Sustainable Growth Rate = Return on Equity X Retention Ratio

Tips, Tricks, & Techniques

SustainableGrowth Rate.

You may forecast an earnings growth rate for the future.

There are a number of guidelines for this forecast.

One is called the Sustainable Growth Rate.

Sustainable growth rate is that rate at which the company can continue to grow, without having to borrow money or without having to issue new common stock.

This rate is a function of both Return on Equity [ROE] and the dividend payout ratio.

ROE is a measure of how well management is using stockholders money to build the company.

It compares the gains in EPS to gains in book value per share.

Dividend payout ratio is that percentage of profits paid out to stockholders. Keep in mind that every dollar paid out in dividends is one dollar less to grow the company with.

Formula: Sustainable Growth Rate = ROE * [1 - dividend payout ratio]


Example:

Company’s ROE is 20%.

Dividend payout ratio is 10%.

What is the Sustainable Growth Rate?

0.20 * [1.0 — 0.10] = 0.20 * 0.90 = 0.18 = 18%

Good guideline to determine forecast EPS: Keep forecast EPS estimate lower than Sustainable Growth Rate.

The ROE value used is the average for the last 5 years where ROE is calculated as the EPS for the given year divided by the prior year’s Book Value per Share.

The rational for calculating ROE in this manner is that this year’s EPS is the result of last year’s Book Value.


Addendum to Sustainable Growth Rate comments by Ellis Traub 

As happens so often, we can get carried away with the formulae and the numbers and lose sight of the concepts.

A company begins the year with $100 million in equity.

And, during the course of that year, it earns $15 million for a return on that equity of 15 percent.

If it retains all of what it earned, the equity will have grown 15 percent.

And, since the company was able to make 15 percent on its equity, those retained earnings should also be able to earn 15 percent in the next year.

Similar to compounding, this shows that the sustainable growth, just the growth produced by those retained earnings, be 15 percent.

Companies aren't restricted from growth above that rate. They use a variety of resources to increase or perpetuate a higher rate.

They include leverage (using other people's money) to acquire the assets that generate more revenue, or they sell more shares.

While those shares might dilute the EPS, they were sold not given away, so they do add to the equity of the company.

Acquiring productive assets, acquiring operating companies, etc. are only a few of the things that managements, or directors, commonly do to exceed the sustainable growth rate.

So, of what interest is it to us?

 It's just a simple metric that tells us that, without doing these other things, the company can still grow at that rate. 

The only thing that might keep the ROE, sustainable growth, and earnings growth from being the same is the prospect of not using all of those earnings to produce more but, instead, to pay out some of those earnings in dividends. 

This, of course, would reduce the amount of money that is available to earn more; and it will, therefore, cut down the sustainable or implied growth rate. 

Otherwise, if dividends are not paid, the ROE and earnings growth rate will be the same, as will Implied growth.

If earnings growth falls, so will the ROE.

This formula (Implied growth = ROE * RR) [RR=Retention ratio, the percent of earnings NOT distributed to shareholders] will not work if you use ending or average equity.



http://naicspace.org/pdf/sustainablegrowthrate.pdf


STOCK FUNDAMENTALS By Ellis Traub USING ROE TO ANALYZE STOCKS: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT
http://www.aaii.com/journal/article/using-roe-to-analyze-stocks-what-you-need-to-know-about

Staying Rational in a Falling Market, using rational price or rational value approach

Read the Market's Long-Term Performance

By Ellis Traub | September 16, 2008

Those "buy-and-watch" physician-investors have experienced one of the most unsettling periods in their investment lives. They've seen the value of investments soar to heights that would have cast a shadow on Icarus, and then plummet to depths that few of us have ever seen. These extraordinary bubbles and busts have tested the faith that many have in fundamental investment principles and likely caused some to abandon their discipline. Many who stayed the course are still questioning whether they should have been able to tell when the market was going to take its dive.

KEEP PERSPECTIVE

Of course, the best way to keep your mind at ease through times like these is perspective. Those who are thoroughly grounded in long-term thinking know that these kinds of events are transient and will eventually work out. Patience and vigilance are the only attributes an investor needs to get through them. A new approach is found in rational price or rational value, which pertains to a portfolio whose stocks have been priced at their rational prices.

There's no question that the most recent bubble was the product of what Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan termed "irrational exuberance."We now know that in the course of a year, the price of a stock can go up or down, departing as much as 50% from the average price. The distortion that applies to the price is also applicable to the price/earnings (P/E) ratio, which is a function of the price. Viewing the P/E ratio as merely a rate you pay for a dollar's worth of earnings makes perfect sense.

During the course of a 5-year cycle, the market's P/E ratio will typically make even greater departures from the norm. And several times during a century, excursions from the average can be extreme and either delightful or painful.

The significant thing for physician-investors to remember is this: If the price is truly driven by earnings in the long term, and successful methodology says that it is, then deviations in the P/E ratio, the "rate," must be caused by something other than earnings. If it weren't, the price and P/E ratio would always march in absolute lock step with the most recently reported earnings per share.

KNOW THE HUMAN FACTOR

What is that mysterious force that causes the price and P/E ratio to vary up and down, sometimes by huge amounts? It's nothing more than the collective perception or opinion about the effect that the daily host of media reports, stories, current events, earnings forecasts, speculation, etc, will have on the economy, the market, an industry, or a company. It's fear, greed, paranoia, and euphoria that uninformed or over-informed speculators act on. These change every minute; reported earnings do not.

