent Market Action, Stock ideas Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

background

Hedge fund manager David Einhorn has been urging AAPL for some time to adopt his pet idea of issuing preferred stock that would basically be backed by the company’s gigantic accumulated cash position.

APPL isn’t interested.

In the Steve Jobs days, I think the AAPL CEO would have told Mr. Einhorn, either directly or through the press, that his answer was “No!!,” and that Einhorn should stop trying to interfere with the running of AAPL’s business.  This probably would have been the end of the matter.

The current AAPL management didn’t do that.  Instead, it put on the agenda at the company’s annual meeting this week a shareholder vote to change the company’s charter in a way that would forbid the kind of perpetual preferred Einhorn is championing (see my analysis of the preferred idea).

Not only that, but AAPL wrapped this proposal in a package of others and asked for a single vote on the whole bundle.

last week

Mr. Einhorn sued, saying in effect that the bundling violates both common sense and SEC rules.  On Friday, a federal judge agreed–and barred a vote on “Proposal #2” at this annual meeting.

According to the Financial Times, by the time of the court ruling AAPL had received ballots representing 40% of the outstanding shares.  Of them, 97.5% had voted for the company and, by implication, against Mr. Einhorn.

the voting results are no surprise

In my experience, individual shareholders vote with management no matter whether it’s in their economic interest or not.  Hard for me to understand, but easy to predict.

For almost two decades, the SEC has been pushing the compliance departments of professional money managers on proxy voting.  The regulator wants them to take seriously their fiduciary obligation to vote the shares under their stewardship in the best interests of their customers–or else.  This pressure has resulted in the rise of third-party firms like ISS and Glass Lewis, which have set themselves up as independent experts in proxy analysis and making shareholder-friendly voting recommendations.  The path of least resistance for institutional investors seems to me to be to subscribe to  one of these firms’ services and vote accordingly.

Both ISS and GL recommended voting for AAPL in this matter.

In other words, all the individuals and all the traditional institutions were going to vote against Einhorn.

why a vote at all?   …and why this vote?

Mr. Einhorn points out on the Greenlight Capital website that because no one has tried his preferred suggestion, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea.  Of course, it doesn’t mean it’s a good one either  …or a good one for AAPL.

What’s clear, however, is that AAPL doesn’t want to discuss the idea publicly–even to say that it’s a thought, but one that won’t work for AAPL.  I think this is a mistake.

I think I understand why AAPL set up the vote as a bundle, though, rather than a straight yes-or-no on the preferred issue alone.  From my common sense viewpoint, as well as from an SEC perspective, grouping a bunch of disparate proposals together just doesn’t seem fair.  (In addition, for what it’s worth, I don’t see how narrowing the scope of possible future preferred issues serves shareholders interests.  It just makes Mr. Einhorn go away.)

Why bundle?  AAPL must know that institutions pretty much vote whatever way ISS tells them.  I think AAPL presented the preferred proposal to the advisory service in a package that it simply couldn’t recommend voting against.  It thereby also avoided the risk that if the preferred ban were offered separately ISS would recommend a “no” vote, which a ton of institutional holders would then cast.

AAPL management hasn’t done itself any favors, 

…in my view.

The company’s unwillingness to lay out reasons–like that the preferreds might constrain needed US-sourced cash flow–for opposing the Einhorn proposal make management look weak.

The bundling makes the company look like it has something to hide.

AAPL’s odd behavior suggests there’s considerably more to this story than meets the eye.

Intel’s 4Q12–waiting for the upturn

January 18, 2013 By in earnings conference calls, Industry Analysis, internet, Recent Market Action, semiconductor manufacturing, Stock ideas, Technology, Wireless Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

the report

Yesterday afternoon, INTC reported earnings results for 4Q and full year 2012.  For the quarter, INTC made $.51 per share on revenue of $13.5 billion.  Revenues were down 3% year-on-year, and flat sequentially during a normally seasonally strong quarter.   EPS were off 24% vs. 4Q11.  The profit figures were considerably better, however, than the Wall Street analysts’ consensus of $.45.

For the full year 2012, INTC’s revenues were down by 1% yoy, at $53.3 billion.  EPS were down by 10%, at $2.24.

INTC also gave initial guidance for 2013 yesterday–basically for a not much more than flattish year, with considerably better performance during the second half than in the first.

The stock rose initially as traders saw the better than expected quarterly EPS, only to fall by 5% then they read down the page to the 2013 guidance.  As I’m writing this on Friday morning, INTC shares are down more than 6%.

the details

INTC’s overall business began to decelerate in the second half.  Weakness continued through 4Q.

