5 Mar 2023

When I talk of stupidity I do not refer to my own which, save in painful retrospect, is an unknown unknown. For better or worse I am limited to my own perception of the stupidity of others.  My proposition is that when some people are wrong, others can profit. Like all judgements, observations of stupidity need to be subjected to a probability test.  Warren Buffett says that sometimes prices are “foolish”, absolving people of some responsibility for the valuations of “Mister Market” but he is a kindly man and evidently much nicer than me.  One advantage of our publicly-traded segment is that – episodically – it becomes easy to buy pieces of wonderful businesses at wonderful prices. It’s crucial to understand that stocks often trade at truly foolish prices, both high and low. “Efficient” markets exist only in textbooks. In truth, marketable stocks and bonds are baffling, their behavior usually understandable only in retrospect Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter, February 2022 THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE INVESTOR It makes sense that the greater the number of people that are wrong, the greater the potential rewards for those who know better. If you haven’t read The Big Short by Michael Lewis, or watched the film made of it, you should. It was a lonely life, defying consensus ahead of the great financial crisis of 2008 and it is never easy. As Keynes said, most investors would rather fail in the comfort of a crowd than risk standing out.  Holding a minority opinion can be worse than lonely. For some reason, rejecting consensus appears to provoke hostility, particularly at times of perceived emergency (see my last post). After Neville Chamberlain agreed to Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland in Munich in September 1938, Winston Churchill denounced the deal (“England…has chosen shame and will get war”). This may look like a historical footnote but Churchill’s own constituency party attempted to have him deselected and very nearly succeeded. The appeasers of 1938 were in a large majority and the idea that Hitler could be bought off was treated as believable because people wanted “peace in our time” so much. Stupidity is surely the eager and dangerously loyal...

4 Feb 2022

The FTSE 100 outperformed (+4.2% in the quarter) the other indices (250 and All Share) because big resource shares (oil, gas, metals) did well as the market began to realise that high commodity prices promised outstanding profits. Free cash flow would be enhanced by the fact that the environmental lobby has bullied these businesses out of making the investments that would once have been expected. Instead the likes of BP (sorry, bp) have begged for forgiveness by bidding up the price of offshore wind licences.  For the full year, all the main UK indices rose by just over 14%, perhaps a sign of a fairly indiscriminate wall of money looking for a home. This was not a great result by international standards: the S&P 500 returned 27% in 2021. Meanwhile UK gilts began to show some signs that the Bank of England Asset Purchase Facility was nearly full, meaning that 2022 gilt auctions would be offered to an unrigged market. In December the 10 year yield rose from 0.82% to 0.97% and (spoiler alert) in January was set to soar up through...

17 Sep 2021

The company once known as British Petroleum (a name revived by President Obama when he wanted to stick it with all the blame for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill) has quietly rebranded itself in the lower case though almost nobody seems to have noticed. As if it is the corporate embodiment of white privilege, bp can only apologise and beg forgiveness for its own existence.  The splendidly named CEO, Bernard Looney (who will soon rebrand himself as Nigel Neurodiverse) has pledged to reinvent the company as a provider of multi energy customer solutions. My opinion is that if he thinks this is going to keep the eco warriors at bay he needs to change his medication, but never mind.   What interests me now is the entertaining contrast between the reinvention rhetoric and the grim reality that bp is probably having a stupendously profitable year due, of course, to the rises in the prices of oil and natural gas. How embarrassing could this get? I will save you the trouble of ploughing through bp’s 2020 annual report (tagline: “Performing While Transforming”) and take you straight to page 183 where you can get an idea of how the company actually earns its money. Essentially it is 94.5% from oil, oil products and gas. There was little bp could do in H1 2021 to avoid the surge of cash that resulted from the pop in gas prices in Q1 and the stronger crude oil price in Q2.  In its presentation about Q2 it was careful to say that it expected gas supply to remain tight and refining margins to remain roughly unchanged. In fact the natural gas price (Henry Hub) which averaged $2.9 in Q2 is now (17 September) at $5.37. And industry refining margins which for bp were strong at $13.7 per barrel in Q2 seem to be sharply higher again across the industry. It seems probable that bp will experience another embarrassingly strong quarter when it reports in late October.  The share price of bp would surely be higher were it not for the armies of Net Zero shamers whose abuse will only increase in volume as the delightful prospect of that orgy of UN...

