Tag Archives: economy

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.

 

 

 

3Q14 for Intel (INTC): keeping the faith …or not

October 16, 2014 By in Current Market Thoughts, earnings conference calls, Industry Analysis, semiconductor manufacturing, Stock ideas, Technology Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

INTC reported 3Q14 results after the close on Tuesday.  Earnings per share came in at $.66, which beat the brokerage house analyst consensus by $.02.  The company’s guidance for 4Q14 exceeded analysts’ expectations as well.

The stock gained about 3% in the aftermarket   …but plunged at the open yesterday.

There are two main points at issue, as I see it:

oversupply?

1.  Some analysts think INTC’s outlook is too bullish.

a. Last Thursday, Microchip Technology (MCHP), a maker of a broad range of commodity semiconductors, warned that its 3Q14 would be weaker than it had previously thought.  The reason:  weakness in China in September.  The company also predicted that a general semiconductor industry downturn is now beginning.

MCHP is saying,  in effect, that it is in much better touch with end users of its products than most other semiconductor firms, including INTC.  It records revenue only when an end-user buys a chip from a distributor–not when the chip leaves the factory, which is the common industry practice.  It believes others will soon figure out they have much too much inventory floating around in their distribution systems (already booked as revenue) and will be forced to cut back production to bring them back into line with demand.  If so, MCHP is sort of like the canary in the coal mine for chipmakers.

b.  INTC recorded healthy growth in its PC business.  Third-party research services like IDC say demand was basically flat.  Is INTC inadvertently stuffing the channel?

INTC’s response to this worry is:

–it’s a specialized maker of microprocessors

–corporate demand is strong, partly because Microsoft (MSFT) has stopped supporting Windows XP, but also because corporations are beginning to replace the now-decrepit PCs they’ve been duct taping back together for a decade.  This trend will last for a long time.

–third-party researchers like IDC are fine for tabulating demand in the US and the EU, but can’t easily see the businesses of no-name computer makers in the emerging world who are strong INTC customers.

–yes, inventories are higher today than they were a year ago, but they’ve just returned to normal from extremely low levels.

mobile?

2.  INTC’s mobile chip business is losing $1 billion a quarter, even as the company has become the second-largest vendor of tablet microprocessors in the world.  Can this end well?

The company has gone from a standing start to having chips in maybe 40 million tablets being made this year.  It is concentrating on low-end tablets in emerging markets, entering into long-term R&D and development arrangements with Chinese firms–and, for now at least, more or less giving its chips away to get them into machines (the reality is more complicated).

The company thinks it can begin to whittle away at those losses, beginning next year.  Profitability in 2016?  My guess is yes, but who knows?

my take

If INTC is ever going to crack the mobile market, the time is now and the company’s strategy is sound (it’s also the only one I see available to it).  Suppose it loses $5 billion on the effort and has to reassess.   Not good   …but then $5 billion represents only about 3% of the firms stock market value.  A risk, yes, but one worth taking, I think.

The cyclical downturn thesis is more worrying. When it comes down to it, though, I’m unwilling to generalize from MCHP’s business softness.  Arguably, the weakness MCHP is seeing comes from the Beijing orienting the economy away from construction and low-end commodity-like activities.  The move to higher value-added business should mean greater demand for microprocessors, not less.  So on this front, too, I’m willing to give INTC the benefit of the doubt.

The stock is trading at 15x earnings (high for it but a discount to the market) and yielding a tad under 3%.  If I had to put numbers to my thinking, I’d say that, in the absence of a serious semiconductor swoon, downside is to $25.  Upside if tablet losses begin to abate in 2015 is maybe to $45.

If I thought upside and downside were both equally probable, I should have been a seller at $35.  I wasn’t.  I’m now guessing that upside/downside has deteriorated from 2/1 to each equally probable.  But at $31, I’m still a holder.  I’m not a buyer, though.

 

 

 

 

 

ARK Investment Management and its ETFs

October 13, 2014 By in Autos, cloud services, ETFs Vs. Mutual Funds, growth vs value, Industry Analysis, internet, Investment firms, robots, semiconductor manufacturing, software, Technology, Wireless Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

ARK

I was listening to Bloomberg Radio (again!?!) earlier this month and heard an interview of Cathie Wood, the CEO/CIO of recently formed ARK Investment Management.  I don’t know Ms. Wood, although we both worked at Jennison Associates, a growth-oriented equity manager with a very strong record, during different time periods.  Just before ARK, she had been CIO of Global Thematic Strategies for twelve years at value investor AllianceBernstein.  (As a portfolio manager I was a big fan of Bernstein’s equity research but I’m not familiar with her Bernstein output.)  She’s been  endorsed by Arthur Laffer of Laffer Curve fame, who sits on her board.

ARK is all about finding and benefiting from “disruptive innovation that will change the world.”

Ms. Wood was promoting two actively managed ETFs that ARK launched at the beginning of the month, one focused on industrial innovation (ARKQ) and another the internet (ARKW).  Two more are in the works, one for genomics (ARKG) and the last (ARKK) an umbrella innovation portfolio which will apparently hold what it considers the best of the other three portfolios.

What really caught my ear in the interview was Ms. Wood’s discussion of the domestic automobile market (summary research available on the ARK website).  Most cars lie around doing nothing during the day.  What happens if either ride-sharing services like Uber or the Google self-driven car, which make more constant use of autos, catch on as substitutes?  According to Ms. Wood, until these innovations reach 2.5% of total miles driven (based on the idea that on a per mile basis ride-sharing costs half what owning a car does), there’s little effect.  But at 5% penetration, the bottom falls out of the new car market.  New car sales get cut in half!