How, then, should you compensate for these fleeting, disconcerting, and often misleading trends? We recognize that the daily, short-term fluctuations in the P/E ratio are not important when compared to earnings over the long term. This allows us to calculate a rational price for each of our stocks and a rational value for our holdings.

Simply stated, the rational price tells what the price of our stock would be if the public's decisions to buy or sell were governed by earnings and not by all the unpredictable factors. In effect, the rational price answers the question, "If the public really had it together, what would they be paying for my stocks?"

To calculate a price, use the "signature P/E ratio" and earning per share. The simplest way to do this is to multiply a company's 10-year average P/E ratio by the most recent trailing 12 months' earnings. Once you've calculated your rational prices, you can analyze your portfolio and calculate its rational value (ie, the sum of the products of the number of shares and their rational prices).

The benefit to be derived from this exercise is significant. It puts whatever irrationality Mr. Market might be currently laboring under into perspective and gives you a view of just how irrational he is at any time. It's a way to quantify just how right you are compared to the rest of the world, which goes a long way toward providing comfort when times are bad, and tempering euphoria when they're good. And, if nothing else, it may be just the encouragement a physician-investor needs to stay the course. That may be the best medicine of all.

Ellis Traub, author of Take Stock: A Roadmap to Profiting from Your First Walk Down Wall Street (Dearborn; 2000), is chairman of the Inve$tWare Corp (www.investware.com), manufacturers of stock analysis software. He welcomes questions or comments at 954-723-9910, ext 222, or etraub@investware.com.

- See more at: http://www.hcplive.com/publications/pmd/2003/53/2654#sthash.4g85ciyZ.dpuf

What is Portfolio Management anyway?

When to Sell: A Workshop with Ellis Traub

Session 1

What is Portfolio Management anyway?

Around the end of last year, a few of us were asked to contribute a list of five stocks we thought would be good investments and to comment on the reasons we thought they would be. I did so but, unfortunately, I got so wrapped up in other things that I forgot all about them. So I’m in the embarrassing position of having to lead this discussion off with the admonition, “Do as I say and not as I do!”

In any event, the best I can hope for is a) you’ll accept this as an example of why you should pay attention to what’s ahead, and b) I’ll be able to demonstrate in the months ahead how you can greet such a challenge and turn things around. That disclaimer out of the way, let’s get at it.

Although most of the fun of investing surrounds the acquisition of your stocks, the fact is that buying them is only a half of what investing’s all about. The other half—for a variety of reasons we’ll discuss in a moment—is considered by most of us as being pretty much of a drag! Yet, there’s as much or more potential benefit is to be derived from managing your portfolio as from buying the right stocks in the first place.

What I intend to do in the next few days is to address all the reasons why we don’t do it very well—if we do it at all—and to expose those reasons for what they are: insufficient excuses. In the next five lessons, I hope to make it clear that we no longer have a leg to stand on for not doing what we need to do; and, with any luck at all, I might even persuade you it can be fully as much fun as the stuff we do to select our companies for investment.

You know, just the term, “Portfolio Management,” is pretentious …almost intimidating. It suggests that we have to put in hours of dedicated and tedious work, and it suggests that it’s much more complicated than it really is. So let’s set the record straight here by first understanding what Portfolio Management really is; and start that process by explaining what it’s not.

Portfolio Management is definitely not Portfolio Tracking. If you think that regularly looking at our portfolios to see how the prices are doing, and whether or not they’re making money, is managing our portfolios, fuggedaboudit! Portfolio tracking, at best, is merely checking to see how good or poor a job of managing our portfolios we’re doing. It has nothing to do with the actual task of managing our holdings. In fact, as you’ll see down the road in this workshop, portfolio tracking can be one of the more insidious things that can work against sound portfolio management.

No, Portfolio Management is a pro-active activity that requires a certain amount of discipline and dedication. Its purpose is simply to catch our losers before they damage our portfolios’ performances, and to maintain our average estimated return at as close to 15 percent as possible so we can meet our objective or doubling our money every five years.

When an issue seems complicated, what’s the easiest way to cut it down to size? It’s to break it down into its smallest parts. In this case, that’s easy! Once we own a stock or stocks, there are only two things we can possibly do with them: either hold onto them or sell them.

Since we already hold them, we are left with only one decision to make; and that is simply when to sell them. So Portfolio Management is nothing more than making that determination: when to sell them. That’s all there is to it!

More than “when,” why we would sell them is the important issue. As long-term investors, the most important thing that distinguishes us from “the herd”—those who trade or try to make money in the market in the short term—is the definition of “long-term.” We buy stocks not to hold until they reach a target price, not for a month, not even for five years. We buy them to hold forever! …unless—and here is where I can go another step further in making it simpler for you—unless one of three, and only three, conditions come to pass:

1. We want or need the money,
2. The Quality deteriorates (Defensive strategy: SSG Sections 1 & 
3. The potential Return deteriorates (Offensive strategy: SSG Sections 3 – 5)

Indeed, these are the only three conditions that would warrant your selling a stock.

So, “When to sell” (Portfolio Management) means watching our holdings to see whether any of them meet conditions 2 or 3 in hopes that we can hold onto them until such time as we reach condition 1.

