Tag Archives: stocks

Poster Board on Sentiment; A Contrarian Investor

I like to have a reference to refer back to a year or five years from now capturing certain points in time.   The market seems to be placing peak confidence in financial assets (stocks) vs. gold.

This post continues from a prior post: http://csinvesting.org/2016/11/17/when-no-one-wants-em-search-strategy/

The Bearish Gold Articles keep on coming:  http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-why-you-should-never-buy-and-hold-gold-2016-12

http://seekingalpha.com/article/4032167-gold-miners-perfect-bear-case

http://bloom.bg/2hWukKn Running out of metal.

Even bullish mining investors expect “waterfall declines” and gold going below $1,100. Momentum creates the news:  http://www.kitco.com/news/video/show/Gold–Silver-Outlook-2017/1456/2016-12-22/Mining-Stocks-Could-See-Waterfall-Declines—David-Erfle   To be fair, he is long-term bullish, but note the “certainty, inevitability” of gold falling in USD below $1,100 or even to $1,000.  Since he is probably considered strong hands (better capitalized with more experience in precious metals miners) his view indicates VERY bearish near-term (1 day to two/three months sentiment). As I interprete this news.

Financial risk is increasing on US company balance sheets, but then who cares while confidence is high?

As an investor, you want to monitor the amount of capital (especially in a capital intensive business!) going into and out of a business.   An industry starved of capital augurs well for future returns!

‘Anonymous Billionaire’ in the Spotlight After 1,000% Rally

  • Alaska fund is No.2 fund focused on Brazilian equities
  • Barros’s fund is now buying up Fibria, Marcopolo, Vale

Luiz Alves Paes de Barros is something of an enigma in Sao Paulo’s financial circles. At 69, he’s known around town as the “anonymous billionaire” for quietly amassing a fortune by wagering on stocks almost no one else seemed to want.

In Magazine Luiza SA, Barros may have made one of his best bets yet.

Starting in late 2015, Barros’s Alaska Investimentos Ltda. made the battered retailer one of its biggest holdings, a brazen move in a nation stuck in the middle of its worst recession in a century. It paid off. Magazine Luiza has surged more than 1,000 percent since reaching a record low about a year ago, making it the top stock in one of the world’s top-performing markets. That turned Alaska’s Black Master, which Barros co-manages with Henrique Bredda and Ney Miyamoto, into the No. 2 fund among 569 peers focused on Brazilian equities, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Barros’s latest success only adds to the intrigue surrounding one of Brazil’s most storied, but media-shy, individual investors. Early in his career, he traded commodities and was a partner of star fund manager Luis Stuhlberger at what is now Credit Suisse Hedging-Griffo. Barros then spent the next half century investing only his own cash, almost exclusively in Brazilian stocks, and regulatory filings show he personally holds 1.2 billion reais in equities.

When it comes to managing other people’s money, Barros is a rookie, having co-founded Alaska in July 2015. But his investing method remains the same. He only holds a handful of stocks, favors companies with bottom-of-the-barrel valuations and usually jumps in as everyone else is bailing.

“Perfecting patience is all I’ve done over the past 50 years,” Barros says. “I love when things get bad. When it’s bad, I buy.”

During two interviews, first in Alaska’s shoebox office in the heart of Sao Paulo’s financial district and then at his personal office on the city’s oldest business thoroughfare, the silver-haired asset manager explained what drew him to Magazine Luiza and went over the stocks he likes now: Fibria Celulose SA, Braskem SA, Marcopolo SA and Vale SA.

“The market has forgotten these stocks,” he says.

Alaska started building a stake in petrochemicals maker Braskem about four months ago (the stock has surged 48 percent since mid-August after tumbling 20 percent this year before then) and pulpmaker Fibria a few months later. Barros likes both companies because they’re fundamentally sound — and valuations are low. Braskem’s price-to-earnings ratio is 8.3, less than half the level three years ago. Fibria’s valuation is less than half the average of the past two years.Marcopolo, a maker of trucks and buses, is a play on Brazil’s rebound from recession, while miner Vale will benefit as global investors start seeking value again over safety. There’s no economic expansion in Brazil without infrastructure investments, he says.

“Vale won’t be a disaster for anyone. When iron-ore prices rise again, Vale will fly,” he said.

If those stocks return just a fraction of what Magazine Luiza did, they’d count as stellar investments. In all, Alaska acquired almost 40 percent of Magazine Luiza’s free-floating shares, regulatory filings show. In 2016’s third quarter, Alaska unloaded half its stake. What’s left of Alaska’s holdings in Magazine Luiza is now worth about 111 million reais ($33 million).

Asked how he knew Magazine Luiza would do as well as it did, he says he didn’t. “I just knew it was cheap.” The fact that the retailer of appliances and electronics had a market value of 180 million reais even though a bank had offered to pay 300 million reais for the right to offer extended guarantees on Magazine Luiza products made that clear.

“Either the bank was crazy or there was value there,” Barros says.

Alaska’s Black Master fund has returned 143 percent in 2016, compared with a 33 percent gain for Brazil’s benchmark Ibovespa stock index. The gains were also driven by a stake in Cia. de Saneamento do Parana, the water utility known as Sanepar that’s almost tripled this year.

