28 Aug 2019

Anyone who cares to investigate can discover that the equities that you probably own directly or through your pension scheme are equitable only with each other. Benjamin Graham, the so-called father of modern investing, called them “common shares” which is a better clue. When a company is wound up this typically means that it has run out of money and run out of people who will lend or give it more cash. Equities represent any surplus assets that are left when all other creditors have been paid off. Every other creditor ranks above the owners of the common shares. First are secured creditors like banks or bondholders who have lent money on fixed terms. If the company defaults on those terms it can be forced into formal insolvency, though sometimes the secured creditors will accept equity in return for a further cash injection, if they judge that their best chance of getting their money back in the end is to keep the business going. In those circumstances they will be issued shares on such favourable terms that existing equity investors are diluted to the point of worthlessness. This is happening now in the case of Thomas Cook. After secured creditors have been paid in full, anything left goes to so-called preferential creditors, including employees, and then to the luckless trade creditors and HMRC. You can infer that common shareholders will usually be completely wiped out. Unsurprisingly, people who invest in equities very rarely think about the risk of insolvency and losing all their money. We all dream of the day when the theoretical value of those surplus assets explodes upwards. Bond holders may get their money plus interest back but as Benjamin Graham pointed out many decades ago, common stocks have “a far better record than bonds over the long term past”. It has widely been accepted as a fact that equities are the answer for a long term investor. Cautious share owners look for sustainable dividends that can rise as the company grows; the more optimistic hope for rising share prices as well. Those are the two elements that drive the long-term performance of common stocks observed by Graham. But stock market investors...

3 Oct 2017

In the Q2 report I said that the stock market had been amazingly calm. The amazement intensified in Q3. Political and economic commentators are so certain of impending collapse that they can hardly get the words out quickly enough. The politicians themselves are cringing in response, like the invertebrates that most of them sadly appear to be. You can be sure that if the fear gets to investors they will panic but, rightly or wrongly, they are not doing so. It has usually been a sound investment policy to say that if it’s reached the front page of the news, it’s probably in the price. In other words, the perceived risks have been accounted for.  Obviously perceived risk is a moving target and securities will continue to trade accordingly. To take a singular example, the Labour party wants to nationalise Royal Mail, probably at its issue price of 330p. The shares are down 17% this year to 385p, just a further 14% above Labour’s assumed confiscation price. The company just raised the dividend again and they yield 6%. That looks to me as if the price is discounting the risk quite efficiently. (Given that the competitors to Royal Mail are “gig economy” delivery companies I cannot imagine why Labour hates it so much). Labour’s wider threat is that it proposes to confiscate privately owned assets (starting with anything that has ever been state-owned which is pretty much everything that existed before the internet). This is potentially catastrophic (defined by Dr Johnson as “A final event; a conclusion generally unhappy”). The wing of the Labour party that hates capitalism would be delighted because capital would flee to the land of Anywhere Else. The stock market tells us that, specific victims like Royal Mail aside, it thinks that Corbyn’s electioneering pledges are hot air on which he would never be able to deliver. But the closer he comes the more frightening he will get. So watch that space.        In the quarter, the FTSE 100 was +0.9%, the All Share + 1.3% and the 250 + 2.8%. 10 year gilt yields rose from 1.26% to 1.33%. A big yawn, even if it was a nervous...

5 Jul 2017

The UK stock market was on a rollercoaster ride to nowhere in Q2. The FTSE 100 fell by -0.3% and the 250 managed a rise of +1.8%. Given that we had a shock election, a shock result, a hung parliament and that the shadow Chancellor thinks that democracy has failed, you could say that the stock market has been amazingly calm. Likewise the government bond market. The 10 year gilt yield was 1.23% at the end of Q1 and 1.26% at the end of Q2. This is the dog not barking in the night time. We are widely told that the pale imitation of austerity that has been attempted for the last eight years is to be abandoned but the bond market is not panicking yet. Here is a picture of gilt yields since 2007.    One of the lessons of the election was that voters under the age of fifty or so are not frightened of the things that made the 1970s rather messy. Inflation, double digit interest rates and labour unions challenging the government’s right to run the country to name but three. It remains the case that the return of inflation is what bears warn about most frequently. In the 1970s the best way to protect oneself against inflation was to buy property. House prices rose by 492% over the decade. I wouldn’t advise the same strategy now. In fact I would consider doing the opposite. The world still seems pretty deflationary to me. You can choose your own explanation and file it under “uncertainty” but it still seems to me that listed companies are still being very cautious about capex and expecting their shareholders to approve of this caution. Here are five domestically exposed UK companies that have reported March or April year-end results recently. Halfords cut capes by 11% and raised its dividend by 3%. Dairy Crest cut capex by 62% and raised its dividend by 2%. M&S cut capex by 25% and kept its dividend unchanged. Stage Coach cut capex by 18% and raised its dividend by 4%. Royal Mail cut capex by 16% and raised its dividend by 4%. All these are behaving in a risk averse...

