Increase in Bearish News is Long-Term Bullish - Weekly Blog # 882

 

 

 

Mike Lipper’s Monday Morning Musings

 

Increase in Bearish News is Long-Term Bullish

 

Editors: Frank Harrison 1997-2018, Hylton Phillips-Page 2018

 

                             

 

Another Term for History: Uneven Cyclicality

In describing the behavior of people and other animals the terms of optimism and pessimism are appropriate, particularly the extreme emotions in overcoming risks. These actions drive all kinds of markets, including climates. Extreme increases and decreases occur irregularly, with people forgetting the pain caused by collapses.

 

We may currently be entering a negative economic cycle, possibly caused by an exaggerated political cycle. The biggest danger in focusing on the probable down cycle is retreating from a continued effort to search for early up-cycle clues.

 

A lawyer who practiced at a bank during the Great Depression mentioned that he hired workers every day to work on bad loans. During this period there were some activist investors who purchased defaulted securities, hoping to hold them for a partial or full recovery of face value. Some of the more well-known players were Ruth Axe, Max Heine, Ben Graham, and David Dodd, among others. Current conditions are not yet at this level of pain, but some smart people are examining the potential for such a period, both in the U.S. and elsewhere.

 

What is Happening Now?

Moody’s (*), in its latest proxy statement, predicted a continued multi-year decline. PIMCO is reluctant to buy long-term US Treasuries. Small and Mid-Cap stocks are dropping more than large-cap stocks on down market days because there is only liquidity in large-cap trades. This suggests that sizeable positions may have to be held until there is a sustained recovery.

(*) Owned in client and personal accounts

 

The two major consumer confidence surveys showed sharp drops in their March reports. One long-term negative factor facing the US is the relative unproductiveness of the entire educational process for investment capital. In the public school system, the number of administrators has increased eleven times the rate of growth in the number of students. (Sitting on a number University boards I have seen the same tendency at their level.) The mental health needs of the students have almost become a sub-industry. Many homes are not effective educational sites either.

 

What are the Investments Prospects?

As someone who basically learned analysis at the New York racetracks, I turn to the availability of numbers and ratios. Most dollars invested in equities are for funding needs beyond ten years. Consequently, I am using the median investment performance of the larger peer groups of mutual funds for the last ten years, as shown below:

    Large-Caps      8.50%

    Multi-Caps      7.92%  

    Mid-Caps        7.57%     

    Small Caps      6.82% 

    International   5.19%

(I think the overall range of 8.50% - 5.19% is a reasonable compound return for the next 10 years, considering the two years of 20% or more in the last 10 years. However, I don’t think the rank order of the peer groups will work out the same as it has in the past. Large-Cap performance is too heavily dependent on a concentrated group of high-tech companies. Small and mid-caps should benefit from buyouts and the movement of talent from larger companies to smaller companies. International funds may be the beneficiary of reactions to US government actions. I recently added Exor, the Agnelli family holding company, to my personal portfolio.

 

With so many controversial views expressed, I am interested in learning your view.

 

 

 

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Retro, Forward, & Cycles - Weekly Blog # 792

 

Mike Lipper’s Monday Morning Musings

Retro, Forward, & Cycles

 

Editors: Frank Harrison 1997-2018, Hylton Phillips-Page 2018

  

 

 

Managing Money Motivations

There are two very different parties in a professionally managed investment account. The first is the owner of the capital who is primarily interested in investment performance, usually using current performance as representative of future performance.

 

The second participant is the manager of the account who wishes to maintain the relationship for a long time. The fully loaded cost of acquiring the account is usually not earned back immediately. Thus, the first rule for the manager is not losing the account. This is somewhat different than the motivation of the owner of the account.

  

Best Defense is to Keep the Account

Managers assemble a number of different securities into a portfolio so that not all of them decline by the same amount in most down periods, hopefully some will rise. One of the standard ways of accomplishing this task is diversifying the investment characteristics of the securities. The most important characteristic of a security is deemed to be its risk of declining.

 

The money management profession in many cases believes stocks and bonds have separate levels of risk of decline. The way this is expressed and managed is through a ratio of stocks and bonds, for example 60/40. This means 60% in stocks and 40% in bonds. The investment media has declared the 60/40 strategy dead following approximately 40 gainful years for bonds and 3 years of decline. The average performance of 107 mutual fund sectors over the last three years through Thursday, 41% have lost ground. All but one of the declining sectors were fixed-income oriented.  The one exception was Chinese Regional funds. (This confirms my view that we have been in a period of stagflation for some. We will be dealing with Chinese oriented funds in a subsequent blog.)

 

Understanding the Use of Numbers

The purpose of the ratios was to manage risk. Today there are many stocks that are less risky than some bonds or other credit instruments. A better name for this diversification function would be low risk, or high quality/high risk, or low quality. One should recognize that like almost everything else in life, risks move in cycles. Some Scottish Trusts started life owning only British gilts, and over time introduced stocks. Today, some of these trusts are almost exclusively invested in stocks, while maintaining their historic names. 

 

In the US, trust accounts have gone from 100% bonds to a 50/50 split. Trusts then moved to 60/40, with some advocating for 70/30 and even 80/20. What brings this concept of cycles to mind is in 1957, or there about, discussion I had with the venerable Professor David Dodd, who was teaching Securities Analysis at Columbia. He emphasized the use of balance sheet related data in securities selection. With the arrogance of a student, I suggested growth had become more important since the Depression, when he and Ben Graham wrote their seminal textbook on Securities Analysis.

