Finance – Page 34

Book Review: The Outsiders – and outsized returns

The Outsiders: Eight unconventional CEOs and their radically rational blueprint for success – by William Thorndike.

I’ll recommend this book. Although it is becoming somewhat dated (copyright date was 2012), it gives the reader a 50,000 foot above the skies satellite view of some hand-picked CEOs that were able to strongly defeat the GE Jack Welch / S&P 500 record during multi-decade periods. They shared a single characteristic – they were able to allocate capital with discipline and ruthless efficiency. Operationally they were able to delegate to competent individuals and decentralization to the point of abdication was another theme.

If this book was written today and for Canadian CEOs, I would think Mark Leonard of Constellation Software (TSX: CSU) is an obvious candidate. He has delivered 42% compounded annual returns over the past decade, and 38% since going public in May of 2006 – notably still earning this return through the 2008-2009 economic crisis.

Reading (mostly written by) Mark Leonard’s Shareholder Q&A letters is fascinating insight on the company and how management thinks. It is indeed a shame that I never heard of this company until it was far, far too late. Sadly they are looking at future returns in the upper teens from their current size.

I have also taken great pleasure of reading Tyler’s compilation of quotations by TransForce’s (TSX: TFII) CEO Alain Bedard, which is a trucking and logistics company. TFII has performed at 22% compounded annually over the past decade, and about 13% since going public in October 2002 (in both cases dividend-adjusted). For a low margin business such as trucking, this is needless to say impressive.

There is a bit of retrospective bias in this book, however. Most individuals would probably regard Prem Watsa of Fairfax (TSX: FFH) as being a very good CEO, but his dividend-adjusted CAGR over the past decade has been 9%, and over the past 20 years has been 6%. Compare this with CEO Duncan Jackman of E-L Financial (TSX: ELF), which has been approx. 9% over both the past 10 and 20 year period. E-L Financial, in my opinion, is the least attention-seeking publicly traded corporation with a market cap of over a billion dollars.

For the sake of comparison, the TSX’s performance (dividends reinvested) over the past 10 years has been 6.6%. The main index (dividends not reinvested) over the past 17.7 years (which is how far the data goes back when they did a major change to the index) is 4.5% – adding in dividends would be another 3% or so. So a 9% CAGR performance is a slightly overperformance over the TSX, but posting returns into the teens and better is clear outperformance.

Ray Dalio / Paradigm Shifts / Gold

Ray Dalio doesn’t need much description, but his latest post (which can generally be summarized as: the party is changing tone, buy gold) gives one consideration.

Why just gold?

In theory, if dollar devaluation is the name of the game, then I would think that any natural resources that have future demand would be eligible for consideration – especially since most of these companies (thinking fossil fuels) have huge debt loads. The debt becomes cheaper due to the dilution of underlying currency, and the underlying commodity becomes more valuable in nominal terms.

The post would also suggest that the low rate environment will continue and asset prices will continue to be pushed higher (and yields lower) – hence, if cash is trash, leveraging via margin would be opportunistic (one could have made this argument right after the economic crisis as well).

I would also think firms with in-demand fixed infrastructure (e.g. wireless telecoms) will reasonably retain value in such an environment.

Canadian preferred shares – commentary

Early 2016 was a good time to invest in Canadian preferred shares, and there was also a lot of carnage in the equity market at the time. Five-year government bond yields bottomed at 0.48% in February 2016, and you can see the damage it did to the preferred share market – ZPR is an ETF that tracks 5-year rate resets:

What is interesting is a well-timed entry on the bottom (not completely clairvoyant, but say $7.50/unit) and an exit anytime between October 2017 to 2018 would have netted a total return that exceeded the TSX with less risk. Of course, you can’t determine those preferred shares will do better than the TSX when you’re sitting at your computer console in February 2016!

Today’s investing environment has plenty of parallels – the 5-year interest rate has dropped to 135bps from 240bps back in October. If 5-year yields continue to drop further, there is a high degree of likelihood that preferred shares will also be sold down to levels seen in 2016.

The question is getting the timing correct.

A lot of retail investors get burnt by buying into a relatively high yield product thinking it is safe. While the yield itself may be safe (it has been awhile since I can recall a dividend suspension in the Canadian preferred share marketplace beyond Aimia and some really garbage split-share corps), the capital is most certainly at risk. It looks like a very easy leveraged trade on paper when margin rates are 2.5% and you see a financial instrument at 5%, but how much pain can you take when the yield goes to 6%? 7%? You’ve just lost nearly 17% and 29% of your capital, respectively.

Using a real example, investors in Brookfield Preferred Shares series 30 (TSX: BAM.PR.Z) back in September was trading at par, had a near-guarantee 4.7% yield, and a rate reset of 2.96% over the 5-year government bond rate. Some enterprising chap sees margin rates at 2.5% and decides to invest $50,000 cash to buy $100,000 of BAM.PR.Z. Now they’re sitting on $23,000 in equity plus $3,500 in accumulated dividends and they would have surely received a margin call (or would be very close to one). How much of the population out there is leveraged to preferred shares in this manner and are feeling nervous? How many will hit the sell button to take the tax hit and move away from this “guaranteed leveraged return”?

Ideally when they all want to cash out, that’s the time to get in. Doesn’t quite feel time yet.

Inversion of the Canadian yield curve

Canadian government bond yields:

3-month: 1.63%
1-year: 1.68%
2-year: 1.55%
5-year: 1.48%
10-year: 1.59%

This would be one explanation why those 5-year rate reset preferred shares aren’t doing so good price-wise.

The 5-year yield also dropped under 1% between June 2015 to October 2016 – these were not happy times for rate resets.

The most obvious safety mechanism appears to be cash – but is one willing to endure the pain of taking a 2% pre-tax return?

The death of Bitcoin – not so fast!

Bitcoin has been going through a remarkable surge in the past few months:

It looks like a classic short squeeze, but the open interest on the CME futures (4,800 times 5 coins) is not a material portion of trading that occurs on the higher volume exchanges (which is cleverly charted here).

So who the heck is firing a bunch of capital at Bitcoin? Good mystery.

There is no fundamental case to be made for any price of bitcoin at this level (four thousand, eight thousand, twenty thousand…) – its utility ultimately is derived from its participants and right now, it is clearly higher than it was a couple months ago!

When things start getting interesting again will be if it goes above USD$10k again – that should be the price level where it will start getting a lot more mainstream media attention.