15 Jun 2015

The privatisation of Royal Mail in October 2013 was a lesson in how the City can run rings around politicians who fancy themselves as financial sophisticates. In this case the sap-in-chief was Vince Cable, a man whose CV includes many “economics advisor” titles. Despite this supposed in-house expertise, his department for Business, Innovation & Skills hired a vast syndicate of City banks, perhaps believing in the wisdom of crowds. It is well known that the shares were priced at 330p, that the institutional offering was oversubscribed by 24x and the retail portion by 7x. Most applicants for shares got none at all but 16 priority investors shared 38% of the entire offer (representing 22% of the company). On the first day of trading the shares closed at 455p. Within a few weeks, seven of the sixteen priority shareholders had cashed out completely. The grounds on which the priority investors had been selected were said to include their willingness to be long-term shareholders. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the government behaved with a mixture of ignorance and fear. For many years, financial institutions have gorged themselves on the naivety of their customers but, as a citizen, I find it very disappointing that my elected representatives are quite so useless. The underpricing and mishandling of the IPO was something of a public humiliation that may have contributed to the ejection of Vince Cable in the recent general election. It took only until March 2014 for the National Audit Office to publish a report that criticised the government for being cautious and pointed out in restrained language that “the taxpayer interest was not clearly prioritised within the structure of the independent adviser’s role”.  Royal Mail was something of a dinosaur company in stock market terms. It was a state-owned business that retained a highly unionised workforce and huge defined benefit pension liabilities. Moreover, it was obliged to maintain a national postal delivery service while the potentially more lucrative parcel delivery service was open to new competitors who could to some extent cherry-pick the services that they fancied. Letter volumes are in clear decline as most of us prefer e-mail while parcel volumes are rising...

30 Mar 2015

In Q1 the FTSE 100 rose by 3.3% and the FTSE 250 by 6.4%. The FTSE 250 is probably more sensitive to the domestic economy (or at least to how investors are feeling about it). The FTSE 100 has larger more global businesses including, of course, oil companies and banks, which received another kicking in the recent budget. That last point is a salutary reminder that investors will have to judge political risk in Q2 as the general election arrives 7th May (though the formation of a government may take weeks if the polls are correct in suggesting that no party will win a majority). I strongly doubt whether the economic outlook will be materially changed regardless of who wins. There is very little room for manoeuvre and it is painful to watch politicians trying to pretend otherwise. But where the banks have been led others could follow, particularly if the next government includes Labour. Utility companies have already been singled out to be sacrificed to the mob. No politician appears to understand that electricity supply is a very long-term and expensive commitment. It may be true that utilities are greedy cash cows but they will not invest the vast sums needed in next generation energy supply if they are treated like political footballs. Labour also wants to limit the profits available to companies who provide services to the NHS. I have no idea what they mean by this (drug companies? nursing agencies? hospital retail concessions?) but I am pretty sure that they don’t either. The point to bear in mind that stupidity is no bar to persecuting businesses that can be successfully vilified. Gilts had a relatively quiet quarter with yields falling from 1.72% to 1.57%. Last week I took profits on 25% of my gilt holdings. This was a small insurance against the political scene, but looking across the sea and seeing Irish 10 year bonds yielding 0.76% it is clear that most of us are missing something. Core eurozone bonds i.e. those of Germany saw 10 year yields fall from 0.54% to 0.18% and as I write the seven year German bonds have a negative yield. ECB QE now looks even...

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...