2 Sep 2022

Fifteen months ago I pointed out that ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) investing would make a few people rich (via the vast public subsidies directed their way) and many people poorer. I tried to appear even handed without disguising my characteristic scepticism. Subsequent events have proved to me that I was much too restrained. ESG is not only rubbish but it is toxic rubbish. It fills up companies’ financial reports with box ticking nonsense that replaces facts that investors need to make decisions based on, you know, the financial outlook. Tom Kerridge is a “celebrity” chef who owns three successful gastropubs. He says that his energy bill is about to rise from £60,000 to £420,000 a year. The UK hospitality sector, having spent the best part of two years in imposed lockdown, is now staggering out of control towards a new disaster. All UK businesses that need significant retail outlets have seen their share prices dive because investors fear that rising energy costs will push them into loss or worse.  On 16 June Halfords released upbeat results for the year to April 2022. The dividend was 9p a share and the dividend policy is described as “progressive”. Today the shares are at 130p, down 60% this year, offering a theoretical yield of 7%. So I turned to Halford’s annual report and accounts to seek some clue about the company’s sensitivity to energy costs.    It seems that for Halfords risk management is based around a Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (“TCFD”). As the lights are about to go out Halfords’ ESG committee is meeting monthly to discuss the effect of climate change on the business between 2030 and 2050. The significant risk to Halfords retail sites is said to be extreme weather that results in flooding across the UK.  This might be the stuff of satire were it not for the fact that it replaces rather than supplements useful analysis.  Sainsbury’s shares are down 30% this year and the dividend yield appears to be 6.5%. As with Halfords, investors probably have visions of winter shopping in mittens by candlelight. Sainsbury’s annual report has seventeen pages of risk assessment. The company is watching out for...

6 May 2020

Things are starting to get serious. The SAGE committee is vast and its remit is the virus and nothing but the virus. It has saved the NHS to the extent that the new Nightingale hospital near the O2 in London is shutting after four weeks. Job done except that most of the public is either scared out of its senses or, more worryingly, preferring a life of leisure on 80% wages. The government is now directly supporting more than half the adult population. Normally I would say that a minority of taxpayers is bearing the burden of the rest but that is nowhere near the truth. Taxpayers are being furloughed too. The printers are rolling and the government is set to borrow from itself. The question is, how long will people be able to live on these new government tokens (once known as sterling currency)? CURRENCY DEBASEMENT My son Leo has just written about the use of the first ancient coins. Greek traders who knew nothing of coinage were happy to use them, even though the gold/silver content was lower than natural bullion of the same weight. Leo was puzzled as to how items of lower intrinsic value continued to be accepted. My answer was that a coin’s real intrinsic value is the belief that if you accept it in return for a “real” good you will be able to pass it on to someone else in return for goods of the same value. But once that belief falters the coins will be swiftly debased. The debasement of our currency will manifest itself as inflation. If you weren’t an adult by the 1980s you will not remember a time when people bought assets today for fear that they would cost more tomorrow. I knew a couple in about 1985 who agreed to buy a small house off the King’s Rd. It was suddenly withdrawn from the market and re-listed at a £50k premium. To their credit, I guess, they did not blink and paid up at once. The US is issuing $3 trillion of debt this quarter. (That’s $9146 for every man, woman and child, or $11,363 for every adult). The US can get...

