RANDOM MUSSINGS (iii)

It seems to me that today everyone is a trend follower.  In 2009, everyone was macro economist. And both without apparent reason. It is clear today that the latter was wrong. At least, so far. I think that majority of the first will be trapped, too. Buffett is talking his book and eternal perspective and obviously he is right, so those who can afford to follow his advise, should definitely do that.  The rest at least has to be hedged.

I liked (let's call it) the battle of John Hussman and the Brooklyn Investor on the profit margins (a few additional dimensions on the subject - link). Frankly, after reading the Brooklyn Investor post I became hesitant, which means it is a must read. John seems like a strong statistician to me but as someone said owls are not what they seem.. Eternal perspective assumes that it is unclear what people will think when profit margins shrink, which is inevitable. In other words, multiple is uncertain. I still tend to lean towards a bias against high margins, which is now happening at the same time with a high multiple.

Graham with 50% in cash (link) is thinking in the same direction but instead of cash my hedge is a more aggressive bet (short of indexes).

A brief and eclectic stock update: INFU looks interesting below $1.40 (for a brief moment). Gazprom below $8.00, too. Gas reserves cannot cost 80x cheaper than at CHK for a long. However, Russian element brings some shiver in me. Umom Rasiju neponiatj (link - loose translation: you can't fathom Russia with mind). I do not have positions in both, yet. Of my holdings, LOJN looks cheap, trading almost at cash.

DELTA UPSET PINNACLE AIRLINES SHAREHOLDERS

It is about the right time to call the finale of the Pinnacle Airlines bankruptcy.

Delta Airlines, an iconic American brand, did not bother with shareholders of its subcontractor and took over a profitable and solvent company. What is interesting it took it over FREE OF CHARGE (yes, it provided financing, blah blah blah, and got hundreds for a few tens of millions).


Evidently, Delta follows a very strong set of guidelines as summarized in the Code of Ethics and Business Conduct:

Fair Dealing. Directors shall oversee fair dealing by employees, officers and directors with the Company's customers, suppliers, competitors and employees. "Fair dealing" means the avoidance of unfair advantage through manipulation, concealment, abuse of privileged information, misrepresentation of material facts, or any other unfair dealing practice. This Code provision will have no effect on existing legal rights and obligations of the Company and its employees, including "at will" employment arrangements.

As a shareholder, I would prefer a liquidation (without a credible attempt it was impossible to extract any shareholder value) and potentially a meaningful recovery of some shareholder money but a "greater good for society" argument in combination with questionable action of a judge (can he read the balance sheet?) and lack of shareholder coordination and financial resources to take the litigation risk negated this opportunity. What is greater good for society, though, a properly functioning and just civilization or preserved jobs in the hands of vulture iconic brands?

As written here: 

If Pinnacle were to liquidate, Delta wouldn’t have many options for regional jet service, putting the bargaining power in the regional airlines’ corner. Without Pinnacle, Delta’s options would be limited to Skywest Inc. and other smaller regional providers.

I forgot to mention the leading role of management, unwilling and incompetent to extract any value in such a strong bargaining situation for those who created them jobs. But they did really well for their new employer.

Here are the heroes: Board of Directors

Donald J. Breeding Chairman

Susan MacGregor Coughlin Director

Ian Massey Director

James E. McGehee Jr. Director

Thomas S. Schreier Director

R. Philip Shannon Director

Alfred T. Spain Director

Nicholas R. Tomassetti Director

John Spanjers Director

What are the lesson here? Anything is possible, anywhere. Even in Russia.

Debt layer of financial structure is much safer and considerably less prone for a binary outcome in similar situations.

INTERESTING FEELINGS

I have been silent for quite a long time. Do not have much to say, just to note that I remain bearish for no particular reason. It is probably nature of contrarian pretenders to think in the opposite direction than the majority.

Downtown Josh (I like his writings a lot) is pounding weekly how the tide is turning and the snowball starts rolling like a train. Even EU ongoing disaster and Chinese real estate bubble correction cannot even bump it. And nothing (known) in sight can change the situation. Josh probably wants to sound balanced and neutral but this how I feel after reading him.

I try to check my temper with John Hussman’s weekly musings. Last Monday, he once again produced the calm for me. Human beings really need to belong somewhere and to rationalize everything. In business cycles though it is crucial to synchronize ones expectations with the real pace of life.