Who knows whether this is correct or whether it will happen or not   …but I find this a very interesting idea.

about the ETFs

The top holdings of ARKW are:  athenahealth, Apple, Facebook, Salesforce.com and Twitter.  These comprise just under 25% of the portfolio.

For ARKQ, the top five are:  Google, Autodesk, Tesla, Monsanto and Fanuc.  They make up just over 24% of the portfolio.

Both will likely be high β portfolios.  Both have performed roughly in line with the NASDAQ Composite since their debut.

The perennial question about thematic investors (I consider myself one) is whether the high-level concepts are backed up by meticulous company by company financial research.  This is essential.  In addition, it’s important, to me anyway, that the holdings be arranged so that they’re not all dependent on a single theme–the continuing success of the Apple ecosystem, for instance.

I’m not familiar with Ms. Wood’s work, so I can’t say one way or another (Fanuc and ABB strike me as kind of weird holding for ARKQ, though).  But I think her research is worth reading and her ETFs worth at least monitoring.  For us as investors, the ultimate question will be whether Ms. Wood can outperform an appropriate index.  The NASDAQ Composite would be my initial choice.

 

 

 

 

 

the Employment Situation–now scanning the horizon for wage increases

October 6, 2014 By in employment, Employment Situation report Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

the Employment Situation

Last Friday morning the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the Labor Department released its monthly Employment Situation report for September.  The numbers were good– +248,000 new jobs added in the economy, +236,000 of them in the private sector.

Revisions were also favorable.  July figures were boosted from +212,000 to +243,000, and the worrisome +142,000 number posted for August was revised up to +180,000.

With last month’s poor employment gain showing now being interpreted as simply a hiccup in the reporting system rather than an indicator of a slowdown in hiring, the stock market’s attention is beginning to turn toward the wage gain information in the ES, rather than the employment numbers themselves.

wage gains?

what counts aw wages in the ES?

The figure itself appears to me to be pretty solid.  It’s derived from actual gross wage figures reported by the large number of substantial private sector firms who are participants in the BLS Establishment survey.  There is some government estimation, in the sense that the participating firms are thought to be representative of the economy as a whole.  But the data aren’t estimations.  They’re the real, complete salary figures.

The figures are gross, in the sense that they are before any deduction for taxes or benefits.

They’re salary figures only.  They don’t include payroll taxes that employers pay.  They also don;t include health or retirement benefits that employees may receive.

the current rate of wage gains…

…is 2% per year.

In one sense, this suits the Fed just fine.  The absence of sharp upward pressure on wages means the central bank doesn’t have to hurry to raise interest rates to stave off potentially runaway inflation (in the US, inflation is almost completely about wage gains).  The low number implies that employers can easily find all the qualified workers they need to grow their businesses either from new entrants into the labor market or from the currently unemployed.  They don’t need to poach new hires from rivals by offering very large pay increases.

On the other, it’s kind of eerie that the Fed can have had the monetary stimulus taps more wide open than ever before for over five years and not have wages be rising faster than this.

The wage gain numbers will increase in importance to Wall Street in the coming months, I think, as the Fed prepares to start raising the Federal Funds rate from the current level of zero.

My sense of the consensus belief is that:

–rates will being to rise next Spring,

–the “normal” rate is not the 4.0%-4.5% the Fed was talking about in 2012-13, but rather 2.5%-3.0%, and

–the Fed Funds rate could be halfway back to normal by the end of 2015–meaning five or six quarter-percent moves next year.

 

household income and the substitution effect

September 17, 2014 By in median incomes, Stock ideas, Strategy, wage gains Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Yesterday, the Census Bureau released its 2013 annual report on Income and Poverty in the United States.

It showed that median household income in the US was an estimated $51,959 last year, up $180 (whoa, baby!) from the median in 2012.  The 2013 figure is still about 8% lower than the pre-recession level and 8.7% below the all-time peak in household earnings in 1999.

Not a pretty picture, but it brings home how long the period of structural change the US is experiencing has been going on.  Personally (meaning I think so but I wouldn’t bet the farm on being correct), I think it’s no accident that the current wage stagnation began with the emergence of the internet as a major economic force.

In economic theory, and also in practice, people can increase their economic well-being in one of two ways:

(1) they can earn more income, or

(2) they can “upgrade” the basket of goods and services they consume by substituting lower-cost equivalents for the stuff they have typically purchased in the past.

The Census Bureau figures show that door #1 has been closed, on average, for a long period of time.  Therefore, to the degree that people want a higher standard of living, they have had to become adept at strategy #2.

In my experience, during economic expansions people typically try to keep up appearances and hesitate to substitute lower-priced items.   It’s only during recessions that it becomes acceptable to, say, substitute a Hyundai for your Lexus or store brand staples for national brands.

investment significance

It seems to me that in the US stock market, we’ve only begun to see the substitution effect expressed in stock prices in earnest during  the past year (for example, teen retailers, soda and food companies)..  I think there’s lots more to come.  It’s probably easier to identify potential losers than winners.  Just look for high gross and operating margins.  Such companies have the most to lose from price competition; they also may have created “price umbrellas” that allow rivals to undercut them.

 

The Census Bureau report has two other figures that caught my eye.

–The 5% of American households headed by 15-24 year-olds saw their incomes jump by 10.5% last year to $34,311.  A proxy for Millennials?

–The median income for over 65 year-olds is $35,611.  That’s up by 3.7%, year on year.  But it’s also less than two-thirds of the $57,538 median for 55 – 64 year-olds.  The future for Baby Boom purchasing power?