Aswath Damodaran's Blog, page 18
October 29, 2018
An October Surprise? Making Sense of the Market Mayhem!
I don't know what it is about October that spooks markets, but it certainly feels like big market corrections happen in the month. As stocks have gone through contortions this month, more down than up, like many of you, I have been looking at my portfolio, wondering whether this is the crash that the market bears have been warning me about since 2012, just a pause in a continuing bull market or perhaps a prognosticator of economic troubles to come. If you are expecting me to give you the answer in this post, I would stop reading, since reading market tea leaves is not my strength. That said, I have been wrestling with what, if anything, I should be doing, as an investor, in response to the market movements. As in previous market crises, I find myself going back to a four-step process that I hope gets me through with my sanity intact.
Step 1: Hit the pause buttonThe first casualty of crisis is good sense, as I mistake my panic response for instinct, and almost every action that I feel the urge to take in the heat of the moment is driven by fear and greed, not reason. No amount of rational thinking or studying behavioral finance will cure me of this affliction, since it is part of my make up as a human being, but there are three things that I find help me manage my reactions:Take a breath: When faced with fast-moving markets, I have to force myself to consciously slow down. It helps that I don't work as a trader or a portfolio manager, since part of your job is to look like you are in control, even when you are not. Turn off the noise: Turn back the clock about four decades and assume that you were a doctor, a lawyer or a factory worker with much of your wealth invested in stocks. If markets were having a bad day, odds were that you would not even have heard about it until you got home and turned on the news, and even then, you would have been fed scraps of information about Dow, perhaps a 2-minute discussion with a market expert, and you would have then turned on your favorite sitcom. Today, not only can you monitor your stocks every moment of your working day, you can trade on your lunch break and stream CNBC on to your desktop. That may make you a more informed investor, or at least an investor with more information, but I am not sure that constant feedback is healthy for your portfolio, especially in periods like this one. I don't have a Bloomberg terminal on my desk, a ticker tape running on my computer or stock apps on my phone, and I am happy that I don't during periods like this month.Don't play the blame game: Every market correction has its villains, and investors like to tag them. Central banks and governments are always good targets, since they have few defenders and have a history of triggering market meltdowns. The problem that I find with assigning blame to others is that it then relieves me of any responsibility, even for own mistakes, and thus makes it impossible to learn from them and take corrective action. Step 2: Assess the damage In an age of instant analysis and expert opinion, it is easy to get a skewed view of not only what is causing the market damage, but also where that damage is greatest. In my (limited) reading of market analyses during the last four weeks, I have seen at least a half a dozen hypotheses about the stock swoon, from it being the Fed's fault (as usual) to a long overdue tech company correction to it being a response to global crises (in Italy and Saudi Arabia). In keeping with the old adage of "trust, but verify", I decided to take a look at the data to see if there are answers in it to these questions.
1.The Fed's fault? As those of you who read my blog know well, I believe that the Fed has far less power than we think it does to set interest rates, but it is a convenient bogeyman. One explanation for the stock drop that has been making the rounds is that it is fear that Fed will raise rates too quickly in the future, that is causing stocks to swoon. Is that a plausible story? Yes, but if it is the reason for the market decline, you would have a difficult time explaining the movement in interest rates during October 2018:
Source: Federal Reserve (FRED)As stocks have gone through their pains since October 1, treasury bill and bond rates have remained steady, which would make little sense if the expectation is that they will rise in the near future. After all, if investors expect rates to rise soon, those rates will start going up now and not on cue, when the Fed acts.
There is the possibility that this could be a delayed reaction to rates having gone up over the year already, with the 10-year treasury bond rate moving from 2.41% at the start of the year to 3.06% at the start of October 2018 and to a flattening yield curve (which has historically been a precursor to slower economic growth). Note though, that much of this movement in interest rates happened in the first six months of the year and you would need a reason for why stock prices would be moving four months later.
2. A Tech Meltdown? My view, based upon what I had been hearing and reading, and before I looked at the data, was that the October 2018 stock drop was being caused by tech companies, in general, and the large tech companies, especially the FANG Apple combination, specifically. To see if this is true, I looked at the returns on all US stocks, classified by sectors (as defined by S&P), in October, in the year to date and for 1-year and 5-year time periods.
US Sector Market Cap Change. Source: S&P Capital IQI know that the S&P sector classifications are imperfect, but my priors seem to be wrong. While information technology, as a group, lost 8.76% of aggregate market capitalization in October 2018, the three worst sectors in the US market were energy, industrials and materials, all of which lost much more, in percentage terms, than technology. In fact, the two sectors that did the best were consumer staples and utilities, with the latter's performance also providing evidence that it is not interest rate fears that are primarily driving this market correction.
I have argued that, unlike two decades ago, technology companies now are now a diverse group, and many of them don't fit the "high growth, high risk" profile that people seem to still automatically give all tech companies. Using the terminology of corporate life cycles, tech companies run the gamut from old tech to middle-aged tech to young tech, and I have looked at how tech companies in each age grouping in the graph below (age is defined, relative to year of founding):
The median percentage change, in both October 2018 and YTD 2018, in market capitalization was greatest at the youngest tech companies. The median percentage change becomes smaller for older tech companies, in October 2018, but the effect for the four highest age classes is more mixed for the YTD numbers. That said, a much smaller median percentage change at the largest tech companies has a much biggest effect on the market, because of the market capitalization of these companies. That is the reason I look at the FANG stocks and Apple in the table below:
While the percentage change in stock prices at these companies is in line with the market drop, if Apple is included in the mix, the five companies collectively lost a staggering $276 billion in market capitalization between October 1 and October 26. accounting for almost 11.7% of the overall drop in market capitalization of US stocks. While investors in these stocks may feel merited in complaining about their losses, I would draw their attention to the third column, where I look at what these stocks have done since January 1, 2018, with the losses in October incorporated. Collectively, these five companies have added almost $521 billion in market capitalization since the start of the year, and without them, the overall market would have been down substantially.
3. A Correction in Overvalued Stocks? For some value investors who have argued that investors were pushing up some stocks to unsustainable levels, the market correction has been vindication, a sign that the market is correcting its pricing mistakes and marking down the stocks that it had over priced the most. That may be plausible, and to see if it holds, I broke all US stocks, at the start of October, based upon PE ratios into six groupings (low to high PE and a separate one for negative earnings companies):
PE Ratio at start of October 2018, using trailing 12 month earningsIf the selective correction argument is correct, you should expect to see the highest PE ratio and negative earnings companies drop the most in value and the companies with the lowest PE ratios be less affected. While negative earnings stocks have seen the market correction, during October 2018, there is no pattern across the other PE classes. In fact, the lowest PE ratio companies had the second worst record, in terms of price performance, among the groupings.
4. A US Problem?
One of the lessons of the last decade is that much as countries would like to disconnect from the rest of the world and chart their own pathway to economic prosperity, they are joined at the hip by globalization, with crisis in one part of the world quickly affecting economies and markets in other parts. In October 2018, we had our share of global shocks, with the standoff between Italy and the EU and Saudi Arabia's Khashoggi problem taking top billing. To see how the market correction has played out in world markets, I broke global markets down into broad regional groupings and arrived at the following:
Source: S&P Capital IQ, based upon headquarters geographyNote that these returns are all in US dollars, reflecting both the performance of the market and the currencies of each region. Asia seems to have been hit the worst this month, with China, Small Asia (South East Asia, Pakistan, Bangladesh) and Japan all seeing double digit declines in aggregate market capitalization. Latin America has had the best performance of the regional groupings, with the election surprise in Brazil driving its markets upwards during the month. The year-to-date numbers do tell a bigger story that has been glossed over in analysis. For much of 2018, the US market & economy has diverged from the rest of the globe, posting solid numbers (prior to October) whereas the rest of the world was struggling. It is possible that we are seeing an end to that divergence, suggesting that the US markets will move more closely with the other global markets going forward.
5. Panic Attack?
One of the more striking features of the markets during October 2018 has been that the stock market retreat, while substantial, has, for the most part, been orderly. In a panic-driven stock market sell off, you usually see a surge in government bond prices (and a drop in rates), a general flight to quality (US $ and safer companies) and a rise in the price of gold. As we noted in the earlier section, the market drop does not seem to be smaller at larger and more profitable companies, and government bond rates have not dropped. In addition, while the US dollar has had a strong year so far, especially against emerging market currencies, it generally did not see a flight to it in October 2018:
The dollar strengthened mildly against almost every currency during the month, and the only currency where there was a big move was against the Brazilian Reai, where it weakened, again on political news in Brazil. Note again that the market correction may be, at least partly, a delayed reaction to the strength of the US dollar leading into October, but the timing is still difficult to explain. Finally, I looked at gold prices in October 2018, in conjunction with bitcoin, since the latter has been promoted as millennial gold:
It has been a good month for gold, with prices up 4.44%, though there is little sign of panic buying pushing up prices. It may be a little unfair to be passing judgment on Bitcoin, after one crisis, but if it is millennial gold, either millennials are unaware that there is a stock market sell off or they do not care.
Step 3: Review the fundamentals
With the assessment of market pain behind us, we can turn to looking at the fundamentals, again looking for clues in why stocks have had such a tough month. While almost every factor affects stock prices, the effects have to show up in one of four places for fundamental value to change significantly: a shock to base year earnings or cash flows, a change in expected earnings/cash flow growth, a increase in the risk free rate or a change in the price of risk:
Since treasury bond rates have been stable through much of the month, I am going to look at one of the other three variables as the potential culprit.
Base Year Earnings/Cashflows: The earnings reports that have come out for companies in diverse sectors in the last two weeks seem to reinforce the strong earnings story. While there were a few like Caterpillar and 3M that reported headwinds from a stronger dollar, both companies also conveyed the message that they were able to pass the higher costs through to the customers.
On the cash flow front, there were no high profile cessations of buybacks or dividends, and all signs point to the market delivering and perhaps beating the earnings and cash flows that we have estimated for 2018.Earnings Growth: This is a trickier component, since it is driven as much by actual data, as it is by perception. At the start of the year, the expectation that earnings growth would be strong for this year, helped both the tax law changes of last year and a strong economy. That growth has been delivered, but it is possible that investors are now doubtful about the sustainability of that earnings growth. That has not shown up yet in forecasted growth for next year, but it bears watching.Price of Equity Risk (Equity Risk Premium): If you have been reading my blog for a while, you are probably aware of my implied equity risk premium calculation, one that backs out a price of equity risk (equity risk premium) from the level of the index, expected cash flows and a growth rate. Holding cash flows and growth rate fixed for October, I have computed the implied equity risk premium by day. table.tableizer-table { font-size: 12px; border: 1px solid #CCC; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; } .tableizer-table td { padding: 4px; margin: 3px; border: 1px solid #CCC; } .tableizer-table th { background-color: #104E8B; color: #FFF; font-weight: bold; }
End of DayUS 10-yr T.BondS&P 500Implied ERPSpreadsheet9/28/183.06%2913.985.38%Download10/1/183.09%2924.595.36%Download10/2/183.05%2923.435.36%Download10/3/183.15%2925.515.35%Download10/4/183.19%2901.615.39%Download10/5/183.23%2885.575.41%Download10/8/183.22%2884.435.42%Download10/9/183.21%2880.345.43%Download10/10/183.22%2785.685.61%Download10/11/183.14%2728.375.73%Download10/12/183.15%2767.135.65%Download10/15/183.16%2750.795.68%Download10/16/183.16%2809.925.57%Download10/17/183.19%2809.215.56%Download10/18/183.17%2768.785.65%Download10/19/183.20%2767.785.64%Download10/22/183.20%2755.885.67%Download10/23/183.17%2740.695.70%Download10/24/183.10%2656.105.89%Download10/25/183.14%2705.575.78%Download10/26/183.08%2658.695.89%%DownloadIf cash flows and expected growth have not changed over the month, the price of equity risk has jumped from 5.38% at the start of the month to the 5.89% on October 26, putting it at the high end of equity risk premiums in the last decade.
You could attribute the higher equity risk premiums to global crises (in Italy and Saudi Arabia) but that would be a reach since the increase in risk premiums predates both crises. If you do lower expected earnings growth going forward, perhaps reflecting a delayed response to the stronger dollar and higher rates, the equity risk premium will drop. In fact, halving the expected growth rate from 2019 on from the current estimate of 7.29% to 4.71% (the compounded average annual earnings growth rate over the last 10 years) reduces the equity risk premium to 5.28%, but even that number is a healthy one, relative to historic norms. The bottom line is that, at least by my calculations, I am estimating an equity risk premium that seems fair, given macro and micro fundamentals and my risk preferences.
Step 4: Investment Action
One of the biggest perils of being reactive in a crisis is that it can knock you off your investment game and cause you to abandon your core philosophy. I don't believe that there is one investment philosophy that is right for every one, but I do believe that there is one that is right for you, and shifting away from it is a recipe for bad results. I am a “value” investor, though my definition of value is different from old-time value investing in two ways:
Under valued stocks can be found across sectors and the life cycle: I believe that we should try to assess fair value, not a conservative estimate of value, and that the value should include expected value added from future growth. To the critique that this is speculative, my answer is that everything other than cash-in-hand requires making assumptions about the future, and I am willing to go the distance. That is why, at different points in time, you have seen Twitter and Facebook in my portfolio in the past and may well see Netflix and Tesla in the future (just not now).Intrinsic value can change over time: I believe that intrinsic value is a dynamic number that changes over time, not only because new information may come out about a company. but also because the price of equity risk can change over time. That said, intrinsic values generally change less than market prices do, as mood and momentum shift. This has been a month of significant price drops in many companies, but assuming that they are therefore more likely to be under valued is a mistake, since the intrinsic values of these companies have also changed, because the ERP that I will be using to value the stocks on October 26, 2018, will be 5.89%, much higher than the 5.38% at the start of the month.Given my philosophy and a reading of the data, here is what I plan to do.
No change in asset allocation: I am not changing my asset allocation mix in significant ways, since I don't see a fundamental reason to do so. Revisit existing holdings: I normally revalue every company in my portfolio at least once a year, but after a month like this one, I will have to accelerate the process. Put simply, I have to make sure that at the current price for equity risk, and given expected cash flows, that my buys still remain buys and the sells remain sells.Bonus from short sales: I do have a portion of my portfolio that benefits from a sell off, primarily in short sales and those have provided partial offsets to my losses. I did sell short on Amazon and Apple at the start of the month, and while I would like to claim prescience, it was pure luck on timing, and the market downdraft during the month has helped me. Check out the biggest market losers: I plan to take a closer look at the stocks that have been pummeled the most during the month, including 3M and Caterpillar, to see if they are cheap at October 26 prices, and using an October 26 ERP in my valuation. Please note that this is not meant to be investment advice and your path back to investment serenity may be very different from mine!
YouTube Video
Step 1: Hit the pause buttonThe first casualty of crisis is good sense, as I mistake my panic response for instinct, and almost every action that I feel the urge to take in the heat of the moment is driven by fear and greed, not reason. No amount of rational thinking or studying behavioral finance will cure me of this affliction, since it is part of my make up as a human being, but there are three things that I find help me manage my reactions:Take a breath: When faced with fast-moving markets, I have to force myself to consciously slow down. It helps that I don't work as a trader or a portfolio manager, since part of your job is to look like you are in control, even when you are not. Turn off the noise: Turn back the clock about four decades and assume that you were a doctor, a lawyer or a factory worker with much of your wealth invested in stocks. If markets were having a bad day, odds were that you would not even have heard about it until you got home and turned on the news, and even then, you would have been fed scraps of information about Dow, perhaps a 2-minute discussion with a market expert, and you would have then turned on your favorite sitcom. Today, not only can you monitor your stocks every moment of your working day, you can trade on your lunch break and stream CNBC on to your desktop. That may make you a more informed investor, or at least an investor with more information, but I am not sure that constant feedback is healthy for your portfolio, especially in periods like this one. I don't have a Bloomberg terminal on my desk, a ticker tape running on my computer or stock apps on my phone, and I am happy that I don't during periods like this month.Don't play the blame game: Every market correction has its villains, and investors like to tag them. Central banks and governments are always good targets, since they have few defenders and have a history of triggering market meltdowns. The problem that I find with assigning blame to others is that it then relieves me of any responsibility, even for own mistakes, and thus makes it impossible to learn from them and take corrective action. Step 2: Assess the damage In an age of instant analysis and expert opinion, it is easy to get a skewed view of not only what is causing the market damage, but also where that damage is greatest. In my (limited) reading of market analyses during the last four weeks, I have seen at least a half a dozen hypotheses about the stock swoon, from it being the Fed's fault (as usual) to a long overdue tech company correction to it being a response to global crises (in Italy and Saudi Arabia). In keeping with the old adage of "trust, but verify", I decided to take a look at the data to see if there are answers in it to these questions.
1.The Fed's fault? As those of you who read my blog know well, I believe that the Fed has far less power than we think it does to set interest rates, but it is a convenient bogeyman. One explanation for the stock drop that has been making the rounds is that it is fear that Fed will raise rates too quickly in the future, that is causing stocks to swoon. Is that a plausible story? Yes, but if it is the reason for the market decline, you would have a difficult time explaining the movement in interest rates during October 2018:
Source: Federal Reserve (FRED)As stocks have gone through their pains since October 1, treasury bill and bond rates have remained steady, which would make little sense if the expectation is that they will rise in the near future. After all, if investors expect rates to rise soon, those rates will start going up now and not on cue, when the Fed acts.There is the possibility that this could be a delayed reaction to rates having gone up over the year already, with the 10-year treasury bond rate moving from 2.41% at the start of the year to 3.06% at the start of October 2018 and to a flattening yield curve (which has historically been a precursor to slower economic growth). Note though, that much of this movement in interest rates happened in the first six months of the year and you would need a reason for why stock prices would be moving four months later.
2. A Tech Meltdown? My view, based upon what I had been hearing and reading, and before I looked at the data, was that the October 2018 stock drop was being caused by tech companies, in general, and the large tech companies, especially the FANG Apple combination, specifically. To see if this is true, I looked at the returns on all US stocks, classified by sectors (as defined by S&P), in October, in the year to date and for 1-year and 5-year time periods.
US Sector Market Cap Change. Source: S&P Capital IQI know that the S&P sector classifications are imperfect, but my priors seem to be wrong. While information technology, as a group, lost 8.76% of aggregate market capitalization in October 2018, the three worst sectors in the US market were energy, industrials and materials, all of which lost much more, in percentage terms, than technology. In fact, the two sectors that did the best were consumer staples and utilities, with the latter's performance also providing evidence that it is not interest rate fears that are primarily driving this market correction. I have argued that, unlike two decades ago, technology companies now are now a diverse group, and many of them don't fit the "high growth, high risk" profile that people seem to still automatically give all tech companies. Using the terminology of corporate life cycles, tech companies run the gamut from old tech to middle-aged tech to young tech, and I have looked at how tech companies in each age grouping in the graph below (age is defined, relative to year of founding):
The median percentage change, in both October 2018 and YTD 2018, in market capitalization was greatest at the youngest tech companies. The median percentage change becomes smaller for older tech companies, in October 2018, but the effect for the four highest age classes is more mixed for the YTD numbers. That said, a much smaller median percentage change at the largest tech companies has a much biggest effect on the market, because of the market capitalization of these companies. That is the reason I look at the FANG stocks and Apple in the table below:
While the percentage change in stock prices at these companies is in line with the market drop, if Apple is included in the mix, the five companies collectively lost a staggering $276 billion in market capitalization between October 1 and October 26. accounting for almost 11.7% of the overall drop in market capitalization of US stocks. While investors in these stocks may feel merited in complaining about their losses, I would draw their attention to the third column, where I look at what these stocks have done since January 1, 2018, with the losses in October incorporated. Collectively, these five companies have added almost $521 billion in market capitalization since the start of the year, and without them, the overall market would have been down substantially.3. A Correction in Overvalued Stocks? For some value investors who have argued that investors were pushing up some stocks to unsustainable levels, the market correction has been vindication, a sign that the market is correcting its pricing mistakes and marking down the stocks that it had over priced the most. That may be plausible, and to see if it holds, I broke all US stocks, at the start of October, based upon PE ratios into six groupings (low to high PE and a separate one for negative earnings companies):
PE Ratio at start of October 2018, using trailing 12 month earningsIf the selective correction argument is correct, you should expect to see the highest PE ratio and negative earnings companies drop the most in value and the companies with the lowest PE ratios be less affected. While negative earnings stocks have seen the market correction, during October 2018, there is no pattern across the other PE classes. In fact, the lowest PE ratio companies had the second worst record, in terms of price performance, among the groupings. 4. A US Problem?
One of the lessons of the last decade is that much as countries would like to disconnect from the rest of the world and chart their own pathway to economic prosperity, they are joined at the hip by globalization, with crisis in one part of the world quickly affecting economies and markets in other parts. In October 2018, we had our share of global shocks, with the standoff between Italy and the EU and Saudi Arabia's Khashoggi problem taking top billing. To see how the market correction has played out in world markets, I broke global markets down into broad regional groupings and arrived at the following:
Source: S&P Capital IQ, based upon headquarters geographyNote that these returns are all in US dollars, reflecting both the performance of the market and the currencies of each region. Asia seems to have been hit the worst this month, with China, Small Asia (South East Asia, Pakistan, Bangladesh) and Japan all seeing double digit declines in aggregate market capitalization. Latin America has had the best performance of the regional groupings, with the election surprise in Brazil driving its markets upwards during the month. The year-to-date numbers do tell a bigger story that has been glossed over in analysis. For much of 2018, the US market & economy has diverged from the rest of the globe, posting solid numbers (prior to October) whereas the rest of the world was struggling. It is possible that we are seeing an end to that divergence, suggesting that the US markets will move more closely with the other global markets going forward.5. Panic Attack?
One of the more striking features of the markets during October 2018 has been that the stock market retreat, while substantial, has, for the most part, been orderly. In a panic-driven stock market sell off, you usually see a surge in government bond prices (and a drop in rates), a general flight to quality (US $ and safer companies) and a rise in the price of gold. As we noted in the earlier section, the market drop does not seem to be smaller at larger and more profitable companies, and government bond rates have not dropped. In addition, while the US dollar has had a strong year so far, especially against emerging market currencies, it generally did not see a flight to it in October 2018:
The dollar strengthened mildly against almost every currency during the month, and the only currency where there was a big move was against the Brazilian Reai, where it weakened, again on political news in Brazil. Note again that the market correction may be, at least partly, a delayed reaction to the strength of the US dollar leading into October, but the timing is still difficult to explain. Finally, I looked at gold prices in October 2018, in conjunction with bitcoin, since the latter has been promoted as millennial gold:
It has been a good month for gold, with prices up 4.44%, though there is little sign of panic buying pushing up prices. It may be a little unfair to be passing judgment on Bitcoin, after one crisis, but if it is millennial gold, either millennials are unaware that there is a stock market sell off or they do not care. Step 3: Review the fundamentals
With the assessment of market pain behind us, we can turn to looking at the fundamentals, again looking for clues in why stocks have had such a tough month. While almost every factor affects stock prices, the effects have to show up in one of four places for fundamental value to change significantly: a shock to base year earnings or cash flows, a change in expected earnings/cash flow growth, a increase in the risk free rate or a change in the price of risk:
Since treasury bond rates have been stable through much of the month, I am going to look at one of the other three variables as the potential culprit.
Base Year Earnings/Cashflows: The earnings reports that have come out for companies in diverse sectors in the last two weeks seem to reinforce the strong earnings story. While there were a few like Caterpillar and 3M that reported headwinds from a stronger dollar, both companies also conveyed the message that they were able to pass the higher costs through to the customers.
On the cash flow front, there were no high profile cessations of buybacks or dividends, and all signs point to the market delivering and perhaps beating the earnings and cash flows that we have estimated for 2018.Earnings Growth: This is a trickier component, since it is driven as much by actual data, as it is by perception. At the start of the year, the expectation that earnings growth would be strong for this year, helped both the tax law changes of last year and a strong economy. That growth has been delivered, but it is possible that investors are now doubtful about the sustainability of that earnings growth. That has not shown up yet in forecasted growth for next year, but it bears watching.Price of Equity Risk (Equity Risk Premium): If you have been reading my blog for a while, you are probably aware of my implied equity risk premium calculation, one that backs out a price of equity risk (equity risk premium) from the level of the index, expected cash flows and a growth rate. Holding cash flows and growth rate fixed for October, I have computed the implied equity risk premium by day. table.tableizer-table { font-size: 12px; border: 1px solid #CCC; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; } .tableizer-table td { padding: 4px; margin: 3px; border: 1px solid #CCC; } .tableizer-table th { background-color: #104E8B; color: #FFF; font-weight: bold; } End of DayUS 10-yr T.BondS&P 500Implied ERPSpreadsheet9/28/183.06%2913.985.38%Download10/1/183.09%2924.595.36%Download10/2/183.05%2923.435.36%Download10/3/183.15%2925.515.35%Download10/4/183.19%2901.615.39%Download10/5/183.23%2885.575.41%Download10/8/183.22%2884.435.42%Download10/9/183.21%2880.345.43%Download10/10/183.22%2785.685.61%Download10/11/183.14%2728.375.73%Download10/12/183.15%2767.135.65%Download10/15/183.16%2750.795.68%Download10/16/183.16%2809.925.57%Download10/17/183.19%2809.215.56%Download10/18/183.17%2768.785.65%Download10/19/183.20%2767.785.64%Download10/22/183.20%2755.885.67%Download10/23/183.17%2740.695.70%Download10/24/183.10%2656.105.89%Download10/25/183.14%2705.575.78%Download10/26/183.08%2658.695.89%%DownloadIf cash flows and expected growth have not changed over the month, the price of equity risk has jumped from 5.38% at the start of the month to the 5.89% on October 26, putting it at the high end of equity risk premiums in the last decade.
You could attribute the higher equity risk premiums to global crises (in Italy and Saudi Arabia) but that would be a reach since the increase in risk premiums predates both crises. If you do lower expected earnings growth going forward, perhaps reflecting a delayed response to the stronger dollar and higher rates, the equity risk premium will drop. In fact, halving the expected growth rate from 2019 on from the current estimate of 7.29% to 4.71% (the compounded average annual earnings growth rate over the last 10 years) reduces the equity risk premium to 5.28%, but even that number is a healthy one, relative to historic norms. The bottom line is that, at least by my calculations, I am estimating an equity risk premium that seems fair, given macro and micro fundamentals and my risk preferences.
