18 Oct 2016

Every five minutes, someone, somewhere, says that “markets hate uncertainty”. This is an example of anthropomorphism or the attribution of human characteristics to animals, objects or ideas. Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing according to Warren Buffet, wrote about Mr Market, an obliging business partner who offers to buy you out or sell you a larger stake on a daily basis. Mr Market can be generous or miserly but his defining characteristic is that he always shows up. Mr Market is in fact, a market.  Regrettably, the temptation to turn Mr Market into a soap opera character who experiences human emotions has proved too much for many commentators. Watch, read or listen to today’s news and you will find that Mr Market is an extremely judgmental fellow. Donald Trump makes him very unhappy. He is incandescent with anger about Brexit. Interestingly, Mr Market is not a great believer in democracy. When he thinks that voters in the US or the UK are making a mistake he stamps his foot in rage. He much prefers the smack of firm leadership. When Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia attempt to collude to restrict the supply of oil he performs a little jump of joy. Enough. Mr Market does love or hate anything. Markets are just places where buyers and sellers look for each other and sometimes meet. If you want to attach a smiley face to the chart of a rising market that’s up to you but remember that higher prices result in losers as well as winners. Witness the UK housing market – oldies = smiley face: youngsters = sad face. The sloppy thinking that leads people to say that markets hate uncertainty invariably evolves into the confident factual statement that “investors hate uncertainty”. This assertion is central to the fund management industry that wants to frighten you into paying to have your savings looked after. Please see my post “Clients are very nervous”. But the truth is the opposite. Investors love uncertainty because it causes assets to be mispriced. It is only the mispricing of assets that leads to good opportunities to buy and sell. I don’t want to be unkind but if someone...

29 Oct 2014

This is the transcript of a speech I made this week at the smartfuturelondon conference How to turn a good idea into an investment What makes a good idea?  If everyone agrees that change is inevitable and ‘it’s only a matter of time’, it always seems to take a very long time. Having heard yesterday’s presentation on smart energy – hands up if anyone thinks that’s a bad idea – I suspect that a common drag on the development of really good ideas is that everyone wants a piece. I was watching The Man With The Golden Gun on TV the other day. It was made in 1974 when the world was suffering the first OPEC oil shock. So in the tradition of the James Bond series to be topical, they shoved in a sub-plot in which the Golden Gun Guy steals the Solex Agitator, a device that turns the sun’s rays into energy.  What a great idea. Someone should try that. When mobile payments were agreed to be a good idea in 1997, there were more than 100 companies represented in the first mobile forum. That year, Coca Cola built a vending machine that accepted payment from a Nokia phone. Around 2005 I attended a presentation about mobile payment at which someone said that there was a Coca Cola vending machine in Helsinki. Everybody was trying to get a piece of mobile payments – and it was all taking a very long time. Sometimes, great ideas are just too early. Twenty years ago, Larry Ellison of Oracle thought that the PC was an absurd device, being limited by its own processing power and memory. “Put it on the internet” he said. So Oracle launched what we would now call the first netbook. Unfortunately, the internet was too slow at the time. The Oracle NC failed. But one of Ellison’s managers thought it was a great idea. He was Marc Benioff and he left to found Salesforce.com in 1999. It is now the reference business cloud computing company and has a market cap of $37 billion or 7x forecast revenues. The best and most valuable ideas seem to come from nowhere and often evolve...

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...

5 Mar 2013

After the shock of the credit crunch, many companies are beginning to feel flush with cash again. Sadly, an unwelcome old habit is also making a re-appearance – buying back shares in an exercise falsely described as “returning cash (or value) to shareholders”. Here is an extract from the last annual report of an otherwise very sensible company, Morrison Supermarkets: We expect capital expenditure to be higher in 2012/13 as we continue to invest for future growth. £368m was invested into our equity retirement programme, and we are on track to meet our objective of returning £1bn to shareholders over the two years to March 2013, in addition to normal dividends. In 2012/13, Morrison generated £1209m of cash flow after tax. It invested £796m in capital expenditure and paid £301m in dividends for a total of £1097m which is just over 90% of cash flow: result, as Mr Micawber would say, happiness? Not quite. As the extract points out, the company also spent (or as it would say, “invested”) £368m buying back its own shares meaning, obviously, that it had to borrow to do so and total net indebtedness increased. So why do they do that? There are a number of possible reasons, most of which are negative for ordinary shareholders and some of which are outrageous. Managers of companies sometimes dislike building up excessive cash on their balance sheets. If they have run out of ideas to enhance the business by reinvesting that cash, they should presumably pay it back to the owners (aka the shareholders). The trouble with this is that many managers appear to think that a) paying a high dividend is an implicit admission that the company is ex-growth and b) the obligation to keep paying the dividend will become an inconvenience if the business performs less well in the future – executives know that dividend cuts often cost their own jobs, so why tempt fate? Yet, businesses that just sit on piles of cash can become takeover targets, particularly from private equity buyers who can effectively use the target’s cash to fund its own takeover. Once again, executives of acquired firms tend to lose their jobs. So, despite the...