 

He closed the discussion by explaining that the fund he was involved with had made lots of money buying discounted value securities. However, ten years later growth stocks led the market. Perhaps the good professor was right for professionals. Many growth stocks fell, including from the ’73 peak, whereas his value stocks held up much better. This experience convinced me that the appropriate diversification schedule is a cyclical pattern.

 

Are We Near a Change in Valuations?

There is some evidence that it is possible, if not likely, we are near a change in valuation. Fixed income yields have been inverted without a marked recession for over a year. Last week the US Treasury yield-spread between the two-year (4.93%) and thirty year (4.03%) was a remarkably narrow 0.9%. This suggests the long-term future is not as attractive as the current period, with potential recessions in the next thirty years.

 

This appears to be at variance with current estimates for S&P 500 stocks. Net income changes in the second and third quarter of 2023 are expected to be -8.6% and +1.7%, respectively. (These are net income changes, EPS estimates are expected to be -6.4% and +1.7%, respectively. This shows the benefit of firms buying back their common stock. Buy backs potentially help managements with their stock options, but possibly not in the long-term improvement of the value of the company.)

 

The “bulls” in the market are possibly relying on one of the oldest market forecasting devices, The Dow Theory, which requires both the DJIA and the Transportation Index to move in the same direction. In the latest week only two of the 30 DJIA stocks rose, with thirteen of the 20 transportation stocks rising. At this time of year seasonal inventory is moving toward the stores, but many stores are closing or hiring inexperienced staff.

 

With services and non-durables growing while durables are not, there is a long-term structural problem for the economy.

 

Conclusion:

Changes are coming and we need to manage them, or they will manage us.

 

 

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Mike Lipper's Blog: Gravitational Waves & Investing - Weekly Blog # 791

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Investors Can Learn from History, If Diligent - Weekly Blog # 631

Mike Lipper’s Monday Morning Musings

Investors Can Learn from History, If Diligent

Editors: Frank Harrison 1997-2018, Hylton Phillips-Page 2018 –

Most memories are summaries of what people think happened and these memories over an extended period become enshrined as facts that are used for future investment decision making. Current investors are under the impression that “history” favors “value” and “Goodbye Globalization”, without being fully conscious of the history that created these impressions. Upon further study, one would realize that the underlying history is more nuanced and complex.

Value vs. Growth
We like to use short labels to cover complex situations. For example, we use the same label for both a company and its stock price, which often go in different directions. A company’s growth is essentially dependent on increasing sales and possibly its earnings, whereas stock prices are the result of buyers and sellers, often evaluating the stock in relation to other investments. Daily stock prices make them easy to rank from best to worst performance for each time period, which probably has little predictive power for long-term investing. Nevertheless, some investors search through the poorer performers looking for turnarounds, fitting with a part of the American psyche that likes to cheer for the underdog. Many investors who have missed being heavily invested in different forms of growth are now cheering the long-awaited trend of “value” beating “growth”, at least for a period.

I believe the first textbook publishing of Security Analysis by Ben Graham and David Dodd was written during the Depression in the 1930s. (The first was an adjunct professor and the second a full professor at Columbia University, which twenty years later suffered having me in his class.) Their approach, both in class and to some extent in their practice at a successful closed-end fund, was to find a security selling at a substantial discount to their analysis of value. What worked for them and others like Ruth Axe and Max Heine, was looking at distressed bonds and preferred shares using this approach.

The first thing the good professor taught us was to reconstruct the balance sheet by discounting finished inventory by 50%, work in progress by 100%, and raw materials by 75%. In the same fashion we reduced the value of physical assets to our estimate of quick resale prices. We wrote off all intangible assets and what was left of the underlying equity (more on this later). Comparing our new estimate against the depressed price of the senior securities became our initial estimate of value. During the 1930s and into the war years, this led to some very successful investments in railroad bonds and preferred shares. In effect, what we were taught was the rapid liquidating value.

Today, Merger & Acquisition activity has become the main determiner of value. Instead of determining the liquidating value, the acquirer is interested in what accountants call the going concern value. However, the acquirer often writes off some of the assets, adds the cost of expected layoffs, and determines an estimated increase in earnings based on “better” management and new opportunities from existing assets. I suspect that in the acquirers view of the future there is no estimate for a down period or the reactions from competitors.

M&A driven prices create an accounting problem, because after accepting the remaining costs of fixed assets transferred to the new balance sheet, an amount must still go to the consolidated balance sheet. Some of this gap can be labeled as the value of intangibles, such as customer lists and patents. However, even with these additions there is typically still a gap labeled “goodwill”. (I was the beneficiary of this math when I sold the operating assets of my data business, a service business who’s price was substantially above the value of the physical assets sold.) This is where the fictional portrayal of balance sheets and  book value come into the picture.

For publicly traded companies, “goodwill” and other assets cannot be written up but can be written down if there is clear evidence of loss of value (a non-cash charge which lowers reported earnings). The CFA Institute notes that private companies can write off goodwill over ten years and there is a movement to allow publicly traded companies the same privilege. In an article they pointed out that there are 25 corporations that have between $28-$146 billion of goodwill on their balance sheets, including Berkshire Hathaway, CVS Health, and JP Morgan Chase. In my case it would be difficult to write off the goodwill from the transaction, as they continue to use the name and basic calculations for the statistics. As the acquirer continues to have many of the same clients after a sale 22 years ago.

I believe too many investors lump “value” stocks with cyclical stocks, which is why they have been greeted by poor performance for over ten years. Most of the world’s economies have grown during this period due to increasing services revenue growth. Over the same period there have been relatively few goods and materials shortages. Prices of goods, particularly manufactured or natural resources, have not kept up with inflation.