Step 4: Investment Action
One of the biggest perils of being reactive in a crisis is that it can knock you off your investment game and cause you to abandon your core philosophy. I don't believe that there is one investment philosophy that is right for every one, but I do believe that there is one that is right for you, and shifting away from it is a recipe for bad results. I am a “value” investor, though my definition of value is different from old-time value investing in two ways:
Under valued stocks can be found across sectors and the life cycle: I believe that we should try to assess fair value, not a conservative estimate of value, and that the value should include expected value added from future growth. To the critique that this is speculative, my answer is that everything other than cash-in-hand requires making assumptions about the future, and I am willing to go the distance. That is why, at different points in time, you have seen Twitter and Facebook in my portfolio in the past and may well see Netflix and Tesla in the future (just not now).Intrinsic value can change over time: I believe that intrinsic value is a dynamic number that changes over time, not only because new information may come out about a company. but also because the price of equity risk can change over time. That said, intrinsic values generally change less than market prices do, as mood and momentum shift. This has been a month of significant price drops in many companies, but assuming that they are therefore more likely to be under valued is a mistake, since the intrinsic values of these companies have also changed, because the ERP that I will be using to value the stocks on October 26, 2018, will be 5.89%, much higher than the 5.38% at the start of the month.Given my philosophy and a reading of the data, here is what I plan to do.
No change in asset allocation: I am not changing my asset allocation mix in significant ways, since I don't see a fundamental reason to do so. Revisit existing holdings: I normally revalue every company in my portfolio at least once a year, but after a month like this one, I will have to accelerate the process. Put simply, I have to make sure that at the current price for equity risk, and given expected cash flows, that my buys still remain buys and the sells remain sells.Bonus from short sales: I do have a portion of my portfolio that benefits from a sell off, primarily in short sales and those have provided partial offsets to my losses. I did sell short on Amazon and Apple at the start of the month, and while I would like to claim prescience, it was pure luck on timing, and the market downdraft during the month has helped me. Check out the biggest market losers: I plan to take a closer look at the stocks that have been pummeled the most during the month, including 3M and Caterpillar, to see if they are cheap at October 26 prices, and using an October 26 ERP in my valuation. Please note that this is not meant to be investment advice and your path back to investment serenity may be very different from mine!
YouTube Video
October 16, 2018
High and higher: The Money in Marijuana!
In 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president of the United States, and was asked whether he had ever smoked marijuana, he responded that he had, but that he did not inhale, reflecting the fear that being viewed as a weed-smoker would lay low his presidential ambitions. How times have changed! Today, smoking marijuana recreationally is legal in nine states, and medical marijuana in twenty nine states, in the United States. Outside the United States, much of Europe has always taken a much more sanguine view of cannabis, and on October 17, 2018, Canada will become the second country (after Uruguay) in the world to legalize the recreational use of the product. In conjunction with this development, new companies are entering the market, hoping to take advantage of what they see as a “big” market, and excited investors are rewarding them with large market capitalizations. I have never smoked marijuana, but on my daily walks on the boardwalks of San Diego, I have been inhaling a lot of second-hand smoke, leaving me a little light headed as I write this post. So, read on at your own risk!
The Macro Big Picture
While there is much to debate about how this market will evolve over time, and whether investors and businesses can make money of that evolution, there is one fact that is not debatable. The cannabis market will be a big one, in terms of users and revenues, drawing in large numbers of the population. To get a sense of the growth in this business, consider some nascent statistics from the soon-to-be legalized Canadian recreational market:Lots of people smoke weed: According to the Canadian national census, 42.5% of Canadians have tried Marijuana and about 16% had used it in the recent past (last 3 months), with the percentages climbing among younger Canadians, where one in three being recent users.And spend money to do so: The total revenues from recreational marijuana sales in Canada alone is expected to be $7-8 billion in 2020 and grow at a healthy rate after that. Some of this will represent a shifting from the illegal market (estimated at close to $5 billion in 2017) and some of it will represent new users drawn in its legal status.There is also information that can be gleaned about the future of this business from the states in the United States that have legalized marijuana.In California, where legalization occurred at the start of 2018, revenues from cannabis are expected to be about $3.4 billion in 2018, but that is not a huge jump from the $3 billion in revenues in the illegal market in 2017. One reason, at least in California, is that legal marijuana, with testing, regulation and taxes, is much more expensive than that obtained in the illegal markets that existed pre-legalization. In Colorado, where recreational marijuana use has been legal since 2014, the revenues from selling marijuana have increased from $996 million in 2015 to $1,25 billion in 2016 to $1,47 billion in 2017, representing solid, but not spectacular, growth. Marijuana-related businesses in Colorado have benefited from the revenue growth but have, for the most part, been unable to convert that growth into solid profits, partly because of the regulatory and tax overlay that they have had to navigate. With the limited data that we have from both Canada and the US states that have legalized marijuana, here are some general conclusions that come to mind.The illegal marijuana market will persist after legalization: The illegal weed business will continue, even after legalization, for many reasons. One is that legalization brings costs, regulations and taxes, which make the cost of legal weed higher than its illegal counterpart. The other is cultural, where a segment of long-time weed smokers will be reluctant to give up their traditional ways of acquiring and using weed. From a business standpoint, this will mean that the legal weed businesses will have to share the market with unregulated and untaxed competitors, reducing both revenues and profitability.There will be growth in recreational marijuana sales, but it will not be exponential: For those who are expecting a sudden surge of new users, as a result of legalization, the results from the parts of the world that have legalized should be sobering. In most of these parts, to the extent that society and law enforcement had already turned a blind eye to enforcing marijuana laws before legalization, there was no sea change in legal consequences from weed smoking. The medical marijuana market growth will be driven more by research indicating its value in health care than by popularity contests. The bad news is that this will require navigating the time-consuming and cash-burning FDA regulatory approval process but the good news is that once approved, there is less likely to be pushback, cultural or legal, against its use. It is a safe prediction that medical marijuana will be legal in all of the United States far sooner than recreational marijuana.Federal laws matter: If you are a company in the weed business in one of the nine states that has legalized recreational marijuana, you still face a quandary. While your operations may be legal in the state that you operate in, you are at risk any time your operations require you to cross state lines and as we noted with Colorado businesses, when you pay federal taxes. Since most financial service firms operate across state borders and are regulated by Federal entities, it has also meant that even legal businesses in this space have had trouble raising funding or borrowing money from banks.In spite of all of these caveats, there is optimism about growth in this market, with the more conservative forecasters predicting that global revenues from marijuana sales will increase to $70 billion in 2024, triple the sales today, and the more daring ones predicting close to $150 billion in sales.
The Business Question If the marijuana market is likely to grow strongly, it should be a good market to operate a business in, right? Not all big businesses are profitable or value creating, since for a big business to be value creating, it has to come with competitive advantages or barriers to entry. If you are an investor in this space, you also have to start thinking about how companies will set themselves apart from each other, once the business matures. To see how companies in this business will evolve, it is important that you separate the recreational from the medical cannabis businesses, since each will face different challenges.
I. Recreational Cannabis
Like tobacco and alcohol, the recreational marijuana business will grow with a wink and a nod towards its side costs, and potential to be a gateway to more potent and addictive substances. Like tobacco and alcohol, marijuana will face both constraints on who it can be sold to, as well as lawsuits down the road. Before you take issue with me for taking a negative view of marijuana, note that this is not a bad path to follow, given that tobacco and alcohol have been solid money-makers for decades. The question then becomes whether, like alcohol and tobacco, cannabis will become a brand-name driven business, where having a stronger brand name allows the winners to charge higher prices and earn better margins, or whether it devolves into a commodity business, where there is little to differentiate between the offerings of different companies, leading to commoditization and low margins. If it is the former, the most successful businesses in the space will bring marketing and branding skills to the table and if it is the latter, it will be economies of scale, and low-cost production that will be the differentiator.
II. Medical Cannabis
The medical marijuana business will more closely resemble the pharmaceutical business, where you will have to work with health care regulations and economics. Success in this business will come from finding a blockbuster cannabis-based drug that can then be sold at premium prices. If our experience with young pharmaceutical and biotech companies is an indicator, this would suggest that to succeed in this business, a company will need continued access to capital from investors with patience, a strong research presence and an understanding of the regulatory approval process. The company will also generate more value in health care systems where drug companies have pricing power, making the US market a much more lucrative one than the Canadian one. The differences between the two businesses are stark enough that you can argue that it will be difficult for a company to operate in both businesses without running into problems, sooner or later.
Investment considerations So, should you invest in this business or stay away until it becomes more mature? While there is an argument for waiting, if you are risk averse, it will also mean that you will lose out on the biggest rewards. If you are exploring your options today, you have to start by assessing your investment choices and pick the one that you are most comfortable with.
The Investment Landscape This is a young and evolving business, with the Canadian legalization drawing more firms into the market. Not only are the companies on the list of public companies in the sector recent listings, but almost all of them have small revenues and big losses. While that, by itself, is likely to drive away old time value investors, it is worth noting that at a this early stage in the business life cycle, these losses are a feature, not a bug. Looking at just the top 10 companies, in terms of market cap, on the cannabis business, here is what I see:
Largest Publicly Traded Cannabis Companies- October 2018 Note that the biggest company on the list is Tilray, a company that went publicly only a few months ago, with revenues that barely register ($28 million) and operating losses. Tilray made the news right after its IPO, with its stock price increasing ten-fold in the weeks after, before losing almost half of its value in the weeks after. Canopy Growth, the largest and most established company on this list, has the highest revenues at $68 million. More generally, Canadian companies dominate the list and all of them trade at astronomical multiples of book value.
As new companies flock into the market, the list of publicly traded companies is only going to get longer, and at least for the foreseeable future, most of them will continue to lose money. Adding to the chaos, existing companies that have logical reasons to enter this business (tobacco & alcohol in the recreational and pharmaceuticals in the medical) but have held back will enter, as the stigma of being in the business fades, and with it, the federal handicaps imposed for being in the business. Put simply, this business, like many other young and potentially big markets, seems to be in the throes of what I called the big market delusion in a post that I had about online advertising companies a few years ago.
Trading and Investing Like all young businesses, this segment is currently dominated by trading and pricing, not investing and valuation. Put differently, companies are being priced based upon the size of the potential market and incremental information. Put simply, small and seemingly insignificant news stories will cause big swings in stock prices. Thus, there is no fundamental rationale you can give for why Tilray’s stock has behaved the way it has since it's IPO. It is driven by mood and momentum. If you are a good trader, this is a great time to play the game, since you can use your skills at detecting momentum shifts to make money as the stock goes up and again as it goes down. Since I am a terrible trader, I will leave it up to to you to decide whether you want to play the game.
If you are an investor, you want to invest on the expectation that there is more value in these companies than you are paying up front, for your equity stake. As I see it, here are your choices:The Concentrated Pick: Pick a stock or two that you believe is most suited to succeed in the business, as it matures. Thus, if you believe that the business is going to get commoditized and that the winner will be the one with the lowest costs, you should target a company like Canopy Growth, a company that seems to be pushing towards making itself the low-cost leader in the growth end of the business. If, in contrast, you believe that this is a business where branding and marketing will set you apart, you should focus on a company that is building itself up through marketing and celebrity endorsements. To succeed at this strategy, you have to be right on both your macro assessment and your company pick, but if you are, this approach has the potential to have the biggest payoff. Spread your bets: If your views about how the business will evolve are diffuse, but you do believe that there will be strong overall revenue growth and ultimate profitability, you can buy a portfolio of marijuana stocks. In fact, there is an ETF (MJ) composed primarily of cannabis-related stocks, with a modest expense ratio; its ten biggest holdings are all marijuana stocks, comprising 62% of the portfolio. The upside is that you just have to be right, on average, for this strategy to pay off, but the downside is that these companies are all richly priced, given the overall optimism about the market today. You also have to worry that the ultimate winner may not be on the list of stocks that are listed today, but a new entrant who has not shown up yet. If you are willing to wait for a correction, and there will be one, you may be able to get into the ETF at a much more reasonable price.The Indirect Play: Watch for established players to also jump in, with tobacco and alcohol stocks entering the recreational weed business, and pharmaceutical companies the medical weed business. You may get a better payoff investing in these established companies, many of which are priced for low growth and declining margins. One example is Scott’s Miracle-Gro, for instance, which has a growing weed subsidiary called Hawthorne Gardening. Another is GW Pharmaceuticals that has cannabis-based drugs in production for epilepsy and MS.It may be indication of my age, but I really don’t have a strong enough handle on this market and what makes it tick to make an early bet on competitive advantages. So, I will pass on picking the one or two winners in the market. Given how euphoric investors have been since the legalization of weed in Canada in pushing up cannabis stock prices, I think this is the wrong time to buy the ETF, especially since sector is going to draw in new players. That leaves me with the third and final choice, which is to invest in a company that is not viewed as being in the business but has a significant stake in it nevertheless. At current stock prices, neither Scott Miracle-Gro nor GW Pharmaceuticals looks like a good bet (I valued Scott Miracle-Gro at about $55, below its current stock price of $70.), but I think that my choices will get richer in the years to come. I can wait, and while I do, I think I will take another walk on the boardwalk!
YouTube Video
The Macro Big Picture
While there is much to debate about how this market will evolve over time, and whether investors and businesses can make money of that evolution, there is one fact that is not debatable. The cannabis market will be a big one, in terms of users and revenues, drawing in large numbers of the population. To get a sense of the growth in this business, consider some nascent statistics from the soon-to-be legalized Canadian recreational market:Lots of people smoke weed: According to the Canadian national census, 42.5% of Canadians have tried Marijuana and about 16% had used it in the recent past (last 3 months), with the percentages climbing among younger Canadians, where one in three being recent users.And spend money to do so: The total revenues from recreational marijuana sales in Canada alone is expected to be $7-8 billion in 2020 and grow at a healthy rate after that. Some of this will represent a shifting from the illegal market (estimated at close to $5 billion in 2017) and some of it will represent new users drawn in its legal status.There is also information that can be gleaned about the future of this business from the states in the United States that have legalized marijuana.In California, where legalization occurred at the start of 2018, revenues from cannabis are expected to be about $3.4 billion in 2018, but that is not a huge jump from the $3 billion in revenues in the illegal market in 2017. One reason, at least in California, is that legal marijuana, with testing, regulation and taxes, is much more expensive than that obtained in the illegal markets that existed pre-legalization. In Colorado, where recreational marijuana use has been legal since 2014, the revenues from selling marijuana have increased from $996 million in 2015 to $1,25 billion in 2016 to $1,47 billion in 2017, representing solid, but not spectacular, growth. Marijuana-related businesses in Colorado have benefited from the revenue growth but have, for the most part, been unable to convert that growth into solid profits, partly because of the regulatory and tax overlay that they have had to navigate. With the limited data that we have from both Canada and the US states that have legalized marijuana, here are some general conclusions that come to mind.The illegal marijuana market will persist after legalization: The illegal weed business will continue, even after legalization, for many reasons. One is that legalization brings costs, regulations and taxes, which make the cost of legal weed higher than its illegal counterpart. The other is cultural, where a segment of long-time weed smokers will be reluctant to give up their traditional ways of acquiring and using weed. From a business standpoint, this will mean that the legal weed businesses will have to share the market with unregulated and untaxed competitors, reducing both revenues and profitability.There will be growth in recreational marijuana sales, but it will not be exponential: For those who are expecting a sudden surge of new users, as a result of legalization, the results from the parts of the world that have legalized should be sobering. In most of these parts, to the extent that society and law enforcement had already turned a blind eye to enforcing marijuana laws before legalization, there was no sea change in legal consequences from weed smoking. The medical marijuana market growth will be driven more by research indicating its value in health care than by popularity contests. The bad news is that this will require navigating the time-consuming and cash-burning FDA regulatory approval process but the good news is that once approved, there is less likely to be pushback, cultural or legal, against its use. It is a safe prediction that medical marijuana will be legal in all of the United States far sooner than recreational marijuana.Federal laws matter: If you are a company in the weed business in one of the nine states that has legalized recreational marijuana, you still face a quandary. While your operations may be legal in the state that you operate in, you are at risk any time your operations require you to cross state lines and as we noted with Colorado businesses, when you pay federal taxes. Since most financial service firms operate across state borders and are regulated by Federal entities, it has also meant that even legal businesses in this space have had trouble raising funding or borrowing money from banks.In spite of all of these caveats, there is optimism about growth in this market, with the more conservative forecasters predicting that global revenues from marijuana sales will increase to $70 billion in 2024, triple the sales today, and the more daring ones predicting close to $150 billion in sales.
The Business Question If the marijuana market is likely to grow strongly, it should be a good market to operate a business in, right? Not all big businesses are profitable or value creating, since for a big business to be value creating, it has to come with competitive advantages or barriers to entry. If you are an investor in this space, you also have to start thinking about how companies will set themselves apart from each other, once the business matures. To see how companies in this business will evolve, it is important that you separate the recreational from the medical cannabis businesses, since each will face different challenges.
I. Recreational Cannabis
Like tobacco and alcohol, the recreational marijuana business will grow with a wink and a nod towards its side costs, and potential to be a gateway to more potent and addictive substances. Like tobacco and alcohol, marijuana will face both constraints on who it can be sold to, as well as lawsuits down the road. Before you take issue with me for taking a negative view of marijuana, note that this is not a bad path to follow, given that tobacco and alcohol have been solid money-makers for decades. The question then becomes whether, like alcohol and tobacco, cannabis will become a brand-name driven business, where having a stronger brand name allows the winners to charge higher prices and earn better margins, or whether it devolves into a commodity business, where there is little to differentiate between the offerings of different companies, leading to commoditization and low margins. If it is the former, the most successful businesses in the space will bring marketing and branding skills to the table and if it is the latter, it will be economies of scale, and low-cost production that will be the differentiator.
II. Medical Cannabis
The medical marijuana business will more closely resemble the pharmaceutical business, where you will have to work with health care regulations and economics. Success in this business will come from finding a blockbuster cannabis-based drug that can then be sold at premium prices. If our experience with young pharmaceutical and biotech companies is an indicator, this would suggest that to succeed in this business, a company will need continued access to capital from investors with patience, a strong research presence and an understanding of the regulatory approval process. The company will also generate more value in health care systems where drug companies have pricing power, making the US market a much more lucrative one than the Canadian one. The differences between the two businesses are stark enough that you can argue that it will be difficult for a company to operate in both businesses without running into problems, sooner or later.
Investment considerations So, should you invest in this business or stay away until it becomes more mature? While there is an argument for waiting, if you are risk averse, it will also mean that you will lose out on the biggest rewards. If you are exploring your options today, you have to start by assessing your investment choices and pick the one that you are most comfortable with.
The Investment Landscape This is a young and evolving business, with the Canadian legalization drawing more firms into the market. Not only are the companies on the list of public companies in the sector recent listings, but almost all of them have small revenues and big losses. While that, by itself, is likely to drive away old time value investors, it is worth noting that at a this early stage in the business life cycle, these losses are a feature, not a bug. Looking at just the top 10 companies, in terms of market cap, on the cannabis business, here is what I see:
Largest Publicly Traded Cannabis Companies- October 2018 Note that the biggest company on the list is Tilray, a company that went publicly only a few months ago, with revenues that barely register ($28 million) and operating losses. Tilray made the news right after its IPO, with its stock price increasing ten-fold in the weeks after, before losing almost half of its value in the weeks after. Canopy Growth, the largest and most established company on this list, has the highest revenues at $68 million. More generally, Canadian companies dominate the list and all of them trade at astronomical multiples of book value.As new companies flock into the market, the list of publicly traded companies is only going to get longer, and at least for the foreseeable future, most of them will continue to lose money. Adding to the chaos, existing companies that have logical reasons to enter this business (tobacco & alcohol in the recreational and pharmaceuticals in the medical) but have held back will enter, as the stigma of being in the business fades, and with it, the federal handicaps imposed for being in the business. Put simply, this business, like many other young and potentially big markets, seems to be in the throes of what I called the big market delusion in a post that I had about online advertising companies a few years ago.
Trading and Investing Like all young businesses, this segment is currently dominated by trading and pricing, not investing and valuation. Put differently, companies are being priced based upon the size of the potential market and incremental information. Put simply, small and seemingly insignificant news stories will cause big swings in stock prices. Thus, there is no fundamental rationale you can give for why Tilray’s stock has behaved the way it has since it's IPO. It is driven by mood and momentum. If you are a good trader, this is a great time to play the game, since you can use your skills at detecting momentum shifts to make money as the stock goes up and again as it goes down. Since I am a terrible trader, I will leave it up to to you to decide whether you want to play the game.
If you are an investor, you want to invest on the expectation that there is more value in these companies than you are paying up front, for your equity stake. As I see it, here are your choices:The Concentrated Pick: Pick a stock or two that you believe is most suited to succeed in the business, as it matures. Thus, if you believe that the business is going to get commoditized and that the winner will be the one with the lowest costs, you should target a company like Canopy Growth, a company that seems to be pushing towards making itself the low-cost leader in the growth end of the business. If, in contrast, you believe that this is a business where branding and marketing will set you apart, you should focus on a company that is building itself up through marketing and celebrity endorsements. To succeed at this strategy, you have to be right on both your macro assessment and your company pick, but if you are, this approach has the potential to have the biggest payoff. Spread your bets: If your views about how the business will evolve are diffuse, but you do believe that there will be strong overall revenue growth and ultimate profitability, you can buy a portfolio of marijuana stocks. In fact, there is an ETF (MJ) composed primarily of cannabis-related stocks, with a modest expense ratio; its ten biggest holdings are all marijuana stocks, comprising 62% of the portfolio. The upside is that you just have to be right, on average, for this strategy to pay off, but the downside is that these companies are all richly priced, given the overall optimism about the market today. You also have to worry that the ultimate winner may not be on the list of stocks that are listed today, but a new entrant who has not shown up yet. If you are willing to wait for a correction, and there will be one, you may be able to get into the ETF at a much more reasonable price.The Indirect Play: Watch for established players to also jump in, with tobacco and alcohol stocks entering the recreational weed business, and pharmaceutical companies the medical weed business. You may get a better payoff investing in these established companies, many of which are priced for low growth and declining margins. One example is Scott’s Miracle-Gro, for instance, which has a growing weed subsidiary called Hawthorne Gardening. Another is GW Pharmaceuticals that has cannabis-based drugs in production for epilepsy and MS.It may be indication of my age, but I really don’t have a strong enough handle on this market and what makes it tick to make an early bet on competitive advantages. So, I will pass on picking the one or two winners in the market. Given how euphoric investors have been since the legalization of weed in Canada in pushing up cannabis stock prices, I think this is the wrong time to buy the ETF, especially since sector is going to draw in new players. That leaves me with the third and final choice, which is to invest in a company that is not viewed as being in the business but has a significant stake in it nevertheless. At current stock prices, neither Scott Miracle-Gro nor GW Pharmaceuticals looks like a good bet (I valued Scott Miracle-Gro at about $55, below its current stock price of $70.), but I think that my choices will get richer in the years to come. I can wait, and while I do, I think I will take another walk on the boardwalk!
YouTube Video
September 21, 2018
Amazon and Apple at a Trillion $: A Follow-up on Uncertainty and Catalysts!
In my last post, I looked at Apple and Amazon, as their market caps exceeded a trillion dollars, tracing the journey that they took over the last two decades to get to that threshold and valuing them given their current standing. While you can check out the stories that I told and the details of my valuation in that post, I valued Apple at $200, about 9% less than the market price, and Amazon at abut $1255, about 35% lower than its market price. I concluded the post with a teaser, promising to come back with my decisions on whether I would sell my existing Apple shareholding and/or sell short on Amazon, after reviewing two loose ends. The first is to lay bare the uncertainties inherent in both valuations, to see if there is something in those uncertainties that I can use to make a better decision. The second is to evaluate whether there are catalysts that will convert the gap that I see between value and price into actual profits.
Facing up to Uncertainty
One of the recurrent themes in this blog is that we (as human beings) are not good at dealing with uncertainty. We avoid, evade and deny its existence, and in the process end up making unhealthy choices. When valuing companies, uncertainty is a given, a feature and not a bug, and traditional valuation models often give it short shrift. In fact, looking at my valuations of Apple and Amazon, you can see that the only place that I explicitly deal with uncertainty is in the discount rate, and even that process is rendered opaque, because I use betas and equity risk premiums to get to my final numbers. My cash flows reflect my expectations, and even in my moments of greatest hubris, I don't believe that I know, with precision, what will happen to Apple's revenue growth over time or how Amazon's operating margin will evolve in the future. So, why bother? In investing, you have no choice but to make your best estimates and value companies, knowing fully well that you will be wrong, no matter how much information you have and how good your models are.
That said, it is puzzling that we still stick with point estimates (single numbers for revenue growth and operating margins) in conventional valuation, when we have the tools to bring in uncertainty into our valuation judgments. While our statistics classes in college are a distant (and often painful) memory for most of us, there are statistical tools that can help us. While these tools may have been impractical even a decade ago, they are now more accessible, and when coupled with the richer data that we now have, we have the pieces in place to go beyond single value judgments. It is with this objective in mind that I recently updated a paper that I have on using probabilistic and statistical techniques to enrich valuation online, and you can get the paper by going to this link. Consider it a companion to another paper that I wrote a while back, dealing more expansively with uncertainty and healthy ways of dealing with it in investing and valuation.
Summarizing the probabilistic techniques that may help in valuation, I suggest three: (1) Scenario Analysis, for valuing companies that may have different valuations depending upon specific and usually discrete scenarios unfolding (for example a change in regulatory regimes for a bank or telecommunications company), (2) Decision Trees, for valuing companies that face sequential risk, i.e., you have to get through one phase of risk to arrive at the next one, as is the case with young drug companies that have new drugs in the regulatory pipeline and (3) Monte Carlo Simulations, the most general technique that can accommodate continuous and even correlated risks that you face in valuation, as is the case when you forecast revenue growth and operating margins for Apple and Amazon, in pursuit of their values.
Simulated Values: Apple and Amazon
Before delving into the simulations for Apple and Amazon, it is important that we set up the structure of the simulations first by first deciding what variables to build distributions around. While you may be tempted by the power of the tool to make every input (from risk free rates to terminal growth rates) into a distribution, my suggestion is that you focus on the variables that not only matter the most, but where you feel most uncertain. With Apple, the three inputs that I will build distributions around are revenue growth, operating margins and cost of capital. With Amazon, I will add a fourth variable to the mix, in the sales to invested capital, measuring how efficiently Amazon can deliver its revenue growth.
Apple: A September 2018 Simulation
I build around my core story for Apple, which is that it will be a slow growth, cash machine, deriving the bulk of its revenues, profits and value from the iPhone, but allow for uncertainty in each of my key inputs:
Revenue growth: While my expected growth rate stays 3%, I allow for a range of growth rates from no growth (flat revenues) , if the iPhone's higher prices cost it signifiant market share) to 6% growth, which would require that Apple find a new growth source, perhaps from services or a new product.Operating Margin: In my story, I assumed that operating margin would decline to 25% (from the current 30%) over the next five years. While I still feel that this is the best estimate, I allow for the possibility that competition will be stronger than expected (with margins dropping to 20%), at one end, and that Apple will be able to use its brand name to keep margins at 30%, at the other. Cost of capital: My base case cost of capital is 8.20%, reflecting Apple's mix of businesses, but allowing for errors in my sector risk measures and changes in business mix, I build a distribution centered around 8.20% but with a small standard error (0.40%). Since I want to stay market neutral, taking no stand on either the level of interest rates or overall stock prices, I am leaving the ten-year bond rate and equity risk premium untouched. The results of the simulation are below:
Valuation & Simulation OutputNote that the median, mean and base case valuations are all bunched up at $200 and that the range in value, using the 10th and 90th percentiles, is tight ($176 to $229).
