Tag Archives: finance

Intel (INTC), Microsoft (MSFT) …or an ETF?

April 23, 2015 By in Constructing a Portfolio, ETFs Vs. Mutual Funds, Industry Analysis, internet, securities markets, stock market, Technology Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

When I was reading the Seeking Alpha transcript of INTC’s 1Q15 earnings the other day, I notice that an ad popped up to the right of the text.  It was mostly a list of passive tech-oriented ETFs, with a performance comparison against INTC.  The list showed that INTC had handily outperformed any of the other entries over the pat twelve months   …but that the year-to-date results were a markedly different story.

That started me thinking.  Would I be better off with an ETF than with INTC?

On the one hand,  INTC is a relatively cheap, high dividend yield stock, whose glory days of the PC era are far behind it.  the company finally recognizes this and is in the midst of an attempt to morph into a 21st century-relevant firm. If it’s successful, I can imagine the stock could have, say, a 35% gain in price as Wall Street discounts better future earnings propects (I’d say much the same of the post-Ballmer MSFT).

This isn’t a bad story.  I’m arguably paid to wait.  The stock’s valuation is reasonable.  And at the moment I don’t believe the overall US stock market has very much near-term upside.  So I’ve been content to hold.

The ETF ad, though, got me thinking.   Can I do better, without taking a significantly larger amount of risk?

This question has two parts:

–is there a better tech stock than INTC?, and

–can I locate it?

I’m convinced that the answer to the first is Yes and that the area to look is online services for Millennials and the companies that supply support and infrastructure for them.

For me, the issue is whether to search for, and concentrate, on a single stock–something that requires a lot of time and effort.  I think it’s better to look for an ETF or mutual fund.  The best I’ve found so far is the Web X.O ETF from Ark Investment Management.  The ETF is tiny, so liquidity is a risk–in fact, Merrill Edge wouldn’t accept an online order from me for this reason.  I had no problem with either Fidelity or Vanguard, however.  The other thing is that ARK is a startup.  The principals may have had long Wall Street careers but I see very little evidence of hands-on portfolio management experience.  So ARK is in a sense establishing its bona fides with (a small amount of) my money.  Not exactly the same risk profile as INTC.

Personally, I’m not so concerned about the portfolio manager.  The organization publishes its holdings every day.  For me, liquidity is the bigger worry–and something that would make me reluctant to recommend ARK to anyone else.  Still, I own some.  And I’m looking for other vehicles that can potentially serve the same purpose in my portfolio.

more on discounting

April 22, 2015 By in Academic Theories, Basic Concepts, Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), Discounting Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

In actual practice, judging what the market has already discounted in the price of an individual stock or the prices of stocks in general, is a tricky thing.  Even seasoned professionals are often wrong.

There are trends in overall market direction that are relatively easy to spot.  In a bull market, investors tend to ignore bad news and respond strongly to good.  In bear markets, the opposite happens.

Perhaps the main reason for professionals that technical analysis is more than a curious practice of a more primitive time is that watching for deviations from the usual daily price action of individual stocks can give clues to what other investors are thinking/doing.  Rises on unusually high volume, for example, can suggest that others are figuring out what you already know and have acted on.  On the other hand, failure of the stock to react positively to news that supports your positive thesis suggests that what you thought was a new, investable insight actually wasn’t.

The reality that investors only act piecemeal, or the idea that we act differently when infused with greed than when in the vise grip of fear are both much too untidy for the statisticians who formulated the Efficient Market Hypothesis/Capital Asset Pricing Model that arose in the 1970s (and which–mind-bogglingly–is still taught in business schools).

These theories have no place for observation/practical experience.  They assume that everyone has the same information and that the market factors new information into prices instantaneously.  What’s particularly ironic is that they were formed during the early 1970s.  How so?

–1972 was the peak of the “Nifty Fifty” or “One-Decision Stocks” speculation.  Investors believed that a small number of stocks–Kodak, Xerox, National Lead, for example–would grow rapidly forever.  Therefore, they should never be sold, and no price was to high to pay to acquire them.  The result was that this group of names traded at as high as 110x earnings–in an environment where the 10-year Treasury yielded 6% and the average stock traded at 11x.