In our fund selection process we like to find true value stocks that show substantial discounts from their intrinsic value. These tend not be economically sensitive and are found infrequently. Most of what others call value, are cyclical stocks selling at the low point in their cycle. Typically, their stock prices rise when shortages appear, often when large competitors drop out or the demand level shifts in their favor.

There is a difference in when to sell a true “value” stock versus a cyclical stock. One completes a trade when the discount disappears in the value stock price. Cyclical stocks should be sold when the investor believes the demand for a company’s product or service is peaking. My own way of timing this is to watch commodity prices and commodity fund performance. We could be entering a more favorable period for cyclicals as 66 of the 72 weekly prices tracked by the WSJ were up, but most commodity funds did not rise, except for those invested in energy.

“Goodbye Globalization”
Goodbye Globalization is the headline in a recent edition of The Economist. This magazine is in the running to replace Time and Fortune magazines as excellent negative indicators. They do not know their history, countries and companies that build fortresses by gathering all needed resources within their walls have proven to be builders of self-inflicted prisons, with high costs and lowered productivity. History suggests that even during wars, opponents trade with each other through third parties. In WWII, the relatively easily conquered Sweden and Switzerland were left unoccupied to serve that purpose. Even when the US was clamping down on an increase in Japanese car imports, they still came in through factories in Mexico and Canada.

But the real historical lesson happened in the 15th Century, within those one hundred years created the “new normal” that guided economic and political trends until the late 18th century. During the 1400s the new young Emperor of China decided to recall its very powerful ships from the Mediterranean, India, Africa, and possibly America, before destroying them. At the time, China was the most advanced country in terms of science, gun power, and business structures. China has still not recovered from that decision and this is one of the reasons for China’s leadership moves today.

By mid-century the Ottoman Turks captured Orthodox Constantinople, turning it into the Moslem dominated Istanbul, enabling them to challenge Eastern Europe. An event that has effects even up to today.

Finally, by the end of the century there was the discovery of the misnamed America. This led to the extraction of Latin American gold which turned the European economy positive and the investment opportunity that the US proved to be.

The lessons to be learned from the 15th century was:

1. Adam Smith in his book titled "The Wealth of Nations" showed the benefit of countries/companies specializing to get economic advantage through world trade.
2. Fortresses become prisons, eventually.
3. Often, new critical stimulus come from outside the recognized ecosystem.

It would be difficult not to be a global consumer and investor today, it would deprive us of a better life.

Good News
In April we saw some individual mutual funds and mutual fund management companies having positive net inflows. The winners had particular selection skills rather than being focused on sector section. Much of the inflows came from institutional or retirement investors. In brief discussions we heard that the trends seen in April continued in May. Nevertheless, on an overall basis equity products had net outflows, but larger amounts went into fixed income investments. Being a contrarian suggests to me that once the risks of higher interest rates and inflation rates become more pronounced, we are likely to see substantial equity inflows that can absorb the actuarially driven outflows.

Any thoughts? Please Communicate.



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https://mikelipper.blogspot.com/2020/05/mike-lippers-monday-morning-musings_24.html

https://mikelipper.blogspot.com/2020/05/time-to-review-investments-weekly-blog.html

https://mikelipper.blogspot.com/2020/05/top-down-sells-bottom-up-pays-weekly.html



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Large Opportunities and Risks - Weekly Blog # 626

Mike Lipper’s Monday Morning Musings

Large Opportunities and Risks

Editors: Frank Harrison 1997-2018, Hylton Phillips-Page 2018 –

Current Picture
Normally the US stock market moves at a pedestrian pace, with annual moves of about 10% (7% to 12%). We have just completed a two-month period that by statistical definition includes the fastest “bear market” in history and a recovery that would qualify as a one month “bull market”. There are some signs the recovery has likely ended, with a rounding or flat top for the three major stock indices. Furthermore, the lack of confirmation by the VIX index and the advance/decline line is casting doubt on the direction of the market. Thus, we have probably entered a confusing period, which until it is resolved will lead to lower volume. It offers an opportunity to reposition for a significantly lower market based on deteriorating economics and politics, as well as an  opportunity to buy into stocks that will be viewed as great bargains in the years ahead.

I am a somewhat risk-aware contrarian long-term investor and advisor. Both the Bulls and Bears could be right. For long-term investors, the bulls have an eventual chance to multiply their capital many times over, whereas unleveraged bears could preserve a portion of their capital. Careful bulls amass more capital over time than bears, although some bears have produced exciting short-term returns.

This dichotomy produced the first modern hedge fund, which was housed in the same 74 Trinity Place building in which I spent 25 years. A.W. Jones, a former magazine writer, came up with the concept of always being 50% long and 50% short. This produced good but not spectacular results over the years, often due to declining less in down markets. Unfortunately, he moved out of the building before we established our office there, but I did study his results. From that study and analyzing the success of a number of mutual fund and other managers, I concluded that long-term investing on the long side produced satisfactory returns. My lifetime’s work leads me to briefly outline the case for increasing equity investments now, although I should first clear up the one reason media pundits have led the investing public into a confused state.

What is in a name?
Our ability to name something or someone is critical to organizing our internal filing system, otherwise called memory. But it is also the source of much confusion if the name is not specific enough, such as with a company’s name. A name can mean different things to actual or potential customers, employees, competitors, lenders, and various types of owners. Much like blind people feeling different parts of an elephant.