Amazon: A September 2018 Simulation
Moving from Apple to Amazon, my uncertainties multiply partly because my story is of a company that will move into any business where it believes its disruptive platform can deliver results, and there are very few businesses that are immune. Consequently, every input into the valuation is much more volatile, but I will focus on four:
Revenue Growth: I used an expected growth rate for Amazon of 15% a year for the next 5 years, tapering down to lower levels in the future, to push revenues to $626 billion, ten years from now. While that is an ambitious target, Amazon has proved itself capable of beating sky high expectations before and it is plausible that the growth rate could be as high as 25% (which would translate to revenues of $1.13 trillion, ten years out). There is also the possibility that regulators and anti-trust enforcers may step in and restrain Amazon's growth plans, which could cause the growth rate to drop significantly to 5% (resulting in revenues of $330 billion in year 10).Operating Margin: While Amazon's margins have been on a slow, but steady, climb in the last few years, much of that improvement has come from the cloud services business, and the future course of margins will depend not only on how well Amazon can bring logistics costs under control but also on what new businesses it targets. I will stay with my base cash assumption of a target operating margin of 12.5%, but allow for the possibility that Amazon's margins will stay stagnant (close to today's margins of about 7%), at one extreme, and that there might be a new, very profitable business that Amazon can enter, pushing up the margins above 18%, at the other.Sales to Invested Capital: Currently, Amazon is an efficient utilizer of capital, generating $5.95 in revenues for every dollar of capital invested. While this will remain my base case, there may be future businesses that Amazon is targeting that may be more or less capital intensive than its current ones, leading to a significant range (3.95 for the more capital intensive - 7.95 to the less capital intensive).Cost of Capital: I will stick with my base case cost of capital of 7.97%, with the possibility that that it could drop as Amazon's older businesses become profitable (but not by much, since the current cost of capital is close to the median for global companies) as well as the very real chance that it could go up significantly, if Amazon targets risky businesses in emerging markets for its growth.
Valuation & Simulation OutputThe median value across the simulations is $1242, close to the base case valuation of $1,255. The range on value, using the 10th and 90th percentiles is $705 - $2,152, much wider than the range for Apple.
Lessons from Apple and Amazon Simulations
Simulations yield pretty pictures and if that is all you get out of them, it is time and energy wasted. There are lessons that we can eke out of the Apple and Amazon simulations that may help us in making more informed judgments:
This is not about getting better estimates of value: If you are running simulations because you think they will give you more precise or better estimates of value than point estimate valuations, you will be disappointed. Since my input distributions are centered around my base case assumptions, and they should be, the median values across 100,000 simulations are close to my base case valuations for both Apple and Amazon.If it is a risk proxy, it is a very noisy and dangerous one: It is true that the spread of the distributions provides a measure of estimation uncertainty that you bring into your valuation. Using the Apple and Amazon simulations to illustrate, I face far greater uncertainty with my Amazon story than with my Apple story, and you can see it reflected in a larger range of value for the former. You may be puzzled that my cost of capital is lower for Amazon than for Apple, but that reflects the fact that much of the uncertainty that I face with Amazon is company-specific and should be buffered by other stocks in my portfolio. As a diversified investor, the variance in simulated values is a poor proxy for risk. However, if you are an investor who prefers concentrated portfolios, you can use the variance in simulated value as a measure of risk. There can be no one margin of safety for all companies: I have written about the margin of safety before, often with skepticism, and one of my critiques has been with the way it is used in practice, where it is set at a fixed number for all companies. Thus, you will find value investors who use a margin of safety of 15% or 20% for all stocks, and the Apple and Amazon simulations show the danger in this practice. A 15% margin of safety for Apple may be too large, given how tightly values are distributed for the company, whereas the same 15% margin of safety may be too small for Amazon, with its wider band of values.Tails matter: Symmetry or the lack of it in distributions may seem like an inside statistics topic, but with simulated values, it has investment consequences. You can see that Apple's value distribution is much more symmetric than Amazon's distribution, with the latter having a significant positive skew, reflecting a greater likelihood of big positive surprises in value, than negative ones. With companies with exposure to large and potentially catastrophic news stories (a large lawsuit or debt covenants), you can have value distributions that are negatively skewed. In general, positive skewed distributions are better for (long) investors than negatively skewed ones, and the reverse is true for investors who are shorting a company.I ran the simulations after my base case valuations suggested that Apple and Amazon were over valued, to see how they might affect my decision on whether to sell short on either company. The results are mixed.
While the simulations confirm my over valuations (no surprise there), with both companies, the current stock price is well within the realm of possibilities. While my base case valuation suggested that Apple was far less over valued (10%) than Amazon (55%), there is roughly a 15-20% chance that both companies are under valued, not over valued.In addition, with Amazon, there is the added risk, if you are selling short, given the long positive tail on the distribution, that if I am wrong, the price I will pay will be much greater than if I am wrong with Apple.The bottom line is that while Amazon seemed like a much better short selling target, after my base case valuations, because it was far more over valued than Apple, the simulations that I did on the two companies even out the scales, at least marginally. Apple is more over valued, but the probability of making money, assuming my valuations are on target is about the same with both stocks, and the downside of being wrong is far greater with Amazon than with Apple.
Value and Price: The Search for Catalysts
In the post that initiated this series, I looked at why crossing a trillion-dollar threshold may matter to investors, using the contrast between the value process and the pricing process. In effect, I argued that there can be a gap between value and price, and that even if you are right about your value judgment, you will make money only if the gap between the two closes:
Investment success thus rides not only on the quality of your value judgment, and how much faith you have in it, but on whether there are catalysts that can cause the gap to change. With companies, these catalysts can take different forms:
Earnings reports: In their earnings reports, in addition to the proverbial bottom line (earnings per share), companies provide information about operating details (growth, margins, capital invested). To the extent that the pricing reflects unrealistic expectations about the future, information that highlights this in an earnings report may cause investors to reassess price. Corporate news: News stories about a company's plans to expand, acquire or divest businesses or to update or introduce new products can reset the pricing game and change the gap.Management Change/Behavior: A change in the ranks of top management or a managerial misjudgment that is made public can cause investors to hit the pause button, and this is especially true for companies that are bound to a single personality (usually a powerful founder/CEO) or derive their value from a key person. Macro/ Government: A change in the macro environment or the regulatory overlay for a company can also cause a reassessment of the gap.With all of these catalysts, there may be value effects (because the cash flows, growth and risk) as well, and it should also be noted that when the gap changes, it may not always close. In fact, these catalysts can sometime make a gap bigger, by feeding into pricing momentum.
As an investor, I look for catalysts when I invest, but I am even more intent on finding them, when I sell short than when I am long a stock. The reason for that divergence is that I am in far greater control of my time horizon, when I buy a stock, since, as long as I stay disciplined and retain faith in my value, only liquidity needs can cause me to sell. When I sell short, my time horizon is far less under my control, exposing me to timing risk. Put different, I can bet on a company being over valued, be right on my thesis, but still lose money on a short sale, because I am forced to close out my position, in the absence of a catalyst.
Going through the list of catalysts with Apple and Amazon, with both stocks approaching all-time highs, there is no obvious pricing trigger than I can point to, though my technical analyst friends will undoubtedly point to indicators that I did not even know existed. On the earnings front, the earnings reports for both companies are so heavily scripted to expectations that it would take a big surprise to reset stories, and I don't see that happening. In fact, I will predict that Amazon's earnings reports will continue to deliver double digit revenue growth and improving margins for the next few quarters, and investors will react positively, even though the growth may not be high enough or the margin improvement substantial enough to justify the market pricing. On the corporate news front, Apple's smart phone business model, with the pressure it puts on the company every year or two to reinvent itself, with the latest and the best, coupled with its big announcement events, creates catalyst moments. Looking back at Apple's ups and downs over the last few years, the triggers for substantial up and down movements on the stock have been new iPhone models doing better or worse than expected. In contrast, Amazon is remarkably low key in new product introductions, preferring to slip in under the radar. Both companies have well regarded and established CEOs, and neither company is personality-driven, making it unlikely that you will see management changes triggering big price changes. Finally, on the macro front, both companies face potential catalyst moments. For Apple, it is the possibility of a trade war with China, a huge market for its products and devices, and for Amazon, it is talk of regulatory restrictions and anti-trust actions that can constrain the company. Since I cannot filibuster my way to a non-decision, I decided to compare my Apple and Amazon numbers/analysis, side by side:
I sold my Apple shares at $220, at the start of trading on Friday (9/21), but while I have not sold short any more shares. I have put in a limit (short) sell, if the price hits $230 (roughly my 90th percentile of value) in the near future. With Amazon, I sold short at $1950 at the start of trading on Friday (9/21). the first time in twenty years that I have sold short on the company, and one reason that I am pulling the trigger is because I believe that the pushback from regulators and anti-trust enforcers will slow the company down in ways that no competitor ever could. I am doing so, with open eyes, since I believe that Amazon is in one of the best run companies in the world, adept at setting market expectations and beating them, and with a track record of taking short sellers to the graveyard. Time will tell, and I am sure that some of you reading this post will let me know, if my bet goes awry, but I don't plan to lose any sleep over this.
YouTube Video
Trillion Dollar Posts
Trillion Dollar Toppers: Market Drivers, Pricing Triggers and CatalystsAmazon and Apple at a Trillion $: Looking back and Looking forwardAmazon and Apple at a Trillion $: A Follow up on Uncertainty and Catalysts!
Spreadsheets
Apple valuation and simulation resultsAmazon valuation and simulation results(I use Crystal Ball, an add-on to Excel, for my simulations. If you don't have that extension (available only on the PC version), you cannot recreate my simulations, but you can download the program for a trial run on the Oracle website)
Papers/ReadingFacing up to Uncertainty: Using Probabilistic Approaches in ValuationLiving with Noise: Investing and Valuation in the Face of Uncertainty
Facing up to Uncertainty
One of the recurrent themes in this blog is that we (as human beings) are not good at dealing with uncertainty. We avoid, evade and deny its existence, and in the process end up making unhealthy choices. When valuing companies, uncertainty is a given, a feature and not a bug, and traditional valuation models often give it short shrift. In fact, looking at my valuations of Apple and Amazon, you can see that the only place that I explicitly deal with uncertainty is in the discount rate, and even that process is rendered opaque, because I use betas and equity risk premiums to get to my final numbers. My cash flows reflect my expectations, and even in my moments of greatest hubris, I don't believe that I know, with precision, what will happen to Apple's revenue growth over time or how Amazon's operating margin will evolve in the future. So, why bother? In investing, you have no choice but to make your best estimates and value companies, knowing fully well that you will be wrong, no matter how much information you have and how good your models are.
That said, it is puzzling that we still stick with point estimates (single numbers for revenue growth and operating margins) in conventional valuation, when we have the tools to bring in uncertainty into our valuation judgments. While our statistics classes in college are a distant (and often painful) memory for most of us, there are statistical tools that can help us. While these tools may have been impractical even a decade ago, they are now more accessible, and when coupled with the richer data that we now have, we have the pieces in place to go beyond single value judgments. It is with this objective in mind that I recently updated a paper that I have on using probabilistic and statistical techniques to enrich valuation online, and you can get the paper by going to this link. Consider it a companion to another paper that I wrote a while back, dealing more expansively with uncertainty and healthy ways of dealing with it in investing and valuation.
Summarizing the probabilistic techniques that may help in valuation, I suggest three: (1) Scenario Analysis, for valuing companies that may have different valuations depending upon specific and usually discrete scenarios unfolding (for example a change in regulatory regimes for a bank or telecommunications company), (2) Decision Trees, for valuing companies that face sequential risk, i.e., you have to get through one phase of risk to arrive at the next one, as is the case with young drug companies that have new drugs in the regulatory pipeline and (3) Monte Carlo Simulations, the most general technique that can accommodate continuous and even correlated risks that you face in valuation, as is the case when you forecast revenue growth and operating margins for Apple and Amazon, in pursuit of their values.
Simulated Values: Apple and Amazon
Before delving into the simulations for Apple and Amazon, it is important that we set up the structure of the simulations first by first deciding what variables to build distributions around. While you may be tempted by the power of the tool to make every input (from risk free rates to terminal growth rates) into a distribution, my suggestion is that you focus on the variables that not only matter the most, but where you feel most uncertain. With Apple, the three inputs that I will build distributions around are revenue growth, operating margins and cost of capital. With Amazon, I will add a fourth variable to the mix, in the sales to invested capital, measuring how efficiently Amazon can deliver its revenue growth.
Apple: A September 2018 Simulation
I build around my core story for Apple, which is that it will be a slow growth, cash machine, deriving the bulk of its revenues, profits and value from the iPhone, but allow for uncertainty in each of my key inputs:
Revenue growth: While my expected growth rate stays 3%, I allow for a range of growth rates from no growth (flat revenues) , if the iPhone's higher prices cost it signifiant market share) to 6% growth, which would require that Apple find a new growth source, perhaps from services or a new product.Operating Margin: In my story, I assumed that operating margin would decline to 25% (from the current 30%) over the next five years. While I still feel that this is the best estimate, I allow for the possibility that competition will be stronger than expected (with margins dropping to 20%), at one end, and that Apple will be able to use its brand name to keep margins at 30%, at the other. Cost of capital: My base case cost of capital is 8.20%, reflecting Apple's mix of businesses, but allowing for errors in my sector risk measures and changes in business mix, I build a distribution centered around 8.20% but with a small standard error (0.40%). Since I want to stay market neutral, taking no stand on either the level of interest rates or overall stock prices, I am leaving the ten-year bond rate and equity risk premium untouched. The results of the simulation are below:
Valuation & Simulation OutputNote that the median, mean and base case valuations are all bunched up at $200 and that the range in value, using the 10th and 90th percentiles, is tight ($176 to $229).Amazon: A September 2018 Simulation
Moving from Apple to Amazon, my uncertainties multiply partly because my story is of a company that will move into any business where it believes its disruptive platform can deliver results, and there are very few businesses that are immune. Consequently, every input into the valuation is much more volatile, but I will focus on four:
Revenue Growth: I used an expected growth rate for Amazon of 15% a year for the next 5 years, tapering down to lower levels in the future, to push revenues to $626 billion, ten years from now. While that is an ambitious target, Amazon has proved itself capable of beating sky high expectations before and it is plausible that the growth rate could be as high as 25% (which would translate to revenues of $1.13 trillion, ten years out). There is also the possibility that regulators and anti-trust enforcers may step in and restrain Amazon's growth plans, which could cause the growth rate to drop significantly to 5% (resulting in revenues of $330 billion in year 10).Operating Margin: While Amazon's margins have been on a slow, but steady, climb in the last few years, much of that improvement has come from the cloud services business, and the future course of margins will depend not only on how well Amazon can bring logistics costs under control but also on what new businesses it targets. I will stay with my base cash assumption of a target operating margin of 12.5%, but allow for the possibility that Amazon's margins will stay stagnant (close to today's margins of about 7%), at one extreme, and that there might be a new, very profitable business that Amazon can enter, pushing up the margins above 18%, at the other.Sales to Invested Capital: Currently, Amazon is an efficient utilizer of capital, generating $5.95 in revenues for every dollar of capital invested. While this will remain my base case, there may be future businesses that Amazon is targeting that may be more or less capital intensive than its current ones, leading to a significant range (3.95 for the more capital intensive - 7.95 to the less capital intensive).Cost of Capital: I will stick with my base case cost of capital of 7.97%, with the possibility that that it could drop as Amazon's older businesses become profitable (but not by much, since the current cost of capital is close to the median for global companies) as well as the very real chance that it could go up significantly, if Amazon targets risky businesses in emerging markets for its growth.
Valuation & Simulation OutputThe median value across the simulations is $1242, close to the base case valuation of $1,255. The range on value, using the 10th and 90th percentiles is $705 - $2,152, much wider than the range for Apple.Lessons from Apple and Amazon Simulations
Simulations yield pretty pictures and if that is all you get out of them, it is time and energy wasted. There are lessons that we can eke out of the Apple and Amazon simulations that may help us in making more informed judgments:
This is not about getting better estimates of value: If you are running simulations because you think they will give you more precise or better estimates of value than point estimate valuations, you will be disappointed. Since my input distributions are centered around my base case assumptions, and they should be, the median values across 100,000 simulations are close to my base case valuations for both Apple and Amazon.If it is a risk proxy, it is a very noisy and dangerous one: It is true that the spread of the distributions provides a measure of estimation uncertainty that you bring into your valuation. Using the Apple and Amazon simulations to illustrate, I face far greater uncertainty with my Amazon story than with my Apple story, and you can see it reflected in a larger range of value for the former. You may be puzzled that my cost of capital is lower for Amazon than for Apple, but that reflects the fact that much of the uncertainty that I face with Amazon is company-specific and should be buffered by other stocks in my portfolio. As a diversified investor, the variance in simulated values is a poor proxy for risk. However, if you are an investor who prefers concentrated portfolios, you can use the variance in simulated value as a measure of risk. There can be no one margin of safety for all companies: I have written about the margin of safety before, often with skepticism, and one of my critiques has been with the way it is used in practice, where it is set at a fixed number for all companies. Thus, you will find value investors who use a margin of safety of 15% or 20% for all stocks, and the Apple and Amazon simulations show the danger in this practice. A 15% margin of safety for Apple may be too large, given how tightly values are distributed for the company, whereas the same 15% margin of safety may be too small for Amazon, with its wider band of values.Tails matter: Symmetry or the lack of it in distributions may seem like an inside statistics topic, but with simulated values, it has investment consequences. You can see that Apple's value distribution is much more symmetric than Amazon's distribution, with the latter having a significant positive skew, reflecting a greater likelihood of big positive surprises in value, than negative ones. With companies with exposure to large and potentially catastrophic news stories (a large lawsuit or debt covenants), you can have value distributions that are negatively skewed. In general, positive skewed distributions are better for (long) investors than negatively skewed ones, and the reverse is true for investors who are shorting a company.I ran the simulations after my base case valuations suggested that Apple and Amazon were over valued, to see how they might affect my decision on whether to sell short on either company. The results are mixed.
While the simulations confirm my over valuations (no surprise there), with both companies, the current stock price is well within the realm of possibilities. While my base case valuation suggested that Apple was far less over valued (10%) than Amazon (55%), there is roughly a 15-20% chance that both companies are under valued, not over valued.In addition, with Amazon, there is the added risk, if you are selling short, given the long positive tail on the distribution, that if I am wrong, the price I will pay will be much greater than if I am wrong with Apple.The bottom line is that while Amazon seemed like a much better short selling target, after my base case valuations, because it was far more over valued than Apple, the simulations that I did on the two companies even out the scales, at least marginally. Apple is more over valued, but the probability of making money, assuming my valuations are on target is about the same with both stocks, and the downside of being wrong is far greater with Amazon than with Apple.
Value and Price: The Search for Catalysts
In the post that initiated this series, I looked at why crossing a trillion-dollar threshold may matter to investors, using the contrast between the value process and the pricing process. In effect, I argued that there can be a gap between value and price, and that even if you are right about your value judgment, you will make money only if the gap between the two closes:
Investment success thus rides not only on the quality of your value judgment, and how much faith you have in it, but on whether there are catalysts that can cause the gap to change. With companies, these catalysts can take different forms:
Earnings reports: In their earnings reports, in addition to the proverbial bottom line (earnings per share), companies provide information about operating details (growth, margins, capital invested). To the extent that the pricing reflects unrealistic expectations about the future, information that highlights this in an earnings report may cause investors to reassess price. Corporate news: News stories about a company's plans to expand, acquire or divest businesses or to update or introduce new products can reset the pricing game and change the gap.Management Change/Behavior: A change in the ranks of top management or a managerial misjudgment that is made public can cause investors to hit the pause button, and this is especially true for companies that are bound to a single personality (usually a powerful founder/CEO) or derive their value from a key person. Macro/ Government: A change in the macro environment or the regulatory overlay for a company can also cause a reassessment of the gap.With all of these catalysts, there may be value effects (because the cash flows, growth and risk) as well, and it should also be noted that when the gap changes, it may not always close. In fact, these catalysts can sometime make a gap bigger, by feeding into pricing momentum.
As an investor, I look for catalysts when I invest, but I am even more intent on finding them, when I sell short than when I am long a stock. The reason for that divergence is that I am in far greater control of my time horizon, when I buy a stock, since, as long as I stay disciplined and retain faith in my value, only liquidity needs can cause me to sell. When I sell short, my time horizon is far less under my control, exposing me to timing risk. Put different, I can bet on a company being over valued, be right on my thesis, but still lose money on a short sale, because I am forced to close out my position, in the absence of a catalyst.
Going through the list of catalysts with Apple and Amazon, with both stocks approaching all-time highs, there is no obvious pricing trigger than I can point to, though my technical analyst friends will undoubtedly point to indicators that I did not even know existed. On the earnings front, the earnings reports for both companies are so heavily scripted to expectations that it would take a big surprise to reset stories, and I don't see that happening. In fact, I will predict that Amazon's earnings reports will continue to deliver double digit revenue growth and improving margins for the next few quarters, and investors will react positively, even though the growth may not be high enough or the margin improvement substantial enough to justify the market pricing. On the corporate news front, Apple's smart phone business model, with the pressure it puts on the company every year or two to reinvent itself, with the latest and the best, coupled with its big announcement events, creates catalyst moments. Looking back at Apple's ups and downs over the last few years, the triggers for substantial up and down movements on the stock have been new iPhone models doing better or worse than expected. In contrast, Amazon is remarkably low key in new product introductions, preferring to slip in under the radar. Both companies have well regarded and established CEOs, and neither company is personality-driven, making it unlikely that you will see management changes triggering big price changes. Finally, on the macro front, both companies face potential catalyst moments. For Apple, it is the possibility of a trade war with China, a huge market for its products and devices, and for Amazon, it is talk of regulatory restrictions and anti-trust actions that can constrain the company. Since I cannot filibuster my way to a non-decision, I decided to compare my Apple and Amazon numbers/analysis, side by side:
I sold my Apple shares at $220, at the start of trading on Friday (9/21), but while I have not sold short any more shares. I have put in a limit (short) sell, if the price hits $230 (roughly my 90th percentile of value) in the near future. With Amazon, I sold short at $1950 at the start of trading on Friday (9/21). the first time in twenty years that I have sold short on the company, and one reason that I am pulling the trigger is because I believe that the pushback from regulators and anti-trust enforcers will slow the company down in ways that no competitor ever could. I am doing so, with open eyes, since I believe that Amazon is in one of the best run companies in the world, adept at setting market expectations and beating them, and with a track record of taking short sellers to the graveyard. Time will tell, and I am sure that some of you reading this post will let me know, if my bet goes awry, but I don't plan to lose any sleep over this.
YouTube Video
Trillion Dollar Posts
Trillion Dollar Toppers: Market Drivers, Pricing Triggers and CatalystsAmazon and Apple at a Trillion $: Looking back and Looking forwardAmazon and Apple at a Trillion $: A Follow up on Uncertainty and Catalysts!
Spreadsheets
Apple valuation and simulation resultsAmazon valuation and simulation results(I use Crystal Ball, an add-on to Excel, for my simulations. If you don't have that extension (available only on the PC version), you cannot recreate my simulations, but you can download the program for a trial run on the Oracle website)
Papers/ReadingFacing up to Uncertainty: Using Probabilistic Approaches in ValuationLiving with Noise: Investing and Valuation in the Face of Uncertainty
September 19, 2018
Apple and Amazon at a Trillion $: Looking Back and Looking Forward!
For most of us, even envisioning a trillion dollars is difficult to do, a few more zeros than we are used to seeing in numbers. Thus, when Apple’s market capitalization exceeded a trillion on August 2, 2018, it was greeted with commentary, and when Amazon’s market capitalization also exceeded a trillion just over a month later on September 4, 2018, there was more of the same. I have not only admired both companies, but tracked and valued them repeatedly over the last twenty years. There is much that I have learned about business and finance from both companies, and I thought this would be a good occasion to look at how these two companies got to where they are today, as well as their similarities and differences. In the process, I will make my assessment of where Apple and Amazon stand today, and update my valuations and investment judgments on both companies. I am sure that your assessments will be different, but it is of these differences that markets are made.
The Road to a Trillion Dollars
Markets give and markets take away, and this is true not just for the laggards in the market, but even the most successful companies. Apple and Amazon have had amazing runs, but without taking anything away from their success, it is worth noting that during their march towards trillion dollar market capitalizations, each has had to endure periods in the wilderness, and the way they dealt with market adversity is what has made them the companies that they are today.
Apple is the older of the two companies, founded in 1976, and igniting the shift away from mainframe computers to personal computers, first with its Apple computers and later with its Macs. My first personal computer was a Mac 128K, which I still own, and I have been an investor in the stock off and on, for decades. In the chart below, I graph the market capitalization of the company from 1990 to September 2018:
After its auspicious beginnings, Apple endured a decade in the wilderness in the 1990s, after the departure of Steve Jobs, its visionary but headstrong co-founder, in 1975, and a series of inept successors. As testimonial that there are sometimes second acts for both people and companies, Apple found its mojo in the first decade of this century, headed again by Steve Jobs but this time with a stronger supporting cast. That success has continued into this decade, with Tim Cook stepping in as CEO, after the untimely demise of Jobs. In the last few years, the company has also chosen to use its capacity to borrow money, increasing its debt ratio from close to nothing to just over 10% of equity (in market value terms).
Just as Apple presided over one major change in our lives, Amazon’s entrée into markets reflected a different shift, one that has changed the way we buy goods, and, in the process, and has upended the retail business. Amazon's sprint from start-up to trillion dollar value is captured below:
From a barely registering market capitalization in 1996, Amazon zoomed to success during the dot-com boom, but as that boom turned to bust, the company lost more than 80% of its market capitalization in 2000. After its near-death experience in 2000, Amazon spent the bulk of the following decade, consolidating and getting ready for its next phase of growth, increasing its market capitalization almost eight-fold between 2012 and 2018.
Along the way, both companies have had their detractors, who have not only scoffed at the capacity both companies to scale up, but have also sold short on the stock, making both stocks among the most shorted in the market. Little seems to have changed on that front, since Apple and Amazon remain among the most heavily shorted stocks in September 2018, though neither Jeff Bezos nor Tim Cook seems to be paying any attention to the short sellers. (Elon Musk, Please take note!)