1 Oct 2019

At the end of Q2 I wrote that part of my brain wanted to go on an equity buying spree but I wasn’t sure which part that was. It seems to have been the part that wants a quiet life because the FTSE 100 was unchanged over the last three months. The broader FTSE 250 rose by 2.4%, perhaps due to takeover activity. Sterling rose by 0.7% against the euro which is effectively also unchanged. The political noise of the last three months happened in a wind tunnel as far as the financial world was concerned (though that may change, especially if Britain’s MPs continue to risk their own legitimacy). As the global economic news continued to deteriorate government bond yields fell again. The US 10 year yield fell by about 0.25% to 1.75%. 10 year gilt yields dived from 0.86% to 0.55% and the German Bunds now have an even more negative yield (-0.30% to -0.57%). If these are unprecedented scary times, this is the reason. In my recent post entitled “Equities are the new junk bonds” I pointed out that takeover bids had favoured shares in my own portfolio no fewer than four times this year. I have been thinking some more about why this is happening and, by implication, how one might incorporate that into stock picking. Unlike purely financial investors, corporate buyers hate uncertainty. They like to know what they are buying and are put off by the thought of unquantifiable liabilities. This is one of the reasons why companies in trouble are rarely rescued. It’s far easier and safer to buy the assets from the administrator. The new accounting standard IFRS 16 is now kicking in and it invariably increases a company’s balance sheet financial debt – but it removes the uncertainty of obligations to pay future operating leases which were previously off-balance sheet. Now they are there for all to see. A business with reliable cash flow that easily covers its seasonal working capital requirements, its minimum capital expenditure needs and its annual interest payments is potentially of interest and if it is perceived as badly managed that is not necessarily an impediment. If times are tough, one...

11 Jun 2018

When making investment decisions I try to employ pragmatism and to avoid behaving emotionally or irrationally. As a rule of thumb, most other words that end in “–ism” are not useful. Optimism, pessimism, idealism – these are all attitudes that we find appropriate or inspiring in our daily lives but when it comes to making decisions supposedly based on evidence, they load us with confirmation bias. I read a good piece about The Psychology of Money which points out no fewer than twenty common mistakes that can damage your wealth. One that I particularly liked was titled: “The seduction of pessimism in a world where optimism is the most reasonable stance”. Brexit, or the contemplation of it, appears to have plunged half of the UK into some kind of collective nervous breakdown. It is group-think of the most destructive kind and its victims wallow in anything that can be spun as bad news. Bluntly, they see pessimism as a virtuous scourging exercise because the people must pay for their sins. This is a phenomenon that is far from new. Gilbert & Sullivan wrote the Mikado in 1885. The song “As some day it may happen” is a “little list” of “society offenders” which reads rather oddly in 2018 (lady novelists?; seems harsh). But 133 years on, we are still very familiar with: “The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone, all centuries but this and every country but his own.” The current leader of the Labour Party, anyone? Moreover, anyone who is upbeat today is liable to be seen as deluded or laughable or even dangerous and fanatical.    The current President of the United States, anyone? In my report on Q4 2017, just after the Trump tax cuts had been implemented, I wrote that: Almost all the reporting in the UK mocks Donald Trump and strains to suggest that he is incompetent and dangerous. This remains mostly true though some people are beginning to contemplate the idea that Trump’s thoroughly unfashionable bullishness may be effective. He is bullish and he is demanding: put those two words together and you might come up with the word bullying – just how unfashionable can this man get?...

30 Mar 2018

In my report on Q4, I wrote that “for the third successive quarter, the markets were mysteriously calm.” The calm was disrupted in Q1 for sure: the main UK indexes fell by between 6% and 8%. The German DAX was -6.3%. Supported by a falling dollar, the US markets, though volatile, did better with the DJIA -2.5%. I hinted before that the stock markets might be vulnerable to rising interest rates or, more specifically, rising bond yields. In February it started to look as if this was happening; the US 10 year treasury yield had risen from 2.40% to 2.94%; but by the end of the quarter it was back to 2.74%. A similar pattern played out elsewhere. The 10 year gilt yield rose from 1.20% to 1.69% but ended the quarter back at 1.34%. It would seem that the wait for inflation goes on. Aside from the usual nonsensical white noise about “uncertainty” it is hard to escape the conclusion that the stock market is truly concerned about the ability of large corporations that feature in our lives daily to invest capital, service debt and pay dividends. Here is your day described in terms of dividend yields: you are woken by the ringing of the house phone (BT: 6.8%) and switch on the light (National Grid: 5.6%); you turn up the central heating (Centrica: 8.5%) and clean your teeth (Glaxo: 5.7%); you decide to go into town but your car has no petrol (BP: 6.0%, Royal Dutch Shell: 5.8%) and needs a new rear light (Halfords: 5.4%) so you decide to take the bus (Stagecoach: 9.0%, Go-Ahead: 5.8%); you do some shopping in Currys PC World (Dixons Carphone: 6.0%, Vodafone: 6.7%) and M&S (Marks & Spencer: 6.9%) before treating yourself to a pub lunch (Marstons: 7.4%, Greene King: 7.0%). Is it the end of the world as we know it? Yet, against this rather sinister background something quite different has been happening. Companies who want to buy each other seem to like these prices very much. On 22 December GVC announced its intention to buy Ladbrokes plc. On 17 January, Melrose bid for GKN; on 30 January UBM agreed to be taken over;...

