Tag Archives: Apple

The “Hunger Games” Economy: The FOUR

Those four companies touch our lives whether we want them to or not.  How did those four firms amass so much power and what does that imply for our futures? 52% of Americans have Amazon Prime while 51% go to church.  You may know of these firms, but you and I probably vastly underestimate them, especially Amazon.

Whether you invest in those companies, you need to understand their effect on other industries.  How is value created and destroyed in the digital age?  While Amazon grows other retailers are barely treading water.  Amazon’s cost of capital is vastly lower than its competitors.

GM has 215,000 employees with a market cap per employee of $231,000 while Facebook has 17,048 employees with a market cap of $20.5 million pr employee. We are in a “Hunger Games” economy. Page 268: “We have a perception of these large companies that they must be creating a lot of jobs, but in fact they have a small number of high-paying jobs, and everybody else is fighting over the scraps.  America is on pace to be home to 3 million lords and 350 million serfs.  Again, it has never been easier to be a billionaire, but never been harder to be a millionaire.”

 

Prof. Bruce Greenwald on the Market Today

Confessions of a Quantitative Easer

We went on a bond-buying spree that was supposed to help Main Street. Instead, it was a feast for Wall Street.
By Andrew Huszar Nov. 11, 2013 7:00 p.m. ET

I can only say: I’m sorry, America. As a former Federal Reserve official, I was responsible for executing the centerpiece program of the Fed’s first plunge into the bond-buying experiment known as quantitative easing. The central bank continues to spin QE as a tool for helping Main Street. But I’ve come to recognize the program for what it really is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time.

Five years ago this month, on Black Friday, the Fed launched an unprecedented shopping spree. By that point in the financial crisis, Congress had already passed legislation, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, to halt the U.S. banking system’s free fall. Beyond Wall Street, though, the economic pain was still soaring. In the last three months of 2008 alone, almost two million Americans would lose their jobs.

The Fed said it wanted to help—through a new program of massive bond purchases. There were secondary goals, but Chairman Ben Bernanke made clear that the Fed’s central motivation was to “affect credit conditions for households and businesses”: to drive down the cost of credit so that more Americans hurting from the tanking economy could use it to weather the downturn. For this reason, he originally called the initiative “credit easing.”

My part of the story began a few months later. Having been at the Fed for seven years, until early 2008, I was working on Wall Street in spring 2009 when I got an unexpected phone call. Would I come back to work on the Fed’s trading floor? The job: managing what was at the heart of QE’s bond-buying spree—a wild attempt to buy $1.25 trillion in mortgage bonds in 12 months. Incredibly, the Fed was calling to ask if I wanted to quarterback the largest economic stimulus in U.S. history.

This was a dream job, but I hesitated. And it wasn’t just nervousness about taking on such responsibility. I had left the Fed out of frustration, having witnessed the institution deferring more and more to Wall Street. Independence is at the heart of any central bank’s credibility, and I had come to believe that the Fed’s independence was eroding. Senior Fed officials, though, were publicly acknowledging mistakes and several of those officials emphasized to me how committed they were to a major Wall Street revamp. I could also see that they desperately needed reinforcements. I took a leap of faith.

In its almost 100-year history, the Fed had never bought one mortgage bond. Now my program was buying so many each day through active, unscripted trading that we constantly risked driving bond prices too high and crashing global confidence in key financial markets. We were working feverishly to preserve the impression that the Fed knew what it was doing.

It wasn’t long before my old doubts resurfaced. Despite the Fed’s rhetoric, my program wasn’t helping to make credit any more accessible for the average American. The banks were only issuing fewer and fewer loans. More insidiously, whatever credit they were extending wasn’t getting much cheaper. QE may have been driving down the wholesale cost for banks to make loans, but Wall Street was pocketing most of the extra cash.

From the trenches, several other Fed managers also began voicing the concern that QE wasn’t working as planned. Our warnings fell on deaf ears. In the past, Fed leaders—even if they ultimately erred—would have worried obsessively about the costs versus the benefits of any major initiative. Now the only obsession seemed to be with the newest survey of financial-market expectations or the latest in-person feedback from Wall Street’s leading bankers and hedge-fund managers. Sorry, U.S. taxpayer.

Trading for the first round of QE ended on March 31, 2010. The final results confirmed that, while there had been only trivial relief for Main Street, the U.S. central bank’s bond purchases had been an absolute coup for Wall Street. The banks hadn’t just benefited from the lower cost of making loans. They’d also enjoyed huge capital gains on the rising values of their securities holdings and fat commissions from brokering most of the Fed’s QE transactions. Wall Street had experienced its most profitable year ever in 2009, and 2010 was starting off in much the same way.

You’d think the Fed would have finally stopped to question the wisdom of QE. Think again. Only a few months later—after a 14% drop in the U.S. stock market and renewed weakening in the banking sector—the Fed announced a new round of bond buying: QE2. Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, immediately called the decision “clueless.”

That was when I realized the Fed had lost any remaining ability to think independently from Wall Street. Demoralized, I returned to the private sector.

Where are we today? The Fed keeps buying roughly $85 billion in bonds a month, chronically delaying so much as a minor QE taper. Over five years, its bond purchases have come to more than $4 trillion. Amazingly, in a supposedly free-market nation, QE has become the largest financial-markets intervention by any government in world history.

And the impact? Even by the Fed’s sunniest calculations, aggressive QE over five years has generated only a few percentage points of U.S. growth. By contrast, experts outside the Fed, such as Mohammed El Erian at the Pimco investment firm, suggest that the Fed may have created and spent over $4 trillion for a total return of as little as 0.25% of GDP (i.e., a mere $40 billion bump in U.S. economic output). Both of those estimates indicate that QE isn’t really working.

