Guerrilla Approaches to Finding and Evaluating Stocks
Marc H. Gerstein mgerstein@yahoo.com Portfolio123.com AAII/Better Investing, Washington DC – 4/18/2015
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Guerrilla Approaches to Finding and Evaluating Stocks Marc H. - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
Guerrilla Approaches to Finding and Evaluating Stocks Marc H. Gerstein mgerstein@yahoo.com Portfolio123.com AAII/Better Investing, Washington DC 4/18/2015 1 Marc H. Gerstein spent his career analyzing stocks, educating investors, and
Marc H. Gerstein mgerstein@yahoo.com Portfolio123.com AAII/Better Investing, Washington DC – 4/18/2015
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Marc H. Gerstein spent his career analyzing stocks, educating investors, and helping to develop stock screening platforms at Value Line and various web
Low-Priced Stock Report. His commentary can be found on SeekingAlpha.com, Forbes.com and Harvest (hvst.com). He has authored three books, Screening the Market (Wiley, 2002), The Value Connection (Wiley 2003), Atlas Upgrades: Objectivism 2.0 (Create Space, 2013). He is presently working on a novel with a Wall Street setting, and a book with Stanford’s Dr. Charles Lee based on the latter’s course in “Alphanomics.”
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If there’s a teeny-bit too much seasoning, live with it!
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On a circa 1990s conference call, Wall Street analyst were taking the Burlington Coat Factory CFO to task, and rather harshly, for disappointing sales numbers The CFO was having trouble articulating a reason that was considered satisfactory by the analysts
CEO Monroe Milstein, who typically said little during these calls, broke in: “Gentlemen,” he said. “I’ve been in this business for many years. We have good months and we have bad months. This was a bad month.”
Prolonged silence The analysts were rendered speechless The call then proceeded to an uneventful conclusion
Milstein cashed in huge when the company was sold to Bain Capital in 2006 for $2.06 billion
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Subsequent events reveal that the supposedly great company was more human than they had realized, and/or The price they paid for the great-company shares turned out to be fart less of a bargain than they had originally supposed
The shares can benefit as the companies improve (i.e. from horrendous up to mundane) The shares tend to be cheaper
It can be great to buy a company with 25 units of Pathetic if the stock is priced as if the company had 40 units of Pathetic
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“[T]he habits of perfected Self-Mastery and Courage are spoiled by the excess and defect, but by the mean state are preserved.” “At all events thus much is plain, that the mean state is in all things praiseworthy, and that practically we must deflect sometimes towards excess sometimes towards defect, because this will be the easiest method of hitting on the mean, that is, on what is right.”
From Nicomachean Ethics, Book II (D.P. Chase Translation)
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Holding a cup and overfilling it – Cannot be as good as stopping short – Pounding a blade and sharpening it — Cannot be kept for long Gold and jade fill up the room – No one is able to protect them – Wealth and position bring arrogance – And leave disasters upon oneself When achievement is completed, fame is attained – Withdraw
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Ch. 9 (Derek Lin Translation)
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Virtue The Mean Withholding Stopping Short
Mean Reversion Corrections Overbought and Oversold Business Cycles Economic Excesses Supply and Demand (market forces correct excesses and deficiencies in pricing and units) Company Transition (as growth companies mature) The overpowering of economic moats
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Don’t obsess over finding perfection
What looks to some “gurus” like a fat pitch is more likely a slow-moving knuckle ball that breaks erratically and flutters frustratingly past your frantic swing
Don’t be judgmental
Accept normal warts
Recognize that extremes are not sustainable
Embrace the ordinary, or worse
Embrace the ordinary
Recognize and even embrace our inability to know the future
Diversify, diversify an diversify
Focused portfolios (most money in a few best ideas) are nonsense. They presume too much about our ability to know the future, and if we could know the future, there’d be no reason not to put 1200% of assets into one’s single favorite idea
Accept that it’s better to be “vaguely right than precisely wrong”
British Philosopher-Logician Carveth Read
Don’t fret about being wrong, just try to be less wrong than others
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You’ll see as we go along that it’s not about precise formulas It’s about broad ideas regarding what to look for A very important theme will emphasize the “generalist” idea rather than the “specialist”
i.e., a stock that is decent in a lot of respects (and may or may not be excellent in some and/or dreadful in others); as opposed to a stock that seems excellent under a particular formulation You can apply this approach whether or not you use screeners, etc.