Some of the abovementioned people are interested in what the company can do for them today and that becomes the company’s image, although it’s quite different for those who own the company’s debt or equity. They are vitally interested in the future securities price of what they own or are contemplating buying and need to guess the price of the securities at future dates of importance to them. The price will be determined by the current owners selling for some unidentified reason, while potential buyers compare similar investment opportunities. Today, most companies are experiencing falling sales and increasing prices, so things look temporarily bad. However, the securities buyer is looking at pent-up demand, which could return to 2019 levels, more or less.

The Optimistic Case
As is often the case, buying largely rests on demand in the short, intermediate and long-term. In the short-term, the $4 trillion in Money Market funds is earning next to nothing relative the real inflation being generated by the COVID-19 stimulus. At Bank of America (Merrill Lynch), 14 % of the average account is allocated to cash. In the intermediate term, when both businesses and other consumers get more comfortable, pent-up demand will generate sales of products and services.

In the long term, the main purpose of most money in institutional and individual accounts is to create future payments for specific retirements and/or legacies. If one amalgamates the retained earnings from 2018 through the present time, my guess is that in general it did not earn an actuarial rate of return sufficient to meet future payout desires. As my Grandfather’s friend Bernard Baruch explained to congress, the Latin derivation of the word speculate is to see into the future. I expect to see changes in how we live and think about the future coming from demographic trends, the march of technology, and the impetus from the current Coronavirus and future COVID plagues. As a global society we will be paying more for longer and more expensive retirements, particularly in the end.

An example of a little noticed change with larger implications is the following small notice on page 2 of The Wall Street Journal. 

“Notice to readers, Wall Street Journal staff members are
   working remotely during the pandemic. For the
   foreseeable future, please send reader comments only by
   email or phone using the contacts below, not U.S. Mail.”   

Considering President Trump wants the Postal Service to charge much more for packages, while rural members of Congress remain unwilling to change the schedule for mail delivery, future communications from various governments are likely to change. We are already seeing a smaller quantity of mail, which is not altogether negative, but is a lost sales opportunity for some.

The biggest long-term change I see is the possible reduction in our real estate footprint. Not only in our homes, but hospitals, schools/universities, and entertainment locations. I became more convinced of this threat when I read an article on the latest Gallup Poll survey, where individuals favored real estate over securities as an investment. As a contrarian I hope they are right but think their view will change as real estate becomes more difficult to sell, due in part to mortgage rates rising and state/local taxes going up.

What to Buy?
As usual, there are investment performance arenas from which to choose current winners and laggards. One advantage our clients have is that I look over the performance of all US and over 26,000 offshore funds each week. In the latest week, measuring from March 23rd which I am using as a bottom, the three leading mutual fund peer group averages were Precious Metals +47.40%, Equity Leverage +46.36%, and Energy MLP +43.16%. These are narrow-based funds enjoying a large recovery, which should probably not be a large part of a long-term mutual fund portfolio. The best performing diversified equity funds for the same one-month period were: Mid-Cap Growth +27.14%, Multi-Cap Growth +25.54%, and Large-Cap Growth +25.31%. Clearly, in this recovery growth has been favored in part due to its positions in the health/biotech sector, which gained +30.12%.  What may be significant is that performance leadership is no longer the sole property of large-cap funds, suggesting the overriding need for liquidity is shrinking.

Future performance leaders often come from the bottom of the performance ladder, which in this case are a few well-managed Value funds. However, one needs to be particularly careful looking for Value today. Far too many base their analysis on the spread between book value and price, which was a scholastic task assigned at Columbia University by Professor David Dodd while I was there.

This was a relatively easy job because we had the published financial statements, which had some relevance back then. This was not the way he and his partner Ben Graham (*), at the closed end leveraged Graham Newman fund, produce his great performance. Book value, according to their student Warren Buffett, is today misleading. It is an accounting number based on the historic cost of assets, which can only be changed by impairments, not improvements.

The task in the class I took was to identify companies that should be liquidated, not purchased as a going concern. There are relatively few of these companies today, as they are usually prey to private funds who specialize in this art form. There are however a reasonable number of companies whose financial statements do not fully reflect their improving value in the right hands. Careful and patient analysis can uncover their true value, the trick is identifying what or who will recognize their true value and change investor’s perceptions.

Conclusion:
Successful investing is much more an art form than a quantitative exercise. It requires patience and luck to make one’s investments profitable. 


(*) I am the recipient of the New York Society of Securities Analysts Benjamin Graham award



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https://mikelipper.blogspot.com/2020/04/mike-lippers-monday-morning-musings.html

https://mikelipper.blogspot.com/2020/04/long-term-investors-mistakes-ahead.html

https://mikelipper.blogspot.com/2020/04/time-to-get-out-of-foxhole-weekly-blog.html



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Capital Cycles Changing? - Weekly Blog # 595

Mike Lipper’s Monday Morning Musings

Capital Cycles Changing?

Editors: Frank Harrison 1997-2018, Hylton Phillips-Page 2018 –

                             
The critical lesson of living we must deal with is that all of life is cyclical. As investing is an abstraction of living, investors must deal with cycles. Our cycles occur along the spectrum of capital, going from capital appreciation to capital preservation or from highlighting goals of success to those of survival. A somewhat parallel spectrum is arrayed between “growth” and “value”, as we choose to define them. It is often useful to determine where we are in the spectrum by relating current values to those at the extremes. The activists believe they can consciously time their movement from one extreme to another, while  historians are generally more comfortable mid-range. This dichotomy was evident during the past two weeks.