The Back Story: Revenues and Operating Income
We can debate whether Amazon and Apple are worth a trillion dollars, but there can be no denying that both companies have been successful in their businesses, and that it is these operating success that best explain their high market values. That said, as we will see in the section following, the way these companies have evolved over time have been very different, and looking at the pathways that they used to get to where they are, I will lay the foundations for valuing them today.
Revenue Growth and ProfitabilityEvery investigation of operations starts with revenues and operating income, and with Apple, the picture of revenues and operating income over the last three decades illustrates the transformation wrought by its decision to shift away from personal computers to hand held devices, starting with the iPod and then expanding into the iPhone and iPad, in the the last decade:
The revenue growth rate, which languished in the 1990s, zoomed in 2000-08 time period, and operating margins almost doubled. However, it was in the 2009-13 period that Apple saw the full benefits of its rebirth, with operating margins almost quadrupling, with the iPhone being the primary contributor. During the 2014-18 period, the good news for Apple is that margins have stayed mostly intact but it has seen a fairly dramatic drop off in growth, as the smart phone market matures.
The Amazon operating story also starts with revenue growth, but the company's evolution on operating margins has followed a different path from Apple's:
The company's growth was stratospheric in the early years, partly because it was a start-up, scaling up from less than a million dollars in revenues in 1995 to $2.76 billion in 2000. While scaling up did slow down growth, the company weathered the dot com bust to grow revenues at 28.61% a year from 2000 to 2010, with revenues reaching $34.2 billion in 2010. The most impressive phase for Amazon has been the 2011-2018 period, because it has been able to continue to grow revenues at almost the same rate as in the prior decade, but this time with a much larger base, increasing revenues to $208.1 billion in the last twelve months, ending June 2018. On the income front, the story has not been as positive. While the initial losses in try 1990s can be explained by Amazon's status as a young, growth company, it becomes more difficult to justify the continuation of these losses into 2002 (six years after its public listing) and the trend lines in operating margins since then. Rather than improving over time, as economies of scale kick in, which is what you would expect in growth companies, Amazon's margins have not only stayed low but have often headed lower, suggesting either that the company is not reaping scaling benefits or that it is playing a very different game, and my bet is on the latter.
The Cash Flow ContrastIf you are a value investor, I know that you will probably be taking me to task at this point by noting that you don't get to collect on revenues or operating income and that you invest for the cash flows. That is true, and it is on this dimension the the difference between Apple and Amazon becomes a yawning gap. With Apple, the evolution of the company from a has-been in the 1990s to a disruptive force in the 2001-2010 period to its more mature phase between 2011 and 2018 plays out in its cash flows. Using the free cash flow to equity, which measures cash left over for equity investors after reinvestment and taxes, as the measure of cash that can potentially be returned to shareholders, here is what I see:
I have described Apple as the greatest cash machine in history and you can see why, by looking at the cumulative cash flows generated by the firm. After getting a start in the 2000-08 time period, the cash machine kicked into high gear between 2009 snd 2013, with $124 billion in free cash flow to equity generated cumulatively over the period. You can also see the company's initial reluctance to return the cash, both in the fact that only about a third of the cash flow during this period was returned in dividends and buybacks and in the increase in the cash balance of just over $122 billion. Prodded by activist investors (Einhorn and Icahn, in particular), the company switched gears and began returning more cash, increasing dividends and buying back more stock. Between 2014 and 2018, the company returned an astonishing $277 billion in cash to investors ($61 billion in dividends and $216 billion in buybacks), which is higher than the $242 billion that the firm generated as free cash flows to equity. While it was returning more cash than any other company has in history, Apple pulled off an even more amazing feat, increasing its cash balance by $96 billion, as it used it dipped into it debt capacity, to borrow almost $100 billion.
Amazon's cash flows are a distinct contrast to Apple's, though you should not be surprised, given the lead up. As noted in the earlier section, it is a company that has gone for higher revenue growth, often at the expense of profit margins, and has been willing to wait for its profits. The graph below looks at net income and free cash flows to equity at the company over its lifetime:
It is not the negative FCFE in the early years that is the surprise, since that is what you would expect in a high growth, money losing company, but the evolution of the FCFE in the later years. Initially, Amazon follows the script of a successful growth company, as both profits and FCFE turn positive between 2001 and 2010, but in the years since, Amazon seems to have reverted back to the cash flow patterns of its earlier years, albeit on a much larger scale, with huge negative free cash flows to equity. During all of this period, Amazon has never paid dividends and bought back stock in small quantities in a few years, more to cover management stock option exercises than to return cash to stockholders.
Story and Valuation
With the historical assessment of Apple and Amazon behind us, it is time to turn to the more interesting and relevant question of what to make of each company today, since Apple and Amazon are clearly are on different paths, with very different operating make ups and at different stages in the life cycle. Apple is a mature company, with low growth, and is behaving like one, returning large amounts of cash to stockholders. Amazon is not just a growing company, but one that seems intent on continuing to grow, even if it means delayed profit gratification. In the section below, I will lay out my story and valuation for each company, with the emphasis on the word "my", since I am sure that you have your own story for each company. I will leave my valuation spreadsheet open for you to download, with the story levers easily changed to reflect different stories.
Apple: The Smartphone Cash Machine Apple's success over the last two decades has been largely fueled by one product primarily, the iPhone, and that success has come with two costs. The first is that Apple is now predominately a smart phone company, generating almost 62% of its revenues and an even higher percentage of its profits from the iPhone. The second is that the smart phone business has not only matured, with lower growth rates globally, but is intensely competitive, with both traditional competitors like Samsung and new entrants roiling the business. While there remains a possibility that Apple will find another market to disrupt, I think it will be difficult to do so, partly because with Apple's size, any new disruptive product has to not only be of a big market, but one that is immensely profitable, to make a difference to Apple's cash flow stream.
Download spreadsheetMy story for Apple is therefore relatively unchanged from my story last year, though I am a little bit more optimistic that Apple will be able to use its immense iPhone owner base to sell more services.
I am valuing Apple as a mature company, growing at the same rate as the economy in perpetuity, while seeing its operating margins decline from their current level (30%) to about 25% over the next 5 years, and with these assumptions, I estimate a $200 value per share, roughly 9% lower than the $219 stock price on September 18, 2018.
Amazon: The Disruptive PlatformIn my earlier valuations of Amazon, I called it a Field of Dreams company, because investing in it required investors to buy into its vision of "if we build it (revenues), they (profits) will come". In my most recent valuation of Amazon, I noted that the company was finally starting to deliver on the second half of the promise, increasing its profits margins, with its cloud business contributing large profits, and significant investments in logistics keeping shipping costs in check. Along the way, and especially since 2012, the company has also moved from being predominantly a retailer of goods and services to one that is unafraid to enter any new business, where it can use its disruptive platform to good effect. In effect, it has seemed to have transitioned from being a disruptive retail company to a disruption platform that can be aimed at other businesses, with an army of Prime members at its command.
My story is that will continue to do more of the same, with high revenue growth coming from new businesses and markets and a continued growth in margins, as established businesses start to find their footing.
Download spreadsheetMy revenue growth rate of 15% may seem modest, given Amazon's growth rate in the last decade, but note that if this growth rate can be delivered, Amazon's revenues will be $626 billion in 2027, and if it can improve its overall operating margin to 12.5%, its operating profit will be $78 billion in that year. With this story, I estimate a $1,255 value per share for Amazon, well below its market price of $1,944 a share, making it over valued by almost 35%. I will admit, with no shame, that Amazon is a company that I have consistently under estimated, and it is entirely possible, perhaps even plausible, that the real story for Amazon is even bigger (in terms of revenue growth) and more profitable.
End GameI have always operated on the premise that if you value companies, you should be willing to act on those valuations. In the case of Apple and Amazon, that would suggest that the next step that I should be taking with each company is to sell. With Apple, a stock that I have held for close to three years and which has served me well over the period, that would be accomplished by selling my holding. With Amazon, a stock that I have not held for more than five years, that would imply joining the legions of short sellers. Like an Avengers' movie, I am going to leave you in suspense until my next post, because I have two loose ends to tie up, before I can act. The first is to grapple with the uncertainties that I have about my own stories for the two companies, and the resulting effects on their valuations. The second is what I will mysteriously term "the catalyst effect", which I believe is indispensable, especially when you sell short.
YouTube video
Valuation SpreadsheetsApple Valuation (September 2018)Amazon Valuation (September 2018)
The Road to a Trillion Dollars
Markets give and markets take away, and this is true not just for the laggards in the market, but even the most successful companies. Apple and Amazon have had amazing runs, but without taking anything away from their success, it is worth noting that during their march towards trillion dollar market capitalizations, each has had to endure periods in the wilderness, and the way they dealt with market adversity is what has made them the companies that they are today.
Apple is the older of the two companies, founded in 1976, and igniting the shift away from mainframe computers to personal computers, first with its Apple computers and later with its Macs. My first personal computer was a Mac 128K, which I still own, and I have been an investor in the stock off and on, for decades. In the chart below, I graph the market capitalization of the company from 1990 to September 2018:
After its auspicious beginnings, Apple endured a decade in the wilderness in the 1990s, after the departure of Steve Jobs, its visionary but headstrong co-founder, in 1975, and a series of inept successors. As testimonial that there are sometimes second acts for both people and companies, Apple found its mojo in the first decade of this century, headed again by Steve Jobs but this time with a stronger supporting cast. That success has continued into this decade, with Tim Cook stepping in as CEO, after the untimely demise of Jobs. In the last few years, the company has also chosen to use its capacity to borrow money, increasing its debt ratio from close to nothing to just over 10% of equity (in market value terms).
Just as Apple presided over one major change in our lives, Amazon’s entrée into markets reflected a different shift, one that has changed the way we buy goods, and, in the process, and has upended the retail business. Amazon's sprint from start-up to trillion dollar value is captured below:
From a barely registering market capitalization in 1996, Amazon zoomed to success during the dot-com boom, but as that boom turned to bust, the company lost more than 80% of its market capitalization in 2000. After its near-death experience in 2000, Amazon spent the bulk of the following decade, consolidating and getting ready for its next phase of growth, increasing its market capitalization almost eight-fold between 2012 and 2018.Along the way, both companies have had their detractors, who have not only scoffed at the capacity both companies to scale up, but have also sold short on the stock, making both stocks among the most shorted in the market. Little seems to have changed on that front, since Apple and Amazon remain among the most heavily shorted stocks in September 2018, though neither Jeff Bezos nor Tim Cook seems to be paying any attention to the short sellers. (Elon Musk, Please take note!)
The Back Story: Revenues and Operating Income
We can debate whether Amazon and Apple are worth a trillion dollars, but there can be no denying that both companies have been successful in their businesses, and that it is these operating success that best explain their high market values. That said, as we will see in the section following, the way these companies have evolved over time have been very different, and looking at the pathways that they used to get to where they are, I will lay the foundations for valuing them today.
Revenue Growth and ProfitabilityEvery investigation of operations starts with revenues and operating income, and with Apple, the picture of revenues and operating income over the last three decades illustrates the transformation wrought by its decision to shift away from personal computers to hand held devices, starting with the iPod and then expanding into the iPhone and iPad, in the the last decade:
The revenue growth rate, which languished in the 1990s, zoomed in 2000-08 time period, and operating margins almost doubled. However, it was in the 2009-13 period that Apple saw the full benefits of its rebirth, with operating margins almost quadrupling, with the iPhone being the primary contributor. During the 2014-18 period, the good news for Apple is that margins have stayed mostly intact but it has seen a fairly dramatic drop off in growth, as the smart phone market matures.
The Amazon operating story also starts with revenue growth, but the company's evolution on operating margins has followed a different path from Apple's:
The company's growth was stratospheric in the early years, partly because it was a start-up, scaling up from less than a million dollars in revenues in 1995 to $2.76 billion in 2000. While scaling up did slow down growth, the company weathered the dot com bust to grow revenues at 28.61% a year from 2000 to 2010, with revenues reaching $34.2 billion in 2010. The most impressive phase for Amazon has been the 2011-2018 period, because it has been able to continue to grow revenues at almost the same rate as in the prior decade, but this time with a much larger base, increasing revenues to $208.1 billion in the last twelve months, ending June 2018. On the income front, the story has not been as positive. While the initial losses in try 1990s can be explained by Amazon's status as a young, growth company, it becomes more difficult to justify the continuation of these losses into 2002 (six years after its public listing) and the trend lines in operating margins since then. Rather than improving over time, as economies of scale kick in, which is what you would expect in growth companies, Amazon's margins have not only stayed low but have often headed lower, suggesting either that the company is not reaping scaling benefits or that it is playing a very different game, and my bet is on the latter. The Cash Flow ContrastIf you are a value investor, I know that you will probably be taking me to task at this point by noting that you don't get to collect on revenues or operating income and that you invest for the cash flows. That is true, and it is on this dimension the the difference between Apple and Amazon becomes a yawning gap. With Apple, the evolution of the company from a has-been in the 1990s to a disruptive force in the 2001-2010 period to its more mature phase between 2011 and 2018 plays out in its cash flows. Using the free cash flow to equity, which measures cash left over for equity investors after reinvestment and taxes, as the measure of cash that can potentially be returned to shareholders, here is what I see:
I have described Apple as the greatest cash machine in history and you can see why, by looking at the cumulative cash flows generated by the firm. After getting a start in the 2000-08 time period, the cash machine kicked into high gear between 2009 snd 2013, with $124 billion in free cash flow to equity generated cumulatively over the period. You can also see the company's initial reluctance to return the cash, both in the fact that only about a third of the cash flow during this period was returned in dividends and buybacks and in the increase in the cash balance of just over $122 billion. Prodded by activist investors (Einhorn and Icahn, in particular), the company switched gears and began returning more cash, increasing dividends and buying back more stock. Between 2014 and 2018, the company returned an astonishing $277 billion in cash to investors ($61 billion in dividends and $216 billion in buybacks), which is higher than the $242 billion that the firm generated as free cash flows to equity. While it was returning more cash than any other company has in history, Apple pulled off an even more amazing feat, increasing its cash balance by $96 billion, as it used it dipped into it debt capacity, to borrow almost $100 billion.
Amazon's cash flows are a distinct contrast to Apple's, though you should not be surprised, given the lead up. As noted in the earlier section, it is a company that has gone for higher revenue growth, often at the expense of profit margins, and has been willing to wait for its profits. The graph below looks at net income and free cash flows to equity at the company over its lifetime:
It is not the negative FCFE in the early years that is the surprise, since that is what you would expect in a high growth, money losing company, but the evolution of the FCFE in the later years. Initially, Amazon follows the script of a successful growth company, as both profits and FCFE turn positive between 2001 and 2010, but in the years since, Amazon seems to have reverted back to the cash flow patterns of its earlier years, albeit on a much larger scale, with huge negative free cash flows to equity. During all of this period, Amazon has never paid dividends and bought back stock in small quantities in a few years, more to cover management stock option exercises than to return cash to stockholders.
Story and Valuation
With the historical assessment of Apple and Amazon behind us, it is time to turn to the more interesting and relevant question of what to make of each company today, since Apple and Amazon are clearly are on different paths, with very different operating make ups and at different stages in the life cycle. Apple is a mature company, with low growth, and is behaving like one, returning large amounts of cash to stockholders. Amazon is not just a growing company, but one that seems intent on continuing to grow, even if it means delayed profit gratification. In the section below, I will lay out my story and valuation for each company, with the emphasis on the word "my", since I am sure that you have your own story for each company. I will leave my valuation spreadsheet open for you to download, with the story levers easily changed to reflect different stories.
Apple: The Smartphone Cash Machine Apple's success over the last two decades has been largely fueled by one product primarily, the iPhone, and that success has come with two costs. The first is that Apple is now predominately a smart phone company, generating almost 62% of its revenues and an even higher percentage of its profits from the iPhone. The second is that the smart phone business has not only matured, with lower growth rates globally, but is intensely competitive, with both traditional competitors like Samsung and new entrants roiling the business. While there remains a possibility that Apple will find another market to disrupt, I think it will be difficult to do so, partly because with Apple's size, any new disruptive product has to not only be of a big market, but one that is immensely profitable, to make a difference to Apple's cash flow stream.
Download spreadsheetMy story for Apple is therefore relatively unchanged from my story last year, though I am a little bit more optimistic that Apple will be able to use its immense iPhone owner base to sell more services. I am valuing Apple as a mature company, growing at the same rate as the economy in perpetuity, while seeing its operating margins decline from their current level (30%) to about 25% over the next 5 years, and with these assumptions, I estimate a $200 value per share, roughly 9% lower than the $219 stock price on September 18, 2018.
Amazon: The Disruptive PlatformIn my earlier valuations of Amazon, I called it a Field of Dreams company, because investing in it required investors to buy into its vision of "if we build it (revenues), they (profits) will come". In my most recent valuation of Amazon, I noted that the company was finally starting to deliver on the second half of the promise, increasing its profits margins, with its cloud business contributing large profits, and significant investments in logistics keeping shipping costs in check. Along the way, and especially since 2012, the company has also moved from being predominantly a retailer of goods and services to one that is unafraid to enter any new business, where it can use its disruptive platform to good effect. In effect, it has seemed to have transitioned from being a disruptive retail company to a disruption platform that can be aimed at other businesses, with an army of Prime members at its command.
My story is that will continue to do more of the same, with high revenue growth coming from new businesses and markets and a continued growth in margins, as established businesses start to find their footing.
Download spreadsheetMy revenue growth rate of 15% may seem modest, given Amazon's growth rate in the last decade, but note that if this growth rate can be delivered, Amazon's revenues will be $626 billion in 2027, and if it can improve its overall operating margin to 12.5%, its operating profit will be $78 billion in that year. With this story, I estimate a $1,255 value per share for Amazon, well below its market price of $1,944 a share, making it over valued by almost 35%. I will admit, with no shame, that Amazon is a company that I have consistently under estimated, and it is entirely possible, perhaps even plausible, that the real story for Amazon is even bigger (in terms of revenue growth) and more profitable. End GameI have always operated on the premise that if you value companies, you should be willing to act on those valuations. In the case of Apple and Amazon, that would suggest that the next step that I should be taking with each company is to sell. With Apple, a stock that I have held for close to three years and which has served me well over the period, that would be accomplished by selling my holding. With Amazon, a stock that I have not held for more than five years, that would imply joining the legions of short sellers. Like an Avengers' movie, I am going to leave you in suspense until my next post, because I have two loose ends to tie up, before I can act. The first is to grapple with the uncertainties that I have about my own stories for the two companies, and the resulting effects on their valuations. The second is what I will mysteriously term "the catalyst effect", which I believe is indispensable, especially when you sell short.
YouTube video
Valuation SpreadsheetsApple Valuation (September 2018)Amazon Valuation (September 2018)
September 10, 2018
Trillion Dollar Toppers: Market Triggers, Value Drivers and Pricing Catalysts!
In the last few weeks, the market capitalization of Apple and Amazon each hit a trillion dollars, a threshold not seen before in public markets. Predictably, that has drawn press attention and commentary about what this moment means for markets, investors and the companies themselves. As readers of this blog know, I have followed both companies and valued them for more than two decades, and this is as good a time as any to see how they got to where they are today, and what the future holds for each company. I will do that in my next post, but in this one, I want to look at the far more basic question of whether hitting a trillion dollar value (or a hundred billion or a billion or any other number) should matter to investors.
Market Triggers
Does the market capitalization rising above a trillion dollars change Amazon or Apple as companies? After all, $1,000,000,000,000 is only a dollar higher than $999,999,999,999 and nothing is changed fundamentally in either company by the event. That said, as human beings, we do make more of a fuss around some numbers than others, especially with age and birthdays. In some cases, the fuss is merited, as when you turn eighteen, since you will be able to vote and be treated as an adult in the legal system, or sixty five, since you may be entitled to your pension and social security benefits. In others, it is a concocted milestone, as is the case when you turn thirty or forty or fifty years old, since little changes in your life, as a consequence.
Investors also seem to endow some numbers with more weight than others, sometimes with reason, and sometimes without. When a publicly traded company’s stock price drops below a dollar, it is often punished, often because it risks being delisted, putting liquidity at risk. When the stock prices rises above $1,000, the company may come under pressure to do a stock split, because it has become “too expensive” for retail investors to buy. With young, privately owned companies, getting a pricing of more than a billion dollars gets you unicorn status, though it not clear what that branding entitles you to, other than a little public attention. Within corporate finance, there are similar triggers built around revenues and profits, with management contracts tied to revenues reaching a billion dollars or EBITDA cresting one hundred million. Collectively, I will call these market triggers , and the focus of this post is to examine how much attention we should pay to them, if any.
The Market Reaction to TriggersBefore we embark on the discussion on whether, and if yes, how much attention to pay to market triggers, note that the degree to which these triggers matter varies widely across investors. While some investors view them as side games, there are others who build much of their investing around market triggers. Value investors, and especially those raised on the classics, scoff at price triggers as distractions from their focus on earnings and moats but they often have their own triggers, based upon earnings or book value. In contrast, a great deal of technical analysis, as an investment philosophy, is built on triggers, many built around price per share. Support and resistance lines, the cresting of which have long been viewed as an indicator of future price movements, are based upon prices that may reflect the company’s past history but often have no intrinsic basis. Similarly, chartists often pay heed to historical high and low prices for the stock, arguing that cresting either number could have consequences for future returns. Many technical indicators are built around price or volume metrics with rules of thumb that often have no fundamental justification.
At this stage, by making this a contest between value investors and chartists, I have probably already forced you to pick a side, and that would be a pity, since I think that both sides have something to learn from the other. For those who believe in efficient markets, it remains an enduring frustration that markets seem to move in response to what looks like, at least on the surface, to be a cosmetic change in the company. In particular, there is research that stock prices seem to react to stock splits, With stock splits, where the share count changes in proportion to existing holdings, and nothing fundamentally changes about the company, the market not only reacts positively to the split but these stocks continue to do better than expected in the months after.When a stock approaches its 52-week high, there is some evidence that the high price acts as a barrier, making it more likely that the stock will go down than up.There is some evidence that support and resistance lines have price effects; one study focusing on exchange rates concluded that pricing trends in currency rates are more likely to be interrupted at support and resistance lines. A general study of technical analysis (and price patterns) concludes that technical indicators, such as head-and-shoulders and double bottoms do have a price impact, though it is unclear that you can make money of these price movements.In short, much as you may be inclined to dismiss technical research as baseless, there is evidence that past price paths can drive future returns.
Some researchers have managed to convince themselves that the market behavior is consistent with an efficient market, with the rationale that these actions operate as signals about future fundamentals, thus explaining the price changes. A stock split, we are therefore told, is a signal to markets that companies feel that they have the cash flows to sustain higher dividends in the future, translating into higher value. I find most signaling stories to be unconvincing, reflecting almost desperate attempts to reconcile a belief in efficient markets with market behavior that is not consistent with that belief. In my experience, market triggers often affect stock prices, sometimes substantially, and it has little to do with signals. Rather than dismiss these triggers as irrational and useless, I need to understand them better, with the intent of separating ones that may be able to incorporate into my investing from those that I am better off ignoring.
Value Drivers and Pricing Catalysts
In the pursuit of understanding why market triggers matter, I find it useful to go back to a contrast between pricing and value that I have talked about before, and draw a distinction between value drivers and price movers.
In short, the value of a business is driven by its fundamentals, but the pricing of a business is determined by demand and supply, and the two processes can yield different numbers, resulting in a gap between price and value. In this framework, market trigger effects can be classified into three groups:Value effects: If a market trigger has an effect on one or more of the three drivers of value, which are cash flows, growth and business risk, it can affect value. Revenue or earnings triggers set by companies can have an effect on value, if management compensation is tied to them. With some corporate borrowings, there are covenants tied to stock prices or earnings, the violation of which may lead to consequences for the firm, sometimes taking the form of higher interest expenses and sometimes a change in control. With convertible bonds and preferred shares, the conversion price can become a trigger for a change in value, if it results in a significant increase in shares outstanding and in debt ratios. Consider the grant that Tesla’s board of directors gave Elon Musk in March 2018, where he will get billions of dollars in shares and options in the company, if he can deliver on a variety of targets, some related to market capitalization and some to operating performance. Specifically, the board of directors has listed 12 market capitalization tiggers, each of which can result in shares being granted to Mr. Mush, and 16 operating triggers, with eight relating to revenues and eight to EBITDA. For a Tesla investor, meeting each of these thresholds will be a cause for mixed feelings, joy that revenues, EBITDA and capitalization are increasing, tempered by dilution occurring at the same time. Pricing effects: If a market trigger has an effect on market mood or momentum, it can affect prices, even though it has no effect on fundamentals. For instance, the argument that technical analysts use for paying attention to support lines, often based upon historical prices, is that when a company’s stock price drops below its support line, it creates a negative psychological effect that can cause more selling, with prices falling even further. A pricing trigger can also have a liquidity effect, which can affect prices. This has often been the rationale used by some companies, especially those with high priced shares, for stock splits, arguing that retail investors are more likely to trade a $100 stock than a $1000 stock, and that the increased liquidity can translate into higher prices. The liquidity story can also be used the push by many start-ups to get to unicorn status, since doing so may attract more venture capital money, which, in turn, can push up pricing. Finally, there is the herd effect, where crossing a pricing or value trigger can lead people who have been sitting on the sidelines to act, pushing up prices if they decide to buy and pushing down prices when they sell.Gap (Catalyst) effects: There is a third and more subtle effect from market triggers, which comes from the attention garnered by crossing even an arbitrary threshold. This is especially the case with smaller and lower profile companies, which can often be ignored by investors and analysts, in a market where larger and higher profile companies garner the bulk of coverage. To the extent that these companies are being mispriced, the attention leading from hitting a trigger can lead to a reassessment of the company and perhaps a closing of the gap. Note that this reassessment can cut in both directions, with unnoticed strengths coming to the surface, and increasing the prices of some companies, and unnoticed weaknesses being unearthed in other companies, resulting in prices dropping. This framework can be used to judge whether and why market triggers can affect prices. Some do so, because they have value consequences, some because they affect mood and liquidity, some because they are attention gatherers and some because they have all three effects. Most pricing and volume indicators used by technical analysts, for instance, are pure pricing effects, but since the name of the game in pricing is to gauge shifts in mood and momentum, that is understandable. With companies that have management options and convertibles outstanding, crossing some price barriers can create value effects, by diluting share ownership. With companies that have been operating under the radar, a market trigger can lead to more attention being paid to the company, leading to a closing in gaps between value and price.
