18 Jan 2023

For the first time in five quarters The FTSE 250 outperformed the FTSE 100 (+9.8% vs +8.1% compared to Q3). This does not change the fact that the big-cap index with international exposure trounced its smaller more domestically exposed rival over the year as a whole (+1% vs -20%). But some recovery by FTSE 250 shares would be very welcome in the face of much public negativity about the UK economy. In my Q3 report I wrote that half a dozen shares must be long term buys. I invest in line with what I perceive as probability and necessarily one is sometimes correct. While I take a brief lap of honour I shall recite as follows – Sainsbury +40%, Tesco +20%, Halfords +39%, Kingfisher +23%, Pets At Home +27%, M&S +52%. I own all those shares but the only one that I actually bought at the end of Q3 was M&S. The government bond markets have been interesting, as I wrote here on 23 December. Over the quarter UK 10 year gilts fell from 4.23% (a peak induced by the Bank of England, not Liz Truss) to 3.67%, a normalisation from an excellent buying opportunity. US 10 year Treasuries were flat at 3.88%, summing up the unresolved debate between inflation mongers and recession peddlers. German yields rose from 2.1% to 2.5%. CHINA AND NUMBERS Finally, a geopolitical strategist named Peter Zeihan mentioned something that I have seen before – namely that China, in addition to reporting dodgy population and Covid numbers, has long overstated its GDP growth. While this might seem just the grandiose bull of an authoritarian government, it has huge mathematical implications once you take into effect the compounding effects over time. An overstatement by 3% of a number that is itself already overstated will, in twenty five years, produce a GDP number that is distorted by 100%. It could be that the reason why the world has withstood the repeated closure of the Chinese economy is that China is not as important as its official GDP numbers...

8 Oct 2022

The FTSE 250 fell by 8.0% in Q2 and is down by 25.5% year to date. The FTSE100 is down by just 2.7% year to date, a massive and, in my experience, unprecedented outperformance. On average FTSE 100 companies are larger and more international meaning that they are typically earning dollar revenues, a very good cushion in recent months. UK ten year government bond yields began the quarter at 2.06% and ended it at 4.1%, a rout that was ludicrously attributed to a trivial mini budget. As I wrote recently, this has been coming for a long time and the cause is a combination of relentless excessive borrowing, to which the nation appears to be addicted, and blundering behaviour by the Bank of England which naturally fails to accept responsibility. The overdue correction in government bond yields was certainly not confined to the UK. Ten year German Bund yields soared from 1.2% to 2.1% and US Treasuries more modestly from 3.02% to 3.8%. As those yield movements imply, Europe has a bigger inflation threat because most commodities are priced in dollars. Stock investors in the US have seen most commodity prices well off their highs and are disappointed that the Fed appears to be set on continuing to dampen an economy that appears to be slowing down quite nicely. It is worth mentioning that most US commentators see a bad recession across Europe as a given. I have been buying two year Gilts yielding above 4% in the knowledge that these represent a very viable alternative to stocks, at this difficult time, as they say when flags are flying at half mast. There is no doubt that many share prices are very low and some of them may even be cheap. I have been looking at retailers. Sainsbury, Tesco, Halfords, Kingfisher and Pets at Home all have solid balance sheets and yield between 4.5% (Pets) and 7.5% (Sainsbury).Marks & Spencer, which must be selling hair shirts, pays no dividend for some reason but its historic free cash flow yield is 33%. Barring serious management blunders, which are of course quite possible, these companies are long term buys. I am tempted to write that there...

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...