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And we’ll be open to inadequate, or bad, if we can get indications of improvement
specialists
Example: Prefer company A (score of 70 of better under, perhaps 8 out of 10 factors and no factor worse than 50) over company B (scores of 90+ in two factors and below 30 in all others)
Data oddities are ubiquitous and unavoidable, so we’ll use “factor diversification” to diminish the impact of oddball items, such as:
divestiture
Even if you’re a committed value investor, would it pain you to take a big profit by selling to an algorithmic day trader?
attractive to the latter?
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Portfolio123
Unlike a screen, which seeks a small number of companies that pass all of a set of yes/no filters, ranking systems assign best-to-worst scores to all companies A multifactor ranking system is one based on more than one factor, as
Other well-known ranking systems: Investors’ Business Daily (Stock Checkup), Value Line, Morningstar, Schwab, MSN, The Street.com, etc.
checklist based on these factors
Don’t get too precise Sample score for each item
Choose a scoring system that will
See next slide for sample spreadsheet
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Trailing 12 Month (TTM) Operating Margin (75% - higher is better) 5 yr. average Operating Margin (25% - higher is better)
TTM Asset Turnover (100% - higher is better)
TTM Return on Investment (30% - higher is better) 5 yr. average Return on Investment (40% - higher is better) TTM Return on Equity (10% - higher is better) 5 yr. average Return on Equity (20% - higher is better)
Latest Current Ratio (30% - higher is better) TTM Interest Coverage (45% - higher is better) Latest Total Debt to Capital (25% - higher is better)
PE based on Trailing 12 months EPS (33.33%) PE based on consensus estimate of Current Yr. EPS (33.33%) PEG ratio with G based on estimate of long-term growth rate (33.33%)
Price/Trailing 12 month Sales (50%) Price/Trailing 12 month Free Cash Flow (50%)
Price/Book (100%)
Basic Growth (50%)
YTY growth in latest quarter (higher is better – 33%) Trailing 12 Month (TTM) growth (higher is better – 33%) 5 year growth rate (higher is better – 33%)
Acceleration in Growth (50%)
Latest qtr. growth compared to TTM (higher is better – 50%) TTM growth compared to 5-year growth TTM (higher is better – 50%)
Basic Growth (75%)
YTY growth in latest quarter (higher is better – 33%) Trailing 12 Month (TTM) growth (higher is better – 33%) 5 year growth rate (higher is better – 33%)
Acceleration in Growth (25%)
Latest qtr. growth compared to TTM (higher is better – 50%) TTM growth compared to 5-year growth TTM (higher is better – 50%)
* Volume in up days in defined period divided by volume in down days
% 4 Week Change in Consensus Current Yr. EPS Est. (higher is better - 33.33%) % 4 Week Change in Consensus Current Qtr. EPS Est. (higher is better - 33.33%) Standard Deviation of Current Qtr. EPS estimates/absolute value of consensus estimate (lower is better - 33.33%)
Surprise % most recent quarter (higher is better - 65%) Surprise % second most recent quarter (lower is better - 35%)
4-week change in consensus recommendation (more bullish is better - 75%) Current consensus recommendation (more bullish is better - 25%)
Street
but are instead creating strategies that can be narrowed to the point of selecting manageable (approx. 15 stocks) portfolios
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Consistent with what we saw above regarding the importance of value
complete strategy
It’s about not just value per se; it’s about value thoughtfully applied
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consideration
suggesting a definite need for more work):
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There is something to estimate revision, as theoretically weak as it seems
Think about this later, when we discuss “noise” as distinct from “value”
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Not clear the difference is especially significant
More consistent performance over longer periods of time
The key is to do what successful sales people do; prospect from “pre-qualified” lists (as opposed to, say, the white pages) Screens are a great way to create pre-qualified lists
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Company in top 25%
Company in top 50%
Company in top 25%
Company in top 50%
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Fine for some, but not my cup of tea
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The original rule caused the portfolio to tilt heavily toward Financial; stocks, which normally carry relatively low PEs
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=((D14*$F$3)+(E14*$F$4)+(F14*$F$5))*C14
=IF(F14+E14+D14<>1,"***ERROR - Place 1 in just one, column)","")
=SUM(G14:G29)
M14 =D14*C14*$F$3 N14 =E14*C14*$F$4 O14 =F14*C14*$F$5
M30 =SUM(M14:M29)
D30 =M30/$G$9
G30 =SUM(D30:F30) D31 =IF(ABS(E30)>0.65,"Company is a generalist","Company is a specialsit")
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Investors buy stocks they believe will deliver good returns
[T]he professional investor is forced to concern himself with the anticipation of impending changes, in the news or in the atmosphere, of the kind by which experience shows that the mass psychology of the market is most influenced . . . . The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelop our future. The actual, private object of the most skilled investment to-day is “to beat the gun”, as the Americans so well express it, to outwit the crowd, and to pass the bad, or depreciating, half-crown to the other fellow.