So, what effect will crossing the trillion-dollar threshold have on Apple and Amazon? Neither company has options or convertibles that will unlock at the trillion dollar capitalization and thus there should be no value effect. There may be a pricing effect, but it is not clear in which direction. On the one hand, you can argue that for some long term holders of the stock, crossing the trillion dollars may be a culmination of a long and successful journey, leading to selling. On the other hand, there are others who may have resisted both stocks as overpriced, who may decide that this is the time to capitulate and buy the stock. As two of the most widely tracked and followed companies in the world already, it is not likely that there will be any major reassessments in either company, on the part of stockholders, nullifying the gap effect. There is one potential black cloud that comes with the increased attention, at least for Amazon, which is that the company's success may be drawing the attention of anti-trust and regulatory authorities, perhaps putting a crimp on its future growth plans globally. I will return to that issue in my next post.
Market Triggers and Investment Philosophies
If market triggers can have value, price and gap effects, how do you incorporate them into investing? The answer depends upon your investment philosophy:If you are a trader: The essence of trading is that you are playing the pricing game, and to the extent that you are, your success will depend upon how well you can ride the trend and how quickly you spot changes in momentum. Thus, it does not surprise me that charting and technical indicators are built heavily around these triggers. If you are a good trader, and I believe that they are some, your strength is in assessing how these triggers change mood and getting ahead of the market on these shifts.If you are a value investor: As someone focused on value, your first instinct may be to ignore market triggers, viewing them as a distraction from your central mission of valuing companies based upon their fundamentals, and then buying undervalued stocks and selling overvalued ones. While I understand that focus, I think that you should consider incorporating pricing triggers into your value mission for two reasons. The first is that a few of these triggers have value effects and ignoring them will mean that you are mis-valuing companies. The second is that to make money as a value investor, you not only have to get value right, but you have to trust the market to correct its mistake, by moving price towards value. Since the latter is often out of your control, I believe that one of the keys to being a good value investor is finding catalysts that can cause the price correction. If market triggers can operate as catalysts, incorporating them into your investment process can unlock the value mistake that you have found. I am a value investor, albeit one with perhaps a broader definition of what comprises value than some old time value investors, but I do look at pricing triggers, especially with small cap, lightly followed and emerging market companies. Thus, if I value a stock at $6 a share and it is trading at $4.10/share, but its historical low price is $4 (the support line), I may wait to buy it, hoping for one of two outcomes. The first is that it hits the support line and does not drop below it, signaling a positive shift in momentum, indicating that this would be a good time to buy. The second is that it drops below its support line, resulting in a negative shift in momentum and more selling, allowing me to buy the stock at an even lower price. Thus, while my primary decision of whether to buy or sell a stock is driven by value judgments, the question of when to do it can be affected by market triggers.
My Bottom Line
I own shares in Apple and I don’t own any (right now) in Amazon, and I have explained why in prior posts on both companies. With my Apple shares, I have been rewarded well over my almost three-year holding period, and the question then becomes whether the trillion dollar market capitalization should make a difference in whether I continue to hold the shares. With Amazon, I saw little reason to buy the stock a few months ago, as I noted in this post, where I argued that it was a great company but not a great investment. The question then becomes whether market capitalization crossing trillion dollars changes that assessment. The final judgment has to wait until the next post, where I will revalue both companies, and look at whether the trillion-dollar trigger has made a difference.
YouTube Video
Market Triggers
Does the market capitalization rising above a trillion dollars change Amazon or Apple as companies? After all, $1,000,000,000,000 is only a dollar higher than $999,999,999,999 and nothing is changed fundamentally in either company by the event. That said, as human beings, we do make more of a fuss around some numbers than others, especially with age and birthdays. In some cases, the fuss is merited, as when you turn eighteen, since you will be able to vote and be treated as an adult in the legal system, or sixty five, since you may be entitled to your pension and social security benefits. In others, it is a concocted milestone, as is the case when you turn thirty or forty or fifty years old, since little changes in your life, as a consequence.
Investors also seem to endow some numbers with more weight than others, sometimes with reason, and sometimes without. When a publicly traded company’s stock price drops below a dollar, it is often punished, often because it risks being delisted, putting liquidity at risk. When the stock prices rises above $1,000, the company may come under pressure to do a stock split, because it has become “too expensive” for retail investors to buy. With young, privately owned companies, getting a pricing of more than a billion dollars gets you unicorn status, though it not clear what that branding entitles you to, other than a little public attention. Within corporate finance, there are similar triggers built around revenues and profits, with management contracts tied to revenues reaching a billion dollars or EBITDA cresting one hundred million. Collectively, I will call these market triggers , and the focus of this post is to examine how much attention we should pay to them, if any.
The Market Reaction to TriggersBefore we embark on the discussion on whether, and if yes, how much attention to pay to market triggers, note that the degree to which these triggers matter varies widely across investors. While some investors view them as side games, there are others who build much of their investing around market triggers. Value investors, and especially those raised on the classics, scoff at price triggers as distractions from their focus on earnings and moats but they often have their own triggers, based upon earnings or book value. In contrast, a great deal of technical analysis, as an investment philosophy, is built on triggers, many built around price per share. Support and resistance lines, the cresting of which have long been viewed as an indicator of future price movements, are based upon prices that may reflect the company’s past history but often have no intrinsic basis. Similarly, chartists often pay heed to historical high and low prices for the stock, arguing that cresting either number could have consequences for future returns. Many technical indicators are built around price or volume metrics with rules of thumb that often have no fundamental justification.
At this stage, by making this a contest between value investors and chartists, I have probably already forced you to pick a side, and that would be a pity, since I think that both sides have something to learn from the other. For those who believe in efficient markets, it remains an enduring frustration that markets seem to move in response to what looks like, at least on the surface, to be a cosmetic change in the company. In particular, there is research that stock prices seem to react to stock splits, With stock splits, where the share count changes in proportion to existing holdings, and nothing fundamentally changes about the company, the market not only reacts positively to the split but these stocks continue to do better than expected in the months after.When a stock approaches its 52-week high, there is some evidence that the high price acts as a barrier, making it more likely that the stock will go down than up.There is some evidence that support and resistance lines have price effects; one study focusing on exchange rates concluded that pricing trends in currency rates are more likely to be interrupted at support and resistance lines. A general study of technical analysis (and price patterns) concludes that technical indicators, such as head-and-shoulders and double bottoms do have a price impact, though it is unclear that you can make money of these price movements.In short, much as you may be inclined to dismiss technical research as baseless, there is evidence that past price paths can drive future returns.
Some researchers have managed to convince themselves that the market behavior is consistent with an efficient market, with the rationale that these actions operate as signals about future fundamentals, thus explaining the price changes. A stock split, we are therefore told, is a signal to markets that companies feel that they have the cash flows to sustain higher dividends in the future, translating into higher value. I find most signaling stories to be unconvincing, reflecting almost desperate attempts to reconcile a belief in efficient markets with market behavior that is not consistent with that belief. In my experience, market triggers often affect stock prices, sometimes substantially, and it has little to do with signals. Rather than dismiss these triggers as irrational and useless, I need to understand them better, with the intent of separating ones that may be able to incorporate into my investing from those that I am better off ignoring.
Value Drivers and Pricing Catalysts
In the pursuit of understanding why market triggers matter, I find it useful to go back to a contrast between pricing and value that I have talked about before, and draw a distinction between value drivers and price movers.
In short, the value of a business is driven by its fundamentals, but the pricing of a business is determined by demand and supply, and the two processes can yield different numbers, resulting in a gap between price and value. In this framework, market trigger effects can be classified into three groups:Value effects: If a market trigger has an effect on one or more of the three drivers of value, which are cash flows, growth and business risk, it can affect value. Revenue or earnings triggers set by companies can have an effect on value, if management compensation is tied to them. With some corporate borrowings, there are covenants tied to stock prices or earnings, the violation of which may lead to consequences for the firm, sometimes taking the form of higher interest expenses and sometimes a change in control. With convertible bonds and preferred shares, the conversion price can become a trigger for a change in value, if it results in a significant increase in shares outstanding and in debt ratios. Consider the grant that Tesla’s board of directors gave Elon Musk in March 2018, where he will get billions of dollars in shares and options in the company, if he can deliver on a variety of targets, some related to market capitalization and some to operating performance. Specifically, the board of directors has listed 12 market capitalization tiggers, each of which can result in shares being granted to Mr. Mush, and 16 operating triggers, with eight relating to revenues and eight to EBITDA. For a Tesla investor, meeting each of these thresholds will be a cause for mixed feelings, joy that revenues, EBITDA and capitalization are increasing, tempered by dilution occurring at the same time. Pricing effects: If a market trigger has an effect on market mood or momentum, it can affect prices, even though it has no effect on fundamentals. For instance, the argument that technical analysts use for paying attention to support lines, often based upon historical prices, is that when a company’s stock price drops below its support line, it creates a negative psychological effect that can cause more selling, with prices falling even further. A pricing trigger can also have a liquidity effect, which can affect prices. This has often been the rationale used by some companies, especially those with high priced shares, for stock splits, arguing that retail investors are more likely to trade a $100 stock than a $1000 stock, and that the increased liquidity can translate into higher prices. The liquidity story can also be used the push by many start-ups to get to unicorn status, since doing so may attract more venture capital money, which, in turn, can push up pricing. Finally, there is the herd effect, where crossing a pricing or value trigger can lead people who have been sitting on the sidelines to act, pushing up prices if they decide to buy and pushing down prices when they sell.Gap (Catalyst) effects: There is a third and more subtle effect from market triggers, which comes from the attention garnered by crossing even an arbitrary threshold. This is especially the case with smaller and lower profile companies, which can often be ignored by investors and analysts, in a market where larger and higher profile companies garner the bulk of coverage. To the extent that these companies are being mispriced, the attention leading from hitting a trigger can lead to a reassessment of the company and perhaps a closing of the gap. Note that this reassessment can cut in both directions, with unnoticed strengths coming to the surface, and increasing the prices of some companies, and unnoticed weaknesses being unearthed in other companies, resulting in prices dropping. This framework can be used to judge whether and why market triggers can affect prices. Some do so, because they have value consequences, some because they affect mood and liquidity, some because they are attention gatherers and some because they have all three effects. Most pricing and volume indicators used by technical analysts, for instance, are pure pricing effects, but since the name of the game in pricing is to gauge shifts in mood and momentum, that is understandable. With companies that have management options and convertibles outstanding, crossing some price barriers can create value effects, by diluting share ownership. With companies that have been operating under the radar, a market trigger can lead to more attention being paid to the company, leading to a closing in gaps between value and price.
So, what effect will crossing the trillion-dollar threshold have on Apple and Amazon? Neither company has options or convertibles that will unlock at the trillion dollar capitalization and thus there should be no value effect. There may be a pricing effect, but it is not clear in which direction. On the one hand, you can argue that for some long term holders of the stock, crossing the trillion dollars may be a culmination of a long and successful journey, leading to selling. On the other hand, there are others who may have resisted both stocks as overpriced, who may decide that this is the time to capitulate and buy the stock. As two of the most widely tracked and followed companies in the world already, it is not likely that there will be any major reassessments in either company, on the part of stockholders, nullifying the gap effect. There is one potential black cloud that comes with the increased attention, at least for Amazon, which is that the company's success may be drawing the attention of anti-trust and regulatory authorities, perhaps putting a crimp on its future growth plans globally. I will return to that issue in my next post.
Market Triggers and Investment Philosophies
If market triggers can have value, price and gap effects, how do you incorporate them into investing? The answer depends upon your investment philosophy:If you are a trader: The essence of trading is that you are playing the pricing game, and to the extent that you are, your success will depend upon how well you can ride the trend and how quickly you spot changes in momentum. Thus, it does not surprise me that charting and technical indicators are built heavily around these triggers. If you are a good trader, and I believe that they are some, your strength is in assessing how these triggers change mood and getting ahead of the market on these shifts.If you are a value investor: As someone focused on value, your first instinct may be to ignore market triggers, viewing them as a distraction from your central mission of valuing companies based upon their fundamentals, and then buying undervalued stocks and selling overvalued ones. While I understand that focus, I think that you should consider incorporating pricing triggers into your value mission for two reasons. The first is that a few of these triggers have value effects and ignoring them will mean that you are mis-valuing companies. The second is that to make money as a value investor, you not only have to get value right, but you have to trust the market to correct its mistake, by moving price towards value. Since the latter is often out of your control, I believe that one of the keys to being a good value investor is finding catalysts that can cause the price correction. If market triggers can operate as catalysts, incorporating them into your investment process can unlock the value mistake that you have found. I am a value investor, albeit one with perhaps a broader definition of what comprises value than some old time value investors, but I do look at pricing triggers, especially with small cap, lightly followed and emerging market companies. Thus, if I value a stock at $6 a share and it is trading at $4.10/share, but its historical low price is $4 (the support line), I may wait to buy it, hoping for one of two outcomes. The first is that it hits the support line and does not drop below it, signaling a positive shift in momentum, indicating that this would be a good time to buy. The second is that it drops below its support line, resulting in a negative shift in momentum and more selling, allowing me to buy the stock at an even lower price. Thus, while my primary decision of whether to buy or sell a stock is driven by value judgments, the question of when to do it can be affected by market triggers.
My Bottom Line
I own shares in Apple and I don’t own any (right now) in Amazon, and I have explained why in prior posts on both companies. With my Apple shares, I have been rewarded well over my almost three-year holding period, and the question then becomes whether the trillion dollar market capitalization should make a difference in whether I continue to hold the shares. With Amazon, I saw little reason to buy the stock a few months ago, as I noted in this post, where I argued that it was a great company but not a great investment. The question then becomes whether market capitalization crossing trillion dollars changes that assessment. The final judgment has to wait until the next post, where I will revalue both companies, and look at whether the trillion-dollar trigger has made a difference.
YouTube Video
August 15, 2018
Deja Vu In Turkey: Currency Crisis and Corporate Insanity!
This has been a year of rolling crises, some originating in developed markets and some in emerging markets, and the market has been remarkably resilient through all of them. It is now Turkey's turn to be in the limelight, though not in a way it hoped to be, as the Turkish Lira enters what seems like a death spiral, that threatens to spill over into other emerging markets. There is plenty that can be said about the macro origins of this crisis, with Turkey's leaders and central bank bearing a lion's share of the blame, but that is not going to be the focus of this post. Instead, I would like to examine how Turkish business practices, and the willful ignorance of basic financial first principles, are making the effects of this crisis worse, and perhaps even catastrophic.
The Turkish Crisis: So far!The Turkish problem became a full fledged crisis towards the end of last week, but this is a crisis that has been brewing for months, if not years. It has its roots in both Turkish politics and dysfunctional practices on the part of Turkish regulators, banks and businesses, and has been aided and abetted by investors who have been too willing to look the other way. The most visible symbol of this crisis has been the collapse of the Turkish Lira, which has been losing value, relative to other currencies, for a while, capped off by a drop of almost 15% last Friday (August 10):
Yahoo! FinanceWhile it is undoubtedly true that the weaker Lira will lead to more problems, currency collapses are symptoms of fundamental problems and for Turkey, those problems are two fold. One is a surge in inflation in the Turkish economy, which can be seen in graph below:
While it easy to blame the Turkish central bank for dereliction of duty, it has been handicapped by Turkey's political leadership, which seems intent on making its own central bank toothless. Rather than allow the central bank to use the classic counter to a currency collapse of raising central bank-set interest rates, the government has put pressure on the bank to lower rates, with predictable (and disastrous) consequences.
Corporate Finance: First PrinciplesI teach both corporate finance and valuation, and while both are built on the same first principles, corporate finance is both wider and deeper than valuation since it looks at businesses from the inside out. i.e., how decisions made a firm's founders/managers play out in value. In my introductory corporate finance class, I list out the three common sense principles that govern all businesses and how they drive value:
The financing principle operates at the nexus of investing and dividend principles and choices you make on financing can affect both investment and dividend policy. It is true that when most analysts look at the financing principle, they zero in on the financing mix part, looking at the right mix of debt and equity for a firm. I have posted on that question many times, including the start of this year as part of my examination of global debt ratios, and have used the tools to assess whether a company should borrow money or use equity (See my posts on Tesla and Valeant). There is another part to the financing principle, though, that is often ignored, and it is that the right debt for a company should mirror its asset characteristics. Put simply, long term projects should be funded with long term debt, convertible debt is a better choice than fixed rate debt for growth companies and assets with cash flows in dollars (euros) should be funded with dollar (euro) debt. The intuition behind matching does not require elaborate mathematical reasoning but is built on common sense. When you mismatch debt (in terms of maturity, type or currency) with assets, you increase your likelihood of default, and holding debt ratios constant, your cost of debt and capital.
In effect, your perfect debt will provide you with all of the tax benefits of debt while behaving like equity, with cash flows that adapt to your cash flows from operations.
There are two ways that you can match debt up to assets. The first is to issue debt that is reflective of your projects and assets and the second is to use derivatives and swaps to fix the mismatch. Thus, a company that gets its cash flows in rupees, but has dollar debt, can use currency futures and options to protect itself, at least partially, against currency movements. While access to derivatives and swap markets has increased over time, a company that knows its long term project characteristics should issue debt that matches that long term exposure, and then use derivatives & swaps to protect itself against short term variations in exposure.
Turkey: A Debt Mismatch Outlier?The argument for matching debt structure (maturity, currency, convertibility) to asset characteristics is not rocket-science but corporations around the world seem to revel in mismatching debt and assets, using short term debt to fund long term assets (or vice versa) and sometimes debt in one currency to fund projects that generate cashflows in another. In numerous studies, done over the decades, looking across countries, Turkish companies rank among the very worst , when it comes to mismatching currencies on debt, using foreign currency debt (Euros and dollars primarily) to fund domestic investments.
Lest I be accused of using foreign data services that are biased against Turkey, I decided to stick with the data provided by the Turkish Central Bank on the currency breakdown of borrowings by Turkish firms. In the chart below, I trace the foreign exchange (FX) assets and liabilities, for non-financial Turkish companies, from 2008 and 2018:
Central Bank of TurkeyThe numbers are staggeringly out of sync with Turkish non-financial service companies owing $217 billion more in foreign currency terms than they own on foreign currency assets, and this imbalance (between foreign exchange assets and liabilities) has widened over time, tripling since 2008.
I am sure that there will be some in the Turkish business establishment who will blame the mismatching on external forces, with banks in other European countries playing the role of villains, but the numbers tell a different story. Much of the FX debt has come from Turkish banks, not German or French banks, as can be seen in the chart below:
Central Bank of TurkeyIn 2018, 59% of all FX liabilities at Turkish non-financial service firms came from Turkish banks and financial service firms, up from 39% in 2008. The mismatch is not just on currencies, though. Looking at the breakdown, by maturity, of FX assets and liabilities for Turkish non-financial service firms, here is what we see:
Central Bank of TurkeyIn May 2018, while about 80% of FX assets are Turkish non-financial firms are short term, only 27% of the FX debt is short term, a large temporal imbalance.
It is possible that the Turkish government may be able to put pressure on domestic banks to prevent them from forcing debt payments, in the face of the collapse of the lira, but looking at when the debt owed foreign borrowers comes due (for both Turkish financial and non-financial firms), here is what we see.
Central Bank of TurkeyFrom a default risk perspective, though, the debt maturity schedule carries a message. About 50% of debt owed by Turkish banks and 40% of the debt owed by Turkish non-financial service companies will be coming due by 2020, and if the precipitous drop in the Lira is not reversed, there is a whole lot of pain in store for these firms.
Rationalizing the Mismatch: The Good, The Dangerous and the DeadlyTurkish firms clearly have a debt mismatch problem, and the institutions (government, bank regulators, banks) that should have been keeping the problem in check seem to have played an active role in making it worse. Worse, this is not the first time that Turkish firms and banks will be working through a debt mismatch crisis. It has happened before, in 1994, 2001 and 2008, just looking at recent decades. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different outcome, there is a good case to be made that Turkish institutions, from top to bottom, are insane, at least when it comes to dealing with currency in financing. So, why do Turkish companies seem willing to repeat this mistake over and over again? In fact, since this mismatching seems to occur in many emerging markets, though to a lesser scale, why do companies go for currency mismatches? Having heard the rationalizations from dozens of CFOs on every continent, I would classify the reasons on a spectrum from acceptable to absurd.
Acceptable Reasons
There are three scenarios where a company may choose to mismatch debt, borrowing in a currency other than the one in which it gets its cash flows.The mismatched debt is subsidized: If the mismatched debt is being offered to you (the borrower) at rates that are well below what you should be paying, given your default risk, you should accept that mismatched debt. That is sometimes the case when companies get funding from organizations like the IFC that offer the subsidies in the interests of meeting other objectives (such as increasing investment in under developed countries). It can also happen when lenders and bondholders become overly optimistic about an emerging market's prospects, and lend money on the assumption that high growth will continue without hiccups.Domestic debt markets are moribund: There are emerging markets where the only option for borrowing money is local banks, and during periods of uncertainty or crisis, these banks can pull back from lending. If you are a company in one of these markets and have the option of borrowing elsewhere in the world to fund what you believe are good investments, you may push forward with your borrowing, even though it is currency mismatched.Domestic debt markets are too rigid: As you can see from the debt design section, the perfect debt for your firm will often require tweaks that include not only conversion and floating rate options, but more unusual tweaks (such as commodity-linked interest rates). If domestic debt markets are unwilling or unable to offer these customized debt offerings, a company that can access bond markets overseas may do so, even if it means borrowing in a mismatched currency.In all three cases, though, once the money has been borrowed, the company that has mismatched its debt should turn to the derivatives and swap markets to reduce or eliminate this mismatch.
Dangerous Reasons
There are two reasons that are offered by some companies that mismatch debt that may make sense, on the surface, but are inherently dangerous:
Speculate on currency: Mismatching currencies, when you borrow money, can be a profitable exercise, if the currency moves in the right direction. A Turkish company that borrows in US dollars, a lower-inflation currency with lower interest rates, to fund projects that deliver cashflows in Turkish Lira, a higher-inflation currency, will book profits if the Lira strengthens against the US dollar. Since emerging market currencies can go through extended periods of deviation from purchasing power parity, i.e., the higher inflation emerging market currency strengthens (rather than weakening) against the lower inflation developed market currency, mismatching currencies can be profitable for extended periods. There will be a moment of reckoning, in the longer term, though, when exchange rates will correct, and unless the company can see this moment coming and correct its mismatch, it will not only lose all of the easy profits from prior periods, but find its survival threatened. Currency forecasting is a pointless exercise, even when practiced by professional currency traders, and I think that companies should steer away from the practice.Everyone does it: I have argued that many corporate finance practices are driven by inertia and me-tooism rather than good sense, and in many countries where currency mismatches are common, the standard defense is that everyone does it. Many of these companies argue that the government cannot let the entire corporate sector slide into default and will step in to bail them out, and true to form, governments deliver those bailouts. In effect, the taxpayers become the backstop for bad corporate behavior.Bad Reasons
I am surprised by some of the arguments that I have heard for mismatching debt, since they suggest fundamental gaps in basic financial and economic knowledge.
The mismatched debt has a lower interest rate: I have heard CFOs of companies in emerging markets, where domestic debt carries high interest rates, argue that it is cheaper to borrow in US dollars or Euros, because interest rates are lower on loans denominated in those currencies. After all, it is cheaper to borrow at 5% than at 15%, right? Not necessarily, if the 5% rate is on a US dollar debt and the 15% debt is in Turkish Lira, and here is why. If the expected inflation rate in US dollars is 2% and in Turkish Lira is 14%, it is the Turkish Lira debt that is cheaper.Risk/Reward: There are some companies that fall back on the proposition that mismatching debt is like any other financial choice, a trade off between higher risk and higher reward. In other words, their belief is that they will earn higher profits, on average and over time, with mismatched debt than with matched debt, but with more variability in those profits. This argument stems from the misplaced belief that markets reward all risk taking, when the truth is that senseless risk taking just delivers more risk, with no reward, and mismatching debt is senseless.The FixIt is too late for Turkish companies to fix their debt problem for this crisis, but given that this crisis too shall pass, albeit after substantial damage has been done, there are actions that we can take to keep it from repeating, though it will require everyone involved to change their ways:Governments should stop enabling debt mismatching, by not stepping in repeatedly to save corporates that have mismatched debt. That will increase the short term pain of the next crisis, but reduce the likelihood of repeating that crisis. Bank Regulators should measure how much the banks that they regulate have lent out to corporates, in mismatched debt, and require them to set aside more capital to cover the inevitable losses. That, in turn, will reduce the profitability of lending out money to companies that mismatch.Banks have to incorporate whether the debt being taken by a business is mismatched in deciding how much to lend and on what terms. The interest rates on mismatched debt should be higher than on matched debt.Companies and businesses have to consider what currency a loan or bond is in, when evaluating interest rates, and in their own best interests, try to match up debt to assets, either directly (in debt design) or using derivatives.Investors in companies should start breaking down the profitability of firms with mismatched debt, especially in good periods, into profits from debt mismatch and profits from operations, and ignore or at least discount the former, when pricing these companies.I don't think any of these changes will happen overnight but unless we change our behavior, we are designed to replay this crisis in other emerging markets repeatedly.
YouTube Video
Data
FX Assets & Liabilities of Turkish non-financial corporations (from Turkish Central Bank)Loans from Abroad to Turkish Private Sector
Papers
Financing Innovations and Capital Structure Choices
The Turkish Crisis: So far!The Turkish problem became a full fledged crisis towards the end of last week, but this is a crisis that has been brewing for months, if not years. It has its roots in both Turkish politics and dysfunctional practices on the part of Turkish regulators, banks and businesses, and has been aided and abetted by investors who have been too willing to look the other way. The most visible symbol of this crisis has been the collapse of the Turkish Lira, which has been losing value, relative to other currencies, for a while, capped off by a drop of almost 15% last Friday (August 10):
Yahoo! FinanceWhile it is undoubtedly true that the weaker Lira will lead to more problems, currency collapses are symptoms of fundamental problems and for Turkey, those problems are two fold. One is a surge in inflation in the Turkish economy, which can be seen in graph below:
While it easy to blame the Turkish central bank for dereliction of duty, it has been handicapped by Turkey's political leadership, which seems intent on making its own central bank toothless. Rather than allow the central bank to use the classic counter to a currency collapse of raising central bank-set interest rates, the government has put pressure on the bank to lower rates, with predictable (and disastrous) consequences.
Corporate Finance: First PrinciplesI teach both corporate finance and valuation, and while both are built on the same first principles, corporate finance is both wider and deeper than valuation since it looks at businesses from the inside out. i.e., how decisions made a firm's founders/managers play out in value. In my introductory corporate finance class, I list out the three common sense principles that govern all businesses and how they drive value:
The financing principle operates at the nexus of investing and dividend principles and choices you make on financing can affect both investment and dividend policy. It is true that when most analysts look at the financing principle, they zero in on the financing mix part, looking at the right mix of debt and equity for a firm. I have posted on that question many times, including the start of this year as part of my examination of global debt ratios, and have used the tools to assess whether a company should borrow money or use equity (See my posts on Tesla and Valeant). There is another part to the financing principle, though, that is often ignored, and it is that the right debt for a company should mirror its asset characteristics. Put simply, long term projects should be funded with long term debt, convertible debt is a better choice than fixed rate debt for growth companies and assets with cash flows in dollars (euros) should be funded with dollar (euro) debt. The intuition behind matching does not require elaborate mathematical reasoning but is built on common sense. When you mismatch debt (in terms of maturity, type or currency) with assets, you increase your likelihood of default, and holding debt ratios constant, your cost of debt and capital.
