Tag Archives: Portfolio management

a surprising reaction to a so-so jobs report …trading computers at work?

May 11, 2015 By in Constructing a Portfolio, Current Market Thoughts, economics, Employment Situation report, Strategy Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

Last Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released, as usual, its monthly employment report for April.  The numbers were good, but not surprisingly so.  The Employment Situation said the economy added 223,000 new positions in April– +213,000 in the private sector and +10,000 in government.

The revisions to prior months’ data were strongly negative, though–+2,000 jobs for February and -41,000 for an already weak March.

Wage gains remained in the +2%/year range;  the unemployment rate was stable at 5.4%.

My reaction was that the figures were about what the market had expected.  The headline figure, ex revisions, was exactly in line with economists’ estimates.  Nothing else changed much.

Nevertheless,

…the S&P rose steadily during the day end ended up by 1.3%.

Yea, I’ve been retired for some time.  But I can’t imagine any of the portfolio managers I knew/know buying stocks on this report (because it contained no new information).

Yet the market didn’t just shrug the report off.  Instead, it went up a lot.  Assuming the market went up on the Employment Situation–and I think it did–the market reacted to a just-as-expected report rather than discounting it in advance, as usually happens.

Why did the market behave this way?  I don’t know.  All I can come up with is that computers, not people, are the main actors, and that the decision rules they’re using aren’t very good.

Something to think about …and keep an eye on, since this behavior runs so counter to prior experience.

worrying about productivity

May 8, 2015 By in economics, employment, wage gains Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

getting GDP growth

Looking at GDP from a labor perspective, growth comes either from having more workers or from more productivity, that is, from workers creating more stuff per hour on the job.  (Yes, you can get more output by not letting workers go home and forcing them to work 100 hours a week.  But that’s not going to last long, so economists generally ignore this possibility.)

The trend growth rate of the population in the US is, depending on who we ask, somewhere between +.7% and +1.0% per year. For reasons best known to itself,  Congress spends an inordinately large amount of time, in my view, devising ways to keep a lid on this paltry number by prohibiting immigration.  So, as a practical matter, the only way to get GDP to expand in the US by more than 1% is through productivity growth.

 

The weird thing about productivity is that it’s a residual.  We don’t see it directly.  Productivity is a catchall term for the “extra” GDP that a country delivers above what can be explained by growth in the number of people employed.  Economists figure it’s the result of employers providing better machinery for workers to use, technological change, and improved education + on the job training.

Productivity peaked in the US shortly after the turn of the century at around +2% per year, accounting for the lion’s share of national GDP growth.  It has been falling steadily since.  Over the December 2014 and March 2015 quarters, productivity dipped into negative territory.  This is hopefully a statistical quirk and not the sudden onset of mass senior moments throughout the workplace.

why worry?

Over the long term, the disappearance of growth through productivity gains implies economic stagnation in the US.  (My personal view is that the productivity number are the aggregation of a highly productive tech-oriented sector and a low/no-productivity rest of us hobbled by a weak public education system   …but, as a practical matter, who knows?   By the way, productivity figures don’t include government.)

The more pressing issue is that no productivity gains means employers aren’t finding ways to make their employees create more output per hour worked.  That is, they have no way of offsetting  higher wages other than to try to pass costs on by raising prices.

the bottom line for investors

Conventional wisdom is that the Fed will take a long time to shift from extreme economic stimulation through emergency-low interest rates back to normality.  Both stock and bond prices also seem to me to have imbedded in them the idea that “normal” will be lower in nominal terms than it has been in the past.

A bout of inflation induced by rising wages could change that thinking in a heartbeat.

To be clear, dangerously accelerating inflation isn’t my base case for how the economy will play out.  And no one is thinking that the US will only grow at about 1% annually from now on.  All the more reason to keep a close eye on how productivity figures evolve.

trading: buying in thirds

May 7, 2015 By in buying and selling, Trading, trading: how valuable? Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

coming late to the party

I’ve found that the situation arises more often than one might think where I find a stock I think it interesting but where I’m very clearly not the first one at the party.  In other words, the company has potentially attractive long-term prospects but the stock is not cheap enough that I can justify buying a full position right away–and I don’t have a practical feel for how it trades.  My instinct is that the price is a bit too high, but I’m not sure.

how to get involved?

What I’ll typically do is buy a third of the position I ultimately want to have.

I’ll then continue to find out more about the company and watch the stock’s trading carefully (my experience is that people, myself included, never look hard enough if the name is only in a paper portfolio–a kind of portfolio I find psychologically pretty useless, anyway).

My intention will be to buy another third on a decline of, say, 5% – 10%, assuming I don;t turn up new information, positive or negative, that overturns my whole thesis.

If I I buy the second third, I’ll wait for a further decline to buy the final portion.