During the next five days, we’re going to discuss 1) all the excuses we have heard for not doing the job; 2) why you can no longer use them for excuses; 3) the basics of defensive portfolio management, 4) the basics of offensive portfolio management, and 5) the tools we have at our disposal to make the task even simpler.

http://www.stockcentral.com/tabid/143/forumid/289/postid/3523/view/topic/Default.aspx

The PE: On its way out? For the Intelligent Investor, the PE emerges as the perfect tool to evaluate the degree of disconnect between the herd and reality.

August 31st, 2010

The Wall Street Journal strikes again! This time it’s an article entitled “The Decline of the PE Ratio.” And once again, it was too hard to pass up as a topic for this blog.

The first sentence alleges that the PE ratio “is shrinking in size and importance.” And it points out that, in spite of the fact that U.S. companies announced record profits during the second quarter—beating forecasts by more than 10%—the market dropped 5% this month.

It goes on to connect the dots, making the point that “the market’s average price/earnings ratio…is in free fall, having plunged about 36% during the past year,” and claiming that, because PEs have declined while earnings have risen, that the PE ratio may no longer be a reasonable metric by which to value the market. They’re absolutely right…if the market is what you invest in!

I submit that this article simply puts the cart before the horse and lets the tail wag the dog! (How’s that for mixing a barnyard full of metaphors!)

If the exercise is to analyze the market for the purpose of forecasting where it’s going next—a waste of time for my money, but a preoccupation of the herd—then they’re right in saying the PE has little importance. It never really did! Technical analysis, the tool of the market analyst, never could be  bothered with earnings, or the other fundamentals.  The market is driven by anything but company performance, as the article correctly point out.

However, for the intelligent investor who has only a passing interest in the meanderings of the market, the PE emerges as the perfect tool to evaluate the degree of disconnect between the herd and reality. The lower the PE, especially in the face of growing corporate earnings, the more obvious it becomes that the herd doesn’t understand the nature of investing, and the wider the abyss between the herd and those who understand what investing really is.

And the easier it is to find bargains out there.

To understand the real value of the Price/Earnings ratio, read What’s a PE, and What’s it to Me?

http://www.financialiteracy.us/wordpress/2010/08/31/the-pe-on-its-way-out/#more-2331





Wall Street Journal

The Decline of the P/E Ratio

BY BEN LEVISOHN

As investors fixate on the global forces whipsawing the markets, one fundamental measure of stock-market value, the price/earnings ratio, is shrinking in size and importance.

And the diminution might not stop for a while.

The P/E ratio, thrust into prominence during the 1930s by value investors Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, measures the amount of money investors are paying for a company's earnings. Typically, companies that post strong earnings growth enjoy richer stock prices and fatter P/E ratios than those that don't.

But while U.S. companies announced record profits during the second quarter, and beat forecasts by a comfortable 10% ....

Better Investing Philosophy

Fundamentals of Investing

 

Explaining the BetterInvesting Philosophy

 

Our February issue traditionally includes an invitation for you to bring a visitor to your investment club meeting so that they can discover how clubs can help them build wealth and can learn about BetterInvesting’s philosophy. Two years ago we published an article explaining our approach to investing that proved popular with readers. This month we’ll tackle the subject again. If you’re bringing a guest to a meeting or want to introduce someone to the BetterInvesting approach, you might consider giving them this issue.

Brad Perry, in his classic book Winning the Investment Marathon, wrote that investing “is pursued most successfully in a simple, straightforward way.” This is the Golden Rule for most investors who employ fundamental analysis and have a long-term perspective. Buy stocks of high-quality companies at good prices and continue holding them as long as the companies’ performance merits doing so.

Sales drives earnings; earnings drives the stock price. That’s what it comes down to for fundamental investors. You might hear of different ways to buy and sell stocks, and countless books have touted systems that promise great returns. But over the long term fundamental analysis is what works in building wealth.
   
Fundamental analysis comes down to studying a company’s financial performance. Broadly, there are those who look for growth stocks and those who look for value equities, but the line between value and growth investing is gray: As Warren Buffett says, value and growth “are joined at the hip.”
   
Value investing, as practiced by Buffett and his mentor Benjamin Graham, is a time-tested method involving fundamental analysis that has served many investors well. But for the typical person who has a job and family and who is managing his own portfolio while following Perry’s admonition to keep it simple, fundamental analysis focused on growth stocks might be more appropriate.
   
This is because individual investors can spot a good growth company quickly. BetterInvesting’s Stock Selection Guide arranges the fundamental data in a way that allows users to see a company’s growth and management performance as well as the stock’s investment possibilities in just a few minutes; see the Stock to Study SSG on pages 29 and 30 for an example. Meanwhile, the work required to spot a good value stock is a little more complex. But as we’ll discuss later, value should be a vital consideration as well.

The Three Most Important Ideas:
Management, Management, Management
The individual investors who belong to BetterInvesting ask two questions when studying a stock:

•  Is this a well-managed company?
•  Is its stock reasonably priced?
   
We seek great management because talented, capable executives know how to ensure their company thrives over the long term amid competitive battles and periodic downturns. These are the people, in other words, who are responsible for driving the sales and growth increases that fuel stock prices.
   
In assessing management, we don’t know everything about a company’s day-to-day operations and boardroom discussions. But as laid out in a methodology promoted by association co-founder George Nicholson, we do have a lot of the information we need. A first step in finding a well-managed company is to look at the history of sales and earnings growth. An important indicator of strong management is its ability to grow the business in good times and bad.
   
We also seek companies that are growing sales and earnings over the long term at a rate that’s high relative to their size. Smaller companies generally should be growing earnings by at least 15 percent a year; mid-size companies, by 10 percent to 15 percent a year; and large companies, by at least 7 percent annually.
   
