Summer doldrums

I have not been doing much equity research over the last little bit as recreational matters have generally dominated the landscape. One chart I have been curiously watching, however, is the 10-year note yields, which has dipped from its 1.4% minimum:

Which way are the yield winds blowing, up or down?

The Canadian 10-year note equivalents have a similar yield curve and are trading about 15-20 bps above US treasuries in yield. One would think that you could do better than 1.8% over 10 years by taking a little bit of risk…

The decline of Dell

Dell stock is down another 6% today, reaching lows not seen since the economic crisis; before that, you have to trace back to 1997 to match their current share price ($11.57 as of this writing). A “buy and hold” investor from 1997 to today would have seen a 15 year performance of precisely zero in their Dell investment. Fortunately, not many people are 15-year investors in equities these days.

I will post a lifetime chart of Dell:

Dell did mostly nothing in its first year and a half in its public existence, but as the chart depicts, the real meaty part of the growth curve was between 1995 to 2000 when an investor would have multiplied their money by 75 times. Catching this part of a company’s trajectory is the most profitable.

Of course, this is not going to happen now with Dell – the PC cycle is long since done and the company is mature. The question for an investor is – what other types of companies out there are selling products that will become as popular as PCs, and when will they have this type of growth curve? There is one that I have in mind which I have invested in where there is a feasible Dell-like scenario.

Companies in their pre-explosive growth curve typically have smaller market caps (e.g. under a billion). Cases like Apple (where they have already been public for a considerable period of time, having gone through a few product cycles) are relatively unusual.

Filtering Yahoo Finance News

Over the past couple years, the news portion of the Yahoo Finance portal has been increasingly filling with useless computer-generated articles, such as Forbes articles on every stock that is going ex-div, or paying out their dividend:

Is there any way to filter this type of stuff (or anything from Forbes, the Motley Fool and Seeking Alpha)? I’m finding going through my email spam box to be a slightly more productive use of time than sifting through these types of “news” headlines.

Very good abstract financial advice

David Merkel writes an article he titled “The Future Belongs to Those with Patience“, but the summary explanation is about how peoples’ expectations drive asset values. Waiting for when expectations are low and investing will generate superior returns. Easier said than done.

The article he wrote contains very powerful information and is well worth reading in entirety (along with most of what else Merkel writes), but is probably too abstract for those that are not in tune with the marketplace to understand. I believe it was a Warren Buffet quote that said “There are no called strikes in investing”, and using this analogy, it is if you are playing a game of baseball and every (investment) “pitch” equates to every security you end up researching. The only difference is that in a real game of baseball you’re out if you receive three good pitches and don’t swing, while in the investment world you can still wait for that perfect pitch.

Since the third quarter of 2011 I have been averaging at about a 70-90% cash balance. I started deploying this late in the second quarter of 2012, and am currently sitting on around 30% cash. I don’t know of many people that can keep large cash balances for a significant length of time – it is easy to get “itchy” and take a swing at some marginal bets. This is how you lose capital.

Genworth MI Canada update

I am generally skeptical of stocks when they do parabolic-type increases that we have seen over the past two weeks of trading, but the obvious conclusion is that somebody presumably wanted to get their hands on some shares of Genworth MI Canada (TSX: MIC) quickly.

My theory is that whoever decided to do the “dump the shares slowly starting April until they’re gone” sale was gone after the couple high volume days in late July and then it was off to the races once that supply dump was concluded. This is one of those rare moments where I have some technical analysis insight (but alas it is still backward-looking).

What I find rather funny is that I (hopefully) timed the bottom relatively well (my average price is around $18/share) but I still feel quite bad that my entry wasn’t perfect. That is the emotional feel. The cold, hard rational world of mathematics, however, says that it is impossible to pick that exact bottom – you will not be that person picking up shares at $16.72 unless if you are very lucky and getting 100% of what you wanted in your portfolio at that bottom price.

With any luck the stock will get around to book value, which is around $26.30/share when you strip out intangibles. It won’t be a straight line otherwise I will start to really get worried. The dream scenario is if they’ve found somebody to buy out the subsidiary business of Genworth (NYSE: GNW). Heaven forbid if they fetch a premium to book value.

I will warn readers that now that I have a tendency of picking tops and bottoms when writing about upward and downward price spikes, respectively!