–this high was immediately followed by a vicious bear market in 1973-74 that saw stocks trade in mid-1974 at discounts to net cash on the balance sheet–and still go down every day, on the theory that money in the hands of management scoundrels wasn’t worth 100 cents on the dollar.

How is it that these guys didn’t notice?

discounting and today’s equity market

April 21, 2015 By in Discounting, EU financial crisis, Greece, securities markets Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Discounting is the term Wall Street uses for the idea that investors factor into today’s prices, to a greater or lesser degree, their beliefs about the future (I wrote a detailed post about the process in October 2012).

 

Two of the major macroeconomic factors the market is wrestling with now are the timing and extent of the Fed’s future moves to raise interest rates from their current emergency lows, and the possibility that Greece will default on its debts and exit the euro.

 

My experience is that almost nothing is ever 100% discounted in advance.  There’s always some price movement when the event actually happens.  Having said that, the coming rise in interest rates in the US has been so anticipated–and talked about by the Fed–for such a long time that there may even be a positive market reaction to the first rise.  This would be on the idea that Wall Street would give a sigh of relief when there’s no more anticipatory tension to deal with.  More likely, there’ll be a mild negative movement, for a short period, but that’s all.

The Greek financial crisis has also been in the news for a long time.  But we don’t have the same extensive history of behavior during past economic cycles to draw on, the way we do with the Fed.  We do have Argentina as a case study in what happens to the defaulting country (personally, I expect the consequences of default for Greece would be pretty terrible for its citizens).  But the focus of investors’ concern is what damage might be done to the EU by Greece’s leaving.  In addition, lots of non-economic factors are involved in this situation.  There’s Greece’s central role in Europe’s beliefs about its own exceptionalism.  There’s the Greek portrayal of the EU’s requirement that Greece implement structural economic reform as a condition for debt relief as 21st-century Nazism.  There’s the status quo in Greece that has benefited from the country’s profligate borrowing.  There’s fear of the unknown that must be urging politicians to paper over Greece’s problems.

In addition, my sense is that the markets’ overriding emotion so far is denial–hope that the whole situation will go away.  Current thinking seems to be that the parties will arrange for some sort of default, along with capital controls to restrict the flow of euros out of Greece, that will allow Greece to stay in the EU.  Still, I find it very hard to calculate odds or even to anticipate what the worst that can happen might be, or the best.  This makes me think that very little of the possible negatives of “Grexit” are factored into today’s prices.

More tomorrow.

Berkshire Hathaway and Kraft

April 20, 2015 By in Current Market Thoughts, economics, from growth to value: the life cycle, growth vs value, mergers and acquisitions, stock market Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

A little less than a month ago, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and Heinz (controlled by Brazilian investment firm 3G) jointly announced a takeover offer for Kraft.  The Associated Press quoted Mr. Buffett as asserting “This is my kind of transaction.”  I looked for the press release containing the quote on the Berkshire website before starting to write this, but found nothing.   The News Releases link on the home page was last updated two weeks before the Kraft announcement.  Given the kindergarten look of the website, I’m not so surprised   …and I’m willing to believe the quote is genuine.  If not, there goes the intro to my post.

 

As to the “my kind” idea, it is and it isn’t.

On the one hand, Buffett has routinely been willing to be a lender to what he considers high-quality franchises, notably financial companies, in need of large amounts of money quickly–often during times of financial and economic turmoil.  The price of a Berkshire Hathaway loan typically includes at least a contingent equity component.  The Kraft case, a large-size private equity deal, is a simple extension of this past activity.

On the other, this is not the kind of equity transaction that made Mr. Buffett’s reputation–that is, buying a large position in a temporarily underperforming firm with a strong brand name and distribution network, perhaps making a few tweaks to corporate management, but basically leaving the company alone and waiting for the ship to right itself.  In the case of 3G’s latest packaged goods success, Heinz, profitability did skyrocket–but only after a liberal dose of financial leverage and the slash-and-burn laying off of a quarter of the workforce!  This is certainly not vintage Buffett.