We want smaller companies to have higher growth rates partly because they generally are riskier investments than large companies. The higher growth rate compensates us for this additional risk, and if we do a good job of assessing these companies, we’ll see handsome returns. As you’ll see in this issue in “Repair Shop” and “Watch List,” finding small companies can be challenging but also quite rewarding.
   
Finally, we favor consistent growth over the long term. In the graph on this page, for example, note the railroad-track-like growth of the company’s sales and earnings. Consistent performance reassures us about the capability of management. And although the past is no guarantee of future performance (as they say in the mutual fund world), history informs our decisions regarding future growth.
   
Two other tests help us assess the company’s management. First, we check the company’s profitability before taxes and other charges outside of management’s control. We like to see stable or growing profit margins. The other ratio is return on equity — how well management is using the equity invested in the company. Again, stable or growing ROE is preferred. Comparing the company’s growth rates, profitability and ROE with those of its peers helps determine whether this is a company built for a long voyage or is simply benefiting from the rising tide for its industry.



Evaluating the Investment Potential

Once we’ve determined the company in question is likely a high-quality one worth studying further, we next project sales and earnings growth. As fundamental investors, we know that in the short term, the market may not reward the company for its excellence. But over the long term, we trust that it will. So it’s the long-term projections — five years, very roughly enough for the company to go through a business cycle — we care about.
   
We start by forecasting sales growth because we need this for building our earnings projection. With the caveat that making long-term predictions can be a humbling experience, we have a number of data points at our disposal, including:

•  The company’s historical growth rate.
•  Company statements regarding growth goals.
•  Wall Street estimates of both short- and long-term growth. Long-term sales growth estimates can be difficult to find but are sometimes buried in analyst reports.
•  The industry’s historical growth rate and estimates of future expansion.
   
More experienced investors might consider such factors as the percentage of recurring revenues, the value of projects under contract but not yet completed and historical organic growth and growth by acquisition. For retailers, they might look at projections for store and square footage expansion as well as same-store sales growth. But history is a powerful teacher for beginning and experienced investors alike.
   
We then estimate earnings growth in light of the sales projection. We’ll consider the company’s history of earnings growth and any goals it has stated. We can also access analyst reports and analysts’ consensus estimates, but these forecasts are usually overly optimistic.
   
Studying past and potential future profit margins and tax rates can help us understand the path revenues will take to earnings. We also want to think about what will happen to the firm’s number of common shares outstanding. For example, if a company regularly buys back shares to reduce the number of shares outstanding and is expected to continue this practice, we would expect future earnings to be spread among fewer shares.
   
When we’re finished, we use the earnings growth rate to arrive at an estimate of earnings per share five years from now. If we have forecast growth of 15 percent a year, and the EPS at our starting point is $1, five years from now EPS will be $2. Two things to keep in mind regarding projections:

•  It’s prudent to be conservative.
A firm might have increased earnings 25 percent annually over the past 10 years, but such performance is extremely difficult to maintain. Gravity will eventually take hold as a company moves from small to mid-size to large.
•  Earnings advances can outpace sales growth for only so long. Over the long term, they usually settle in at the rate of revenue growth. If you’re going to project EPS increases that are higher than sales growth, understand where the additional percentage points are coming from: Increased margins? Lower taxes? Fewer shares outstanding?

Checking Valuation

Once we’ve predicted the EPS five years from now, we’re ready to answer our second question: whether the stock is reasonably priced. Investors are good at discovering high-quality stocks but experience more challenges in determining the proper price to pay for the stock. Our first step is to study the stock’s price-earnings ratios over the past several years and forecast the likely high and low P/Es over the next five years. The P/E, the stock’s current price divided by a company’s EPS, is how much the market is willing to pay for $1 of a firm’s earnings; it’s the most common way to measure how expensive a company’s stock is.
   
Historical valuations can help us in this process, but P/Es often go through unpredictable periods of expansion and contraction as industries go in and out of favor on Wall Street. Another idea to keep in mind is that a stock can trade at extremely high P/Es for a while but eventually will drop — severely so when a high-growth company stumbles. P/Es also tend to contract in times of inflation.
   
After we have predicted what the high P/E for a stock will be, we’re ready to estimate a potential high price for our stock. It’s a matter of simple math: The high point of EPS — what we forecast the EPS to be five years from now — is multiplied by the high P/E to come up with a potential high price. For example, if we predict EPS will be $2 in five years and the high P/E will be 30, our predicted high price will be $60.
   
After projecting the low P/E, we can multiply it by the expected low EPS to come up with a potential low price. Since we’ve determined this is a growth company, we usually can use the most recent 12 months’ EPS as the low point for earnings. I can use other criteria for projecting a low, but this is a common method for determining this figure.

Return Expectations

Now that we have the stock’s potential range from low to high, we’re ready to see whether this stock will provide a suitable return. Our SSG divides the range into three zones: Buy, Maybe (or Hold) and Sell. The lowest 25 percent of the range is the Buy zone, and the upper-most 25 percent is the Sell zone.
   
We include the stock’s dividends — the cash payments of earnings to shareholders — in our return calculations. This gives us three ways to achieve a return on a stock: 

• through dividends,
• through the market increasing the stock’s price in concert with the earnings growth and 
• through the stock’s price rising because the market believes the P/E should be higher.