14 Nov 2019

On 9 November, Prof. Brian Cox who is a professor of particle physics and a TV and radio presenter responded to the news that credit rating Moody’s downgraded the outlook for the UK’s debt with this Tweet: “Neither Labour nor the Conservatives will be able to borrow all the money they are pledging if international investors take fright.” Pausing only to note that anyone who relied on Moody’s credit ratings probably got wiped out years ago, Prof. Cox’s view does not seem outrageously controversial to me. Yet he was buried by a landslide of comments such as: “Don’t you just love it when experts step out of their areas of expertise and talk bollocks.” In essence the message is that if Brian Cox thinks that interest rates might rise, then he must be an economic dumbo. But the important point is not whether the professor is a financial simpleton or not but that the crowd is so emphatically behind a view that would quite recently have been unthinkable. Groupthink now knows that interest rates will never rise and that governments can borrow whatever they like. Happy days. And talking of financial simpletons, Donald Trump keeps criticising the Federal Reserve because other countries have negative interest rates on their government debt.  “Give me some of that. Give me some of that money. I want some of that money. Our Federal Reserve doesn’t let us do it.” Source: Speech to the Economic Club of New York 12 November 2019 The remarkable fact is that Brian Cox is regarded as the one who “doesn’t get it” whereas President Trump thinks that he is espousing “the new normal”. HOW DID WE GET HERE? How did we get here and what happens if the consensus is as wrong as usual? “I am concerned that this emerging anti-austerity consensus, driven as it is by the desire for perceived “fair” outcomes, could get messy. Meddling is in the air. An outbreak of doing the wrong thing cannot be far off.” Source: CrowKnows “Prepare to turn left” I wrote that exactly two years ago in the post “Prepare to turn left”. It is surely time to follow up because the steering wheel...

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...

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...

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...

13 Jan 2017

The UK stock market continued to climb the wall of fear or crawl forward in the sea of uncertainty or whatever you will in Q4. The FTSE 100 outperformed the FTSE 250 for the third time (out of four quarters) in 2016. Rising interest rates helped the UK banks index rise by 16% in the quarter. Some people think that lending margins will improve as interest rates “normalise”. Good luck to them. I will not be making that trade. Over the year as a whole the FTSE 100 rose by 13.9% having fallen by 4.8% in 2015. The FTSE 250 was up by 3.5% after +8.4% in 2015. The bond market was a bigger story in many ways with the 10 year gilt yield falling from 1.93% in December 2015 to 0.58% in August and then back up to 1.41% in December 2016. That is quite a rollercoaster dip. Many people believe (or hope) that the rise in interest rates will continue.  In many ways it would be helpful if they did (to help savers rather than borrowers) but I am not convinced that it is going to happen. The trading statements that January has seen have mostly been very encouraging. Marks & Spencer actually sold more clothes. I must admit I didn’t see that coming. I was less surprised that Morrisons sold more food. That has been a slow burner for me but it has started to come good. Let me say that I bought both these shares because of their financial strength (M&S’s cash flow, Morrison’s balance sheet) on the assumption that they would have the time to sort out their retailing problems. I know next to nothing about retailing but I can see that burdensome debt must make it much harder (eg Tesco). I was also amused and pleased to see that Sainsbury is now being helped by its acquisition of Argos. That stock (Home Retail Group) was my one attempt to take a view on a retail model and I just got away with it. The post that is most often called to mind at present is Four kinds of bias from May. The selective use of facts is all...

30 May 2016

1)      SELECTIVE USE OF FACTS It is not news to say that people will select facts and opinions that appear to favour their side of an argument. There was a good example last week from the pro-Remain CBI which wants to demonstrate that the possibility of Brexit is already hurting investment. “Overall, surveys of investment intentions have shown a deterioration in investment plans, particularly in the services sector. Some of this is likely to be related to uncertainty ahead of the EU referendum. Although our April investment intentions data for the manufacturing industry actually strengthened, anecdote from the sector suggests some specific factors at play – in particular, replacement spending in the food & drink sector (following flood-related damage earlier in the year) and buildings investment by chemicals manufacturers looking to expand production on the back of solid export demand.” CBI Economic Forecast 16th May 2016 Did you get that? The latest data suggest that their view is wrong so they have concluded that the data are wrong. The CBI is supposedly a highly respectable organisation (so respectable that the EC contributes money to fund some of its publications) and can get away with substituting anecdote for data, or so it seems.    The Leave side is mostly less respectable and, partly by virtue of the necessity that it is promoting something of a leap in the dark, rarely seems to attempt to employ hard facts. But you can be sure that it is highly selective in what it says. You would imagine that the UK is full of people who are deeply worried about immigration. According to a survey that goes back to 1962, the peak year for UK citizens thinking that there are too many immigrants was 1970 when the level reached 89%. In 2014 it was 54%. Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood” speech was made in 1968 and probably contributed to the high level of antipathy to immigration that the chart shows. During the speech, Powell quoted a white constituent (in Wolverhampton) as saying: “In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.” As it happened, the period...