13 Jan 2018

The following paragraph is not true. A neat way to value a company is to divide the share price by the earnings per share (EPS) which gives you something known as a P/E (price/earnings) ratio. A low P/E ratio (say <10x) implies that a share is cheap and a high P/E ratio (say >20) suggests expensive. Many people, some of them claiming to be investment professionals or financial journalists, still promote P/E ratios (which came to be the standard valuation method in the 1970s and the 1980s). Here are some reasons why they are wrong. MARKET CAPITALISATION IS NOT THE VALUE OF THE COMPANY The price of a share is a measure of one of a company’s liabilities (the equity owned by shareholders) but not the value of the company. The equity is what is left over after all other obligations have been met. The value of the equity is known as the market capitalisation of the company. EI Group (formerly Enterprise Inns) has 479.5 million shares trading at 143p giving it a market capitalisation of £685 million. Also with a market capitalisation of £685 million is Go-Ahead Group with 43.2 million shares at 1586p. Their earnings per share last year were 20.5p (EI Group) and 207.7p (Go-Ahead) giving them P/E ratios of 7.0x and 7.6x respectively. How cool is that? Are they both cheap and are they almost equally cheap? You will not be surprised to read that it’s not as simple as that. The balance sheet of EI Group reveals that it the business is carrying more than £2000 million of net debt whereas Go-Ahead has £200 million of net cash. Consequently, the enterprise value of EI Group is £2700 million (market capitalisation plus net debt) and Go-Ahead’S enterprise value is just £485 million (market capitalisation minus net cash). On that basis the pub leasing business is worth 5.6x as much as the bus and train operating business. This doesn’t tell us which share is more likely to go up but it gives us plenty of ideas about what might influence their prices. None of which involve reported EPS. EARNINGS PER SHARE Another reason why P/E ratios are nearly useless is that...

2 Sep 2017

Who is in the room containing those who are supposedly negotiating the terms of Britain’s exit from the EU? We seem to have sent a team of men (mostly) who are used to attending meetings without trousers which is perhaps appropriate.  The Europeans are fielding another team of men (mostly) who are seemingly permanently “flabbergasted” and like to talk about the conditions for talks about talks. Were they to remove their trousers you can be sure that they would be wearing a second pair underneath. But what is that large white quadruped that keeps sticking its proboscis where it’s not wanted? It is the elephant in the room and its name is sadly not Donald the Tusk but Erich the Euro. Here is a picture of Erich, trumpeting towards his glorious target of parity with the pound (the chart runs from 2014 to this week – click to enlarge).   No one knows for sure why currencies move against other currencies. To listen to analysts and other commentators you might imagine that it is quite obvious, in retrospect if not in advance. This is largely tosh. The best answer is the one that I heard every day when I worked on the floor of the London stock exchange: “More buyers than sellers, mate”. THE REASON FOR CURRENCY MOVEMENTS IS UNCLEAR AND UNIMPORTANT Looking at the elephant picture it appears that there have been more buyers of euros than sellers. In 2015 there were more sellers than buyers. Remind me, why was that again? There just were! Okay, okay. I suppose that Brexit uncertainty and a slowing top-end property market (yes, they might be the same thing) have caused foreign investors to buy less sterling this year. You might just about persuade me that others have been buying euros in preparation for opening new offices in Budapest, Valletta and Clermont Ferrand. But currency movements have real effects, though they take time to play out. There has been a 40% increase in UK tourists to Greece this year (doubtless fuelled partly by aversion to Turkey – people prefer oppressed governments to oppressive ones, it seems). As I write, these tourists will be asking themselves why Greece...