   
We aim for our stock holdings to return 15 percent annually on average over the next five years, or a doubling of return. That’s an aggressive target, but the idea isn’t to be disappointed if we fail to meet it. It’s to maintain our focus on seeking high-quality growth stocks. Achieving returns of, say, 10 percent yearly is pretty commendable.
Managing Risk

Investors can manage their risk in picking individual stocks by following some simple rules:

•  Require that the company have at least five years of financial history. Younger firms haven’t developed enough of a track record for assessing management performance.
•  Study only companies that have proven they can make money. Someone who invests in a company that has never reported earnings is speculating, not investing.
•  Understand the possible risk and reward of owning a stock.
•  Diversify your portfolio. Even if you’ve done your homework on every holding using all the information you need to make an informed decision, you’ll still make mistakes. If you have a good-size basket of stocks, however, you’ll also have some stocks that perform much better than expected.
   
Besides investing in high-quality growth stocks and diversifying your portfolio, two other simple principles can help you build wealth over the long term. 

• First, reinvest all your dividends and earnings. 
• Second, invest regularly in both good markets and bad; this is often called dollar-cost averaging.

   
The type of analysis I’ve outlined provides a lot of the information fundamental investors need to determine whether a stock is a suitable investment. But not everything. Reading annual reports, listening to conference calls and viewing company presentations will help you form a fuller picture of the company.
   
In today’s unpredictable, volatile market, fundamental analysis is even more important than usual. But for an investor using a simple, straightforward methodology that focuses on the long term, these are also times of great opportunity.

http://www.betterinvesting.org/Public/SingleTabs/BI+Mag/Articles+Archives/0210publiccs.htm

What’s Wrong with the Stock Market?

What’s Wrong with the Stock Market?

April 14th, 2009

The problem with the stock market started back before the end of the 18th century—in 1792 as a matter of fact. This was when the stock market as we know it was born under a tree in lower Manhattan. It was there and then that those who first bought and sold stocks as a business got together and formed what became the New York Stock Exchange. From those beginnings, an industry was born that has grown to be one of the most powerful and financially influential in the world.

Transaction-based Compensation – the Wrong Dynamic
Actually, the problem arose from the fact that these people made their money not from any appreciation in the value of the investments they bought and sold but rather from just putting buyers and sellers of those shares together. They profited from the transaction itself. To this day, the majority of brokers receive their compensation as a result of the purchase or sale. It makes no financial difference to them whether their customer gains or loses.

I don’t mean to imply that, just because these people fill a need and are compensated for doing so, they’re bad people. Certainly the existence of this industry is what makes the ownership of stock feasible for the average person. It’s responsible for elevating common stock to the level of liquidity that allows us to own it without fear of being stuck with it when or if we choose to sell it. And it certainly makes it much easier for us to buy those shares when we wish to. If we’re interested in putting our money to work for us in what is arguably the most lucrative manner possible for the least amount of risk, we can’t get along without this industry. But, the difference in perception and fact between what a broker does or is qualified to do and what the uninitiated think he or she is qualified to do is a major source of the problem.

In the beginning, the whole idea of shares was just that: sharing in the fortunes of an enterprise. Where it might be difficult for a company or individual to come up with enough money to finance all that was necessary alone, sharing the business with others in a fashion that limited their liability and exposure to only the amount of money invested was a great way to obtain the necessary funds. Anyone who wanted to participate in a business—sharing both the rewards and the risks—would buy shares and hold them as legal documents that vouched for their entitlement to a proportionate share in the fruits of that enterprise’s operations. Originally, therefore, folks bought shares because they thought the business would be profitable one and they wanted a piece of the action.

The formation of a ready market for stocks, while it performed a very useful service in terms of liquidity and convenience, had a serious side effect. So easy was it to trade that the perception of what a share of stock really was became obscured, giving way to the notion that the stock, like currency, had some intrinsic value that could vary for reasons other than the success or failure of the underlying enterprise.

Easy Trading changed the Nature of the Market
Moreover, the ability to manipulate the perceived value of those shares erected a persistent barrier between those that manipulated it and those that didn’t. It was de rigueur for unscrupulous traders to spread rumors appealing to the fear of the uninitiated, driving down the price of a certain stock, and furnishing an opportunity to pick up a large position at that favorable price. And then it was an equally simple process for those same individuals to spread favorable rumors that appealed to the greedy, drove up the price, and resulted in a great selling opportunity for those who then owned it. Not until well into the 20th century, after the devastating crash of 1929, was there a real effort to address that issue legislatively and make such activities illegal.

However, there was—and is—no way to legislate the greed and fear out of the stock market. Those are still its basic drivers. In fact, as recently as within the last decade, a young kid from New Jersey managed to make nearly a million dollars when he flooded the Internet with glowing stories about a penny stock he had selected for his venture. Unwitting investors bid up the price of the stock with no more to go on than his fiction; and he made a killing.

Disconnect Between Value and Price Creates Bubbles and Busts
The very same dynamics of greed and fear were responsible for an even more spectacular event that impacted millions of shareholders. The appeal of the dot.coms, most of them with no visible means of support—and the technology companies that depended upon them for their burgeoning customer base—inflated one of history’s biggest bubbles. Investors, eager to make a killing, continued to bid up the price of the stock in those companies with no regard for or even any understanding of the factors that comprised their underlying value. This was what the Street refers to as the Greater Fool Theory: “I may be a fool to buy this stock at this price; but I’ll find a greater fool to take it off my hands for more than I paid for it!”

