Market Musings Blog

The market has taken a turn lately. The ‘in crowd’ – those golden stocks of last year, including Netflix, Amazon, Google (okay, okay, “Alphabet”) – are flunking out. Despite fancy earnings at Netflix and Google (Amazon hasn’t reported yet), the stocks fell sharply during their reports. These high fliers are all down for the year. Facebook is – thus far – an exception, up a few points; it hasn’t reported yet either.

Meanwhile, industrial companies are pulling out all the stops, and have been for several quarters now, managing their way through a strong dollar, emerging markets disruptions, bond market sell-offs, slow economies, the crash in oil prices, increased regulation …. you get the picture. Their efforts are finally being rewarded. Earnings are not necessarily good yet, but the big downdrafts have ceased, or everyone has become used to the negative scenarios, and these stocks are trading up, rather than down, despite some disappointments. This is the juncture we were waiting for – when investors shift from ‘bad news is bad, and good news is bad’ to ‘bad news is good, and good news is good’. It’s a time when so-so results are viewed as ‘well, it’s not as bad as it could be’. Even the banks, which were pariahs just a week ago, seem cast with a rosy glow.

The nerds deserve a day in the sun, after last year’s beating.

There are three ways to generate extraordinary returns from stocks. You don’t need a degree in finance, or tons of experience to practice these methods. Like doing anything well, you do need diligence and discipline. Beyond that, time is the only necessary ingredient.

1. Follow and learn about a company that no one else follows, to gain an information advantage. Thousands of listed stocks are available, and 99% of these are vying for your attention. Some, like General Electric, attract hundreds of analysts. It’s hard to know anything about GE that other people don’t know. But among smaller companies, information is scarcer – buried in SEC filings, or locked up in the CFO’s mind, even in footnotes to annual reports. Reading about a company you never heard of might bring a diamond to light.
2. Look at the information everyone else ‘knows’ in a different way. Take IBM. Everyone knows it has a legacy business that is sliding; that it is in a turnaround; that the turnaround will take a long time; that it may not work. The market has been obsessed with these negatives. But also in the company’s reports are indications that its cloud computing business is growing fast. We’ve recently seen reports of the company’s efforts to gain contracts overseas with telecom companies; it may be just a matter of time before it is able to sign a major-ish contract with a US telco. Focusing on the positive, instead of the negative, might lead to a different conclusion about IBM’s stock.
3. Behave differently, related to #2 above. A great example of behaving differently was buying corporate bonds in 2008 and 2009 instead of selling them. Back then, Nordstrom’s bonds yielded close to 11%. IBM bonds were near double digits. The carnage was spectacular. Everyone and his brother was selling. Behaving differently – buying instead of selling – made a lot of money. In nearly every market, there is an opportunity to behave differently. Right now, energy stocks present that opportunity.

The last several months have showcased why many investors fail. In a nutshell, they behave badly. It is hard enough to save – which requires sacrifice; to make discernments about investable assets – which requires education; and to harvest results – which requires patience. Failures in these basics are vastly common. But even those who master these at least in part are capable of proverbially shooting their portfolio in the foot. Here are some examples, all of which have been on display recently:

• Buying into what’s doing well without conducting a rational analysis. There is a reason Amazon, Netflix, Twitter, Go Pro, FitBit, and so forth shot up to the stratosphere. It was investors buying their stocks. But none of these companies sells at anything even remotely resembling a decent value.
• Selling what’s doing poorly without conducting a rational analysis. While the earnings-lite group above was surging, tiny declines in earnings at spectacular companies trading at low valuations caused these stocks to crater further. But in the context of a multi year holding period, earnings misses of pennies, or even a dollar, are irrelevant, especially if they are caused by currency changes.
• Indexing. The index strategy is a triumph of thoughtlessness, and perhaps laziness as well. Hundreds of funds and managers have beat common index benchmarks over time. Finding them is not hard – Morningstar is available to anyone with a computer or a library card. The myth that active managers cannot outperform benchmarks is just that – a myth. On the other hand, we don’t mind if investors prefer to run their money via a computer, because it does create opportunities for thoughtful people.
• Picking on one or two holdings that happen to be at losses, when the balance of the portfolio is doing well. It’s great to optimize holdings; we spend a fair amount of time considering whether what we own could be improved by a swap to a new holding. But just because a stock has moved down since purchase doesn’t mean it’s a crappy company and should automatically be sold. It may only mean you bought it wrong. Don’t hold your buying decision against the stock; what matters is what it will do from now on, not what happened in the past.
• Timing the markets. It cannot be done. If you ‘win’ because you sell in time to avoid a crash, you will not get back into the market in time to reap the benefits of the recovery, which happens very quickly after bear markets.