As worldwide economic growth slowed, corporations responded by cutting spending on servers and PCs.  PC demand from individuals in emerging markets, who had been pillars of strength through the first half, began to sag as well.  Cloud computing everywhere and servers in China were exceptions to this trend.  Weakness was especially acute at the bottom of the PC market.

INTC’s customers spent 4Q working down the inventories of PCs, especially Windows 7 machines, that they already had on hand, rather than buying lots more chips from INTC and making new ones.  Knowing this was likely to happen, INTC shuttered some older production lines earlier than expected and using many of the machines to accelerate development of state-of-the-art 14 nm chips.  These moves (which I think were the right things to do) created one-time changes that whacked 5.5 percentage points from INTC’s gross margin during the quarter (plant writeoffs + startup expenses), clipping about $.10 a share from EPS.

where to from here?

INTC expects an improving world economy to give a boost to its general corporate server business and to its burgeoning PC business in emerging economies as 2013 progresses.

The company also thinks that the personal computing market among affluent individual customers will bifurcate into a large smartphone/7″ tablet market and a second one, consisting of 10″ and larger devices.  It thinks the latter market–ultrabooks, convertibles, tablets–will demand the full speed and computing power of traditional PCs, but in increasingly lighter, thinner, less power-hungry forms   …and that INTC chips will be the only ones able to satisfy these needs.  The first proof of this thesis will likely come late this year.

Significant cellphone market penetration will be a 2014 story, at the earliest.

paid to wait?

That’s the Wall Street cliché about poor-performing high-dividend stocks–that you’re being “paid to wait” for good things to happen.  In the INTC case, I’m content for now to do so.

I must admit, though, that I had expected the good news to be, if not knocking at the door, at least to be walking up the street toward my house, by now.  I don’t think INTC management did much to disabuse me of that view, either.  I don’t mean to say that they misled me;  rather, I suspect this is turning out to be a much longer haul than they expected, too.

Having said that, INTC shares are for me becoming the kind of uncomfortable question that every professional portfolio manager has to deal with sooner or later.  On the one hand, every time you trade you think you know more than the people on the other side of the bargain.  This is somewhat delusional because, on the other hand, experience shows that even Hall of Fame players are wrong at least four times out of ten.

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that if my brain is telling me one thing and the charts are telling me another, the worst decision I can make is to add to a full position (which is what INTC is for me).  The next worst would be to have INTC be one of my two or three largest positions (it isn’t).  So I’m going to sit on my hands for now.

 

 

special dividends and (in)efficient markets

December 20, 2012 By in "carrying" the dividend, Current Market Thoughts, Dividend Discount Model, Dividends, double taxation, Recent Market Action Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

As I’ve already blogged about, many US companies are paying large special dividends to shareholders before December 31st. Either that or they’ve accelerated payouts planned for 2013, distributing them this year instead.  The idea is to avoid the presumably much higher taxes the IRS will be levying on dividends next year.  Some companies, like COST, appear even to be borrowing money to fund distributions.

The after-tax value of a dividend payment in 2012 to a taxable shareholder is likely greater than one made in 2013.  In addition, it may be possible to manufacture a tax loss from the transaction as well–something that would add another bit of extra value.  So it’s not surprising that stocks paying special dividends should be strong performers in advance of the day they start trading ex dividend.

I’ve been noticing another feature they seem to have, however, that I hadn’t anticipated.  The stocks appear to be “carrying” a large part–and in one case I’m aware of, all–the special dividend.  Here’s what I mean:

If a company’s stock is trading at $100 a share the day before it goes ex a $10/share dividend, then in a flat market you’d expect the stock to drop to $90 when ex trading commences the next day.  But the current crop of special dividend stocks aren’t acting true to form.  They’re trading at $93 or $95 or higher instead.

What could be causing this behavior?

I haven’t seen any cases where important news breaks on the day the stock goes ex.  The only thing that I can see is that a buyer is no longer entitled to the special dividend.

I have only one explanation, and a semi-crazy one at that.  I’ve concluded that buyers don’t know that the stock has paid out a large dividend.  Buyers think instead that the stock has just made a large downward random fluctuation that makes it an attractive purchase.

I have two thoughts:

–what I’ve just described could never happen in an efficient market, which tells you something about how much attention Wall Street is currently paying to stocks; and

–I wish I’d thought of this possibility before companies started paying special dividends, rather than when they’re finishing up.