The market of course collapsed when those companies—like Wiley Coyote racing off a cliff only to discover he had nothing under him—learned the hard way that a company had to earn money to live. The extent of that collapse went well beyond rational concerns about the profitability of the affected companies, being exacerbated in large measure by irrational fears growing out of the September 11th, 2001, attack on New York’s World Trade Center and our country’s bellicose activities following that tragedy.

http://www.financialiteracy.us/wordpress/articles/what%E2%80%99s-wrong-with-the-stock-market/

Market Timing - If you absolutely must play the horses

Though Benjamin Graham in no way recommend trying it, he did say that there is a way to combine market timing and value investing principles.

However, Graham noted, the method makes heavy demands on human fortitude, and it can keep an investor out of long stretches of a booming market*.  It sounds simple.  Yet for those who realize how difficult it is to follow, this strategy can diminish the risk of trading on market movements.

Here is the way it works:

1.  Select a diversified list of common stocks (for example, buying undervalued stocks).
2.  Determine a normal value for each stock (choose the PE ratio that seems appropriate).
3.  Buy the stocks when shares can be bought at a substantial discount - say, two-thirds of what the investor has established as normal value.  As an alternative to buying at one target price, the investor can start buying as the stock declines, beginning at 80 percent of normal value.
4.  *Sell the stocks when the price has risen substantially above normal value - say 20 percent to 50 percent higher.

The investor thus would buy in a market decline and sell in a rising market.


Comment:
*When you buy wonderful companies at fair prices, you often do not need to sell.  You may consider selling some or all when the stock prices are obviously very overvalued.  In these situations, the upside gains are limited and the downside losses are high.  These will impair the total returns of your portfolio.  However, even in such overvalued situations, you should only consider selling when the prices have risen very substantially above their normal values, for example, >> 50% over their normal values.  Also, remember to reinvest the money back into other wonderful companies at fair prices that offer a higher reward/risk ratio and that promise returns commensurate with your investment objective.

Visual Analysis of Sales, PTP and EPS lines in Take Stock (Ellis Traub).

It might make it easier if you consider the Visual Analysis one piece at a time.

Does the Sales line look straight? That means Sales growth is pretty consistent; usually what we'd prefer to see.

Is the Sales line getting steeper recently? That indicates more rapid Sales growth, but is unusual. Generally Sales growth slows as a company gets older and bigger. If there is a sudden large upward "jag" in Sales that often indicates a large acquisition. A large acquisition is a situation that tends to make the rest of the Visual Analysis harder to interpret and the future harder to project.

Is the Sales line getting less steep recently? That indicates slowing Sales growth. Slowing Sales growth is "normal" as a company gets larger. However, as an investor, too much slowing that persists over time is not a good sign. BBBY is a classic example of this.

The gap between the PTP and Sales lines shows exactly the same thing as SSG section 2A (pre-tax profit margins). If the gap changes enough that you notice it on the Visual Analysis, then PTP margins probably changed significantly.

With Sales above PTP on the graph, a smaller gap is the same thing as higher PTP margins, which is a good thing. More of every dollar of Sales is being kept as profit (less of every dollar of Sales is being spent on expenses). A larger gap is the same as lower PTP margins (not so good).

Variation in PTP margins is normal so look for a trend. Seeing changes in PTP margins before they show up on the Visual Analysis or SSG section 2A is perhaps the primary reason for looking at PERT-A. Remember that PERT-A tells you the same story as the Visual Analysis, just from a different point of view. If you think they're telling different stories, you're reading at least one of them wrong (or there is a data error).

The gap between the EPS and PTP lines shows the combined effect of changes in tax rate and shares. Anything that changes the size of this gap is unsustainable. If the gap changes enough that you notice it on the Visual Analysis, the underlying change (taxes and/or shares and/or other things) is probably significant. So, if the EPS line is getting steeper but the PTP line isn't following suit, don't expect that situation to continue. Without further investigation, It's generally not possible to know just what things caused a change in the size of this gap (and just how good or bad those things might be).

Remember that when the Sales line changes direction (i.e., isn't straight), the PTP and EPS lines generally also change direction in about the same way. If they don't, that's a warning that you should investigate the cause. If the gap between Sales and PTP lines changes noticably, investigate why PTP margins changed. If the gap between PTP and EPS lines changes noticably, investigate why taxes and/or shares (and/or something else below PTP on the income statement) changed

-Jim Thomas


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I have an article in my BI binder from BI magazine, dated May 2006.  The title is, "Introduction to the income statement" and it is written by Ann Cuneaz.  In it, she talks about "reading the graph" from SSG section I, visual analysis.  Most people align the graphs in the same order as on an income statement: Sales on top, followed by pre-tax profit (PTP)and earnings per share (EPS). The gap between Sales and PTP represents expenses; the gap between PTP and EPS represents both taxes & number of shares.  If we only concern ourselves with graphs that have fairly straight lines for each of these three items, then we have seven different scenarios to consider: All three lines are parallel (preferably rising to the right or curving upwards to the right). This means expenses are under control and taxes & shares outstanding are holding steady.  This is an excellent situation. Sales and PTP are rising and parallel but EPS is diverging. This means expenses are under control but tax rate and/or # shares are increasing. Taxes cannot be controlled (much) so this is ok. However, an increase in shares indicates dilution and that's not good. PTP and EPS are parallel but flat; Sales are increasing.  This means profit margins are declining. This is not good. PTP and EPS are parallel and rising but Sales are flat. This means there has been an increase in efficiency (expenses are under control).  This is ok. Sales and PTP are parallel but flat; EPS is increasing. This means expenses are under control, and either or both taxes are being reduced (good) and/or # shares is being reduced. It was discussed here on the forum recently that although most people consider a share buyback to be a good thing, historically these stocks have not appreciated very well. Sales are flat, PTP is increasing, EPS is flat. This means expenses are decreasing (good) but taxes and/or shares outstanding are increasing. Again, taxes cannot be controlled and an increase in shares indicates dilution and that's not good. Sales are increasing, PTP is flat, EPS is increasing. This means expenses are increasing (not good), but taxes are declining (good) and/or # shares is decreasing (good). Bob Mann

http://community.compuserve.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?msg=32627.1&nav=messages&webtag=ws-naic

