Tag Archives: economy

Millennials and shoes

March 27, 2015 By in Millennials vs. Baby Boomers Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

For a while, I’ve been convinced that my search for secular growth consumer stories should shift from Baby Boomers–an amazingly rich lode to mine for my entire career–to Millennials.

Two reasons:

–Millennials are now more numerous than Boomers, and

–Millennials’ incomes, now only about half that of Boomers, are risng, while Boomers’ are falling as more enter retirement.

So I’ve been on the lookout for information about trends in Millennials’ consumption.

The other day I found one from the NPD Group blog.

It’s shoes!!

The average American–man, woman and child–buys 7.5 pairs of shoes a year.  The business has been growing by about 3% a year since the economy’s low point in 2009.  Total annual retail footwear sales in the US are now around $54 billion.

According to NPD, Millennials in the US spent $21 billion on footwear, about 40% of the total, last year.  That’s up by 6% over their outlay in 2013, or triple what the industry growth was.  In addition, Millennials were a bigger factor in the $100+ shoe segment, where they spent 12% more than in 2013.

Now to find a pure play.

 

 

Grexit a 50/50 possibility…

March 24, 2015 By in economics, EU financial crisis, Greece Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

…according to financier George Soros.

Personally, I have a hard time dealing with Mr. Soros’s Donald Trump-ish nature.  In his book The Alchemy of Finance, for example, he claims to have invented the thesis-anti-thesis-synthesis explanatory pattern that was introduced to European thought by Hegel in 1807 and developed by Marx later in that century.  Hard to believe Mr. Soros, who studied philosophy, is completely unaware of either of these seminal figures.  I’ve also thought that a significant amount of the success of his Quantum Fund was due to Soros’ less well-known partner, Jim Rogers.

If there’s one thing, George Soros knows about, however, it’s currencies and politics.  So his view that it’s a flip of a coin whether Greece stays in the EU or leaves, is well worth listening to.

The short story of Greece’s woes is that after joining the EU it racked up so much sovereign debt using the implicit repayment guarantee of being in the euro (kind of like having a credit card that can’t be maxed out) that it can’t possibly pay all of it back.  The gravity of the situation came to light several years ago when a newly installed (and now gone) government announced  the previous administration had been falsifying the country’s national economic accounts  for years.

Greece has since been negotiating for debt concessions in return for ending its spendthrift ways.  Its strategy so far has been to promise reform in return for debt relief   …but to do nothing.    This tactic seems to have recently passed its “sell by” date.  The EU and the IMF now appear to believe that the moral hazard risk of continue to accommodate Greece is worse than the potential damage to the Eurozone from expelling it.

As I see it, the ball is now clearly in Athens’ court.

For what it’s worth, I think Grexit would turn out to be a genuine tragedy for Greece, but far less damaging to the euro than is commonly believed.  Rather than giving encouragement to breakaway movements in the UK, Spain and elsewhere, I think Greece outside the EU–substantial currency depreciation, loss of access to external finance–would serve as a cautionary tale instead.    Think Argentina without the farm wealth.

My guess is that the euro would decline a bit on Grexit.  The banks might have a rocky time, too.  It’s very possible, though, that the markets would be happy just to have the situation resolved–and that any fallout would be small and short in duration.

 

 

dealing with a rising currency

March 12, 2015 By in economics, growth vs value, Portfolio management, Recent Market Action, Strategy Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

As far as the stock market is concerned, there are two main strategies for dealing with a rising currency:

1.  try to make currency work to your advantage

Profit growth will be highest for a company in a changing currency environment if it has its costs in weak currencies and its revenues in strong ones. In today’s world, this means having costs in, say, yen or euros and sales in the US.

The “good” stocks in weak currency countries gain in two ways:   from stronger profit gains and from domestic portfolio managers rotating their holdings toward the “good” industries.

The obvious candidates are export-oriented firms with high labor content in weak currency countries.  In these areas, firms with high strong-currency import content that sell finished products into the domestic market are the worst ones to hold.

 

In strong currency countries, in contrast, purely domestic stocks are the best bet.  They benefit only from portfolio manager rotation, though.  But they avoid currency induced weakness.

 

2. ignore currency and look for secular growth names whose expansion prospects outweigh possible currency losses 

As a growth investor, this is my preferred strategy.  Historically, the majority of such stocks have been in the US.  In today’s world, however, the ideal investment would be in a hot EU tech company with exposure to the US.

Any ideas?

the US Employment Situation, January 2015

February 6, 2015 By in economics, employment, Employment Situation report Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

the best laid plans…

I’d intended to write about the oil industry today, no matter what the results of the monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly Employment Situation report released this morning.  How good/bad could it be?, I thought.  If anything, there might be a negative impact from layoffs in the oilfields.