5 Jan 2016

Following a very wobbly third quarter, we saw a nervous rally in Q4. As usual, the FTSE 250 (+4.5%) did better than the All Share (+3.5%) and the FTSE 100 (+3.1%). As a reminder, over ten years the 250 has performed more than ten times as well as the 100, yet index trackers continue to offer the 100 or the All Share (than which the 250 returned 5x over 10 years) as the default choice. Quite by chance today I read this from Ross Clarke in the Spectator blog. Jeremy Corbyn wants to get rid of the British Empire Medal and David Cameron wants to ditch the Human Rights Act. But I have a different nomination for the national institution most desperately in need of abolition: the FTSE 100 index. It is harming our economy by consistently underplaying the returns to be made on stock market investments and encouraging us all to invest in property instead. Despite the first nudge higher in the Federal Reserve interest rate government bond markets were quiet. The 10 year Bund yield slipped fractionally from 0.61% to 0.58%. Ten year gilt yields nosed up from 1.8% to 1.9%. The weakness in commodity prices is making people nervous about global GDP growth and the next cycle of rising interest rates seems no closer than it did this time last year or this time the year before…. One of the features of Q4 was the relative scarcity of actual bad corporate news and the relative abundance of negative opinions. The latter seem to suit the spirit of the times. Stock market analysts invariably provide opinions for which there is a demand – don’t be hard on them, it’s the nature of what’s left of the job – and if investors wanted bullishness they would get it. At the moment, anyone putting the view that China is going to be ok, that global demand will eventually underpin commodity prices and allow investment in production again, that middle-Eastern politics are ultimately pragmatic and that the effects of terrorism are statistically trivial would be accused of being naive, stupid or wilfully misleading. This is interesting because one would normally expect Cassandras prophesizing doom to...

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...

6 Jul 2015

In Q2 the FTSE 100 fell by 3.3% but the FTSE 250 was up by 2.8%. In the first half year of 2015, the FTSE 100 was flat but the 250 was +9.2%. This divergence is probably indicative of two factors. The FTSE 100 is heavily weighted with banks and resource and mining stocks, few of which have looked like attractive investments for some years. The 250 is more reflective of UK PLC. Second, despite nervous headlines about (in no particular order) Greece, China, the interest rate cycle and the various consequences of terrorism, large companies have not benefitted from any move to perceived safe havens. Blue chip oil and pharma companies yield 5%+ but the average investor doesn’t seem to care. To put it another way, investors are not particularly nervous. European bond markets have normalised to some extent. The UK 10 year gilt yield has risen from 1.6% to 2.1%. Way back in September 2103 I recommended (and bought) a gilt, UNITED KINGDOM 1 3/4% TREASURY GILT 22. It was trading at 92. Having touched 103 in Q1 it now trades at just under 99, yielding 1.9%. This is not yet tempting me to get back in but it’s movement is worth following. Very little happened to the share prices of the major food retailers in Q2. They have all begun to tackle their structural problems. My view is that the market is now ignoring a trickle of good news. While Tesco is taking small steps at the start of a very long road – because Tesco needs to overhaul its financial structure – Sainsbury reported that the performance in its large stores had improved in June. It implied that the appeal of discount stores like Aldi and Lidl was waning slightly. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but Sainsbury is making an effort and its new joint venture with Argos is interesting. Morrisons has a new chief executive, David Potts, who seems to be making the right noises. When the (dull) Q1 numbers were released he said: “My initial impressions from my first seven weeks are of a business eager to listen to customers and improve“. He seems to be as good as his...