Where Are We Going?
Far too many words have been written recently giving directional advice without understanding where we are in the investment and market cycles. The distinction between the two related cycles is that investment cycles begin with intelligent and prudent transactions, while market cycles record sudden shift in prices. Somewhat suddenly two weeks ago, “value” stocks and funds began performing better than the prior leaders marching under the banner of “growth”.  This past week the momentum in favor of “value” was absent or subdued. This is not surprising as growth has been a consistent winner for ten years and in the first four days of the week transactional volume was low. “It takes a long time to turn a battleship” was one of the lessons taught us in the Naval Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (NROTC).

Is There a Change Happening?
When one is in a turning phase it is almost impossible to be certain of the future direction. Is it a ninety degree, one hundred and eighty degree or three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn? There are at least four bits of evidence that something out of the ordinary is happening.

1. Falling prices have seen more volume than those rising in this week’s transactions. (More dollars are leaving than coming into the market.) 
2. On Friday there was a surge in the transactions of asset management stocks, e.g. T. Rowe Price (*) traded almost 3 times its average volume of the prior four days.
3. High-quality debt yields declined more than intermediate-quality debt based on the latest week’s yields. (Bond prices move inversely to yields, so the desire to own high-quality paper with reduced income is a sign of concern for both bond and stock prices.)
4. WeWork’s proposed IPO price, after dropping by two-thirds, was withdrawn. (In the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, my friend Jason Zweig intelligently questions the myth that private investing produces better results than publicly traded investments. The significance of this belief is that many tax-exempt institutions and wealthy individuals have put substantial amounts of their capital into private securities, believing that their lack of liquidity and disclosure are exchanged for better performance, often caused by their  IPOs. I am familiar with several cases where this didn’t work out.)

(*) T. Rowe Price, the premium publicly traded asset manager, is in both our Financial Services Fund and personal accounts. They are predominantly an investor in publicly traded securities. However, in some of their funds they have been an early investor in private companies. The maximum share that I have seen in their equity portfolios is 7% in privately held securities. Many of these have been good investments and losses have been small over the many years they have been investing in privates.

What is “Growth” and “Value”
Investors use labels as an abstraction to convey a series of integrated, complex concepts. The essence of “growth”, “growth stock” and “growth stock fund” is the rising of stock prices above those found in the general stock market on a secular basis over multiple market price cycles. This definition ignores both short-term and economic cycle price swings around an upwardly sloping trend line. Another way of expressing this concept is that growth companies have profitable products and services, which are met with increasing acceptance by both customers and investors. There is a problem with that definition in that the label is unlikely to be permanent for all time, due to its dependence on the perceived ranking versus their competitors. However, some companies have appropriately maintained the label for a long time. The trick for investors is to identify when that the label is slipping. Renewed, skeptical analysis is needed.

There are many ways to define “value”, because value is in the eye of the beholder. The original investors were the primary investors betting on the success of the venture. The follow-on investors were cashing out the originals and had to question the offered price relative to other alternatives. The second set of investors thought of value in terms of a discount relative to present prices. The history of Security Analysis is that it was developed as an offshoot to accounting. The original course by Ben Graham and Dave Dodd started with the analysis of the assets behind bonds, which were selling below both their maturity price and the statement value of the assets. We were taught to schedule the cash conversion schedule of the assets. Greater weight was readily given to  assets converted to cash, like finished inventory vs. plant and equipment etc. This led to a group of buyers who were labeled “net-net buyers”. Ben Graham, Warren Buffett and the late, great Irving Kahn were some of these.

Because of a much higher level of public disclosure and computer searchable financial statements, there are relatively few net-net opportunities in most developed countries markets. In its place some have used the discount from book value or net asset value for fund vehicles as a substitute. For the most part this has not worked particularly well because balance sheets record historic asset acquisition prices adjusted for annual depreciation and impairment costs. Book values are rarely written up according to accounting and regulatory rules. Recent attempts to capture the discount on closed end funds has not been successful. First, it takes time, effort, and often money to displace the present management. Second, there is likely a difference in price form the last sale at the end of a day and the actual price received in liquidation.

So Where Are the Value Opportunities Today?
There are quite a few that are the equivalent of Sherlock Holmes in the mystery of the dog that didn’t bark. The focus should be on what is not on the balance sheets of both assets and liabilities. One example is real estate for an operating company. Royce & Associates (**) has a fund that invested in Steinway, the concert piano manufacturer, which was not growing. However, uncaptured on its balance sheet was the air rights above its low-level 57th street show room and their large facility in a rapidly changing section of Queens. This proved to be very profitable when the real estate was liquidated. Much like a chain of cigar stores on many prominent corners in Manhattan, which lost money as tastes shifted, but had very long-term leases on their stores.

Today, in many companies the most valuable asset is the lists of customers and what they purchase. Two examples are stocks that I own personally, neither of which I expect to liquidate even though they have understated book values. Apple’s one billion customers names and spending habits proved that an asset could predict future sales, much like when car owners traded in their vehicles every one to three years. Another company that is assembling a combined customer information databank is CVS, which is combining its pharmacy and health insurance customers. Not only are there repeat business opportunities, but the potential to identify new demand as new drugs and services are developed. I suspect Amazon could create the same type of value, which is essentially a derivative of DE Shaw’s ability to predict market prices.