16 Jan 2017

Here are two pieces of great news for the citizens of relatively rich, relatively developed, relatively Western economies. Women can increasingly combine career and motherhood rather than having to choose between them: and improved healthcare (if not exercise and diet) mean that people on average are living to greater ages. Fifty years ago, the UK average birthrate per woman was 2.9 (over her fertile life, not per pregnancy, obviously). Now it is 1.8. No doubt this is down to a combination of reasons which you can work out for yourself. Given that medical science has not yet worked out how to allow men to give birth you might imagine, if the UK’s experience is typical, that in the long term the global population will decline, on the rough basis that each woman should on average have two babies to replace those falling off the perch at the far end of life’s journey. Were it not for the fertility of some African countries, where birthrates of >5 per woman are quite common, mankind might become an endangered species.  According to the World Bank, the average fertility of women in the world was 2.5 in 2016 and the necessary “replacement rate” is 2.1. So the human race looks as if it will walk on for a while. Yet the story for developed nations is quite different. BIRTH RATE IN DEVELOPED NATIONS – FLACCID France (2.0), the US (1.9) and the UK (1.8) are doing their best (all, note, countries with histories of racially diverse immigration). The EU, which only promotes immigration from within itself, is overall at just 1.6 and Germany (1.4), Italy (1.4) and Spain (1.3) are below average. China, just unwinding its one child policy, is at 1.6 and Japan, perhaps the world’s most notorious ageing nation, is at 1.4. But the populations of established nations like the US, Germany and the UK are certainly not declining yet. Instead we have decades ahead in which the population will continue to grow but will age significantly. This is important for all kinds of financial reasons, none of them good. The last time that the fertility rate in the UK was at the “replacement rate” of...

5 Jun 2016

Back in November one of my first ever blogs was about M&S. The shares were trading at 389p and I wrote that only takeover interest could justify a higher price but I thought that the pension liabilities made that a very unlikely prospect. For reasons which were and remain unclear to me the shares touched 600p last year but M&S has not yet been taken over and they have now tumbled all the way back to 355p. A battered low-end competitor BHS has just been closed with 11,000 jobs lost and 164 stores closed. It is no surprise that it was the pension liabilities that provoked the final bullet to the head. In addition, Austen Reed is closing 120 outlets at the cost of 1000 jobs and Matalan is reportedly struggling under its debt burden. (Matalan’s founder loaded it with extra debt in order to pay himself a dividend – sound familiar?) A hard-headed analysis might suggest that the closure of a competitor is good news for the other clothing retailers but on 25 May M&S shares were hammered following publication of its 2015/16 results. Excluding last week’s ex-dividend adjustment they are down 17% (from 445p). For the nth year, M&S is having trouble with its Clothing business. The CEO was ridiculed for referring to the core customer as “Mrs M&S” though the results presentation offered the slightly surprising observation that 42% of its 32 million customers are men. I seriously doubt if there is any company on which more people have an opinion than M&S. There are millions of experts out there. I can read in the presentation what customers are complaining about. There is too much choice, too much fashion at the expense of style, too many sizes out of stock and not enough consistency about price and value. As someone burdened by little interest in shopping or retailing I must say that none of that looks impossible to fix. You can also shop at M&S online though I don’t know how well it works or whether that would appeal to the 78% of customers who are 35 or over (still reading the presentation). Following the rather negative publicity and the share...