In effect, your perfect debt will provide you with all of the tax benefits of debt while behaving like equity, with cash flows that adapt to your cash flows from operations.There are two ways that you can match debt up to assets. The first is to issue debt that is reflective of your projects and assets and the second is to use derivatives and swaps to fix the mismatch. Thus, a company that gets its cash flows in rupees, but has dollar debt, can use currency futures and options to protect itself, at least partially, against currency movements. While access to derivatives and swap markets has increased over time, a company that knows its long term project characteristics should issue debt that matches that long term exposure, and then use derivatives & swaps to protect itself against short term variations in exposure.
Turkey: A Debt Mismatch Outlier?The argument for matching debt structure (maturity, currency, convertibility) to asset characteristics is not rocket-science but corporations around the world seem to revel in mismatching debt and assets, using short term debt to fund long term assets (or vice versa) and sometimes debt in one currency to fund projects that generate cashflows in another. In numerous studies, done over the decades, looking across countries, Turkish companies rank among the very worst , when it comes to mismatching currencies on debt, using foreign currency debt (Euros and dollars primarily) to fund domestic investments.
Lest I be accused of using foreign data services that are biased against Turkey, I decided to stick with the data provided by the Turkish Central Bank on the currency breakdown of borrowings by Turkish firms. In the chart below, I trace the foreign exchange (FX) assets and liabilities, for non-financial Turkish companies, from 2008 and 2018:
Central Bank of TurkeyThe numbers are staggeringly out of sync with Turkish non-financial service companies owing $217 billion more in foreign currency terms than they own on foreign currency assets, and this imbalance (between foreign exchange assets and liabilities) has widened over time, tripling since 2008.I am sure that there will be some in the Turkish business establishment who will blame the mismatching on external forces, with banks in other European countries playing the role of villains, but the numbers tell a different story. Much of the FX debt has come from Turkish banks, not German or French banks, as can be seen in the chart below:
Central Bank of TurkeyIn 2018, 59% of all FX liabilities at Turkish non-financial service firms came from Turkish banks and financial service firms, up from 39% in 2008. The mismatch is not just on currencies, though. Looking at the breakdown, by maturity, of FX assets and liabilities for Turkish non-financial service firms, here is what we see:
Central Bank of TurkeyIn May 2018, while about 80% of FX assets are Turkish non-financial firms are short term, only 27% of the FX debt is short term, a large temporal imbalance.It is possible that the Turkish government may be able to put pressure on domestic banks to prevent them from forcing debt payments, in the face of the collapse of the lira, but looking at when the debt owed foreign borrowers comes due (for both Turkish financial and non-financial firms), here is what we see.
Central Bank of TurkeyFrom a default risk perspective, though, the debt maturity schedule carries a message. About 50% of debt owed by Turkish banks and 40% of the debt owed by Turkish non-financial service companies will be coming due by 2020, and if the precipitous drop in the Lira is not reversed, there is a whole lot of pain in store for these firms.Rationalizing the Mismatch: The Good, The Dangerous and the DeadlyTurkish firms clearly have a debt mismatch problem, and the institutions (government, bank regulators, banks) that should have been keeping the problem in check seem to have played an active role in making it worse. Worse, this is not the first time that Turkish firms and banks will be working through a debt mismatch crisis. It has happened before, in 1994, 2001 and 2008, just looking at recent decades. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different outcome, there is a good case to be made that Turkish institutions, from top to bottom, are insane, at least when it comes to dealing with currency in financing. So, why do Turkish companies seem willing to repeat this mistake over and over again? In fact, since this mismatching seems to occur in many emerging markets, though to a lesser scale, why do companies go for currency mismatches? Having heard the rationalizations from dozens of CFOs on every continent, I would classify the reasons on a spectrum from acceptable to absurd.
Acceptable Reasons
There are three scenarios where a company may choose to mismatch debt, borrowing in a currency other than the one in which it gets its cash flows.The mismatched debt is subsidized: If the mismatched debt is being offered to you (the borrower) at rates that are well below what you should be paying, given your default risk, you should accept that mismatched debt. That is sometimes the case when companies get funding from organizations like the IFC that offer the subsidies in the interests of meeting other objectives (such as increasing investment in under developed countries). It can also happen when lenders and bondholders become overly optimistic about an emerging market's prospects, and lend money on the assumption that high growth will continue without hiccups.Domestic debt markets are moribund: There are emerging markets where the only option for borrowing money is local banks, and during periods of uncertainty or crisis, these banks can pull back from lending. If you are a company in one of these markets and have the option of borrowing elsewhere in the world to fund what you believe are good investments, you may push forward with your borrowing, even though it is currency mismatched.Domestic debt markets are too rigid: As you can see from the debt design section, the perfect debt for your firm will often require tweaks that include not only conversion and floating rate options, but more unusual tweaks (such as commodity-linked interest rates). If domestic debt markets are unwilling or unable to offer these customized debt offerings, a company that can access bond markets overseas may do so, even if it means borrowing in a mismatched currency.In all three cases, though, once the money has been borrowed, the company that has mismatched its debt should turn to the derivatives and swap markets to reduce or eliminate this mismatch.
Dangerous Reasons
There are two reasons that are offered by some companies that mismatch debt that may make sense, on the surface, but are inherently dangerous:
Speculate on currency: Mismatching currencies, when you borrow money, can be a profitable exercise, if the currency moves in the right direction. A Turkish company that borrows in US dollars, a lower-inflation currency with lower interest rates, to fund projects that deliver cashflows in Turkish Lira, a higher-inflation currency, will book profits if the Lira strengthens against the US dollar. Since emerging market currencies can go through extended periods of deviation from purchasing power parity, i.e., the higher inflation emerging market currency strengthens (rather than weakening) against the lower inflation developed market currency, mismatching currencies can be profitable for extended periods. There will be a moment of reckoning, in the longer term, though, when exchange rates will correct, and unless the company can see this moment coming and correct its mismatch, it will not only lose all of the easy profits from prior periods, but find its survival threatened. Currency forecasting is a pointless exercise, even when practiced by professional currency traders, and I think that companies should steer away from the practice.Everyone does it: I have argued that many corporate finance practices are driven by inertia and me-tooism rather than good sense, and in many countries where currency mismatches are common, the standard defense is that everyone does it. Many of these companies argue that the government cannot let the entire corporate sector slide into default and will step in to bail them out, and true to form, governments deliver those bailouts. In effect, the taxpayers become the backstop for bad corporate behavior.Bad Reasons
I am surprised by some of the arguments that I have heard for mismatching debt, since they suggest fundamental gaps in basic financial and economic knowledge.
The mismatched debt has a lower interest rate: I have heard CFOs of companies in emerging markets, where domestic debt carries high interest rates, argue that it is cheaper to borrow in US dollars or Euros, because interest rates are lower on loans denominated in those currencies. After all, it is cheaper to borrow at 5% than at 15%, right? Not necessarily, if the 5% rate is on a US dollar debt and the 15% debt is in Turkish Lira, and here is why. If the expected inflation rate in US dollars is 2% and in Turkish Lira is 14%, it is the Turkish Lira debt that is cheaper.Risk/Reward: There are some companies that fall back on the proposition that mismatching debt is like any other financial choice, a trade off between higher risk and higher reward. In other words, their belief is that they will earn higher profits, on average and over time, with mismatched debt than with matched debt, but with more variability in those profits. This argument stems from the misplaced belief that markets reward all risk taking, when the truth is that senseless risk taking just delivers more risk, with no reward, and mismatching debt is senseless.The FixIt is too late for Turkish companies to fix their debt problem for this crisis, but given that this crisis too shall pass, albeit after substantial damage has been done, there are actions that we can take to keep it from repeating, though it will require everyone involved to change their ways:Governments should stop enabling debt mismatching, by not stepping in repeatedly to save corporates that have mismatched debt. That will increase the short term pain of the next crisis, but reduce the likelihood of repeating that crisis. Bank Regulators should measure how much the banks that they regulate have lent out to corporates, in mismatched debt, and require them to set aside more capital to cover the inevitable losses. That, in turn, will reduce the profitability of lending out money to companies that mismatch.Banks have to incorporate whether the debt being taken by a business is mismatched in deciding how much to lend and on what terms. The interest rates on mismatched debt should be higher than on matched debt.Companies and businesses have to consider what currency a loan or bond is in, when evaluating interest rates, and in their own best interests, try to match up debt to assets, either directly (in debt design) or using derivatives.Investors in companies should start breaking down the profitability of firms with mismatched debt, especially in good periods, into profits from debt mismatch and profits from operations, and ignore or at least discount the former, when pricing these companies.I don't think any of these changes will happen overnight but unless we change our behavior, we are designed to replay this crisis in other emerging markets repeatedly.
YouTube Video
Data
FX Assets & Liabilities of Turkish non-financial corporations (from Turkish Central Bank)Loans from Abroad to Turkish Private Sector
Papers
Financing Innovations and Capital Structure Choices
August 10, 2018
The Privatization of Tesla: Stray Tweet or Game Changing News
After my last two posts in Tesla, I was planning to take a break from the company, since I had said everything that I had to say about the company. In short, I argued that Tesla, notwithstanding its growth potential, was over valued and that to deliver on this potential, it would need to raise significant amounts of capital in the next few years. In an even earlier post, I described Tesla as the ultimate story stock, both blessed and cursed by having Elon Musk as a CEO, a visionary with a self destructive streak. Even by Musk's own standards, his tweet on August 7 that Tesla would be going private, adding both a price ($420) and a postscript (that funding had been secured), was a blockbuster, pushung the stock price up more than 10% for the day. The questions that have followed have been wide ranging, from whether Tesla is a good candidate for "going private" to the mechanics of how it will do so (about funding and structure) to the legality of conveying a market-moving news story in a tweet.
1. Public to Private - The WhyWhen we talk about transitions between private and public market places, we generally tend to focus on private companies going public. That is because it is natural and common for a small, privately owned business, as it grows larger, to move to public markets, with an initial public offering. That said, there are publicly traded companies that seem to move in reverse and go back to being privately run businesses, as Tesla may be proposing to do.
The Trade OffTo understand both transitions, the more-common private to public and the less-frequent pubic to private, let us consider the trade off between being a private business and a publicly traded company, from the perspective of the business:
Private versus Public: Business Perspective
The simple summary is that as a private company's need to access capital increases, it will accept more information disclosure and a more outsider-driven corporate governance structure, and make the transition to being a public company. In recent years, the market for private equity has broadened and become deeper, allowing companies to stay private for far longer; Uber, for instance, is worth tens of billions of dollars and is still a private company. To fully understand the transitions, though, we also have to look at the choice from the perspective of investors:
Private versus Public: Investor PerspectiveIn the classic structure of going public, private firms raise money from venture capitalists who accept less liquidity, but structure their equity investments to often get more protection and a bigger say in how the company is run. It is the desire for liquidity that makes venture capitalists push private companies to go public, so that they can cash out their investments. To be able to negotiate better disclosure and control, private company investors have to be investing larger amounts, and it is one reason that regulatory authorities have been wary of allowing small investors to invest in private companies, since they may end up with the worst of all worlds: illiquid investments in businesses, where they have no say in how the company is run, and no information about how well or badly it is doing.
The Public to Private TransitionWith this trade off in mind, why would a public company choose to go back to being a private business? This transition makes sense if a company feels that the easier access to capital and a continuously set market price (which delivers liquidity), two features of public markets, no longer provide it with sufficient benefits, and/or the costs of disclosure and outsider intervention (from activist investors), that also come with being a public company, increase. In short, it has to be a company:that does not need access to large amounts of new capital to continue operating,where the market is under pricing the company, relative to its intrinsic value ,that feels the actions that it needs to take in its best long term interests will either create public backlash (layoffs and plant closures) or adverse market reactions (because of the effect that they will have on metrics that investors are focused upon).It should come as no surprise that most companies that have gone through the public-to-private transition have been aging companies (no growth, no capital needed), trading at prices that are below their peer group (lower multiples of earnings or cash flows) and that need to shrink or slim down to keep operating.
The Tesla CaseAs I look at the list of criteria for a good buyout company, I see nothing that would bring Tesla onto my radar as a potential candidate:It is a growing company and it needs new capital to not only deliver on its growth promise but to survive for the next few years. If you are more optimistic than I am about Tesla, you may disagree with how much cash the company will have to raise to keep going, but I challenge even the most hardened optimist to tell me how the company will be able to increase production to a million cars or more without investing mind blowing amounts in new capacity.If markets are punishing Tesla by under pricing the company, they are doing so in a very strange manner, giving it a higher market capitalization than much larger, more profitable automobile companies, ignoring large losses and generally tolerant of Elon Musk's errant behavior. In fact, if the critique of markets is that they are short term and focused on profits, Tesla would be the perfect counter example.It is true that there was substantial drama and market volatility around the 5000 cars/week production target, and there may be some in the company who have the drawn the lesson that since there will be more production targets to come in the future, the company needs to operate out of market scrutiny. That would be the wrong lesson, since almost all of the drama in this episode, from setting the target (5000 cars/week) to the constant tweets about whether the targets would be met, was generated by Elon Musk, not the market. In fact, a cynic would argue that by focusing the market's attention on this short term target, Tesla has been able to avoid answering much bigger questions about its operations.There are, of course, the short sellers in Tesla and Musk's frustration with them was clearly a driver of his "going private" tweet. His argument, which many of his supporters buy into, is that short sellers in public markets make money from seeing stock prices go down, and that some of them may do real damage to companies, because of this incentive. I will not dismiss this complaint, but I will come back to it later in this post, since I do think it is playing an outsized role in this process.
Public to Private - The FundingWhen you decide to take a publicly traded company into the privately owned space, you have to replace the public capital (public equity and debt) with new capital that can be either private equity or new debt.
The key questions then become what mix of debt and equity to use, how to raise the private equity needed to get the deal done and what the ultimate end game is in the transaction. Specifically, you may take a company private, because you want to control its destiny fully, and keep tit a private business in perpetuity. More often, though, the end game is to make the changes that you think will make the company more attractive to investors, and either take it back public or sell it to another public company.
The AnalysisIf the company in question fits the buyout mold, i.e., it is an aging company with a lower market capitalization, relative to earnings and cash flows, than its peers, the going private transaction can be funded with a high proportion of debt, explaining why so many buyouts have leverage attached to them, making them leveraged buyouts.
Given that the equity investors in the transactions have to give up public market governance tools, it should come as no surprise that in many of these deals, the private equity comes from a single firm, like KKR or Blackstone, with top managers holding some of the private equity, to align interests, after the deal goes through. Success in these deals comes from taking the reconfigured company public again, at a much higher value, leaving equity investors with outsized gains.
The Tesla CaseTesla is a money-losing company, burning through significant amounts of cash. Not only is the company in no position to borrow more, I have argued before that it should not even carry the debt that it does. If this deal is to make sense, it has to be predominantly equity funded, but that does create some challenges. 1. The No-pain solution: Musk, in his Tuesday tweets, seems to offer a solution, which, if feasible, would be relatively painless. In his set up, existing shareholders will be allowed to exchange their shares in Tesla, the public company, for shares in Tesla, the private business, and those shareholders who are unwilling to take this offer will sell their shares back to the company at $420/share. In the extreme case, where every existing shareholder takes this offer and if existing debt holders are willing to continue to lend to the new private enterprise, Tesla will need no new funding:
This would be magical, if you can pull it off, but there are two significant impediments. The first is that the deal may not pass legal muster, since the SEC restricts private companies to having less than 2000 shareholders, and Tesla has far more than that number. It is true that you might be able to create a fund that has individual shareholders, which then holds equity in the private company, like Uber has, but that fund is restricted to very wealthy, big investors, and the SEC may be unwilling to go along with a structure where there are thousands of small stockholders in the fund. The second is that even if Tesla manages to get regulatory approval for this unconventional set up, many shareholders may choose to cash out at $420, if the company goes private, even if they think that the shares are worth more, because they value liquidity.2. A Deep-pocketed Outsider: The announcement that the Saudi Sovereign fund had invested $2 billion in Tesla shares came just before Musk's "going private" tweet, setting up a second possibility, which is the a large private equity investor (or several) would step in to fund the deal. Here, Tesla's large market capitalization and cash burning status work against it, reducing the number of potential players in the game. At the limit, if all existing shareholders, other than Musk, cash out at $420/share, you would need about $55-$60 billion in funding. No sovereign fund or passive investment vehicle can afford to have that much money tied up in one company, and especially one that is illiquid and will need more capital infusions in the future. Even the biggest private equity and venture capital investors, generally more willing to hold concentrated positions, will be hard pressed to put this much capital, for the same reasons. In fact, the only name that you can come up with that has even the possibility of pulling this off is Softbank, for three reasons:They may be big enough to make the investment. As a publicly traded company with a market capitalization of $103 billion, making a $55-60 billion additional investment in Tesla would be a reach, but Softbank is capable of drawing other investors of its ilk into the funding.They have and are invested in young, growth companies: Unlike traditional PE investors whose focus has been on doing leveraged deals of cash-rich companies, Softbank has invested successfully in growth companies, many of whom continue to burn through cash.They have a history with Tesla: There were rumors last year that Tesla and Softbank had talked about taking the company private, but control disagreements caused negotiations to break down.That said, I am not sure that Elon Musk and Masayoshi Son (Softbank's CEO) can co-exist in the same company. Both value control, and both are unpredictable, and I have to confess that watching the two tango would make for great entertainment.
3. A Corporate Investor: There is one final possibility that I considered and it is that a corporation with deep pockets would provide the money needed to take Tesla private. Given how much money is needed, the list of potential buyers is small and perhaps restricted to the large tech companies - Apple and Google. While they have the cash and perhaps may even have the interest, Musk's follow up that he would continue to run the company and hold on to his ownership stake strikes me as a poison pill that no corporation will want to swallow.
It is at this point that the "secured funding" claim that Musk made in his initial tweet comes into question. If the statement is true, he has either found an inept bank that will lend tens of billions to a money losing company with an undisciplined CEO, or a private equity investor who is willing to make the largest PE investment in history, while allowing Musk to continue running the company, with no checks and balances. If the statement is false, we will be seeing lawyers debating the meaning of the words "secured" and "funding" for a while.
Occam's Razor: A simpler explanationThis entire post has been premised on the notion that Elon Musk had done his homework and that he intended to send a serious signal to markets about a future buyout. Given Musk's history of impetuous and personal tweets, that premise might be completely wrong, in which case the explanation for this episode may be far simpler and rooted in the war with short sellers that Musk has been fighting for a while. Musk is convinced, rightly or wrongly, that short sellers in Tesla are conspiring to bring not just the stock price, but the entire company, down. While there are short sellers in every publicly traded company, including the most successful in market capitalization (Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon), Tesla is an outlier in terms of the short selling on two fronts:It has a CEO who is obsessed with short selling and spends a disproportionate amount of his time and attention on bringing them down. So, it is true that short sellers are a distraction to the company, but only because Elon Musk has made it so. On the other side, many of the short sellers in Tesla seem to be just as obsessed with Musk and are convinced that he is a scam artist. I have a sneaking feeling that for many of them, winning will mean not just making money on their Tesla positions, but seeing the company cease to exist (and taking Musk down with it). On my Tesla valuation from a few weeks ago, it is telling that the most heated responses that I got were not from Tesla bulls, accusing me of being too pessimistic, but from Tesla short sellers, arguing that I was being over valuing the company, even though my assessed value per share was half the prevailing price.Investing is a difficult game, to begin with, but it becomes doubly so, when it becomes personal. Just as it is dangerous to fall in love with a company that you have invested in, it is just as dangerous to bet against a company because you hate its management and want it to fail. I think both sides of the Tesla short selling game are so infected with personal bias that they may do or say things that are not in their best long term investing interests. That is why I hope, for Tesla's sake, that Musk's personal dislike of short sellers did not lead him to tweet out that Tesla would go private. with both the price ($420) and the "secured funding" being spur of the moment inventions. In his zeal to make short sellers pay, he may have handed them the weapon they need to bring him down. I know that Tesla's board has backed Musk, saying that he had opened a discussion about going private with the board, but since no mention is made of a price or funding, and given how ineffective and craven this board has been over the last few years, I cannot attach much weight to this backing.
Bottom LineThere are publicly traded companies where going private is not only an option, but a value-increasing one, but Tesla is not one of them. As with so much else that the company has done over its history, from its acquisition of Solar City to borrowing billions of dollars to this talk of going private, it is not the action per se that is inexplicable, it is that Tesla is not the company that should be taking the action. The drama will undoubtedly continue, and in a world where we get much our entertainment from reality shows, the Elon Musk show is on top of my list of must-watch shows.
YouTube Video
Blog Posts on TeslaTwists and Turns in the Tesla Story: A Boring, Boneheaded UpdateShare Count Confusion: Dilution, Employee Options and Multiple Share ClassesPaper on Going PrivateAnatomy of a Leveraged Buyout: Leverage, Control and Value
1. Public to Private - The WhyWhen we talk about transitions between private and public market places, we generally tend to focus on private companies going public. That is because it is natural and common for a small, privately owned business, as it grows larger, to move to public markets, with an initial public offering. That said, there are publicly traded companies that seem to move in reverse and go back to being privately run businesses, as Tesla may be proposing to do.
The Trade OffTo understand both transitions, the more-common private to public and the less-frequent pubic to private, let us consider the trade off between being a private business and a publicly traded company, from the perspective of the business:
Private versus Public: Business PerspectiveThe simple summary is that as a private company's need to access capital increases, it will accept more information disclosure and a more outsider-driven corporate governance structure, and make the transition to being a public company. In recent years, the market for private equity has broadened and become deeper, allowing companies to stay private for far longer; Uber, for instance, is worth tens of billions of dollars and is still a private company. To fully understand the transitions, though, we also have to look at the choice from the perspective of investors:
Private versus Public: Investor PerspectiveIn the classic structure of going public, private firms raise money from venture capitalists who accept less liquidity, but structure their equity investments to often get more protection and a bigger say in how the company is run. It is the desire for liquidity that makes venture capitalists push private companies to go public, so that they can cash out their investments. To be able to negotiate better disclosure and control, private company investors have to be investing larger amounts, and it is one reason that regulatory authorities have been wary of allowing small investors to invest in private companies, since they may end up with the worst of all worlds: illiquid investments in businesses, where they have no say in how the company is run, and no information about how well or badly it is doing.The Public to Private TransitionWith this trade off in mind, why would a public company choose to go back to being a private business? This transition makes sense if a company feels that the easier access to capital and a continuously set market price (which delivers liquidity), two features of public markets, no longer provide it with sufficient benefits, and/or the costs of disclosure and outsider intervention (from activist investors), that also come with being a public company, increase. In short, it has to be a company:that does not need access to large amounts of new capital to continue operating,where the market is under pricing the company, relative to its intrinsic value ,that feels the actions that it needs to take in its best long term interests will either create public backlash (layoffs and plant closures) or adverse market reactions (because of the effect that they will have on metrics that investors are focused upon).It should come as no surprise that most companies that have gone through the public-to-private transition have been aging companies (no growth, no capital needed), trading at prices that are below their peer group (lower multiples of earnings or cash flows) and that need to shrink or slim down to keep operating.
The Tesla CaseAs I look at the list of criteria for a good buyout company, I see nothing that would bring Tesla onto my radar as a potential candidate:It is a growing company and it needs new capital to not only deliver on its growth promise but to survive for the next few years. If you are more optimistic than I am about Tesla, you may disagree with how much cash the company will have to raise to keep going, but I challenge even the most hardened optimist to tell me how the company will be able to increase production to a million cars or more without investing mind blowing amounts in new capacity.If markets are punishing Tesla by under pricing the company, they are doing so in a very strange manner, giving it a higher market capitalization than much larger, more profitable automobile companies, ignoring large losses and generally tolerant of Elon Musk's errant behavior. In fact, if the critique of markets is that they are short term and focused on profits, Tesla would be the perfect counter example.It is true that there was substantial drama and market volatility around the 5000 cars/week production target, and there may be some in the company who have the drawn the lesson that since there will be more production targets to come in the future, the company needs to operate out of market scrutiny. That would be the wrong lesson, since almost all of the drama in this episode, from setting the target (5000 cars/week) to the constant tweets about whether the targets would be met, was generated by Elon Musk, not the market. In fact, a cynic would argue that by focusing the market's attention on this short term target, Tesla has been able to avoid answering much bigger questions about its operations.There are, of course, the short sellers in Tesla and Musk's frustration with them was clearly a driver of his "going private" tweet. His argument, which many of his supporters buy into, is that short sellers in public markets make money from seeing stock prices go down, and that some of them may do real damage to companies, because of this incentive. I will not dismiss this complaint, but I will come back to it later in this post, since I do think it is playing an outsized role in this process.
Public to Private - The FundingWhen you decide to take a publicly traded company into the privately owned space, you have to replace the public capital (public equity and debt) with new capital that can be either private equity or new debt.
The key questions then become what mix of debt and equity to use, how to raise the private equity needed to get the deal done and what the ultimate end game is in the transaction. Specifically, you may take a company private, because you want to control its destiny fully, and keep tit a private business in perpetuity. More often, though, the end game is to make the changes that you think will make the company more attractive to investors, and either take it back public or sell it to another public company.
The AnalysisIf the company in question fits the buyout mold, i.e., it is an aging company with a lower market capitalization, relative to earnings and cash flows, than its peers, the going private transaction can be funded with a high proportion of debt, explaining why so many buyouts have leverage attached to them, making them leveraged buyouts.
Given that the equity investors in the transactions have to give up public market governance tools, it should come as no surprise that in many of these deals, the private equity comes from a single firm, like KKR or Blackstone, with top managers holding some of the private equity, to align interests, after the deal goes through. Success in these deals comes from taking the reconfigured company public again, at a much higher value, leaving equity investors with outsized gains.