John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Signalman Publishing, 2010 Kindle Ed.), p. 101, Emphasis supplied.
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If all traders did only what’s “right,” no trading could ever take place since one party would have to be willing to make a mistake. But . . . “Noise trading provides the essential missing ingredient . . . . With a lot of noise traders in the market, it now pays for those with information to trade. It even pays for people to seek out costly information which they will then trade on.”
Finance Association, New York, New York, December 20-30, 1985, Journal of Finance, Vol. 41, Issue 3 (July 1986), p. 529-543 at 531 )
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Make decisions based on information relevant to valuation subject only to wealth constraints
Everyone else; i.e., those who do “not respond to expected returns as optimally forecasted”
They often over-react to news and follow fads since they “have no model or at best a very incomplete model of the behavior of stock prices . . . .”
Robert J. Shiller, Stock Prices and Social Dynamics Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Vol. 2 (1984) p. 477
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Pt = Demand for all shares in the market at time t Qt = Demand for shares by Smart Money at time t Yt = Demand for shares by Ordinary Investors at time t
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This is the main item!
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This is just a theoretical framework. We’re not going to try to plug in any numbers.
Nothing new here; we know all about this
This is new
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Courtesy of Prof. Charles M.C. Lee, Stanford
It simply refers to a truly rational approach to valuation, which includes sensible fundamental analysis that helps knowledgeable investors derive inputs to valuation models The key is that these investors trade with their head, not their hearts or guts
These investor can’t or don’t apply rational valuation concepts They trade with their emotions or guts, not their heads
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In this case, we approach a truly efficient market, where the price of a stock is equal to what it’s really worth
We see this all the time
In some global markets, where information is largely unavailable and/or unreliable, the markets are very much or, in some cases entirely noise based Smaller segments of the U.S. market, where analytic coverage tends to be skimpier, we tend to see less efficient pricing
decline), the role of valuation increases
Domestically, the S&P 500 stocks, for which information is most readily available, prices tend to be more efficient than in other parts of the market as value plays a bigger role The nature of the business is another aspect
As it becomes more feasible to value stocks, value traders become more prominent and noise trading diminishes As conventional valuation becomes more difficult, noise investors find happier hunting ground
See, e.g., Tesla, Amazon, many start-ups, many boiotechs
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It cannot be dismissed as an unfortunate circumstance We cannot sit back and sneer or hope it will be conquered by investor education We CAN factor it into our approaches to stock finding and analysis P = V + N, or Price = Value + Noise
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This is a very conservative bond-like valuation which assumes the income component never rises We might call it a “stand-still valuation”
MC = VPO + FGV
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Where
NOPAT = Net Operating Profit After Tax CC = Cost of Capital
For this purpose, Operating Profit = EBIT We see many abnormal tax rates in the real world
You can simply eliminate such stocks, or just assume all tax rates are normal; i.e. NOPAT = Oper Prof * .65
For our purposes, it’s OK to just pick a simple heuristic assumption, like .07
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V% is the percent of a stock’s market cap attributable to Value N% is the percent of a stock’s market cap attributable to Noise
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Recall that
OperProf, for this purpose, is the same as EBIT 0.65 is a simplistic across-the-board assumption for 1-TaxRate 0.07 is a shorthand heuristic assumption for cost of capital
valuation”
Where
RG = realistic growth expectations NG = noise-based growth expectations PN = pure noise
We’ll live with that
Value gurus often talk about a margin of safety; here it is
Unlike with DDM, DCF, etc. etc. etc., we’re not going to pretend to be more precise than we can actually be Our estimate of Noise is likely to be a bit overstated, but as long as we understand that and refrain from getting carried away with specifics, we can live with this, and even use it for screening and analysis
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Many near- and intermediate-term stock price are likely to be noise driven
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P = Stock Price D = Dividend k = required rate of return g = expected dividend growth rate
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I know I talked about being vaguely right or being less wrong than other, but there have to be limits to everything
There’s a difference between being imprecise or less wrong, versus being just-plain whacky
Making as smaller number of predictions as possible, and Trying to have as many of those predictions be of items that are less unpredictable
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Residual income formula is analogous to basic net income, which is equity multiplied by return on equity What we’re doing here is considering only that portion of equity that is above cost of equity; bona fide enhancements to shareholder wealth
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