8 Apr 2016

Following a nervous rally in Q4, in Q1 the UK stock market was merely nervous. For the first time in seven quarters, the FTSE 100 (-1.2%) outperformed the FTSE 250 (-3.0%). This is a small indication that investors were becoming more worried about the outlook for earnings, I suppose. Since the Fed made the first tiny upward move in rates (0.25% in December), the economic smoke signals have deteriorated. Janet Yellen has publicly backtracked on the outlook for more rate rises this year. The ECB has signalled that more stimulus may be needed. Then there is China, Brexit and, most particularly, blah blah.      As usual, market commentators think that equity prices should reflect their view of the world. As usual, they miss the fact that equities are merely assets that compete with the value on offer elsewhere. The implicit secondary purpose of QE (the primary purpose was to bail out the banks) is to make the value of every other investment so unattractive that people begin to invest directly in riskier ventures that are more likely to help the economy. That’s the theory on which, despite its having the weight and robustness of a Twiglet, the world seems to be relying. How’s it going? Well, the price of “safe” investments has climbed to yet more prohibitively unattractive levels. The yield on German 10 year Bunds was 0.63% on the 30th December 2015 and 0.14% on 30th March 2016 and is thought by some to be heading negative. Well, why not? The Bank of England started its QE purchases of gilts in March 2009. At the time, the average UK dwelling cost £157,500 (its low point of the last ten years). In March 2016, the average dwelling cost £224,000 a nifty rise of 42% or 5.2% compound over seven years. No wonder that most Britons think that housing is the best possible investment and that we must have a housing shortage. Memo to everyone: house prices have been inflated by a deliberate and unprecedented policy of monetary easing, not by supply shortage. This is not going to end well. How about the next stage? Are people helping the economy by making riskier investments? Today’s...

2 Oct 2015

According a chap on Bloomberg TV, $11 trillion was lost from the value of global equities in Q3. The FTSE 100 fell by 10.2% and the FTSE 250, as usual doing better, fell by 5.8%. In the three years since I set up this website, the FTSE 100 is up by just 5.6% and the FTSE 250 by 42.2% which is a shocking disparity. The FTSE 100 is the top 100 companies by market capitalisation and contains many international banking, pharma, oil, mining and commodity businesses. The FTSE 250 is companies ranked from 101 to 350 and contains more domestic household names. I suspect that these companies are of a more easily manageable size and have more scope for growth. That may be a story worth looking at more closely but there is an interesting question to ask at once: if you own a tracker fund (as I do in a small way) what is it tracking? Most UK tracker funds follow the FTSE 100 or the FTSE All Share. Over the last five years, the FTSE 100 is cumulatively +8.4% and the All Share is +15.2%. These returns exclude dividend payments. The tracker fund should retain the dividends (after it has taken its fee) to boost the fund performance, so tracker funds should really beat the index (shouldn’t they?). These performance statistics indicate that the question of what your fund is tracking is rather important. And guess what? Over the last five years the FTSE 250 is up by 57.5%, an amazing outperformance of the other two indices. Over the last ten years it looks like this: FTSE 100 + 11%, FTSE 250 + 110%, FTSE All Share +21%. These are remarkable numbers. You might wonder why there are so few 250 trackers on offer. It might be because it’s much easier and cheaper to track an index that consists of 100 large shares rather than 250 medium-sized ones.  Or you might prefer your own conspiracy theory. Government bond markets did not share the sense of near-panic that infected equities. German 10 year Bund yields fell from 0.84% to 0.61%. UK 10 year gilt yields from c.2.1% to 1.8%. Nothing much to smell...