The Tesla CaseTesla is a money-losing company, burning through significant amounts of cash. Not only is the company in no position to borrow more, I have argued before that it should not even carry the debt that it does. If this deal is to make sense, it has to be predominantly equity funded, but that does create some challenges. 1. The No-pain solution: Musk, in his Tuesday tweets, seems to offer a solution, which, if feasible, would be relatively painless. In his set up, existing shareholders will be allowed to exchange their shares in Tesla, the public company, for shares in Tesla, the private business, and those shareholders who are unwilling to take this offer will sell their shares back to the company at $420/share. In the extreme case, where every existing shareholder takes this offer and if existing debt holders are willing to continue to lend to the new private enterprise, Tesla will need no new funding:
This would be magical, if you can pull it off, but there are two significant impediments. The first is that the deal may not pass legal muster, since the SEC restricts private companies to having less than 2000 shareholders, and Tesla has far more than that number. It is true that you might be able to create a fund that has individual shareholders, which then holds equity in the private company, like Uber has, but that fund is restricted to very wealthy, big investors, and the SEC may be unwilling to go along with a structure where there are thousands of small stockholders in the fund. The second is that even if Tesla manages to get regulatory approval for this unconventional set up, many shareholders may choose to cash out at $420, if the company goes private, even if they think that the shares are worth more, because they value liquidity.2. A Deep-pocketed Outsider: The announcement that the Saudi Sovereign fund had invested $2 billion in Tesla shares came just before Musk's "going private" tweet, setting up a second possibility, which is the a large private equity investor (or several) would step in to fund the deal. Here, Tesla's large market capitalization and cash burning status work against it, reducing the number of potential players in the game. At the limit, if all existing shareholders, other than Musk, cash out at $420/share, you would need about $55-$60 billion in funding. No sovereign fund or passive investment vehicle can afford to have that much money tied up in one company, and especially one that is illiquid and will need more capital infusions in the future. Even the biggest private equity and venture capital investors, generally more willing to hold concentrated positions, will be hard pressed to put this much capital, for the same reasons. In fact, the only name that you can come up with that has even the possibility of pulling this off is Softbank, for three reasons:They may be big enough to make the investment. As a publicly traded company with a market capitalization of $103 billion, making a $55-60 billion additional investment in Tesla would be a reach, but Softbank is capable of drawing other investors of its ilk into the funding.They have and are invested in young, growth companies: Unlike traditional PE investors whose focus has been on doing leveraged deals of cash-rich companies, Softbank has invested successfully in growth companies, many of whom continue to burn through cash.They have a history with Tesla: There were rumors last year that Tesla and Softbank had talked about taking the company private, but control disagreements caused negotiations to break down.That said, I am not sure that Elon Musk and Masayoshi Son (Softbank's CEO) can co-exist in the same company. Both value control, and both are unpredictable, and I have to confess that watching the two tango would make for great entertainment.
3. A Corporate Investor: There is one final possibility that I considered and it is that a corporation with deep pockets would provide the money needed to take Tesla private. Given how much money is needed, the list of potential buyers is small and perhaps restricted to the large tech companies - Apple and Google. While they have the cash and perhaps may even have the interest, Musk's follow up that he would continue to run the company and hold on to his ownership stake strikes me as a poison pill that no corporation will want to swallow.
It is at this point that the "secured funding" claim that Musk made in his initial tweet comes into question. If the statement is true, he has either found an inept bank that will lend tens of billions to a money losing company with an undisciplined CEO, or a private equity investor who is willing to make the largest PE investment in history, while allowing Musk to continue running the company, with no checks and balances. If the statement is false, we will be seeing lawyers debating the meaning of the words "secured" and "funding" for a while.
Occam's Razor: A simpler explanationThis entire post has been premised on the notion that Elon Musk had done his homework and that he intended to send a serious signal to markets about a future buyout. Given Musk's history of impetuous and personal tweets, that premise might be completely wrong, in which case the explanation for this episode may be far simpler and rooted in the war with short sellers that Musk has been fighting for a while. Musk is convinced, rightly or wrongly, that short sellers in Tesla are conspiring to bring not just the stock price, but the entire company, down. While there are short sellers in every publicly traded company, including the most successful in market capitalization (Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon), Tesla is an outlier in terms of the short selling on two fronts:It has a CEO who is obsessed with short selling and spends a disproportionate amount of his time and attention on bringing them down. So, it is true that short sellers are a distraction to the company, but only because Elon Musk has made it so. On the other side, many of the short sellers in Tesla seem to be just as obsessed with Musk and are convinced that he is a scam artist. I have a sneaking feeling that for many of them, winning will mean not just making money on their Tesla positions, but seeing the company cease to exist (and taking Musk down with it). On my Tesla valuation from a few weeks ago, it is telling that the most heated responses that I got were not from Tesla bulls, accusing me of being too pessimistic, but from Tesla short sellers, arguing that I was being over valuing the company, even though my assessed value per share was half the prevailing price.Investing is a difficult game, to begin with, but it becomes doubly so, when it becomes personal. Just as it is dangerous to fall in love with a company that you have invested in, it is just as dangerous to bet against a company because you hate its management and want it to fail. I think both sides of the Tesla short selling game are so infected with personal bias that they may do or say things that are not in their best long term investing interests. That is why I hope, for Tesla's sake, that Musk's personal dislike of short sellers did not lead him to tweet out that Tesla would go private. with both the price ($420) and the "secured funding" being spur of the moment inventions. In his zeal to make short sellers pay, he may have handed them the weapon they need to bring him down. I know that Tesla's board has backed Musk, saying that he had opened a discussion about going private with the board, but since no mention is made of a price or funding, and given how ineffective and craven this board has been over the last few years, I cannot attach much weight to this backing.
Bottom LineThere are publicly traded companies where going private is not only an option, but a value-increasing one, but Tesla is not one of them. As with so much else that the company has done over its history, from its acquisition of Solar City to borrowing billions of dollars to this talk of going private, it is not the action per se that is inexplicable, it is that Tesla is not the company that should be taking the action. The drama will undoubtedly continue, and in a world where we get much our entertainment from reality shows, the Elon Musk show is on top of my list of must-watch shows.
YouTube Video
Blog Posts on TeslaTwists and Turns in the Tesla Story: A Boring, Boneheaded UpdateShare Count Confusion: Dilution, Employee Options and Multiple Share ClassesPaper on Going PrivateAnatomy of a Leveraged Buyout: Leverage, Control and Value
August 6, 2018
Country Risk: A Midyear Update for 2018
While political and trade wars are brewing around the world, centered on globalization, the enduring truth is that the globalization genie is out of the bottle, and no political force can put it back. Encouraged to spread their bets around the world, investors have shed some of the home bias in their investing and added foreign equities to their portfolios. Even those that have stayed invested with companies in their own markets are finding that those companies derive large chunks of their revenues from foreign markets. In short, there is no place to hide from assessing global risk and analysts who bury their head in the sand are missing large parts of the big picture. In this post, I revisit the assessments of country risk that I have made every year for the last 25 years and reiterate how to use those assessments when valuing companies or analyzing projects. The full version of this post is a paper that you can download and read, but I have to warn you that I am verbose and it is more than a hundred pages long.
The Fundamentals of Country Risk
So, what makes investing or operating in one country more or less risky than another? Most business people point to three factors. The first is the prevalence of corruption in a country, with the corrosive influences it has on business practices and financial reports. The second is the increased exposure to violence from war or terrorism in some parts of the world, creating not just additional operating costs (for insurance and protection) but also the real possibility of a complete loss of the business. The third is the legal system for enforcing property rights, since a share in even the most valuable business in the world is worth little or nothing, if property rights are ignored or violated on a whim. In this section, we will look at the state of the world on these three dimensions.
I. Corruption
Why we care: Operating in an environment where corruption and bribery are accepted as common practice has two consequences for value. It is a hidden tax: You can view the cost of corruption as a hidden tax, paid not directly to the government but to its functionaries to get business done. As a consequence, the effective tax rate that a company pays in a corrupt economy will be much higher than the statutory tax rate. Since it is not legal for companies to pay bribes in much of the developed world, it is not explicitly reported as such in the financial statements but it is a drain on income, nevertheless.It can be a competitive advantage or disadvantage: In many corrupt economies, there are companies that are not only more willing but are also more efficient at playing the corruption game, giving them a leg up on businesses that face moral or legal restrictions on playing the game.Global differences: While businesses are quick to attach labels to entire regions of the world, there are entities that try to measure corruption in different parts of the world, using more objective measures. Transparency International, for instance, has a corruption index that it has developed and updates every year, with lower scores indicating more corruption and higher scores less. The mid-2018 picture on how different countries measure up is below:
For heat map and for raw dataWhile I am sure that there are some who will look at this chart and attribute the differences to culture, I think that it can be better explained by a combination of poverty and abysmal political governance.
II. Violence
Why we care: At the risk of stating the obvious, operating a business is much more difficult, in the midst of violence and war than in safety. There are two consequences. The first is that protecting the business and its employees against the violence is expensive, with more security built into even the everyday practices. To the extent that this protection is not complete, there is the added cost of the destruction wrought by violence. The second is that in extreme cases, the violence can cause a business to fail. It is true that you can insure against some of these events, but that insurance is never complete and its cost will be high and reduce profit margins.
Global Differences: The news headlines, especially about war and terrorism, give us clues about the parts of the world where violence is most common. To measure exposure to violence, though, it is useful to see indices like the Global Peace Index developed by the Institute for Peace and Economics, with low scores indicating the most and high scores the least violence.
For heat map and for raw dataThere are some surprises on this score. While some parts of the developed world, like Europe, Canada and Australia are peaceful, the United States, China and the United Kingdom don't score as well.
III. Private Property Rights and Legal System
Why we care: In valuation, we value a business or a share in it, on the assumption that that you are entitled, as the owner, to a share of its assets and cash flows. That is true, though, only if private property rights are respected and are backed up a legal system in a timely fashion. As property rights weaken, the claim on the cash flows and assets also weakens, reducing the assessed value, and in extreme circumstances, such as nationalization with no compensation, the value can converge on zero.Global Differences: A group of non-government organizations has created an international property rights index, measuring the protection provided for property rights in different countries. In their 2018 update, they measured property rights on three dimensions, legal, physical property and intellectual property, to come up with a composite measure of property rights, by country. The state of the world, on this measure, is in the picture below:
For heat map and for raw dataIn 2018, property rights were most strongly protected in Oceania (Australia and New Zealand) and North America and were weakest in Africa, Russia and South America.
IV. Overall Risk Scores
As you look at the global differences on corruption, violence and property rights, you can see that there are correlations across the measures. Regionally, Africa performs worst on all three measures, but there are individual countries that perform better on one measure and worse on others. Consequently, a composite country risk score that brings together all of these exposures into one number would be useful and there are many services, ranging from public entities like the World Bank to private consultants, that try to measure that score. We will focus on Political Risk Services, a private service, and the picture below captures their measures of composite country risk, by country in July 2018:
For heat map and for raw dataThere are few surprises here. Eight of the ten riskiest countries in the world, at least according to this measure, are in Africa with Venezuela and Syria rounding out the list. A preponderance of the safest countries in the world are in Northern Europe, though Taiwan and Singapore also make the list. The problem with country risk scores is that there is not only no standardization across services, but it is also difficult to convert these scores into numbers that can be used in financial analysis, either as cash flow or discount rate adjusters.
Default Risk
There is one dimension of country risk where measurements have not only existed for decades but are also more in tune with financial analysis and that is sovereign default risk. Put simply, there is a much higher that some countries will default than others, and default risk measures try to capture that likelihood.
I. Sovereign Ratings
Ratings agencies have rated corporate bonds for default risk, using a letter grade system that goes back almost a century. In the last three decades these agencies have turned their attention to sovereign debt, using the same rating system. Between Moody’s and S&P, there were 141 countries that had sovereign ratings, and the picture below captures the differences across countries:
For heat map and for raw dataWhile North America and Europe represent the greenest (and safest) parts of the world, you do see shades of green in some unexpected parts of the world. In Latin America, historically a hotbed of sovereign default, Chile and Colombia are now highly rated. The patch of green in the Middle East includes Saudi Arabia, indicating perhaps the biggest weakness of this country risk measure, which is its focus on the capacity of a country to meet its debt obligations. As an oil power with a small population and little debt, Saudi Arabia has low default risk, but it is exposed to significant political risk. While ratings agencies have been maligned as incompetent and biased, I think that their biggest weakness is that they are too slow to update ratings to reflect changes on the ground. In the last decade, it took almost two years after Greece drifted into trouble before ratings agencies woke up and lower the company’s rating.
II. Default Spreads
To those who are skeptical about ratings agencies, there is a market alternative, which is to look at what investors are demanding as a spread for buying bonds issued by a risky sovereign. That spread can be computed only if the sovereign in question issues bonds in a currency (like the US dollar or Euro) where there is a default free rate (the US treasury bond rate or German Euro bond rate) for comparison. Since there only a few countries where this is the case, it is provident that the sovereign CDS market has expanded over the last decade. This market, where you can buy insurance, on an annual basis, against default risk, has expanded over the last few years and there are now about 80 countries where you can observe the traded spreads. The picture below captures global differences in sovereign CDS spreads:
For heat map and for raw data
The sovereign CDS spreads are highly correlated with the ratings, but they also tend to be both more reflective of events on the ground and more timely.
Equity Risk Premiums
If you are lending money to a business, or buying bonds, it is default risk that you are focused on, but if you own a business, your exposure to risk is far broader, since your claims are residual. This is equity risk, and if there are variations in default risk across countries, it stands to reason that equity risk should also vary across countries, leading investors and business owners to demand different equity risk premiums in different parts of the world.
Global Equity Risk Premiums: General Propositions
As a prelude to looking at different ways of estimating equity risk premiums across countries, let me lay out two basic propositions about country risk that will animate the discussion.
Proposition 1: If country risk is diversifiable and investors are globally diversified, the equity risk premium should be the same across countries. If country risk is not fully diversifiable, either because the correlation across markets is high or investors are not global, the equity risk premium should vary across markets.
One of the central tenets of modern portfolio theory is that investors are rewarded only for risk that cannot be diversified away, even if they choose to be non-diversified, as long as the marginal investors are diversified. Building on this idea, country risk can be ignored, if it is diversifiable, and it is this argument that some high-profile companies and consultants used in the 1980s to argue for the use of a global equity risk premium for all countries. The problem, though, is that country risk is diversifiable only if there is low correlation across equity markets and if the marginal investors in companies hold international portfolios. As investors and companies have globalized, the correlation across equity markets has increased, with market shocks running through the globe; a political crisis in Sao Paulo can drag down stock prices in New York, London, Mumbai and Shanghai. Consequently, being globally diversified is not going to fully protect you against country risk and there should therefore be higher equity risk premiums for emerging markets, which are more exposed to global shocks, than developed markets.
Proposition 2: If there are variations in equity risk premiums across countries, the exposure of a business to that risk should be determined by where the business operates (in terms of producing and selling its goods and services), not where it is incorporated.
If you accept the proposition that equity risk premiums vary across countries, the next question becomes how best to measure a company or investment's exposure to that risk. Unfortunately, a combination of inertia and bad logic leads many analysts to estimate the equity risk premium for a company from its country of incorporation, rather than where it does business. This is absurd, since Coca Cola, while a US incorporated company, faces significantly more operating risk exposure when it expands into Myanmar or Bolivia than when it invests in Poland. It stands to reason that to measure a company's equity risk premium, you have to look at where it does business.
Equity Risk Premiums
The standard approach for estimating equity risk premiums for emerging markets has been to start with the equity risk premium for a mature market, like the US or Germany, and augment it with the sovereign default spread for the country in question, measured either by a sovereign CDS spread or based on its sovereign rating. Since equities are riskier than bonds, I modify this approach slightly by scaling up the default risk for the higher equity risk, using a relative risk measure; the relative risk measure is computed by dividing the standard deviation of equities in emerging markets by the standard deviation of public sector bonds in these same markets:
My melded approach, using default spreads and equity market volatilities, yields additional country risk premiums slightly larger than the default spreads. In July 2018, for instance, I started with my estimate of the implied equity risk premium of 5.37% for the S&P 500, as my mature market premium. To estimate the equity risk premium for India, I built on the default spread for India, based upon its Moody's rating of Baa2, of2.20%, and multiplied it by the relative equity market scalar of 1.222 yields a country risk premium of 2.69%. Adding this to my mature market premium of 5.37% at the start of July 2018 gives a premium of 8.06% for India. For the two dozen countries, where there are no sovereign ratings or CDS spreads available, I use the PRS score assigned to the country to find other rated countries with similar PRS scores, to estimate default spreads and equity risk premiums. Applying this approach yields the following picture for global equity risk in July 2018:
Download full spreadsheet
Incorporating Country Risk in Valuation
With the estimates of country risk in hand, let's talk about bringing them into play in valuing companies. Staying true to the proposition that risk comes from where companies operate, not where they are incorporated, we confront the question of how best to measure operating exposure. The simplest and most easily accessible is revenue breakdown. For a company like Coca Cola, for instance, with revenues spread across the globe, the equity risk premium would be a weighted average of their regional exposures:
Coca Cola 10K for 2017If the break down of Coca Cola's revenues, by region, strike you as being overly broad, note that this is the only geographical breakdown that the company provides. If there is one area of corporate reporting that requires more clarity and detail, it is this.
Using revenues to measure risk exposure does open you up to the criticism that while risk can also come from where a company produces its goods and services. This is especially true for natural resource companies, where risk can be traced back to where the company extracts its commodity, not where it sells it. Applying this to Royal Dutch Shell in 2018, for instance, yields the following:
Royal Dutch Annual Report for 2017You could even create a composite weighting that brings into account both revenues and production for a company, if you have the information.
Incorporate Country Risk In Investment Analysis
While country risk plays a key role in valuation, it plays an even bigger one in capital budgeting and investment analysis, as multinationals wrestle with comparing investment decisions made in different parts of the world. Using Coca Cola to illustrate, assume that the company is considering making investments in Nigeria, Chile and US and is trying to estimate the "right" cost of equity to use in its assessment. Even if all of the investments are in identical businesses (soft drinks) and are in the same currency (US dollars), the costs of equity will vary across them (the beta for Coca Cola is 0.80 and the risk free rate is 3%):
Nigeria project: Risk Free Rate +Beta* (Nigeria ERP) = 3% + 0.80 (13.15%) = 13.52%Chile project: Risk Free Rate +Beta* (Chile ERP) = 3% + 0.80 (6.22%) = 7.98%US project: Risk Free Rate +Beta* (Canada ERP) = 3% + 0.80 (5.37%) = 7.30%It is worth noting that many companies still adopt the practice of using the same hurdle rate for investments in different markets and if Coca Cola adopted this practice, they would be using the cost of equity of 8.52%, computed using their weighted average equity risk premium of 6.90%, or worse still a cost of equity of 7.30%, using an equity risk premium of 5.37%, based upon Coca Cola's country of incorporation,. Consider the consequences of this practice. It will reduce the cost of equity for the Nigerian investment and raise it for the Chilean and Canadian investments, and over time, it will lead Coca Cola to over invest and over expand in the riskiest markets.
For a multi-business, multi-national company like Siemens, the estimation becomes even messier, since to estimate the cost of equity for a project, you will need to know not only where the project is situated (to estimate the equity risk premium) but also which business it is in (to get the right beta).
Incorporating Country Risk In Pricing
If you don't do intrinsic valuation, but base your investment decisions on pricing metrics (multiples and comparable firms), you may think that you have dodged a bullet, but that relief is fleeting. If equity risk varies across countries, you should also expect to see it show up in PE ratios or EV/EBITDA multiples, with companies in riskier markets trading at lower values. This can be viewed as an argument for finding comparable firms in markets of equivalent risk, but as we saw with Coca Cola and Royal Dutch, that can be difficult to do. In fact, since there are often far fewer companies listed in many emerging markets, you have no choice but to look outside your market for comparable firms, and when you do so, you have to at least consider differences in country risk, when making your judgments. If you do not, and you are comparing publicly traded retailers across Latin America, companies in riskier markets (like Venezuela, Argentina and Ecuador) will look cheap relative to companies in safer markets (like Chile and Colombia).
YouTube Video
Papers
Country Risk Premiums: Determinants, Measures and Implications - The 2018 EditionData
Country Risk - Data tablesEquity Risk Premiums, by Country
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The Fundamentals of Country Risk
So, what makes investing or operating in one country more or less risky than another? Most business people point to three factors. The first is the prevalence of corruption in a country, with the corrosive influences it has on business practices and financial reports. The second is the increased exposure to violence from war or terrorism in some parts of the world, creating not just additional operating costs (for insurance and protection) but also the real possibility of a complete loss of the business. The third is the legal system for enforcing property rights, since a share in even the most valuable business in the world is worth little or nothing, if property rights are ignored or violated on a whim. In this section, we will look at the state of the world on these three dimensions.
I. Corruption
Why we care: Operating in an environment where corruption and bribery are accepted as common practice has two consequences for value. It is a hidden tax: You can view the cost of corruption as a hidden tax, paid not directly to the government but to its functionaries to get business done. As a consequence, the effective tax rate that a company pays in a corrupt economy will be much higher than the statutory tax rate. Since it is not legal for companies to pay bribes in much of the developed world, it is not explicitly reported as such in the financial statements but it is a drain on income, nevertheless.It can be a competitive advantage or disadvantage: In many corrupt economies, there are companies that are not only more willing but are also more efficient at playing the corruption game, giving them a leg up on businesses that face moral or legal restrictions on playing the game.Global differences: While businesses are quick to attach labels to entire regions of the world, there are entities that try to measure corruption in different parts of the world, using more objective measures. Transparency International, for instance, has a corruption index that it has developed and updates every year, with lower scores indicating more corruption and higher scores less. The mid-2018 picture on how different countries measure up is below:
For heat map and for raw dataWhile I am sure that there are some who will look at this chart and attribute the differences to culture, I think that it can be better explained by a combination of poverty and abysmal political governance.II. Violence
Why we care: At the risk of stating the obvious, operating a business is much more difficult, in the midst of violence and war than in safety. There are two consequences. The first is that protecting the business and its employees against the violence is expensive, with more security built into even the everyday practices. To the extent that this protection is not complete, there is the added cost of the destruction wrought by violence. The second is that in extreme cases, the violence can cause a business to fail. It is true that you can insure against some of these events, but that insurance is never complete and its cost will be high and reduce profit margins.
Global Differences: The news headlines, especially about war and terrorism, give us clues about the parts of the world where violence is most common. To measure exposure to violence, though, it is useful to see indices like the Global Peace Index developed by the Institute for Peace and Economics, with low scores indicating the most and high scores the least violence.
For heat map and for raw dataThere are some surprises on this score. While some parts of the developed world, like Europe, Canada and Australia are peaceful, the United States, China and the United Kingdom don't score as well.III. Private Property Rights and Legal System
Why we care: In valuation, we value a business or a share in it, on the assumption that that you are entitled, as the owner, to a share of its assets and cash flows. That is true, though, only if private property rights are respected and are backed up a legal system in a timely fashion. As property rights weaken, the claim on the cash flows and assets also weakens, reducing the assessed value, and in extreme circumstances, such as nationalization with no compensation, the value can converge on zero.Global Differences: A group of non-government organizations has created an international property rights index, measuring the protection provided for property rights in different countries. In their 2018 update, they measured property rights on three dimensions, legal, physical property and intellectual property, to come up with a composite measure of property rights, by country. The state of the world, on this measure, is in the picture below:
For heat map and for raw dataIn 2018, property rights were most strongly protected in Oceania (Australia and New Zealand) and North America and were weakest in Africa, Russia and South America.IV. Overall Risk Scores
As you look at the global differences on corruption, violence and property rights, you can see that there are correlations across the measures. Regionally, Africa performs worst on all three measures, but there are individual countries that perform better on one measure and worse on others. Consequently, a composite country risk score that brings together all of these exposures into one number would be useful and there are many services, ranging from public entities like the World Bank to private consultants, that try to measure that score. We will focus on Political Risk Services, a private service, and the picture below captures their measures of composite country risk, by country in July 2018:
For heat map and for raw dataThere are few surprises here. Eight of the ten riskiest countries in the world, at least according to this measure, are in Africa with Venezuela and Syria rounding out the list. A preponderance of the safest countries in the world are in Northern Europe, though Taiwan and Singapore also make the list. The problem with country risk scores is that there is not only no standardization across services, but it is also difficult to convert these scores into numbers that can be used in financial analysis, either as cash flow or discount rate adjusters.Default Risk
There is one dimension of country risk where measurements have not only existed for decades but are also more in tune with financial analysis and that is sovereign default risk. Put simply, there is a much higher that some countries will default than others, and default risk measures try to capture that likelihood.
I. Sovereign Ratings
Ratings agencies have rated corporate bonds for default risk, using a letter grade system that goes back almost a century. In the last three decades these agencies have turned their attention to sovereign debt, using the same rating system. Between Moody’s and S&P, there were 141 countries that had sovereign ratings, and the picture below captures the differences across countries:
For heat map and for raw dataWhile North America and Europe represent the greenest (and safest) parts of the world, you do see shades of green in some unexpected parts of the world. In Latin America, historically a hotbed of sovereign default, Chile and Colombia are now highly rated. The patch of green in the Middle East includes Saudi Arabia, indicating perhaps the biggest weakness of this country risk measure, which is its focus on the capacity of a country to meet its debt obligations. As an oil power with a small population and little debt, Saudi Arabia has low default risk, but it is exposed to significant political risk. While ratings agencies have been maligned as incompetent and biased, I think that their biggest weakness is that they are too slow to update ratings to reflect changes on the ground. In the last decade, it took almost two years after Greece drifted into trouble before ratings agencies woke up and lower the company’s rating. II. Default Spreads
To those who are skeptical about ratings agencies, there is a market alternative, which is to look at what investors are demanding as a spread for buying bonds issued by a risky sovereign. That spread can be computed only if the sovereign in question issues bonds in a currency (like the US dollar or Euro) where there is a default free rate (the US treasury bond rate or German Euro bond rate) for comparison. Since there only a few countries where this is the case, it is provident that the sovereign CDS market has expanded over the last decade. This market, where you can buy insurance, on an annual basis, against default risk, has expanded over the last few years and there are now about 80 countries where you can observe the traded spreads. The picture below captures global differences in sovereign CDS spreads:
For heat map and for raw dataThe sovereign CDS spreads are highly correlated with the ratings, but they also tend to be both more reflective of events on the ground and more timely.
Equity Risk Premiums
If you are lending money to a business, or buying bonds, it is default risk that you are focused on, but if you own a business, your exposure to risk is far broader, since your claims are residual. This is equity risk, and if there are variations in default risk across countries, it stands to reason that equity risk should also vary across countries, leading investors and business owners to demand different equity risk premiums in different parts of the world.
Global Equity Risk Premiums: General Propositions
As a prelude to looking at different ways of estimating equity risk premiums across countries, let me lay out two basic propositions about country risk that will animate the discussion.
Proposition 1: If country risk is diversifiable and investors are globally diversified, the equity risk premium should be the same across countries. If country risk is not fully diversifiable, either because the correlation across markets is high or investors are not global, the equity risk premium should vary across markets.