Turns out, the January 2105 ES is really good, so I’m writing about that instead.  Different varieties of oil stocks on Monday.

large job gains

The economy added 257, 000 jobs in January, +267,000 in the private sector and -10,000 in government.  That’s significantly more than economists had been forecasting, although I’ve come to think that forecasters don’t tend to put their best efforts into coming up with these numbers.  It’s also the latest in a long string of  monthly gains that are way above the +125,000 or so needed to absorb new workers leaving school and entering the workforce for the first time.

very large positive revisions

More important, the revisions to prior months’ job gain estimates are positive   …and enormous.

November 2014 new positions were originally reported as +321,000.  That figure was revised up to +353,000 last month.  The just-released final figure is +423,000.

December 2014 new positions were reported as +252,000.  That has been revised up this month to +329,000.

Add revisions to the January new job total and the economy turns out to be employing a whopping 404,000 more people than we thought a month ago.

unemployment rate up

The unemployment rate rose slightly in January to 5.7%, despite the jobs gains.  That’s because the labor force grew by over a million workers during the month.  This is also good news.  It implies that large numbers of unemployed people who had stopped looking for work–and thus dropped out of the workforce–now think there’s a good chance they can find a position and are back job hunting again.  The return of discouraged workers is another positive sign that had been missing up until now in the rebound from recession.

salary news still mixed

Wages grew by 2.2% over the past year.  December had shown a drop of $.05 an hour in average wages; January recovered that and added another $.07 to $24.75.

So far S&P 500 stock index futures have gained about six points in the pre-market–a tepid, but positive, response.  I think this news deserves better.

natural resources and economic growth

January 20, 2015 By in Energy, Gold, Industry Analysis, Long-term themes, Mining, Shaping a portfolio for 2015, Strategy Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

I ended up with my first stock market job, more or less by accident–and without any finance experience or training–in the late summer of 1978.  A few months later, the firm’s oil analyst was headhunted away and I took his place.  Within a couple of years (an MBA from NYU at night along the way) I had picked up a bunch of metals mining companies, too, and was in charge of the firm’s natural resources research.

The oil industry was (and still is) really non-intuitive–more about my early adventures tomorrow.  Today I want to write about the mining industry, which is a little more straightforward.

natural resources in the 1970s

I started out by reading the annual reports and 10-Ks of the major base metals mining companies for the prior five or six years.  What stood out clearly was that all the firms held very strongly a series of common beliefs, namely:

1.  that global economic growth would continue to be strong for as far into the future as one could imagine,

2.  that the availability of all sorts of base metals–lead for batteries, copper for wiring and tubing, iron ore for steel, and so on–was a necessary condition for this growth

3.  that, therefore, demand for base metals would grow at least in lockstep with GDP increases.

Implicitly, the companies also assumed that:

4. that oversupply was highly unlikely,

5.  that substitution among raw materials–like aluminum or PVC for copper–wouldn’t be an issue, and

6. that, because of 4. and 5., the selling price of output from future orebody discovery/development would never be a concern.

CEOs’ conviction was buttressed by reams of computer paper containing economists’ regression analyses “proving” that all this stuff was true.

a massive investment cycle…

Naturally, the companies, not risk-shy by nature, went all in across the board on new base metals mine development.

As I was reading these documents in 1979-80, the first (of many) massive new low-cost orebodies were coming into production.  This wave turned out to have been enough to keep most base metals in oversupply–and a lot of mines unprofitable–for the following twenty-five years!!!  Miners were also in the midst of a massive switch to exploring for gold, where high value deposits could be developed quickly and at low-cost–causing, in turn, a twenty year glut of the yellow metal.

…that didn’t work out

The mining CEOs turned out to be wrong in a number of ways:

–like any capital-intensive commodity business where the minimum plant size is huge, industry profits for base metals are determined by long cycles of under-capacity followed by massive investment in new mines that causes long periods of over-capacity

–although it wasn’t apparent in the 1970s, substitution of cheaper materials has been a chronic problem for base metals.  Take copper.  There’s aluminum for heat dissipation and wiring, PVC for plumbing, and glass/airwaves for audiovisual transmission.

–Peter Drucker was writing about knowledge workers as early as 1959.  Nevertheless, the mining companies and their economists weren’t able to imagine a world where GDP growth might not require immense amounts of extra physical materials.

I’ve been looking for a sound byte-y way to put this all into perspective.  The best I can do is a gross oversimplification:

–real GDP in the US has expanded by 245% since 1980.  Oil usage is up by about 10% over that period; steel usage is down slightly.  The supposed dependence of GDP growth on increased use of natural resouces simply isn’t true.

Why am I writing about this today?

…it’s because I continue to read and hear financial “experts” say that weak oil and metals prices imply declining world economic activity.  To me this argument makes no sense.