There are other examples of bad behavior of course, but this roundup represents the most egregious examples we’ve seen lately.

January thus far has hit investors hard with a steep stock decline. We hear this decline blamed on China, but that’s not likely. Let’s review the real reasons for why investors are taking so much value away from stocks.

First, the bear market didn’t start in January. As value managers, we are the canary in the coal mine. If we are not doing well, it is likely because valuation in the market is too high, and the market is narrowing around fewer and fewer stocks. This process started some time ago. Institutional Investor has written that it started five years ago. We really noticed it in the last half of 2014. Last year, 75% of S&P 500 stocks closed out the year below their 200 day moving average prices. A substantial majority of stocks were down. The NYSE Composite was off -6.4% and the Russell 2000 sank -5% in 2015. This is a replay of 1999, when the market indices were up strongly, but only because a few tech stocks were still surging, while all around us, the rest of the economy was fraying.

Second, China, the whipping boy for the blame-meisters, has been giving us fits for months. This didn’t start in January, either.

Furthermore, earnings, which actually do count, have been flat for two years, and look to be down to flat again this year.

While we can’t answer the question – why January 4, exactly? – we can say this is the normal progression of a market when values need to adjust downward to account for a variety of uncertainties. Those uncertainties now include: what do crashing oil prices really mean; who will be our next President; when will the Fed stop raising rates; when will earnings start picking up again… It starts with a whomping in some part of the economy where capital misallocation begins to adjust to normalcy – read ‘energy’ – and it proceeds to more benign bystanders – industrials – then it widens to infect everything, including the nine stocks in the S&P 500 that performed well last year.

No one knows how long this will last or how far down stocks will go. It could be over next week, or it could persist for some time. But the whole point is to make stocks cheap enough to tempt buyers again, and someday, that will happen. At some point, even if earnings are not picking up this minute, investors will be tempted by a dividend yield, or by an asset base, or by future earnings.

The very best way to tell when the selling is about to stop is the reaction to news. If a company reports lousy earnings and the stock goes up, we are shifting from ‘bad news is bad and good news is bad’ to ‘good news is good and bad news is good’. When the market is able to overlook today’s bad news, that is a sign it is finally seeing beyond the end of its proverbial nose, into the future, when things will improve.

From our last post, is it risky to buy Exxon at a 52 week low, but after oil prices have fallen 70% and show no signs of recovery?

The answer is: it is a lot less risky than buying the stock at its 52 week high when oil prices are $110 a barrel. It is not risk-less of course, but the lower the price of an asset, the less risky it is to purchase it. For instance, if you were given a gift of Exxon – ie, its price to you was zero – you could not help but make money. You would hardly care where Exxon’s price had been, if you acquired your shares for nothing, which is the ultimate low price.

Investors, however, behave differently. Many investors see stocks that are rising as less risky than stocks that have fallen. This is a behavioral marker of humans: we ‘herd’ together, and if other people like something and bid it up, we feel better joining in.

Another behavior that shows how we feel about risk is reluctance to take losses. Realizing a loss is an admission that you were wrong. But nothing says you have to make back a loss on the same horse that lost for you. Sometimes switching horses is the best move.

Risk mismanagement abounds in the markets; we’ve barely scratched the surface. Yet, the only aspect of your portfolio that you can truly control is its risk. You cannot control return.  Obtaining that return at the lowest possible risk is the Holy Grail.