All is not well but it is really painful to remain hedged. This pain gives me the feeling of rightness (check – do I have masochistic inclinations?). It is much much easier to go with the stream, like in March 2009 (meaning not to buy stocks at that time). There is huge assumption in the sky that economy is sustainable, the Fed will be able to stop printing and deficit will shrink; and who cares if this is not true…

Stocks are high and bonds are high. Are people taking profits? Is it smart to do that now? Most think that we will ride further up. Those who are afraid of bonds sell them and buy stocks but somebody is always on the other side of the trade. For some reason, somebody is doing the opposite: buying bond and selling stock. Or people earn money and send them to former owners of bonds and stocks, who hell knows what do with this cash. Really what matters is demand and supply – on both, general market and on the micro individual security level.

I am on the edge of initiating a significant position, 3x my normal position size, approaching 10% of net worth. It is a cable company which probably will enter reorganization and it’s debt now trades at ~2.5x EBITDA. I thought that writing about this will give me some courage, for it may be a long ride without daily quotes. In December, I almost bought it at 45, in two weeks it went up to 65 and now back to 50. YTM is >30% for the next 3 years (10% would be enough for me). What is not to like? Cable is an asset in bear or bull.

It is great to have a blog and confess to ones consciousness and others. Whoever that is.

RANDOM THOUGHTS (THE BROOKLYN INVESTOR | PZENA | APPLE)

I enjoy reading The Brooklyn Investor so much now that I endorse him by adding him to the blogger list on the right.

Pzena’s Deep Value Cycle thing is interesting. All the theory sounds neat until you try imagining yourself in Pzena’s shoes. Some HNWI may be puzzled what kind of woodoo thing one is trying to sell. That’s the difference between what can you come up with being a manager of a few billion and a fistful of dollars.

Such macro and cycle things are useful and it is not about timing the market but knowing in what type of environment you are gyrating. However, this type of discussion reminds me the following misjudgment:

Rationalizing. Tendency to rationalize leads to explain by an apparently rational story: a) whatever action, even irrelevant; b) whatever event, even of unclear origin; c) whatever possible sources of responsibility (external – negatives, self attribution – positives). Everyday media finds good explanations of why market went down or up. Truth is that nobody knows the truth – we can just guess.

Investment management is a tough job if you have to come up with such things. What is more interesting if the whole Apple vs. rest of the world story has taken too far. The Apple part of it is probably right (market cap - $625b) but the ROW is probably too much discounted.

I put it on a napkin (I know I probably left out something important and rounded a bit):

HPQ $33b + DELL $17b + MSFT $250b + NOK $10b + Samsung $55b + GOOG $250b + RIM $5b = $620b < $625b AAPL.

Intel is an important piece of the puzzle and has ~$110b market cap. In the former world 2 monopolies Intel and Microsoft made everyone happy, the entire ecosystem of leaders had an important piece of action/profit. Now this former ecosystem cannot come up with the right business model and Apple with its switching, network, whatever effects took it all almost as a single winner.

I cannot fathom that ROW would not come up with cheaper and very good tablets and phones in the nearest future (Nexus 7 is the first canary) while Apple’s winning gap may start narrowing (note a pace of a difference between iPhone 4 and 5). Sheer size and all the forces preserving status quo at all ROW is slowing the thing down but this will not happen forever. Almost all ROW is swimming in cash. For heavens sake, fire all R&D departments, start anew, reverse engineer, adopt one open, robust and cheap OS and boom, off you go.

By the way, all this rant was somewhat provoked by my research for a hardware upgrade. I want to stay in Windows for spreadsheets / word (xIRR is the most complicated function I use in Excel, track changes in Word, and sometimes I get meticulous on formatting, copy/paste between the programs, things like that), improve my reading experience (iPhone 3 > iPhone 5 and add Nexus 7 with LTE). I am scratching my head if I need 3 devices but really it’s just 2 – I will have an ultra-book on my desk and will be taking Nexus when I go out and iPhone will be serving anywhere/anytime time niche.

I just read what I have written and see how bizarre I sound: Windows, Android, and OS. It’s a complicated world and the battle has not finished, yet.

Disclosure: long DELL, RSH.

OTE BONDS (UPDATE)

3 months of summer have passed quickly. Nothing new really happened in the world except for continuous general worry and unshaken trust in central banks. We are muddling through and may continue this for many years.

Since the last time, OTE bonds were not a bad investment. As a % to par, it grew by ~25% in 3 months but stock almost doubled (in USD terms, note that numbers below are in EUR). Interestingly, the longest maturity bonds increased only 17%.

