Finance – Page 70

Stock screening methodologies and a market omen

Whenever I do equity research, I perform a stock screen for certain metrics, and then I give a superficial scan of the stocks that get spat out of the screener. It takes about a couple minutes per equity for me to determine whether it is worth my time to look further into the company or not – typically I throw out 90-95% of the companies in this process. For the remainder, I queue them up to look more thoroughly using a fairly standard methodology (a basic guide), and then if I continue to like what I see, I do some more depth on the industry in question and competitors, and other research.

Most of the time, when I do this extensive research, the equity is over my accumulation price target. More times than not you can rationalize why the market is giving the company the value it is currently trading at, so I end up setting a price alert if the stock goes under a certain price. An email gets sent to my inbox when this occurs. I then “set it and forget it”, and usually do not keep the stocks on my watch list until the price target is hit.

Once the stock hits the threshold price, I then re-evaluate the position to see if anything has fundamentally changed in my original analysis to justify the drop. The point of this process is to make sure that the news the market is pricing in is not fundamentally damaging to the business. Once this is done, then I can set some buy limit orders and then accumulate.

The whole point of this post is that there are typically dry spells when nothing reaches the price target. Then there are times where everything you set a limit for has the price target alert hit your inbox. Today was notable in that a couple stocks are now below my alert price – perhaps an omen?

Playing the risk aversion card

I have deployed a good chunk of the idle cash balances (presently earning 2%) into slightly higher-yielding debentures which should mature within a 1-year time frame with little risk – the underlying companies have cash and/or liquidity to pay off the debt without too much difficulty and could withstand a 2008-style financial crisis. The transaction can also presumably be reversed without too much difficulty in case if I need to deploy the capital into a more efficient area.

Researching the public markets is like trying to find those proverbial needles in the haystack – each hour you pour into the haystack increases your chances of finding needles, but in no way are you ever guaranteed to finding them. Also, the way you sort through the hay might be more or less efficient than other haystack sorters, but your own output is proportional to the amount of time you put into the effort.

The markets also give you some hints on how many needles are in the haystack – right now everything appears to be “stable” and there are no world crises occurring of any significance, hence, the broader markets are likely to be closer to efficient pricing than when things were really rocking a couple years ago. I would suspect the number of needles (at least the ones made out of platinum) to be found are few. There are likely to be more silver needles and a lot of lead!

I have not had a lot of time over the past few weeks to efficiently sort through hay, hence, I have been a bit inactive and parking my portfolio into a very risk-averse position. The easiest way to lose capital is to force trades through without some sort of justification why you are getting sale prices on what you are buying. Companies like Hewlett Packard (NYSE: HPQ) appear to be on sale, but I typically shy away from companies with such huge capitalizations, but you never know what you might get.

Why consistent high returns are impossible without leverage

On the right-hand side of my bookmarks, I posted a 5-year performance of about 22% compounded annually. This is a high number, and as the years tack on, this will likely become lower. 2011 is going to likely be a low single digit percentage year.

The mean value theorem in mathematics can explain why such a level of return is not likely to continue. Let’s pretend that every company I put my money in will have a 15% earnings yield (either retained or given out in dividends; it does not matter). In the long run, my portfolio will be able to increase 15% a year. However, in order to achieve a 22% return, I must invest in something that has a greater than 22% return.

If I cannot find those investment candidates, then in order to achieve 22% on a 15% investment base, I need to borrow money at a rate less than 15% and put it into that 15% investment.

The risk of this is that my capital might “blow up” and I will be forced to liquidate my assets at precisely the wrong moment. Another way of thinking about this is that I want to be investing at precisely the moment that everybody else is forced to liquidate, rather than an arbitrary point in time such as now.

Unfortunately at present I am having grave difficulty identifying candidates that will give these types of returns. I also do not feel comfortable with employing leverage, so I will continue to twiddle my thumbs and wait for a better opportunity. I also do not think ploughing into commodities is any sort of “fix” to this problem – there are much better lower-variation equities out there that will give you a more stable return on investment and also be able to provide inflation-adjusted returns over the long run. Even though it is abundantly clear that commodities such as inexpensive-to-mine oil is rapidly depleting, it is still no reason why the price of such commodities at some point will not go to marginal cost of extraction, or even lower (e.g. natural gas). Commodity markets are cyclical and investors should never assume that the trend will be continuously straight-line up. There will be brutal price corrections in the interim – they are just very difficult to predict.

Back to normal volatility

Curiously, the VIX, after spiking in the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake, and the onset of the military action in Libya, went to a peak of about 30, has slid back down to about 20:

Most people make the mistake of thinking that the VIX is predictive – it is not. It does anti-correlate with the S&P 500, however.

The real question that investors should be asking themselves is that was this just a single ripple in the market pond, or is this a good time to be loading up on index put options while the volatility is still cheap?

Notably, the April VIX futures closed at 21.50 today; going further out, July closed at 23.10. These products are not easy to trade profitably unless if you have a sharp computer model working in your favour.

Group Contrarianism and Japan

My very quick judgment is that “buy Japan” has been contrarian mantra issued to so many people that it now is conventional wisdom.

There is always opportunity to invest in companies that are in the middle of massive public scandals (e.g. BP), but whether such opportunities become a good value is whether people massively misjudge expectations.

In the case of BP, it was a political execution that translated into a disproportionate hit on the share price. In the case of “Japan”, it is very difficult to make the same judgment.

Hence, I’m keeping my eyeballs elsewhere.