7 Jun 2021

When money and virtue share a bed, strange and disturbing things tend to happen.  I have written before (in 2014) about the ethical contradictions concerning the destination of the UK’s Oversea Development Aid budget. Seventy three percent of it went to countries where homosexuality was illegal but if there was ever any debate about that I never heard it. Like a Christmas sweater, the giving is more important than the receiving. Once the donation box has been ticked we can pat ourselves on the back and tell ourselves that to enquire about how the money is spent would be colonial and racist. Seven years later, the shadow of virtue casts a much longer and no less contradictory shadow. Here is a brief case study. THE ETHICS OF TOP LEVEL SOCCER I have found the current season of the English Premier League quite hard to watch. The team with the biggest financial backing won easily. Three brave and impoverished strugglers were relegated long before the end of the season. In stadiums empty of fans (who might well have reacted with displeasure) the clubs and officials all participated in “taking the knee”, originally a show of disrespect for the US national anthem, despite it seeming obvious that the anti-capitalist vibe of Black Lives Matter could hardly be further from the realities of club ownership.  These realities came to a head when some of the owners, acting as if they thought the clubs belonged to them, tried to create a breakaway super league. The result was a mob of multi-millionaires, who, unlike the owners, owed their personal wealth to football itself, rushing to denounce the idea that money should be allowed to ruin the game, as they saw it. Many people, unless they happen to support the clubs funded by wealthy foreigners, would say that that ship sailed a long time ago.  While UK football constantly pledges to “kick out racism” and to take women’s soccer seriously there is not a whisper on the subject of sexual orientation. In the past, fans have been notoriously homophobic. They may not be now but we have no way of knowing because, as luck would have it, not one of...

26 Mar 2021

INFLATION – WHAT THEY TEACH YOU AT SCHOOL I remember from economics lessons at school that there were supposedly two categories of inflation, namely cost-push and demand-pull. This was simple enough for anyone, even a pubescent schoolboy, to understand.  Now I can see that this was something of an oversimplification (for which I was no doubt grateful). Supply and demand do not happen in isolation. They respond to each other over time. It is instructive to remember that the price of anything will rise when the current supply is insufficient to satisfy demand and of course it works in reverse.  Yet the demand element of inflation is what occupies most “informed” chatter. That’s probably because we have a more immediate feeling for it. At present there is said to be a dam of spending waiting to spill out as soon as the first world countries are released from lockdown (I’m assuming it will happen one day – stock markets are impatiently celebrating it already).  Consensus says that this will give a transitory boost to inflation which will then subside because private sector unemployment is too high – in short, the poor sods who have been screwed by lockdown will exert a deflationary effect that prevents the economy from overheating. This in turn is offered as a justification for the probability that central banks will not raise interest rates. Well, yes. Given that the US, European, UK and Japanese economies are all funded by the state balance sheets, I think we can reasonably act as if the date for the next increase in official interest rates is approximately never.  SUPPLY SIDE INFLATION But supply side inflation – now that’s a story. Energy, commodity and shipping prices are really moving this year. Given that most of the world’s major economies are still in recessionary territory that’s quite impressive.  SAMPLE OF PRICE CHANGES IN THE LAST SIX MONTHS   Carbon steel 107.8% Container rates 81.4% Oil 49.2% Lumber 44.7% Soybeans 39.8% Iron ore 38.8% Copper 31.7% Coal 31.4% Cotton 31.3% Sugar 23.1% Aluminium 22.9% Natural Gas 21.1% Wheat 12.9% Rice 8.1% IN THE PAST, TECHNOLOGY HAS BOOSTED EFFICIENCY AND CUT COSTS So what is going on? I...