4 Oct 2014

The stock market remained nervous, reportedly seeing below-average turnover in Q3. The trend that began in Q2, of the shares of smaller companies performing worse, continued. The FTSE 100 fell by 1.7% and the FTSE 250 by 2.9%. For the third quarter in a row, yields on European government bonds fell to previously unimaginable lows. German 10 year Bund yields have fallen below 1% (now 0.93%). To put this in some context, 10 year Japanese bond yields were around 1.9% before the financial crisis bit in 2008. Japan is considered to be the reference case of a country suffering from long-term deflation. Its 10 year yield is now 0.53%. Since June 2008, Japanese yields have declined by 72% and German by 80%. As I have noted before, the bond markets are shrieking the news that global growth has made a long-term shift to lower levels. Many will argue that this is bound eventually to be reflected in lower corporate profits. It is hard to argue with that but wrong to assume that share prices are consequently too high. When yields on all financial assets are falling, investors are paying higher prices for them. A dollar of corporate profit literally becomes more valuable than it used to be. Many stock market commentators, seemingly obsessed with short-term news and the aphrodisiac of growth, appear to be incapable of understanding this. Given that the cloud of deflation continues to hang over the world (see above), the traditionally nervous month of October will probably produce plenty of gloomy headlines. In my post about the supermarkets, I pointed out that, when operating leases are included as liabilities, Morrison was much cheaper that Tesco and Sainsbury. Well, the gap has reduced but not necessarily as anticipated. Morrison’s price has fallen but the others have fallen further. Tesco’s accounting practices have caught up with it and I must say that, as yet, there is no price at which I would buy it. At last I have noticed the beginning of a backlash in the press against Lidl and Aldi – our nostalgia for the 1970s must surely be limited. Sainsbury has promised a strategic review, a development that appears to have...

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...

12 Jun 2013

Investment is betting on probabilities, not on outcomes. How can we judge if the probability of an event is over-priced or under-priced? Do not try to guess the probability of an outcome with a view to pricing it. Do ask when the price is telling you about the probability – then ask yourself if this is reasonable. For obvious reasons, investors are now very interested in dividend yield but they also have reasons to be worried about the stock market. Commentators seem to be evenly split between those who are looking down and suffering vertigo and those who say that equities continue to offer attractive value compared to what else is on offer. According to my own investment rules, you will find me in the second camp for as long as that proposition continues to be true. Dividend yields are as reliable a measure as any for judging what the market thinks of a company. Then, as the quotation from my fourth investment rule (Probability) says, we can ask ourselves whether this is reasonable. Below is a table of current dividend yields from shares that I follow. There is a wide range which, if the market is efficient, should tell us that we can choose between relatively safe companies with relatively low yields and relatively risky with commensurately high returns. Before I discuss any individual stocks, I will characterise what these various yields imply.     Price Yield BG 1165 1.4% Fuller Smith & Turner 925 1.5% Domino’s Pizza 670 1.5% Travis Perkins 1520 1.6% Experian 1175 1.9% Regus 165.00 1.9% Home Retail Group 152 2.0% Diageo 19.15 2.2% Interconti Hotels 1835 2.2% Smith & Nephew 755 2.3% Rentokil 88 2.4% Millennium 549 2.5% Cranswick 1120 2.7% Stage Coach 287 2.7% Kingfisher 344 2.8% Hays 90 2.8% BT 312 2.8% Synthomer 194 2.8% Sage 348 3.0% Rexam 505 3.0% Micro Focus 659 3.1% Unilever (€) 31.4 3.1% Reed 736.0 3.1% Tate & Lyle 811 3.2% Greencore 130.00 3.3% St Ives 160 3.3% Greene King 750 3.4% Debenhams 92 3.6% Morgan Crucible 277 3.6% M&S 448 3.8% Pearson 1173.0 3.8% UBM 690.00 3.9% Mitie 253 4.1% Costain 254 4.2% Tesco 343 4.3% Marstons 142 4.4%...