Is There Another Approach?
Believing in cyclicality, I often look at the worst performing investment objectives compared to the best. (This works for a group of funds, but not necessarily for individual funds where differences in skill levels are apparent.) In the last five years the average growth fund of all sizes, both domestic and international, averaged a gain of +7.57% compared to value funds which gained +3.50%, or effectively half. Thus, one can see my initial attraction to the possible shift in favor of value. Even with this instinct when investing new money we are more weighted toward growth for long-term accounts, but we are slowly increasing our exposure to value. The reason for the slowness is that we could still have another strong bull market led by growth. We are very close to record price levels, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average behind -1.55%, S&P 500 -1.12% and NASDAQ -2.55% from their record highs. We are paying attention to the NASDAQ as it is the most speculative of the indicators and is the one that has recently shown significant selling volume.

(**) My son who is the senior investment strategist for Royce Associates and was not involved in that decision.

Need Help?
If you would like to discuss any of these thoughts or how to structure your portfolio, please contact me.



Did you miss my past few blogs? Click one of the links below to read.
https://mikelipper.blogspot.com/2019/09/concentrate-or-diversify-2-questions.html

https://mikelipper.blogspot.com/2019/09/mike-lippers-monday-morning-musings.html

https://mikelipper.blogspot.com/2019/09/excess-capital-less-equity.html



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A. Michael Lipper, CFA

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Apollo 11 Investment Lessons - Weekly Blog # 586

Mike Lipper’s Monday Morning Musings

Apollo 11 Investment Lessons

Editors: Frank Harrison 1997-2018, Hylton Phillips-Page 2018 –

The incredible historic success of landing two men on the surface of the moon is being celebrated around the world. This coming Friday it will be celebrated at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which is very appropriate. As readers of this weekly blog appreciate, I often see investment implications from many different events and sightings. The investment lessons I perceive from the Apollo landing include:

Historic unspectacular beginnings
Learning from addressing other needs
Inexpensive early development
Appropriate skepticism
Passing on to others
Always looking for next steps
Exercising Leadership in big and small ways

Record high US stock market indices are like a successful rocket launch. In much the same way it’s very interesting that in the same decade Theodore van Karman joined the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at Caltech, Ben Graham and David Dodd were teaching security analysis at Columbia University. At Caltech, von Karman and his students experimented with rockets and in 1936 he founded Aerojet, followed by the founding of JPL in 1944. (By coincidence, in the 1950s I studied under Professor Dodd at Columbia and was one of the few analysts to follow Aerojet in the 1960s. In the 1990s I became a Trustee of Caltech, the manager of JPL for NASA.)

Historic Beginnings and Inexpensive Development
Professor von Karman’s work at Caltech and JPL led to two of the critical forerunners of Apollo, the Ranger and Voyager unmanned probes of the moon and solar system. Before sending a man to the moon there were two schools of thought.

1. An east-coast oriented solution using the power of solid rockets. This approach was based on using a team of German scientists transplanted to Alabama. 
2. Accomplish much the same scientific goals with unmanned, cheaper successors to the van Karman rockets patented in the 1930s. 

For media and political reasons, the more expensive solution was chosen. JPL probes however, were critical to the analysis that it was safe for humans to walk on the moon in space suits. The investment lesson from the above is that marketing needs often dictate major decision making. (One might question whether the current discussion on the appropriate role of the so-called independent Federal Reserve is similar, as it may be a jobs/votes decision rather than a safety and soundness choice.)

Appropriate Skepticism
 As our readers know, I have been skeptical of the recent performance of the three major US stock market indices, although my skepticism is not based on financial or economic fundamentals. My concern is that while most investors are in effect on the sidelines, the dominant traders are being driven by sentiment. Looking at the underlying market data there are a few items to consider:

1. The NASDAQ Composite has been the best performing of the three stock indices in 2019. Recently however, the ratio of new lows as a percent of total issues traded is meaningfully higher for the NASDAQ (6.84%) than the NYSE (4.67%)
2. In the latest week the S&P 500 fell -1.23%, which was more than the Dow Jones Industrial Average -0.65% and the NASDAQ's -1.18%. I suspect the differences are not primarily due to the components of the indices but to the nature of the owners that are selling. Institutions are significantly bigger owners of the S&P stocks and their need for daily liquidity looks to be higher, suggesting they see a need to lighten up on their equity commitments.
3. Of the 72 weekly prices tracked by Dow Jones, only 27 rose, or 38%. Not a harbinger of good future earnings.
4. The yields on different annual maturities of US Treasuries are not tied as much as to yield optimization strategies as they are to the needs of owners who must fill holes in their payment schedule. With rates so low and probably going lower, maturity/duration may become more important than yield, making Fed/Treasury management of the bond market more difficult.
5. It is popular to assume that net flows into mutual funds and other collectives are exclusively a function of performance or investment category selection. This does not appear to be the case in each and every portfolio and shows that some investors or their advisors are looking more deeply than just performance or labels. Nevertheless, the bulk of flows seem to be short-sighted or actuarially based. The real issue is the relative profitability of fund products for distributors. The distributors want to shorten the longevity of the holding period to fund new investments. (As this is a contentious view, I would be happy to discuss privately in terms of specific holdings.)

The French Come to the Rescue Long-Term
Considering MIFID II, there appears to be a trend to reduce the level of brokerage commissions going to firms for their research. While this is legally directed at institutions within the EU, regardless where they are transacting, some US institutions have also adopted these rules globally e.g. T Rowe Price. With a shrinking market for research providers, many are either currently losing money or expect to if they remain independent. Rothschild & Co just announced the acquisition of Redburn and they earlier took a position in Kepler Cheuvreux, historically a top research firm. Another French affiliated firm, AllianceBernstein, is reported to have purchased Autonomous for over $100 million.