8 Feb 2021

As far as I remember, the word “philosophy” means “love of knowledge”. Some of the philosophers whose books were in my college library tried to prove that God knew all the answers and others that truth lay in empirical observation or the meaning of words. “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must pass over in silence” – Wittgenstein. Somewhere buried in their philosophical texts one might find a grudging reference to probability. John Locke wrote that probability “is to supply our want of knowledge”. In the search for certainty, probability was to some, it seems, as admission of defeat, a last resort. A brief disclosure: the only thing written by me in the college library are the letters zzzzz carved into the leg of a table. The fact that I couldn’t see what Locke, Descartes and Wittengenstein were so exercised about was confirmed by my examination results. But I value the awareness of probability as highly as anything else. PROBABILITY – MAN’S BEST FRIEND?  Some people point to the fact that humans initially learn by imitation and get hung up on the observation that animals do that too. The ability to observe that, if A, then B, puts animals on the first step of logical thought. When I pick up my dog’s lead she immediately starts to celebrate her forthcoming walk. You could say that she thinks the probability of a walk is 100%. In Locke’s terms, the sound and sight of the lead being picked up has supplied her want of knowledge.  The weakness in my dog Hattie’s understanding of probability is her failure to appreciate that there are any numbers between 0% and 100%. Her world is essentially binary. But she should not be too despondent. Humans sometimes think in exactly the same way. The easiest example of probability is 50/50. When we toss a coin we know, assuming no skullduggery, that a head or a tail is equally likely. (Dogs always expect tails, obviously). We should also know, though gamblers sometimes don’t agree, that no matter how many times the same side comes up in a row, the odds do not change for the next toss.  For what it’s worth, this...

6 Jan 2020

The last two weeks of 2019 were a good year for equity markets. The immediate cause was of course a decisive majority for the Conservatives and the apparent dispatch of Corbynism to the library shelf marked “Historical Fantasies”, perhaps one day to be studied by students who feel that their knowledge of the Venerable Bede is as complete as it will ever be. From 13 December, the day the results were known, the FTSE 100 rose by 4% to the end of the month, having been down in the quarter up to that point. The star performer in Q4 was the FTSE 250, the most domestically exposed index, which rose by 10%, compared to 2% for the 100 and 3% for the All Share. Year on year, all the indexes were stars due to a meltdown in Q4 2018 which offered a generous comparison. For 2019 as a whole, the FTse 100 was +12%, the 250 + 25% and the All Share +15%. Wow. The US 10 year yield was stable at 1.79%. 10 year gilt yields rallied from 0.55% to 0.74%, perhaps reflecting very small worries about more government borrowing. A year ago when things looked bearish I wrote the following: Here are three really bad things that could happen in 2019 or preferably later. 1) London house prices fall by 20% rapidly or 40% gradually (or both) 2) A major issuer of government debt suffers a catastrophic collapse in confidence or actually defaults (will the person who said “China” see me afterwards?) 3) A neo-Marxist garden gnome becomes Prime Minister of Great Britain. At the time I said that I was bored by politics and Chinese trade wars. On those fronts the noise has remained much the same. Donald Trump is a year closer to re-election, subject to the Democrats deciding to try to defeat him democratically rather than with the law. Climate change activists have got louder and sillier, though following COP 25 in Madrid, at which 27,000 delegates achieved very little, there was some overdue acknowledgement of the tension between the economic demands of poor countries with hundreds of millions of people living in poverty and the schoolgirl demands of...

5 Aug 2019

There seems to be common agreement among first world liberals that we live in unusually difficult times. In my view this a case of “people like us” on steroids. Populism (possibly explained here) has caused great discomfort to people who have grown up feeling pleased with themselves and their kind. Watching them explain their troubles to some of the 29 million people who live in the Dehli region of India, a country with annual GDP per capita of $2,000, would perhaps make great reality TV (note to self – pitch that to someone). But we should resist the temptation to be judgemental if we can (though clearly most of us can’t). Instead I would like to suggest an exercise that can be summed up as “exactly whose problem is this?” When people annoy or upset us we want it to be their problem. We are implicitly saying that they should take responsibility and do something about it. Sometimes, if they ignore us we will get increasingly stressed and suddenly it’s our problem. “YOUR BEHAVIOUR IS UPSETTING ME” It boils down to this: what is the driver of the sentence “Your behaviour is upsetting me”. Is it your behaviour or my being upset? Her are two examples: Malodorous Malcom has a personal hygiene problem. He must be told. Smug Simon and Suzi are blissfully (nauseatingly) in love and don’t seem to want to hang out with any of their old friends. They are starting to alienate people. I think it is pretty clear that Malcolm needs to own the problem, with the support of your helpful advice. If he refuses to acknowledge that no one will stand downwind of him he will soon discover that he loses friends. In the case of the smug lovebirds, it is highly likely that your alienation is a price that they will readily pay in return for the indulgence of their mutual obsession. All you can do is to smile and nod and secretly pray for a traumatic break up. When we are upset we want to blame and we often lose sight of where accountability actually lies. But rational thought can help us decide whether we need to...