Why should the tiger be changing its stripes?

Two reasons:

—the opportunity.

I think many mature companies are wildly overstaffed, even today.

Their architects patterned their creation on the hierarchical structure they learned in the armed forces during the World War II era.  A basic principle was that a manager could effectively control at most seven subordinates, necessitating cascading levels of middle managers between the CEO and ordinary workers.  A corollary was that you could gauge a person’s importance by the number of people who, directly or indirectly, reported to him.

Sounds crazy, but at the time this design was being implemented, there was no internet, no cellphones, no personal computers, no fax machines, no copiers.  The ballpoint pen had still not been perfected.  Yes, there were electric lights and paper clips.  So personal contact was the key transmission mechanism for corporate communication.

Old habits die hard.  It’s difficult to conceive of making radical changes if you’ve been brought up in a certain system–especially if the company in question is steadily profitable.  And, of course, the manager who decided to cut headcount risked a loss of status.

Hence, 3G’s success.

—plan A isn’t working  

One of the first, and most important, marketing lessons I have learned is that you don’t introduce strawberry as a flavor until sales of vanilla have stopped growing.  Why complicate your life?

Buffett’s direct equity participation in Kraft is a substantial departure from the type of investing that made him famous.  I’ve been arguing for some time that traditional value investing no longer works in the internet era.  That’s because the internet has quickly broken down traditional barriers to entry in very many industries.  It seems to me that Buffet’s move shows he thinks so too.

 

 

 

 

positioning in a trendless market…

April 8, 2015 By in Analyzing performance, Constructing a Portfolio, Current Market Thoughts, How often to measure, Portfolio management, stock market Tags: , , , , , , 3 Comments

…that is, in the kind of market we have now.

At stock market bottoms, like the epic one we saw in March 2009, the most highly economically cyclical stocks and the ones with the weakest capital structures (i.e., the most out-of-control debt) are invariably the ones that are the most beaten down.  Because of this, they’re the ones that react the most positively to the first rays of hope that the worst economic news is behind us.

As the market and business cycles mature, leadership gradually shifts from these “value” names to secular growth stocks.  The latter are the least cyclically sensitive and are ones whose investment merit consists in their ability to grow earnings (1) faster than the consensus expects and (2) for a longer period of time than is generally recognized.

Entering year seven after the bottom, we’re deep into the growth stock period.  Dyed-in-the-wool value investors will doubtless be poring over the financials of oil and other commodity production companies.  But the strength of the market will be in technology, social media and Millennial-oriented stocks, I think.

A flat market gives us more time to search for them.

We should also be considering what is likely to happen once this up-one-day, down-the-next period is over.  My view is that the current doldrums are being caused by higher-than-normal valuation, not by perceptions of an upcoming economic slowdown.  If I’m correct, as time passes and company earnings grow, price earnings ratios will gradually shrink.  This will restore more attractive valuation  …and the market will begin to rise again.  When this will happen–and what occurs in the meantime–is less clear.  My answers are “late summer” and “nothing much.”  Alternatives might be “after the first Fed interest rate increase” and “the market goes down 5% – 10%.”

In the current market climate, there’s an easy way to check if my portfolio positioning is in line with my theorizing.

On up days in the market, my holdings should do at least as well as the market; on down days my portfolio will likely underperform.  Conversely, if I have a defensive posture, I should outperform on weak days and underperfrom on strong ones.

The portfolio from heaven will outperform around the clock.  A portfolio potentially in need of overhaul will underperform no matter what.

I normally don’t advocate analyzing portfolio performance on a day-to-day basis.  That’s because there’s often a lot of noise in daily price movements.  And short-term trends may make sense to day traders but no one else.  So there’s a risk that we get shaken out of long-term winning positions by getting scared by meaningless short-term craziness.

Still, in the current market circumstances–and if we don’t get emotionally caught up in the price movements–we have a chance to observe over a short period of time whether our portfolios have the structure we intend them to have.