A cynical view of brokerage firms and to some degree investment managers is summed up in the title of a book “Where are the Customers Yachts?”. When an investment manager buys a research provider they are betting that research is of value and will become more valuable when prices rise.

A third input long-term is the French President’s attempt to lengthen the period to retirement by two years to age 64. As many of you know, one of the reasons we invest in fund management companies around the world is that eventually either governments or the private side of the economy will address the growing global retirement capital deficit. In the US we are starting to see articles suggesting our social security system will begin to further ration Social Security payments in about 2034. (My own view is that with the increase in longevity we should have a minimum retirement age of 72. I agree with my long-term friend and fellow former board member of the New York Society of Security Analysts that one should never retire. That is my plan.)

Conclusion
Just as fifty years ago when Apollo 11 marked the beginnings of our exploration of manned space, the stock market will also soar to meet the needs of investors, particularly those for retirement capital management. It won’t be a smooth ride, but it will be easier with elements of good leadership.   



   
Did you miss my past few blogs? Click one of the links below to read.
https://mikelipper.blogspot.com/2019/07/us-stock-markets-new-highs-misleading.html

https://mikelipper.blogspot.com/2019/07/twin-problems-not-enough-greed-and-too.html

https://mikelipper.blogspot.com/2019/06/reduce-investment-mistakes-with-deeper.html




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2nd of May’s Good Lessons - Weekly Blog # 575

Mike Lipper’s Monday Morning Musings

2nd of May’s Good Lessons

Editors: Frank Harrison 1997-2018, Hylton Phillips-Page 2018 –

The inestimable Charlie Munger has labeled Warren Buffett a learning machine, someone who is always learning from his own and other’s mistakes. This is a good model to follow. The first couple days of May provided some good classrooms, the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting and The Kentucky Derby, both on Saturday, May 4th.

The Annual Meeting/ Investment School

While many attended the meeting to gather bits of information to help guide their views as to Berkshire’s earnings and/or near-term stock price, I view it as an opportunity to learn about the art of investing. For me this is a linear progression from my Introduction to Securities Analysis course under Professor David Dodd at Columbia University. Dave Dodd was both a teaching and investment partner with Ben Graham, Warren Buffett’s first mentor. The following are the nuggets gathered from the meeting which can be applied to investing in general:

1. Paying too much makes it very tough to make money on an investment. (They did for Kraft.)
2. Intrinsic value is a range not a specific point. This range could be 10% plus or minus. (This is the fulcrum point for their buybacks.)
3. Individual Investors are their preferred owners rather than bureaucratic institutions.
4. They have a desire that their heirs hold onto their shares long after Charlie and Warren are gone. That is why they are developing the next tier of management, which will be different and better.
5. A large opportunity reserve has two values, it cushions periodic declines and creates bargain opportunities.
6. The allocation of resources allows them to shift capital to where it is most productive long-term.

The Kentucky Derby 

I have written about “racing luck” or surprises in the past. At this year’s running of “The Derby” we witnessed a classic example of “racing luck”. With far too many horses on a rain-soaked track there was at least one bumping incident, which the three racing stewards felt impacted the order of the finish. After reviewing many films of the race and a call to the two leading jockeys, they disqualified the winner and gave the victory to the horse that came in second. The level of surprise can be gleaned from the betting odds. The first horse to finish was the second favorite at $9 to $2. The declared winner was a $63 to $1 long-shot. This is the first time in the history of this race that they have disqualified the winner for an on-track violation.

The investment lesson from this experience is to avoid putting too much faith in the “inevitable conclusions”. Surprises do happen, even those that are the first in more than one hundred years.

The Mixed Current Picture

Change Signs?

1. While the NASDAQ composite has gained the most since its January low, +26% compared to +17% for the Dow Jones Industrial Average and +20% for the S&P 500, this past week the 420 new highs on the NYSE exceeded the 305 new highs on the NASDAQ. Have traders shifted their focus to more industrial and  seasoned companies from growth and tech?
2. Of the 72 price indicators tracked by the WSJ covering securities, commodities and currencies, only 30 are rising, Recently, the number of gainers were in the majority.
3. Both High quality bonds and intermediate quality bonds gained in price, showing some shift in demand away from stocks. 

Did you miss my past few blogs? Click one of the links below to read.

https://mikelipper.blogspot.com/2019/04/value-investing-will-be-superior-but-it.html

https://mikelipper.blogspot.com/2019/04/contrarian-observations-not-predictions.html 

https://mikelipper.blogspot.com/2019/04/not-yet-peak-luck-lessons-weekly-blog.html

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Copyright © 2008 - 2018

A. Michael Lipper, CFA

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Contact author for limited redistribution permission.

Handling Two Big Future Investment Losses

Introduction

None of us know the future of our investments. Unless human nature is altered we should be prepared for two important losses. According to the Marathon Global Investment Review, the great Ben Graham* (in the Intelligent Investor)  warned investors of the probability that most of their holdings will fall by "one third or more from their high points at various periods." I see no reason not to accept his warning today. This is the first investment loss probability ahead of us.

*I feel drawn to any views expressed by Ben Graham. He and my old Professor at Columbia University David Dodd wrote the Bible for our business entitled,  Security Analysis. I am particularly susceptible to quotes from them. The New York Society of Securities Analysts which Ben helped to found honored me with the Benjamin Graham award for services to the society.