Rational Value: Your Key to Contentment (Ellis Traub)

Rational Value: Your Key to Contentment

May 8th, 2009

Many of my posts have referred to rational value. And I’ve been remiss in not making a special effort to define this term for my readers—one I coined several years ago to try to help investors like us keep their minds on what’s important. The significance of this term is that it can keep our feet on the ground when the market is overvalued, and keep our head in the clouds when it’s in the tank. And, on an ongoing basis tell it will us what the reasonable (rational) value of our shares would be.

Rational Value Defined

Simply defined, Rational Value is the approximate value of a share of stock were it to be selling at its rational price—the price investors would pay for it if it were selling at its historical average multiple or “signature PE.”

If you have calculated either the Historical Value Ratio (HVR) or the Relative Value (RV), the simplest way to determine its Rational Price is to divide the current market price by either of those figures.

If, for example, the HVR or RV of XYZ company is 50%, and the current market price were $50, dividing the $50 by .50 would give you a rational value of $100—the price one would pay for it if one were “rational.” So, as you can see, the rational value is the value of your shares when the RV or HVR are 100%.

For those who have not been exposed to either RV or HVR, let me explain and define these terms for you.

Relative Value or Historical Value Ratio

Our methodology is based upon a very basic premise: “Real” investors—those who own stock as part owners of the businesses that have issued it—attach a value to their ownership that is related to the ability of those businesses to earn money and to grow. That relationship between a company’s earnings and the market price of the stock is recognized as the Price Earnings Ratio (PE). [For a more detailed discussion of this relationship and its importance, read "What's a PE and What's it To Me?"] For our purposes here, let’s define the PE simply as the unit price for one dollar’s worth of a company’s earnings.

You can tell if a gallon of gas is cheap or expensive because its price is under or over a “typical” or average price that’s fairly familiar to you. And an investor similarly knows if a share of stock is overpriced or inexpensive, based up what it has typically sold for. Because the price of the shares of a company will vary over time and the PE is relatively stable, we use the multiple of earnings it has sold for—its PE—rather than the price, itself, to judge its value. And that determination is what the HVR or RV provides us.

The RV is a comparison of the current PE with the historical (five-year) average and is calculated by dividing the current PE by that historical average PE. The HVR is similar, except it’s derived by dividing the current PE by the historical (ten-year) median. [The median is the middle value in a series of values and is not unduly influenced by wide swings or outliers.]

That mid-point, however you calculate it, becomes the stock’s “signature PE”—the multiple at which the stock would sell if it were purchased strictly for its earnings performance. By taking the longer term view, we effectively cancel out the short-term ups and downs of the price that are caused by the herd’s whims and guesses. These, of course, are measured—as if we care—by the amplitude of the distance betwen the high and low PEs either side of that mid-point.

It’s the amplitude of the swings either side of that signature PE or mid-point that measure the “rationality” of the price. If everyone were rational; i.e., if everyone were to buy or sell the stock based upon its underlying company’s earnings, the price would be “rational” all the time. However, in times like these, when “irrational despair” prompts the herd to panic and sell its shares, the price of those shares becomes irrationally low. Of course, in the opposite extreme, when the public is “irrationally exuberant,” as former Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan labled the condition, the prices were irrationally high!

Therefore, the rational price of a share of stock is simply the price that would be paid for the stock if everyone were rational. And, the beauty of this concept is, because the “rational value” is derived from the midpoint of sales and purchases over time, it’s easy to be confident that we will see the price return to that point—and probably overshoot it—when those investors come back to their senses.

Application of Rational Value

The normal cycles in the stock market are caused, in large measure, by the herd’s overshooting in both directions. But, don’t knock it. That’s what makes for the bargains from time to time. It also provides us with an additional opportunity to improve our portfolios’ performances by replacing a position, when it’s so overvalued you can no longer expect a reasonable return on it over the next five years, with one of as good quality but which has a better potential for return.

To sum up, the “rational value,” therefore, is a value of a your holdings to which you can count on your shares returning when the herd comes back to its senses. And that’s the only value you need be concerned about as you perform your portfolio management tasks.

So, sit back, relax, and wait for that to happen. It may take a little longer than usual because the herd is more demoralized than usual; but the value is there, and it will continue to be. Someday soon, we’ll start to see the more intelligent of investors, satisfied that the market has shaken out the last few of its gamblers, backing up the truck and starting to cart off those bargains. And, not long after that, the herd will thunder back, wanting to get on the bandwagon.

http://www.financialiteracy.us/wordpress/articles/rational-value-your-key-to-contentment/

What’s Wrong with the Stock Market?