Unless you’re Wall Street. Having racked up hundreds of billions of dollars in opaque Fed subsidies, U.S. banks have seen their collective stock price triple since March 2009. The biggest ones have only become more of a cartel: 0.2% of them now control more than 70% of the U.S. bank assets.

As for the rest of America, good luck. Because QE was relentlessly pumping money into the financial markets during the past five years, it killed the urgency for Washington to confront a real crisis: that of a structurally unsound U.S. economy. Yes, those financial markets have rallied spectacularly, breathing much-needed life back into 401(k)s, but for how long? Experts like Larry Fink at the BlackRock investment firm are suggesting that conditions are again “bubble-like.” Meanwhile, the country remains overly dependent on Wall Street to drive economic growth.

Even when acknowledging QE’s shortcomings, Chairman Bernanke argues that some action by the Fed is better than none (a position that his likely successor, Fed Vice Chairwoman Janet Yellen, also embraces). The implication is that the Fed is dutifully compensating for the rest of Washington’s dysfunction. But the Fed is at the center of that dysfunction. Case in point: It has allowed QE to become Wall Street’s new “too big to fail” policy.

Mr. Huszar, a senior fellow at Rutgers Business School, is a former Morgan Stanley managing director. In 2009-10, he managed the Federal Reserve’s $1.25 trillion agency mortgage-backed security purchase program.

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND!

Apple (AAPL) 100 to 1 in the Stock Market

Apple

After buying Apple during the depths of the Tech Bubble Bust in 2003 around $6.94, I recently had to sell about ten years later around $700 for a compound annual return over 10 years of 58.5%. Eat your heart out Munger, Buffett, Soros, Graham, Tudor Jones, etc., etc.

And now what? 

Ok, Ok, I live in fantasy.  A friend recently said that he wished he had sold his Apple after buying it last year. Coulda, shoulda, woulda doesn’t advance your skills as an investor. What can we learn A Priori (before the fact) to help us as investors in finding and or managing our investments?  What lessons can be gleaned from Apple’s history? In Part 2: We will begin to prepare our case study file on Apple.

Value Quant Investing; Herbalife; Apple; Reader’s Question

NERD

I have started reading this book mentioned here:
 
I can’t recommend the book yet, since I have a long way to crawl through it. The reading is dense with many statistical studies and numbers.
Herbalife is a Fraud, Right?

right?

http://turnkeyanalyst.com/2013/01/herbalife-hlf-is-it-a-fraud-not-likely/

 

ackmanfight
One set of tools we describe in our book Quantitative Value, is how to apply statistical tools to identify manipulators, frauds, and/or potential by I Want This”
“More money…has been stolen with the point of a pen than at the point of a gun.”
— Warren Buffett, Chairman’s Letter, 2000.
Three basic categories of risk for permanent impairment of capital
  1.    Financial Statement Manipulation  – financial statements fail to tell the whole truth about a company’s financial health/condition.
  2. Fraud – misrepresentation made that may result in unauthorized benefits to an individual, the firm, or a third party.  Affected by opportunity and pressure.
  3. Financial Distress or Bankruptcy – when a firm has difficulty or cannot meet its obligations to creditors.
Tools actually applied:

What do the quant models say?

As of December 31, 2012, the quant model recommended purchasing Herbalife. The firm is very high quality and became excessively cheap after Ackman came out with his “short news.” My guess is Loeb bought our book over the holidays, read it, and then was determined to by I Want This”
How did the Fraud/Manipulation/Bankrupty models stack up?

  Accrual measures relative to universe of stocks

  • Accrual Anomaly: 81 percentile
  • Net Operating Asset Anomaly: 18 percentile
  • Average: 49.5% percentile–basically, no issues
  • Manipulation prediction model:  Less than a 1% probability of manipulation; no red flags on any single  manipulation metric
  • Bankruptcy prediction model: The absolute probability of HLF going bust is low, but HLF scores at around the 89% percentile on this metric relative to the universe analyzed (stocks over $1.4B). This is something to watch, but the absolute probability of this occurring is very low (<1%)
Overall, the statistical results indicate that Loeb’s position is a better bet than Ackman’s position. Of course, this is in reference to the 12/31/2012 HLF stock price. As of yesterday, HLF is no longer included in the quantitative value screen because it has become too expensive.
APPLE
   APPLE BIG
 
I am not an expert on Apple (AAPL) but it makes a great case study on investor expectations. The price has fallen 38% from its all-time high in Sept. 2012 and now is at $450 or so. Apple has about 137 billion of cash equivalents with 69% of it overseas.  Adjusted for taxes, cash works out to $110 per share. The dividend is $10.60 per shares. Assume a cost of capital of 10% (Apple trades at a 10 pe) with a growth rate of 2%, the NPV of those dividends –$10.60 divided by (10% – 2%) or $132. Add that to the $110 and you have almost half the current price. The market doesn’t expect much from Apple.
If you learn anything from this post, it is this–avoid glamour and high expectations and seek out low expectations within your circle of competence.   A money manager on CNBC last Friday said he sold his Apple stock because the future product pipeline was uncertain.  Whoa!  And six months ago, it wasn’t?  Yet, people like him are running billions. Are you surprised that there has been a $300 billion change in valuation despite no to slight fundamental change in the company over the past 4 months?
 
A Reader’s Question
Would it be possible for you to share ‘Grant Interest Rate Observer’ publications on the blog or by email?
Have already spent enough money on MBA and partly on CFA also, can’t afford to spent hefty amount once again at this point in time.
My reply: I must obey the wishes of Grant’s copyright, plus you have to have a special PDF viewer.  I suggest that you sue your Graduate business school and the CFA Institute to get your money back. Why get a CFA AND an MBA?
Good luck.
Look: Harvard Money Manager:
Tilson Focus Fund