The second big future loss ahead of us is our reaction to seeing our wealth decline, perhaps materially. After each major market decline some investors in their mind retreat from taking on any more risk and withdraw from investing. Often they blame their loss on what the popular press claims was the culprit. That way it is easy to, in effect, give ownership to the bad people and policies that they think led to their realized loss. Rarely do they examine their own behavior and naiveté as a contributor to the loss of supposed value in their portfolio. Thus, they can transfer all of the responsibility to these external factors. In other words, the government, the leaders, acts of nature, new products, foreigners, etc., were the causes so they have passed the ownership of the calamity to others.  Actually, this is a small part of the real long-term loss. The real shortfall is the subsequent loss of opportunity. Fortunately, we live in an equity world that after each serious decline the surviving market prices rise and eventually top all prior peaks and of course valleys. Bottom line: one must be a participant in the game to gain the benefit of the recovery.

For many there is a third risk of loss, a different type of risk: career risk. We are already seeing investment professionals lose their jobs. Often the layoffs start at the bottom of the ladder. Today I know of good analysts, portfolio managers, institutional traders, and various administrative types that have been cut from investment advisors, brokerage firms, hedge funds and some market-making facilities. Hopefully after some difficulty many will survive and quite possibly start or get involved with the new entrepreneurial activities that will become tomorrow's winners.

There is another group who indirectly suffer from the career risks of others, their customers. The current environment, after years of mild investment progress, has had only eight months of slowly accelerating progress except for the last couple of months, when it has been gaining faster. Many careerists have not bought into the current rise, so their portfolios have risen more slowly than the popular markets. This is the final straw that breaks some of their clients’ backs or their investment committees. Many investors can tolerate middling performance when the markets are slow, but when momentum sets in, they want a higher level of participation. Except for race horses that are bred for and trained to come from behind, few come from behind and win in particularly long races.

What To Do Now

Others may disagree with my global belief that we have entered a different phase of the equity markets. Prices are generally rising and have passed out of the comfortable range in terms of average valuations. One clue to this is that most acquisitions are shifting to all or largely stock rather than cash deals. We are seeing proposed deals based on the breakup and sale of the various deal’s parts. Is this a signal that we should withdraw from the global stock markets?

While life is never easy for a conscientious professional investor, a good one can identify the appropriate tool kit for various markets. I believe we have entered the phase where sentiment is more important than published financial information. What is important is not the current facts, but how the market is interpreting the new facts in terms of views as to future stock prices. For example, as is often the case, one can see a lesser risk orientation in the corporate bond market. For the moment forgetting the narrowing spreads for high yield paper versus Treasuries because many of the new buyers are disguised equity buyers, they focus on intermediate credits. Barron’s publishes an index of intermediate grade bond yields. Since the beginning of this year the yields have come down 13 basis points and 100 basis points over the last year, indicating an increased demand for this paper. Similar yields for the highest quality bonds have actually gone up 5 basis points and declined only 21 basis points over the last year. All this arcane algebra is flashing the message that in the most conservative sector of our markets buyers are accepting higher credit risks. They perceive less chance of bankruptcies than a year ago and particularly since the beginning of the year. 

Many of the more retail-oriented sentiment indices are slowly beginning to move. One  indicator has me particularly interested: BlackRock believes that individuals are replacing trading groups as the main buyers of its Exchange Traded (ETF) index funds. I believe BlackRock’s retail investors are principally going into its Large Cap index funds, just at the same time there is a continuing trend of what I believe are mutual fund investors redeeming their Large Cap funds after reaching their investment goals. Actually I believe the main way BlackRock is seeing flows is from retail-oriented brokerage houses, often discount brokers. I am wondering if the flow is from brokers or investment advisors who are playing catch-up from being behind for a long time? Their clients are outer-directed and easily led. (I see fairly little signs that do-it-yourself, inner-directed investors are moving into Large Cap indices.) The reason for my skepticism is that when all the stocks in an index move together or are highly correlated, the low or no management fee is attractive. Today we are seeing that tight correlations are coming apart. Rank almost any industry in term of stock price performance now and a year or more ago. You will see the performance spread between the best and worst performer growing. If you want to get the best performance one needs to be in the better performing stocks or shorting the worst.

If I am close to being right, the move of the uninformed public being guided by career risk advisors is an important sign of a top.

In addition to sentiment indicators, a good technical market analyst can be useful. One that I follow has been writing about a major top within the next few years. Others have different views and timespans.

Winning Attitudes

Two wise investors from many years ago are worth paying attention to, even though they are very different. The previously mentioned Ben Graham became quite a stoic so he could tolerate the cyclicality of the market and be prepared to buy cheap stocks with good dividends and operating earnings. Jesse Livermore made and lost fortunes as a market trader. (He may have done some of his trading through my Grandfather's firm.) He is quoted as saying, "The desire for constant action irrespective of underlying conditions is responsible for many losses in Wall Street even among professionals." Further, he said, "It was not my thinking that made big money for me. It was the sitting." 

I have had the privilege to converse with some of the great mutual fund investors over the last fifty years. In terms of the market and their funds during cyclical declines they were stoic and accepted the declines as a normal part of their business even though tension producing. However, one of the reasons that they were so good for so many years was they wanted to chat about their "mistakes" and what they learned from each other, and for the most part they did not repeat. Like all of us they made new mistakes. but they were always learning.

Compliance Adjustment

In last week's post I discussed the shareholder letter released last Saturday of Berkshire Hathaway. Since I did not reference the stock, I failed to proclaim that in both my personal and the financial services private fund I manage, that we own some shares. I hope no one was treating the post as a buy recommendation. My attitude is that we can learn a great deal from Warren Buffett and Charley Munger that is worthwhile beyond their stocks.

__________

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