20 Jun 2022

I am struck by the knowledge that the stock market hit its Covid panic low on 23 March 2020 (FTSE at 4994). That was the very day that the first UK lockdown was announced. This is a splendid example of how desperately keen share prices are to discount bad news. Because the actual news got much worse for much longer than anyone could have believed – but the low was already in for the stock market. Today, it is hard to see how much worse the news could get for UK consumer shares or government gilts. So here are some deservedly unpopular ideas that might just pay off. THREE SHARES VULNERABLE TO CONSUMER SPENDING National Express (buses and coaches) 217p Since the beginning of March it is an amazing fact that three of the four UK listed bus (& train) companies have received takeover bids Stagecoach – bid 105p (now unconditional) vs March low 76p (38% premium) FirstGroup – indicative bid of 163.6p vs 89p in March (84% premium) Go-Ahead – bid of 1500p vs 550p in March (173% premium) That leaves only National Express which is now just a bus company (plus a few trains in Germany). It is huge (£2.7 bn in revenues this year)  and supposedly in the sweet spot for new transport habits (out of those wicked cars, people, and get on board with the monarchs of the road). It raised £235million from shareholders in May 2020 at 230p per share and the price has gone nowhere (now 217p). It plans to restore a dividend in 2022. It has hedged its fuel costs 100% for this year, 64% of 2023 and 25% for 2024. It has guided to a 7% operating margin in 2022 (10% in 2019).  I do not love this company but it has the potential to benefit from a certain scarcity value. Halfords (auto centres and bikes) 157p Another theoretical sweet spot – second hand car servicing and cycling. This statement of the bleeding obvious last week sent the shares down by 20%. While rising inflation and declining consumer confidence will naturally present short-term challenges for any customer-facing business like ours, we remain confident in Halfords’ long-term...

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;...

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...