21 Sep 2015

Perhaps the most pertinent question for UK stock investors today is “can I trust those high dividend yields?” Glaxo has pre-announced that it will maintain its dividend at 80p per share this year and next year. That’s a yield of 6.2%. Royal Dutch appears to yield 7.5% on the basis of paying $1.88 (c.120p) also “guaranteed” for 2015 and 2016. If these companies can be relied on to continue these pay-outs, it matters little whether Janet Yellen dares to raise the federal funds rate from irrelevant to insignificant or indeed whether Mark Carney goes mad and does the same with the bank rate.  Here is what I previously wrote about the interpretation of high dividend yields. Shares that yield 5% The market does not like these companies. They are seen as unreliable. This may be because there are external threats that are beyond the power of management to prevent or mitigate or it may be that management is simply mistrusted. It might also be the case that they are mature businesses that are, rightly or wrongly, thought to be approaching the end of their life-cycle.   Shares that yield 6% The market does not trust the dividend. It expects it to be cut (or “rebased”, in modern corporate terminology). Naturally I agree with every word of this and everything that follows should be seen in the context of those comments. I will briefly discuss Glaxo and Royal Dutch before moving on to some humbler companies. There is a summary at the end. GLAXO           Price:  1296p                    Hoped for dividend:  80p                       Yield: 6.2% Glaxo is showing off by paying a bonus 20p in respect of Q4 (year-end March 2016). This seems to me an unnecessary answer to the sceptics who would anyway be confounded merely by flat progress. People dislike Big Pharma about as much as they dislike Big Tobacco and they both look like industries that spend a fortune on lobbying. Glaxo needs to generate $3.8bn of free cash flow to pay its 80p dividend without adding extra debt (nearer $5bn this year with the bonus). In 2014 it made free cash flow of $5.5bn; in the year to March 2015 free cash flow was...

5 Jan 2015

In a confusing financial and political world in Q4, the UK stock market offered small but notable evidence of calm in as much as the FTSE 250 (+4.5%) easily outpeformed the FTSE 100 (-0.9%), reversing the trend seen in Q2 and Q3. Normally, larger shares perform better in nervous times as they are seen as safer havens. In the case of this quarter, the collapse of oil and oil sensistive shares (including other resource and energy related companies) may have delivered a particular blow to the FTSE but I am still inclined to take the 4% gain in the FTSE 250 at face value. For 2014 as a whole, the FTSE fell by 2.7% following a rise of 13.9% in 2013. Once again, major governmrnt bond yields provided a supportive background. German 10 year Bund yields fell in the quarter from 0.93% to 0.54%. A year ago they were 1.96%. 10 year Gilt yields have fallen from 2.88% to 1.72%. While these seems incredibly low to anyone who has followed gilts over the years, it could be seen as high when compared to the equivalents in Spain (1.62%) and Ireland (1.25%) and France (0.83%). Last quarter I wrote that “bond markets are shrieking the news that global growth has made a long-term shift to lower levels”. The fall of nearly 30% in the oil price in Q4 appears to confirm this view, though it can be argued that a cut of this scale in the price of such a key commodity will ultimately benefit the economies of all countries that do not depend on oil revenues.Initially, though, the effect is more likely to be felt by oil producers and will play out as generally negative in the short term. See my next blog post for more discussion on this. In the UK, the political future appears more important than usual. But it does not seem likely that a change of government would result in a great expansion of government spending. Nor does it seem probable that a referendum would result in a vote for the UK to leave the EU. Most of the political outcomes that frighten investors are highly unlikely and their probability...

22 Apr 2014

The FTSE 100 fell by 2.2% in the quarter. The FTSE 250 (that’s companies from 101 to 350) rose by 2.1%. I wrote in the Q4 report that it is generally the case that smaller companies’ share prices are relative beneficiaries of improving confidence. Large blue chips do better when investors are seeking protection. It is worth noting that in the first three weeks of April, FTSE 250 shares have become more jittery, falling by 2.2% compared to a modest 0.4% recovery in FTSE 100 stocks. It looks as if there has been plenty of profit taking in the best performing shares of the past year, many of which are those of FTSE 250 companies. These were relatively trivial ups and downs in UK equities. Of more consequence for relative valuations is the continued strength of major government bonds. Yields on US, German and UK 10 year bonds have continued to fall, despite much talk of stronger economic data and falling unemployment. More impressive still has been the rebirth of demand for the bonds of Greece (yield on 31 December 2013, 8.41%; today, 6.12%), Portugal (5.9%; 3.73%), Ireland (3.43%; 2.83%) and even France (2.46%; 1.99%). Cash continues to chase yield and is becoming less fussy. At a time when the price of assets regarded as safe continues to rise, it would seem irrational to turn negative on the shares of established and financially sound companies. On that basis, this year’s flat equity market is probably resting rather than expiring. Turning to shares that I have recommended, in December I highlighted four companies with long-term strategies. UBM, whose share price is nearly unchanged since then, has just acquired a new CEO. I must admit that I had missed the declared intention of the CEO David Levin to retire in 2014. He has now been replaced by Tim Cobbold, ex-CEO of De La Rue. There is no reason to think that this will change the company’s long-term strategy. UBM raised its dividend slightly in 2013 and, with its low capex requirements, is confident of maintaining its “progressive” dividend policy. But, there is inevitably a risk that a new CEO will surprise investors (new managers are usually...