Alaska is still a relatively small player in Brazil’s 2.38 trillion-real stock market. The asset manager employs 11 people (“That includes the lady who serves the coffee,” Barros says). While Alaska oversees about 1.6 billion reais, three-quarters of that is Barros’s own cash. But the fund is actively seeking new clients.

Why now, after 50 years of going it alone?

“Because I’m positive that the market is going to rise,” he says.

Compare and Contrast

MINERS-GOLD-RATIO-CHARTS-JUN-18

MINERS-INDEX-MONTHLY-LINEAR-CHART-JUN-18

TMS-2-long-term-dosh-slosh

The above represents my understanding of INFLATION, not prices rising. Prices may or not rise depending upon supply/demand for goods and currency. Usually, as the supply of currency increases much faster than the production of goods and services, then prices rise or the value of the currency declines.

World-stock-vs-GDP

inflation_jerryholbert

Thanks to www.acting-man.com and www.zerohedge.com

A Great Individual Investor’s Investment Letter; A Reader’s Questions

NSA-Santa

A successful individual investor recaps 2013 (Must Read) David Collum_2013_year_in_review  

Note how few long-term decisions he made. Owning long-term bonds from 1980 to 1988, etc.  Buying precious metals in 2001 and STILL holding on through 2013–now that is long-term investing! 2013 was only his second losing year in several decades thanks to gold and silver being down 39% and 55% this year.

Video

A Reader’s Question

I have a couple of valuation questions that I have been wrestling with recently.  I would love to hear your take.

First, do you ever use a PE ratio for valuation?  I have always used a EV to EBIT or something ratio whether pre-tax or after-tax.  (I have an idea of the multiples that interest me in both cases.)  Sometimes I come across something that has a low PE but not so low EV/EBIT.  I think this is when the company has financial leverage and is paying an interest rate substantially below the earnings yield.  If it’s a high quality business and the leverage does not harm the company is it sometimes better to use a PE?
John Chew: No, I would use EV (enterprise value which includes net debt) rather than “P” or market cap because debt is part of the price that you pay. Also, look at the terms and conditions of the debt. Note the quality as well as the quantity of the debt. Bank debt is more onerous than say company-issued bonds. 
Also, if you are normalizing earnings, and current earnings are depressed and may be for a while, do you account for this in the valuation, perhaps as a liability?  Or is this an effort to be overly precise?  This quote from Jean-Marie Eveillard in The Value Investors suggests that the former method is overly precise because the future is uncertain:
  “There is no point asking about a company’s earnings outlook because if we are investing for the long-term, then short-term earnings never affect our intrinsic value calculation. Asking management about long-term plans is also pointless to me because the world changes. No one can predict what will happen, and so what is important for us as analysts is to discover the underlying strengths and weaknesses of the business ourselves.”
John Chew: You do not count this as a liability when you normalize earnings.  You look back over a long enough history 12 to 15 years (including the 2008/09 credit crisis) to sense what normal earnings are.  Part of normalizing earning would be assessing the competitive advantage of the business or the uniqueness of the assets.  For example, you should be able to have confidence in the earnings power of the assets owned by Compass Minerals (rock salt positioned near the Great Lakes giving a cost advantage). 
Finally, I want to share a quote from Dylan Grice that I recently found and thought you may find interesting:
Dylan Grice in the July 17, 2012, Popular Delusions
The power of a discounted cashflow model is that it allows us to achieve a value which is objective. With a model based on discounted future cashflow we can arrive at intrinsic value.
But is this correct? Can cash flows be objectively valued? Suppose I’m a fund manager worried that if I underperform the market over a twelve-month period I’ll be out of a job. What value would I attach to a boring business with dependable and robust cash flows, and therefore represents an excellent place to allocate preserve and grow my client’s capital over time but which, nevertheless, is unlikely to ‘perform’ over the next twelve months? The likelihood is that I will value such cash flows less than an investor who considers himself the custodian of his family’s wealth, who attached great importance to the protection of existing wealth for future generations, values permanence highly, and is largely uninterested in the next twelve months.
In other words, an institutional fund manager might apply a ‘higher discount rate’ to those same expected cash flows than the investor of family wealth. They arrive at different answers to the same problem. The same cash flows are being valued subjectively and there is no such thing as an objective or ‘intrinsic value’ embedded in the asset, even though it has cash flows.
John Chew: Well, I agree that investors have different discount rates. You need to use one that fits your situation.  We are discussing human beings making decisions under uncertainty or human action.  All value is subjective. To learn more go to: http://mises.org/austecon/chap4.asp
Thanks for the questions and to all a Happy, Healthy and Prosperous New Year in 2014

 

Chart Views on Monetary Mayhem

Gold Standard Era

Remember that correlation is not causation. Our eyes make our minds extrapolate.  I use charts to see if the current market facts jibe with my theoretical understanding.  This current boom in stocks will need increasing amounts of credit and money to sustain its rise–but the day of reckoning is never eliminated–just prolonged as the mal-investment increases.

irrational-markets

gold-stocks

http://smartmoneytracker.blogspot.com/

 

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