10 Mar 2015

Calm down now. This post does not address the alleged aphrodisiac qualities of wealth or any other aspect of paying for sex. It is about taboo subjects. A combination of embarrassment and distaste tends to prevent the discussion of topics that should properly be addressed. Hence our nation’s ludicrous history of sexual secrecy with its toxic residue of unplanned pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases and child abuse. Absurdly, forty years after homosexuality was legalised in England, the CEO of BP felt it was necessary (in 2007) to go to court to stop himself being “outed”.   You might think that the sexual inclination of a CEO or any employee is of no interest to anyone else. But a judgemental attitude persists in the UK and it motivates people to behave as if work relationships have to be furtive. Indeed, many organisations take this much further and require all relationships between employees to be confessed. The implication is that such behaviour is sinful. It is quite true that good or bad relationships, sexual or otherwise, can influence the way that people behave at work. And it is essential that unwanted sexual attention is prohibited. But this no excuse for prurient gossip dressed up responsible human resource management. A purely practical point is that many single people who work long hours will spend half their waking time in the company of colleagues. It is nonsense to pretend that professional relationships will not merge with personal life. But I have known couples who have gone to extreme and potentially damaging lengths to disguise relationships that started at work. And once the lying starts it is hard to stop. You think that employment law gives protective rights to woman who become pregnant? It doesn’t if they feel that they must retire to protect the identity of the father whom they met at work. I know of a case just like this. In the UK, a similar damaging reluctance accompanies discussion of financial affairs. While a certain restraint is appropriate when discussing both sex and money – as the Facebook generation might find out to its cost – there is nothing shameful about needing either. And need is not greed. It...

7 Jan 2015

The recent sharp fall in the price of crude oil is one of those rare financial events whose importance is appropriately reflected in press headlines.  Oil has a strong claim to be the world’s most important commodity and also the most political. OPEC was founded in 1960 by the charming quintet of Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Venezuela. According to its website: “OPEC’s objective is to co-ordinate and unify petroleum policies among Member Countries, in order to secure fair and stable prices for petroleum producers; an efficient, economic and regular supply of petroleum to consuming nations; and a fair return on capital to those investing in the industry.” Were these companies rather than sovereign nations, this would be an illegal price rigging cartel subject to enough lawsuits to employ every lawyer until the end of time. As it is, it’s a legal price rigging cartel that everyone else has to live with if they wish to continue consuming oil. In 1973, OPEC became explicitly political when the US supported Israel in the Arab-Israeli war. It banned exports to the US and the barrel price of crude quadrupled from $3 to $12. It was a shocking inflationary impact that the world did not need. The Iranian revolution in 1979 saw a further leap from $14 to $40. The next great move came in the 21st century as global economic growth was propelled by developing countries such as China and India that became huge importers of oil. The price touched $140 until the financial crisis torpedoed the world economy in 2008 and the price fell right back to the 1979 price of $40. It is worth making a couple of points here. One is that the oil price has shown itself to be very volatile with changes in marginal demand having a huge impact. The other is that, partly thanks to OPEC, the market’s opinion of whether oil is cheap or expensive has largely relied on referencing its own history – the most unsophisticated way of valuing anything. That having been said, it is obvious that oil over $100 makes costly oil supply viable, notably from Canadian oil sands but also from fracking. The world...