Maturity	Size, EUR	Coupon	YTM (05/30)	YTM (08/30)	Price of par (05/30)	Price of par (08/30)	Delta
2016/05	900m	4.625%	23.2%	18.9%	55.0%	64.2%	16.7%
2015/02	600m	6.000%	36.3%	23.8%	56.5%	71.5%	26.5%
2014/08	500m	7.250%	41.9%	27.6%	60.5%	76.0%	25.6%
2013/03	1,243m	5.000%	44.0%	22.5%	69.0%	86.6%	25.5%

Back in May my bond money allocation was in a much lower risk 9% return product (EUR deposit at a major Swedish bank) which is maturing soon, consequently, I will have my eyes open in September when supposedly Greek (or even EUR) “solution” will or will not be found. I do not think that odds justify betting a farm on this but a 5-15% position may have its merit.

Just for information purposes…

For convenience: Link to OTE / devaluation and Link to the original note.

Disclosure: no position.

SUSTAINABILITY OF HIGH MARGINS (CHECKLIST)

A significant part of the current bear thesis rests on the shoulders of supposedly "unsustainable profit margins". You have to seek truth in the opposite opinion (my view is that SPY should be around 1,000 rather than where it is at the moment) and I find that arguments in favor of high margins are quite hard to challenge. I decided to make a checklist and revisit it periodically to see if "argument" still sounds realistic. So, is it different this time?

==> US exported lower returning businesses (e.g. manufacturing) to other countries and kept the best pieces locally (pharmaceuticals, tech) (Mason Hawkins of Southeastern Asset Management - Link) = inflation of labor abroad is sending manufacturing jobs back (probably in yet irrelevant quantities);

==> accounting (minority stakes report just profits and no sales) (same source as above) = sounds logical;

==> effective tax rates are lower (probably partially explained by the above points) (David Bianco of Deutsche Bank - Link) = budgets are unbalanced, tax rates may go up, including foreign tax rates;

==> foreign sales and profits are higher (same source as above) = I do not know how he constructed the chart but as I understand, he is saying that the world is different outside of US; it could be simply a function of dollar depreciation;

==> interest rates are lower (same source as above) = this is clearly mean reverting.

This Link dated April 2012 gives a good illustration of how people tend to extrapolate.

I presented my views in the beginning but I want to stress that I am not pretend to anyhow time the market. I am just more cautious these days but an example of PCS shows that the crowd sometimes moves pretty fast in any environment.

I would be grateful for additional points to the checklist.

FOR BEGINNERS (PART IX)

II. c) Psychological Misjudgments (Continued)

You can find List I – Here, List II – Here, and List III - Here. This post concludes psychological misjudgment series.

List IV

It is definitely worth a further digging in Influence by Robert Cialdini (next 6 items are also covered in great detail with practical examples in his book – highly recommended).

1. Reciprocation. According to social rules we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided to us. This is one of the greatest mechanisms of mental shortcut triggering. It is greatly exploited in marketing, especially, in combination with some concession or gift and together with perceptual contrast known as a rejection-then-retreat technique

2. Commitment & Consistency. Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. From the Influence book: “…all of the foot-in-the-door experts seem to be excited about the same thing: You can use small commitments to manipulate a person’s self-image; you can use them to turn citizens into “public servants,” prospects into “customers,” prisoners into “collaborators.” And once you’ve got a man’s self-image where you want it, he should comply naturally with a whole range of your requests that are consistent with this view of himself.” “Lowball” sales tactic is based on this mechanism. Those carefully reading the list will notice traces of loss aversion and other misjudgments.

3. Social Proof. The more uncertain people are – and the higher the stakes involved – the more vulnerable they are to the sort of cue taking that leads to herd behavior. This explains why teenagers are more likely to succumb to a peer pressure. One of ways how to determine what is correct is to find out what other people think about it. Trends and fads begin when individuals decide to ignore their private information and focus instead on the action of others. Do not allow other people to determine the value of things for you.

4. Liking. Research has shown that we automatically assign to good-looking individuals such favorable traits as talent, kindness, honesty, and intelligence. Liking can come via physical attractiveness, similarity, and compliments.

5 Authority. Beware of uniforms, titles, and trappings (expensive watches, jewelry, and cars) and imagine how strong is in combination with clever reciprocity and compliance (restaurant waiters).

6. Scarcity. Obviously, loss aversion plays here the lead role. As a rule, if something is rare or becoming rare, it is more valuable. From Influence: “Whenever free choice is limited or threatened, the need to retain our freedoms makes us desire them (as well as the goods and services associated with them) significantly more than previously.” That is why we have limited editions, deadlines for purchases, queues in front of restaurants, and … stupid parents.