What’s Wrong with the Stock Market?
April 14th, 2009

The problem with the stock market started back before the end of the 18th century—in 1792 as a matter of fact. This was when the stock market as we know it was born under a tree in lower Manhattan. It was there and then that those who first bought and sold stocks as a business got together and formed what became the New York Stock Exchange. From those beginnings, an industry was born that has grown to be one of the most powerful and financially influential in the world.

Transaction-based Compensation – the Wrong Dynamic
Actually, the problem arose from the fact that these people made their money not from any appreciation in the value of the investments they bought and sold but rather from just putting buyers and sellers of those shares together. They profited from the transaction itself. To this day, the majority of brokers receive their compensation as a result of the purchase or sale. It makes no financial difference to them whether their customer gains or loses.

I don’t mean to imply that, just because these people fill a need and are compensated for doing so, they’re bad people. Certainly the existence of this industry is what makes the ownership of stock feasible for the average person. It’s responsible for elevating common stock to the level of liquidity that allows us to own it without fear of being stuck with it when or if we choose to sell it. And it certainly makes it much easier for us to buy those shares when we wish to. If we’re interested in putting our money to work for us in what is arguably the most lucrative manner possible for the least amount of risk, we can’t get along without this industry. But, the difference in perception and fact between what a broker does or is qualified to do and what the uninitiated think he or she is qualified to do is a major source of the problem.

In the beginning, the whole idea of shares was just that: sharing in the fortunes of an enterprise. Where it might be difficult for a company or individual to come up with enough money to finance all that was necessary alone, sharing the business with others in a fashion that limited their liability and exposure to only the amount of money invested was a great way to obtain the necessary funds. Anyone who wanted to participate in a business—sharing both the rewards and the risks—would buy shares and hold them as legal documents that vouched for their entitlement to a proportionate share in the fruits of that enterprise’s operations. Originally, therefore, folks bought shares because they thought the business would be profitable one and they wanted a piece of the action.

The formation of a ready market for stocks, while it performed a very useful service in terms of liquidity and convenience, had a serious side effect. So easy was it to trade that the perception of what a share of stock really was became obscured, giving way to the notion that the stock, like currency, had some intrinsic value that could vary for reasons other than the success or failure of the underlying enterprise.

Easy Trading changed the Nature of the Market
Moreover, the ability to manipulate the perceived value of those shares erected a persistent barrier between those that manipulated it and those that didn’t. It was de rigueur for unscrupulous traders to spread rumors appealing to the fear of the uninitiated, driving down the price of a certain stock, and furnishing an opportunity to pick up a large position at that favorable price. And then it was an equally simple process for those same individuals to spread favorable rumors that appealed to the greedy, drove up the price, and resulted in a great selling opportunity for those who then owned it. Not until well into the 20th century, after the devastating crash of 1929, was there a real effort to address that issue legislatively and make such activities illegal.

However, there was—and is—no way to legislate the greed and fear out of the stock market. Those are still its basic drivers. In fact, as recently as within the last decade, a young kid from New Jersey managed to make nearly a million dollars when he flooded the Internet with glowing stories about a penny stock he had selected for his venture. Unwitting investors bid up the price of the stock with no more to go on than his fiction; and he made a killing.

Disconnect Between Value and Price Creates Bubbles and Busts
The very same dynamics of greed and fear were responsible for an even more spectacular event that impacted millions of shareholders. The appeal of the dot.coms, most of them with no visible means of support—and the technology companies that depended upon them for their burgeoning customer base—inflated one of history’s biggest bubbles. Investors, eager to make a killing, continued to bid up the price of the stock in those companies with no regard for or even any understanding of the factors that comprised their underlying value. This was what the Street refers to as the Greater Fool Theory: “I may be a fool to buy this stock at this price; but I’ll find a greater fool to take it off my hands for more than I paid for it!”

The market of course collapsed when those companies—like Wiley Coyote racing off a cliff only to discover he had nothing under him—learned the hard way that a company had to earn money to live. The extent of that collapse went well beyond rational concerns about the profitability of the affected companies, being exacerbated in large measure by irrational fears growing out of the September 11th, 2001, attack on New York’s World Trade Center and our country’s bellicose activities following that tragedy.

http://www.financialiteracy.us/wordpress/articles/what%E2%80%99s-wrong-with-the-stock-market/

Take Stock with Ellis Traub

Food for thought

• Introduction to Successful Investing
• Investing: How Simple Can it Be? Part 1
• Investing: How Simple Can it Be? Part 2
• Investing: How Simple Can it Be? Part 3
• Making Money, Part 1: What does it really mean?
• Making Money, Part 2: It Started with Barter
• Making Money, Part 3: Why is Our Healthy Economy Vulnerable?
• OpEd article by Warren E. Buffett in the NYTimes October 16, 2008.
• Rational Value: Your Key to Contentment
• Six Really Simple Steps to Buying a Quality Company
• The Growth Cycle
• The Only Ten Terms You Need to Know
• What’s a P/E, and What’s it to Me? Part 1
• What’s a P/E and What’s it to Me? Part 3
• What’s a P/E, and What’s it to Me? Part 2
• What’s Wrong with the Stock Market?

There are only two things you need to learn about a company and its stock:
• Is the company a good company?
• If it is, can you buy it at a reasonable price?

There are only two things you need to know to determine if it’s a well-managed company.
• Is the growth of its revenues and its profits strong and stable?
• Can its current management sustain its successful track record?

Both of these issues can be determined by looking at graphs of readily available data that you can plot yourself.