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...

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...

5 Oct 2016

The second quarter ended just after the Brexit vote and the stock markets were in a state of shock. The FTSE 100, which is where frightened investors go to hide, had one of its rare periods of outperformance over the FTSE 250 in Q2. (The FTSE 100 includes large multinational businesses, the FTSE 250 is a better reflection of the UK economy). In Q3, the FTSE 100 rose by 6.4% and the 250 by 10%, a strong indication that investors recovered their nerve during the summer. Mark Carney would probably claim that this was the result of the Bank of England’s interest rate cut and expansion of QE on 4 August, though much of the stock market recovery had happened by then. European government bond yields have remained low but have had a fairly quiet quarter as people begin to question how much further central banks can go. The consequences of central banks’ actions were addressed by Crowknows in Q3. First in a post called “QE: a wrecking ball to crack a nut“, I suggested that, whatever its ultimate outcome, the predictable side effects of QE are quite disturbing. I looked at the widening of the wealth gap, the rising cost of pension liabilities (see the Tesco half year results on 5 October) and the piling up of the debt burden to be dealt with by future generations. The Bank of England does not print free money: it draws relentlessly on an excellent credit facility better known as the UK economy and its tax receipts of the future. The second post was about how QE plays out. This suggested that shares and arguably only shares are cheap relative to other investable assets. (Never forget thatvalue is always relative and never absolute, unless you believe that there is an investment god). It then suggested that if your house is your pension, then cashing it in is going to become what investment wonks call a “very crowded trade” one day. I don’t know when that will be but included in the possible dates is tomorrow. The third conclusion was that national debt will continue to grow (confirmed by the new Chancellor this week) and that the...

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...

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...