24 Mar 2014

“FTSE 100 sees supermarket shares shelved as Morrisons wages price war.” Last Thursday week (13 March), shares of William Morrison fell by 12% to 206p. They have fallen by 32% since their 2013 peak of 302p in September. In a show of empathy, Sainsbury’s shares were -8% and -26% from last year’s high and Tesco’s -4% and -23% respectively. The strategic announcement from Morrison has emphasised what we already knew – that discounters like Lidl and Aldi have been winning market share from the “Big 4” supermarkets (the other one, Asda, is a subsidiary of the US giant Walmart). This stock market fallout has delivered some shares that ostensibly now look cheap. As ever, the way to judge is to ask what the valuations tell us about the outlook for the businesses and to decide whether this view is realistic, optimistic or pessimistic. But first, some background. Due to the fact that we all go shopping, my observation is that people tend to overestimate the value of their own opinions about retailers. (This is true of many other topics: house prices, because we all live somewhere; climate chance, because we all notice the weather; healthcare, because we all get ill; bankers, because we all use banks.) On that basis, I must assume the same is true of me. So let’s get my prejudices out of the way. First, Lidl and Aldi are private companies from Germany. In my experience, which is somewhat out of date, shopping in Germany is a grim experience, evocative of Britain in the 1970s. If German retailers compete on scale and price, it is because they have nothing else. It is still the case that the collective German psyche has a horror of inflation (I have a 50 million mark note from the 1920s on my desk) and until 10 years ago, the law regulated prices and shop opening times in a way that suggested that shoppers needed to be protected from greedy retailers. The only Lidl outlet I know (in rural France) usually has just one member of staff on the checkout and the last time I was there (buying Chardonnay at less than €3 a bottle) the customer...

29 Nov 2012

In the investment rule that I call “Competing Assets” I included four ways in which investors in a company’s equity should look to get paid out. They are 1) by the share price appreciating because the value of the company increases; 2) by the equity’s share of the company increasing relative to the share of other liability holders; 3) through direct pay outs in the form of dividends; 4) through the sale of the whole business at a premium. M&S is obviously a very mature brand with a business model that some might unkindly label “dinosaur”. If it ever joins the e-commerce party it will be a late arrival. The chance of 1) (the value of the company increasing) looks modest. The same goes for 2); indeed, with capital expenditure growing this year and next, the opposite (the equity’s share of the company’s value declining) looks a risk. This leaves us with 3) (dividends) and 4) (takeover). There seems to be no serious risk to the dividend but no obvious reason why it should be increased. At present, M&S is maintaining its dividend (recent half year results). As such, we can look at the dividend yield (4.4%) and compare it to alternative investments as we wish. 4.4% is not to be sneered at but you can do better from Tesco and Sainsbury. But as the price occasionally pushes towards 400p (389p today) there is reason to think that a small takeover premium has crept into the share price. One of the obvious poison pills that a buyer of M&S would have to swallow is its pension liabilities. Any venerable, domestic company with a large workforce has potential problems with pension liabilities. As interest rates fall, the actuarial calculation of the present value of pension liabilities goes up. From that point of view, the current era of low rates is not good news. In addition, the actuaries have noticed that people are tending to live longer. Good luck for them but bad news for the pension liability. The M&S half year results (published on 1 November) were interesting reading in this respect, once you made your way to Note 10 on page 26 (of 28)....