What does this method get me?  I have immediate exposure, in case I’m correct on the stock but too pessimistic on valuation.  At the same time, I still have a chance to lower my average cost by buying the bulk of the position at a lower price.

an example

My California son and I have been talking about the Elon Musk empire for a long time.  Following its weak  4Q14 results, our conversation turned to Tesla (TSLA).  It’s a stock I’ve owned off and on, but my son hasn’t.  (My view, (too) simply put, is that TSLA is a lot like a gold mining issue whose assets consist solely/predominantly in ownership of a reportedly fabulous orebody now under development.  Such stocks typically peak the day the mine opens–when investors have to deal with facts, not dreams.  Before then, the dreams are more important. )

My reading of the TSLA chart–hopefully more useful than parsing nocturnal visions with a dream book–made me think the stock continues to trade in a range between $180 and $260-ish.  I was also willing to believe that TSLA’s 4Q14 failure to sell enough cars was mostly due to bad weather and port difficulties.

Anyway, I decided to buy my first third at $200.  My son said he would wait for $190.

I bought his first third at around $191, where I bought my second third.

I bought his second third at $186? …and another (less than) one-third for myself there. as well.

Then the stock began to move up quickly and we haven’t bought any more.

The result:  my son has a somewhat smaller position, relative to his total portfolio size, with an average cost of $188?.  I have a larger relative position, with a higher relative cost, $194?.  So we both have exposure, and at a lower cost than if we’d bought all at once.

Another point: We’re dealing with a discount broker where our total commission costs are around $20.  Paying for two or three trades instead of one makes little difference.  For a traditional “full service” broker, this probably won’t be the case.

 

 

 

 

Tesla (TSLA) or Solar City (SCTY)–which to choose

May 6, 2015 By in Autos, battery power, Energy, family owned companies, Industry Analysis, securities markets, stock market, Technology Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

TSLA and SCTY are terrestrial companies run by Elon Musk.  TSLA makes electric-powered cars; SCTY generates electric power with solar cells.

what they have in common

Both are publicly traded.

Both are speculative stocks, in the sense that assessing their value involves projecting results far into the future.

Both are trying to transform staid industries that have been around for a long time.

Both are big users of capital.

Both face substantial regulatory barriers to their success.

–For TSLA, it’s the regulations in many states that prohibit a car manufacturer from selling its products direct to the consumer.  Instead, the carmaker has to use an independent dealer network.

–Because at present they generally have no ability to store power on-site, SCTY clients generally sell the power generated by their solar panels to the electric utilities and purchase power from the grid as they need it run their electrical devices.  Utilities would, naturally, like to buy at 2 and sell at 4.  Regulations, however, force them to trade both ways at the same price, but only so long as solar is a tiny percentage of their business.  In addition, electric utilities are the ones who inspect any local power storage batteries that a household/firm may install.  The utilities aren’t falling all over themselves rushing to do this.

I have small positions in both.

how they differ

Personally, I find SCTY the more conceptually interesting company.

On the other hand, I feel much more comfortable with TSLA.

Why?

It isn’t the industry or the capital structure.

It’s the gigantic battery factory that Musk is in the process of building.

Both TSLA and SCTY can be seen as different ways to create demand for highly sophisticated batteries.  Both are certainly radically dependent on having cutting-edge battery technology.  Arguably, batteries are the main source of value in the products of either firm.

But who owns the battery factory?  TSLA.  To me, this means that Elon Musk’s main economic interest likes in TSLA, not SCTY.  History says an investor wants to have his money in the same place as the entrepreneur he’s betting on.

 

inflation on the rise?

May 5, 2015 By in bond market, currency effects, currency markets, Current Market Thoughts, Dividends, inflation, securities markets, stock market, Strategy Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Regular readers know that I like the economic work done by Jim Paulsen of Wells Capital, the Wells Fargo investment management arm.  His May 1st “Economic and Market Perspective” piece argues that the US has turned the corner on inflation, which will –contrary to consensus beliefs–be on the rise from now on.

His argument:

–the first signs of upward wage pressure in the US are now becoming visible (in developed economies, inflation is all about wages)

–recently, a rising dollar has kept the price of imported goods from rising (in some cases, they’ve been falling) and suppressed demand for US goods abroad.  That’s changing, turning the currency from a deflationary force into in inflationary one

–productivity is low, meaning that companies will have no way of offsetting higher wages other than to raise prices

–in past economic cycles, the Fed has somehow invariably remained too loose for too long.

 

I’m not 100% convinced that Paulsen is correct, and to be clear, he expects only mild inflation, but I’ll add another point to the list:

–although it doesn’t talk much about this any more, the Fed has clearly in mind the lost quarter-century in Japan, where on three separate occasions the government cut off a budding recovery by being too tight too soon.  In other words, there’s little to gain–and a lot to lose–by being aggressive on the money tightening trigger.

 

Suppose Jim is right.  What are the implications for stocks?  This is something we should at least be tossing around in our heads , so we can have a plan in mind for how to adjust our portfolios for a more inflationary environment.

My thoughts:

–inflation is really bad for bonds.  As an asset class, stocks benefit by default.  But bond-like stocks–that is, those with little growth and whose main attraction is their dividend yield–will be hurt by this resemblance.

–if the dollar is at or past its peak, it’s time to look for domestic-oriented stocks in the EU and euro earners in the US (the basic rule here is that we want to have revenues in the strong currency and costs in the weak).

–companies that can raise their prices, firms whose labor costs are a small percentage of the total, and consumer-oriented firms that are able to expand unit volumes without much capital investment should all do well.

–I think that average workers, not the affluent, are the main beneficiaries of a general rise in wages.  So firms that cater to them may be the best performers.