One of the central tenets of modern portfolio theory is that investors are rewarded only for risk that cannot be diversified away, even if they choose to be non-diversified, as long as the marginal investors are diversified. Building on this idea, country risk can be ignored, if it is diversifiable, and it is this argument that some high-profile companies and consultants used in the 1980s to argue for the use of a global equity risk premium for all countries. The problem, though, is that country risk is diversifiable only if there is low correlation across equity markets and if the marginal investors in companies hold international portfolios. As investors and companies have globalized, the correlation across equity markets has increased, with market shocks running through the globe; a political crisis in Sao Paulo can drag down stock prices in New York, London, Mumbai and Shanghai. Consequently, being globally diversified is not going to fully protect you against country risk and there should therefore be higher equity risk premiums for emerging markets, which are more exposed to global shocks, than developed markets.
Proposition 2: If there are variations in equity risk premiums across countries, the exposure of a business to that risk should be determined by where the business operates (in terms of producing and selling its goods and services), not where it is incorporated.
If you accept the proposition that equity risk premiums vary across countries, the next question becomes how best to measure a company or investment's exposure to that risk. Unfortunately, a combination of inertia and bad logic leads many analysts to estimate the equity risk premium for a company from its country of incorporation, rather than where it does business. This is absurd, since Coca Cola, while a US incorporated company, faces significantly more operating risk exposure when it expands into Myanmar or Bolivia than when it invests in Poland. It stands to reason that to measure a company's equity risk premium, you have to look at where it does business.
Equity Risk Premiums
The standard approach for estimating equity risk premiums for emerging markets has been to start with the equity risk premium for a mature market, like the US or Germany, and augment it with the sovereign default spread for the country in question, measured either by a sovereign CDS spread or based on its sovereign rating. Since equities are riskier than bonds, I modify this approach slightly by scaling up the default risk for the higher equity risk, using a relative risk measure; the relative risk measure is computed by dividing the standard deviation of equities in emerging markets by the standard deviation of public sector bonds in these same markets:
My melded approach, using default spreads and equity market volatilities, yields additional country risk premiums slightly larger than the default spreads. In July 2018, for instance, I started with my estimate of the implied equity risk premium of 5.37% for the S&P 500, as my mature market premium. To estimate the equity risk premium for India, I built on the default spread for India, based upon its Moody's rating of Baa2, of2.20%, and multiplied it by the relative equity market scalar of 1.222 yields a country risk premium of 2.69%. Adding this to my mature market premium of 5.37% at the start of July 2018 gives a premium of 8.06% for India. For the two dozen countries, where there are no sovereign ratings or CDS spreads available, I use the PRS score assigned to the country to find other rated countries with similar PRS scores, to estimate default spreads and equity risk premiums. Applying this approach yields the following picture for global equity risk in July 2018:
Download full spreadsheet
Incorporating Country Risk in Valuation
With the estimates of country risk in hand, let's talk about bringing them into play in valuing companies. Staying true to the proposition that risk comes from where companies operate, not where they are incorporated, we confront the question of how best to measure operating exposure. The simplest and most easily accessible is revenue breakdown. For a company like Coca Cola, for instance, with revenues spread across the globe, the equity risk premium would be a weighted average of their regional exposures:
Coca Cola 10K for 2017If the break down of Coca Cola's revenues, by region, strike you as being overly broad, note that this is the only geographical breakdown that the company provides. If there is one area of corporate reporting that requires more clarity and detail, it is this.Using revenues to measure risk exposure does open you up to the criticism that while risk can also come from where a company produces its goods and services. This is especially true for natural resource companies, where risk can be traced back to where the company extracts its commodity, not where it sells it. Applying this to Royal Dutch Shell in 2018, for instance, yields the following:
Royal Dutch Annual Report for 2017You could even create a composite weighting that brings into account both revenues and production for a company, if you have the information.Incorporate Country Risk In Investment Analysis
While country risk plays a key role in valuation, it plays an even bigger one in capital budgeting and investment analysis, as multinationals wrestle with comparing investment decisions made in different parts of the world. Using Coca Cola to illustrate, assume that the company is considering making investments in Nigeria, Chile and US and is trying to estimate the "right" cost of equity to use in its assessment. Even if all of the investments are in identical businesses (soft drinks) and are in the same currency (US dollars), the costs of equity will vary across them (the beta for Coca Cola is 0.80 and the risk free rate is 3%):
Nigeria project: Risk Free Rate +Beta* (Nigeria ERP) = 3% + 0.80 (13.15%) = 13.52%Chile project: Risk Free Rate +Beta* (Chile ERP) = 3% + 0.80 (6.22%) = 7.98%US project: Risk Free Rate +Beta* (Canada ERP) = 3% + 0.80 (5.37%) = 7.30%It is worth noting that many companies still adopt the practice of using the same hurdle rate for investments in different markets and if Coca Cola adopted this practice, they would be using the cost of equity of 8.52%, computed using their weighted average equity risk premium of 6.90%, or worse still a cost of equity of 7.30%, using an equity risk premium of 5.37%, based upon Coca Cola's country of incorporation,. Consider the consequences of this practice. It will reduce the cost of equity for the Nigerian investment and raise it for the Chilean and Canadian investments, and over time, it will lead Coca Cola to over invest and over expand in the riskiest markets.
For a multi-business, multi-national company like Siemens, the estimation becomes even messier, since to estimate the cost of equity for a project, you will need to know not only where the project is situated (to estimate the equity risk premium) but also which business it is in (to get the right beta).
Incorporating Country Risk In Pricing
If you don't do intrinsic valuation, but base your investment decisions on pricing metrics (multiples and comparable firms), you may think that you have dodged a bullet, but that relief is fleeting. If equity risk varies across countries, you should also expect to see it show up in PE ratios or EV/EBITDA multiples, with companies in riskier markets trading at lower values. This can be viewed as an argument for finding comparable firms in markets of equivalent risk, but as we saw with Coca Cola and Royal Dutch, that can be difficult to do. In fact, since there are often far fewer companies listed in many emerging markets, you have no choice but to look outside your market for comparable firms, and when you do so, you have to at least consider differences in country risk, when making your judgments. If you do not, and you are comparing publicly traded retailers across Latin America, companies in riskier markets (like Venezuela, Argentina and Ecuador) will look cheap relative to companies in safer markets (like Chile and Colombia).
YouTube Video
Papers
Country Risk Premiums: Determinants, Measures and Implications - The 2018 EditionData
Country Risk - Data tablesEquity Risk Premiums, by Country
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July 25, 2018
Share Count Confusion: Dilution, Employee Options and Multiple Share Classes!
In my last post, just about four weeks ago, I valued Tesla, and as with all of my Tesla valuations, I got feedback, much of it heated. My valuation of Tesla was $186, in what I termed my base case, and there were many who disputed that value, from both directions. There were some who felt that I was being too pessimistic in my assessments of Tesla's growth potential, but there were many more who argued that I was being too optimistic. In either case, I have no desire to convert you to my point of view, since the essence of valuation is disagreement. In the context of some of these critiques, there was discussion of how my valuation incorporated (or did not incorporate) the expected dilution from future share issuances and what share count to use in computing value per share. Since these are broader issues that recur across companies, I decided to dedicate a post entirely to these questions.
Share Count and Value Per ShareThere was a time, not so long ago, when getting from the value of equity for a company to value per share was a trivial exercise, involving dividing the aggregate value by the number of shares outstanding.Value per share = Aggregate Value of Equity/ Number of Shares outstandingThis computation can become problematic when you have one or more of the following phenomena:Expected Dilution: As young companies and start-ups get listed on public market places, investors are increasingly being called upon to value companies that will need to access capital markets in future years, to cover reinvestment and operating needs. To the extent that some or all of this new capital will come from new share issuances, the share count at these companies can be expected to climb over time. The question for analysts then becomes whether, and if yes, how, to adjust the value per share today for these additional shares.Share based compensation: When employees and managers are compensated with shares or options, there are three issues that affect valuation. The first is whether the expense associated with stock based compensation should be added back to arrive at cash flows, since it is a non-cash expense. The second is how to adjust the value per share today for the restricted shares and options that have already been granted to managers. Third, if a company is expected to continue with its policy of using stock based compensation, you have to decide how to adjust the value per share today for future grants of options or shares.Shares with different rights (voting and dividend): When companies issue shares with different voting rights or dividends, they are in effect creating shares that can have different per-share values. If a company has voting and non-voting shares, and you believe that voting shares have more value than non-voting shares, you cannot divide the aggregate value of equity by the number of shares outstanding to get to value per share.Note that while none of these developments are new, analysts in public markets dealt with them infrequently a few decades ago, and could, in fact, get away with using short cuts or ignoring them. Today, they have become more pervasive, and the old evasions no longer will stand you in good stead.
Expected DilutionThe Change: An investor or analyst dealing with publicly traded companies in the 1980s generally valued more mature companies, since going public was considered an option only for those companies that had reached a stage in their life cycle, where profits were positive (or close) and continued access to capital markets was not a prerequisite for survival. Young companies and start-ups tended to be funded by venture capitalists, who priced these companies, rather than valued them. In the 1990s, with the dot com boom, we saw the change in the public listing paradigm, with many young companies listing themselves on public markets, based upon promise and potential, rather than profits or established business models. Even though the dot com bubble is a distant memory, that pattern of listing early has continued, and there are far more young companies listed in markets today. An investor who avoids these companies just because they do not fit old metrics or models is likely to find large segments of the market to be out of his or her reach.
The Consequence: If you are valuing a young company with growth potential, you will generally find yourself facing two realities. The first is that many young companies lose money, as they focus their attention on building businesses and acquiring clientele. The second is that growth requires reinvestment, in plant and equipment, if you are a manufacturing company, or in technology and R&D, if you are a technology company. As a consequence, in a discounted cash flow valuation, you can expect to see negative expected cash flows, at least for the first few years of your forecast period. To survive these years and make it to positive earnings and cash flows, the company will have to raise fresh capital, and given its lack of earnings, that capital will generally take the form of new equity, i.e., expected dilution, which, in turn, will affect value per share.
The Right Response: If you are doing a discounted cash flow valuation, the right response to the expected dilution is to do nothing. That may sound too good to be true, but it is true, and here is why. The aggregate value of equity that you compute today includes the present value of expected cash flows, including the negative cash flows in the up front years. The latter will reduce the present value (value of operating assets), and that reduction captures the dilution effect. You can divide the value of equity by the number of share outstanding today, and you will have already incorporated dilution.
I know that it sounds like a reach, but let me use my base case Tesla valuation to illustrate. In the table below, I have my expected cashflows for the next 10 years, with the terminal value in year 10.
Download Tesla Valuation and Dilution Spreadsheet The present value of the expected cash flows across all 10 years is $41,333 million, and netting out debt and adding back cash, yields an equity value of $33,124 million; the value per share is $189.23. However, this value includes the present value of expected cash flows from years 1 through 8, which are negative in my forecast,s and have a present value of $16,157 million. If these cash flows had not been considered, the value of the operating assets would have been $57,490 million and the value of equity would have been $48,282 million, a value per share of $284.41. In effect, we have applied a 33.46% discount to value, for future dilution.
Implicitly, I am assuming that the firm will fund 88.06% of its capital needs with debt, consistent with the debt ratio that I assumed in the DCF, and that the shares will be issued at the intrinsic value per share (estimated in the valuation), with that value per share increasing over time at the cost of equity. That may strike some as unrealistic, but it is the choice that is most consistent with an intrinsic valuation. If Tesla is able to issue shares at a higher price (than its intrinsic value), we will have over estimated the value per share, and if it has to issue shares at a price lower than its intrinsic value, we will have under estimated value. There is one final reality check. While we have implicitly assumed that Tesla will have access to capital markets and be able to raise capital, there is a chance that capital markets could shut down or become inaccessible to the firm. That risk is not in the discounted cash flow valuation and has to be brought in explicitly in the form of a chance of failure. In my base case valuation, it is one of the reasons that I attached a chance of failure (albeit a small one of 5%) to the company.
A Viable Alternative: There is an alternative approach, where you forecast the number of shares that will be issued in future years to cover the negative cashflows, and count them as shares outstanding today. If you use this approach, you should set the cash flows for the negative cash flow years to be zero. The peril in this approach is that there is a circularity that can cause your valuations to become unstable, since you will need to forecast a price per share in future years to get an estimate of value per share today. To illustrate this process, assume that you believe that the issuance price for Tesla for the new shares will be $200, with a price appreciation of 9% a year for the next 8 years. The table below computes the new shares that will need to be issued each year, assuming that 88.06% of capital comes from equity, and the dilution that will result as a consequence:
Download dilution spreadsheetNote that, with the assumptions about the issuance price of $200, Tesla will issue 69.35 million shares over the next eight years. Adding that to the current share count of 169.76 million shares yields total shares outstanding of 236.85 million shares. If you set the cash flows in years 1-8 to zero and compute the value of equity, you arrive at a value of equity of $48,282 million, which can be divided by the 239.11 million shares to arrive at a value per share of $201.92. This is slightly higher than the value that I obtained in the cash flow approach, but it is partly because I have assumed an issuance price that is higher than the intrinsic value.
But Never Do This: Reviewing the two approaches, you can either incorporate the present value of the negative cash flows into the value of operating assets today and use the current share count, in estimating value per share, or you can try to forecast expected future share issuances and divide the present value of only positive cash flows by the enhanced share count to get to value per share. You cannot do both, because you are then reducing value per share twice for the same phenomenon, once by discounting the negative cash flows and including them in value and then again by increasing the share count for the shares issued to cover those negative cash flows.
Share Based Compensation (SBC)The Cause: Over history, businesses have used equity to compensate employees, either to align incentives or because they lack the cash to pay competitive wages. That said, the use of share based compensation exploded in the 1990s due to two reasons. The first was an ill-conceived attempt by the US Congress to put a cap on management compensation, while not counting options granted as part of that compensation. Not surprisingly, many firms shifted to using options in compensation packages. The second was the dot com boom, where you had hundreds of young companies that had sky high valuations but no earnings or cash flows; these companies used options to attract and keep employees. Aiding and abetting these firm, in this process were the accountants, who chose not to treat these option grants as expensed at the time they were granted, and thus allowed companies to report much higher income than they were truly earning.
The Consequence: As companies shifted to share based compensation, there were two side effects that analysts had to deal with, when valuing them. The first was the drag on per-share value created by past option and share grants to employees, with options, in particular, creating trouble, since they could create dilution, if share prices went up, but could be worthless, if share prices dropped. The second was the question of how to factor in expected option and share grants in the future, since the value of these grants would be affected by expected future share prices. As with the dilution question, analysts faced a circular reasoning problem, where to value a share today, you had to make forecasts of the value per share in future years.
The Right Response: To deal with share based compensation correctly, you have to break it down into two parts:1. Past option and share grants: If you own shares in a company, the shares and options granted by the firm in prior years to employees represent claims on the equity, that reduces your value per share. The shares issued in the past are simple to deal with, since adding them to the share count will reduce the value per share today. The fact that employees have to vest (which requires staying with the firm for a specified time period) and that the shares have restrictions on trading can make them less valuable than unrestricted shares, but that is a relatively small problem. The options that have been granted in the past are a bigger challenge, since they represent potential dilution, but only if the share price rises above the exercise price. Option pricing models are designed to capture the probabilities of this happening and can be used to value options, no matter how in or out of the money the options are. In an intrinsic valuation, you should value these options first (using an option pricing model) and net the value out of the estimated value of equity, before dividing by the existing share count :SBC Adjusted Value per share = (DCF Value of Equity - Value of Employee Options)/ Share count today including restricted sharesNote that the shares that will be created if the options get exercised should not be included in share count, in this approach, since that would be double counting.2. Expected future grants: To the extent that a company is expected to continue to compensate its employees with options or restricted shares in future years, the most logical way to deal with these grants is to treat them as expenses in future years, and reduce expected income and cash flows. Rather than grapple with expected future share prices, you should estimate the expenses (associated with SBC) as a percent of revenues, and use that forecast as the basis for expenses in the future. Until Tesla uses stock based compensation, and its most recent annual and quarterly statements provide a measure of the magnitude.
Tesla 10K for 2017 and Tesla 10Q, First Quarter 2018The compensation can take the form of restricted stock or options, and the annual filing provides the cumulative effect of this share based activity. At the end of 2017, according to Tesla's 10K, the company had 10.88 million options outstanding, with a weighted average exercise price of $105.56 and a weighted average maturity of 5.30 years and 4.69 million restricted shares. The restricted shares are already included in the share count of 169.76 million shares, but the options need to be accounted for. We value the options, using a modified version of the Black-Scholes model, to arrive at a value of $2,927 million. Netting this value out of the value of equity that we obtained from the cash flows allows us to get to a corrected value per share:
Download Tesla valuationThe value per share, after adjusting for options, is $171.99. There is an elephant in the room in the form of a gigantic grant of 20.26 million shares to Elon Musk, with the issuance contingent on meeting operating milestones (revenues and adjusted EBITDA) and market milestones (market capitalization). The complexity of the vesting schedule on this grant makes it difficult to value using option pricing models, but the effect of this looming grant is to lower value per share today and here is why. If Tesla succeeds in growing revenues and turning to profitability, these option grants will vest, creating large expenses in the year in which that occurs and putting downward pressure on margins. In making my forecasts of future margins for Tesla, I have been more conservative at least in the early years, simply for this reason.
A Sloppy Alternative: There is an alternative approach to deal with options outstanding from past grants. They value options at their exercise value, i.e., the difference between the stock price and strike price today, and ignore out of the money options. This is called the treasury stock approach and the value of equity per share in this approach can be written as follows:Treasury Stock Value per share = (DCF value of equity + Exercise Price * # Options outstanding) / (Share Count today + Options Outstanding)By ignoring the time premium on options, this approach will over value shares today and by ignoring out of the money options, you exacerbate the problem. In the case of Tesla, using the exercise stock approach would yield the following value per share:Treasury Stock Value per share (Tesla) = ($32,124 + $105.56 * 10.88) / (169.76 + 10.88) = $184.19The analysts who use this approach often justify it by arguing that option pricing models can yield noisy estimates, but even the worst option pricing model will outperform one that assumes that options trade at exercise value.
And Nonsensical Practices: There are two woefully bad practices, when it comes to stock based compensation, that should be avoided. The first is to just adjust the share count for options outstanding and make no other changes. In this "fully diluted" approach, you are counting in the dilution that will arise from option exercise but ignoring the cash that will come into the firm from the exercise.
Fully Diluted Value per share = DCF value of equity / (Share Count today + Options Outstanding)With Tesla, for instance, this approach would yield the following:
Fully Diluted Value per share (Tesla) = $32,124/ (169.76 + 10.88) = $177.83This approach will yield too low a value per share, and especially so if you count out of the money options as well in the denominator. The second and even more indefensible practice is to add back share based compensation to earnings to get to adjusted earnings. The rationale that is offered for doing so is that share based compensation is a non-cash expense, a dangerous bending of logic, since it allows companies to use in-kind payments (shares, services) to evade the cash flow test. Using this logic, Tesla would add back the $141.6 million they had in share-based compensation expenses to their income in the first quarter of 2018 and report lower losses. Carried into future forecasts, this will inflate future earnings and cash flows, pushing up estimated value. Since these two bad practices push value away from fair value in different directions, the only logic for their continued use is that, in combination, the mistakes will magically offset each other. Good luck with that!
Shares with different rightsThe Cause: Founders and families who take their companies public have always wanted to have their cake and eat it too, and one way in which they have been able to do so is by creating different share classes, usually built around voting rights. The founder/family hold on to the higher voting right shares and thus maintain control of the company, while selling off large shares of equity to the public, and cashing out. In the United States, shares with different voting rights were rare for much of the last century, primarily because the New York Stock Exchange, which was the preferred listing place for companies, did not allow them. Again, the tech boom of the 1990s changed the game, by making the NASDAQ, which had no restrictions on shares with different voting rights, an alternative destination, especially for large technology companies. The floodgates on shares with different voting rights opened up with the Google listing in 2004, and the Google model, with shares with different voting rights, has become the default model for many of the tech companies that have gone public in the last decade.
The Consequence: When you have different classes of shares, with different voting rights, you have two effects on value. The first is a corporate governance effect, since changing management becomes much more difficult, and that can affect how you value and view badly managed firms. The second is a unit problem, since a voting right share and a non-voting right share represent different equity claims and cannot be treated as having the same value. Thus, you can no longer divide the aggregate value of equity by the total number of shares outstanding.
The Right Response: When valuing firms with different voting rights, you have to deal with it in two steps. When valuing the firm, you have to incorporate the fact that changing management is going to be more difficult to do in your estimates. Thus, if you firm borrows no money (even though it can lower its cost of capital by moving to an optimal or target debt ratio fo 40%), you should leave the debt ratio at zero rather than change it. This will lower the value that you estimate for the operating assets and equity in the firm. Once you have the value of equity, you will have to make a judgment on how much of a premium you would expect the voting shares to trade at, relative to non-voting shares, in one of two ways. In the first, you can look at studies of voting shares in publicly traded companies in the US and Europe, which find a premium of between 5-10% for voting shares, and use that premium as your base number. In the second, you can use an approach that uses intrinsic valuation models to estimate the premium, which I describe in my paper on valuing control. Once you have the estimate, you can use algebra to complete your estimate of value per share. Value per non-voting share = Aggregate Value of Equity/ (# Non-Voting Shares + (1+ Voting Share Premium) # Voting Shares)For example, if the value of equity is $210 million, there are 50 million non-voting shares and 50 million voting shares and the voting share premium is 10%, your value per non-voting share will be:Value per non-voting share = 210/ (50+ 1.1*50) = $2.00/shareValue per voting share = $2.00 (1.10) = $2.20/share
The Bottom LineI know that some of you will view this post as nit-picking, but you will be surprised at how much of an effect on value you can have by not being careful about share count. Those of you who use multiples (PE, EV/EBITDA) may be secretly happy that you don't have to deal with the issues of share count, since you don't do discounted cash flow valuations. Unfortunately, that is not true. Dilution, share based compensation and shares with different rights are just as much an issue when you compare multiples across companies, and ignoring them or using short cuts (like full dilution) will only skew your comparisons and lead to mis-pricing stocks. I would suggest four general rules:Aggregate versus Per-share numbers: Given how dilution and options can play havoc with share count, it is better to use aggregate than to use per share numbers, in valuation and in pricing. Thus, to obtain PE, divide the market capitalization of the company by its total net income, rather than price per share by earnings per share.When SBC is rampant, control for differences: If the use of restricted stockand options vary widely across sector, you need to control for those differences when comparing pricing in the sector. If you do not, companies that have large option overhangs will look cheap, relative to those that do not.Don't use SBC adjusted earnings: Adjusting earnings and EBITDA, by adding back stock based compensation, is an abomination, used by desperate companies and analysts to show you that they are making money, when they are not even close. Don't fall for the sleight of hand.With forward multiples, check on and control for dilution: Analysts, when valuing young companies, often divide today’s market capitalization or enterprise value by expected revenues or EBITDA in the future. The dilution that will be needed to get to future EBITDA has to be brought into the equation.YouTube Video
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Tesla Valuation (June 2018)Tesla Dilution Blog Posts on Tesla
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Share Count and Value Per ShareThere was a time, not so long ago, when getting from the value of equity for a company to value per share was a trivial exercise, involving dividing the aggregate value by the number of shares outstanding.Value per share = Aggregate Value of Equity/ Number of Shares outstandingThis computation can become problematic when you have one or more of the following phenomena:Expected Dilution: As young companies and start-ups get listed on public market places, investors are increasingly being called upon to value companies that will need to access capital markets in future years, to cover reinvestment and operating needs. To the extent that some or all of this new capital will come from new share issuances, the share count at these companies can be expected to climb over time. The question for analysts then becomes whether, and if yes, how, to adjust the value per share today for these additional shares.Share based compensation: When employees and managers are compensated with shares or options, there are three issues that affect valuation. The first is whether the expense associated with stock based compensation should be added back to arrive at cash flows, since it is a non-cash expense. The second is how to adjust the value per share today for the restricted shares and options that have already been granted to managers. Third, if a company is expected to continue with its policy of using stock based compensation, you have to decide how to adjust the value per share today for future grants of options or shares.Shares with different rights (voting and dividend): When companies issue shares with different voting rights or dividends, they are in effect creating shares that can have different per-share values. If a company has voting and non-voting shares, and you believe that voting shares have more value than non-voting shares, you cannot divide the aggregate value of equity by the number of shares outstanding to get to value per share.Note that while none of these developments are new, analysts in public markets dealt with them infrequently a few decades ago, and could, in fact, get away with using short cuts or ignoring them. Today, they have become more pervasive, and the old evasions no longer will stand you in good stead.
Expected DilutionThe Change: An investor or analyst dealing with publicly traded companies in the 1980s generally valued more mature companies, since going public was considered an option only for those companies that had reached a stage in their life cycle, where profits were positive (or close) and continued access to capital markets was not a prerequisite for survival. Young companies and start-ups tended to be funded by venture capitalists, who priced these companies, rather than valued them. In the 1990s, with the dot com boom, we saw the change in the public listing paradigm, with many young companies listing themselves on public markets, based upon promise and potential, rather than profits or established business models. Even though the dot com bubble is a distant memory, that pattern of listing early has continued, and there are far more young companies listed in markets today. An investor who avoids these companies just because they do not fit old metrics or models is likely to find large segments of the market to be out of his or her reach.
The Consequence: If you are valuing a young company with growth potential, you will generally find yourself facing two realities. The first is that many young companies lose money, as they focus their attention on building businesses and acquiring clientele. The second is that growth requires reinvestment, in plant and equipment, if you are a manufacturing company, or in technology and R&D, if you are a technology company. As a consequence, in a discounted cash flow valuation, you can expect to see negative expected cash flows, at least for the first few years of your forecast period. To survive these years and make it to positive earnings and cash flows, the company will have to raise fresh capital, and given its lack of earnings, that capital will generally take the form of new equity, i.e., expected dilution, which, in turn, will affect value per share.
The Right Response: If you are doing a discounted cash flow valuation, the right response to the expected dilution is to do nothing. That may sound too good to be true, but it is true, and here is why. The aggregate value of equity that you compute today includes the present value of expected cash flows, including the negative cash flows in the up front years. The latter will reduce the present value (value of operating assets), and that reduction captures the dilution effect. You can divide the value of equity by the number of share outstanding today, and you will have already incorporated dilution.
I know that it sounds like a reach, but let me use my base case Tesla valuation to illustrate. In the table below, I have my expected cashflows for the next 10 years, with the terminal value in year 10.
Download Tesla Valuation and Dilution Spreadsheet The present value of the expected cash flows across all 10 years is $41,333 million, and netting out debt and adding back cash, yields an equity value of $33,124 million; the value per share is $189.23. However, this value includes the present value of expected cash flows from years 1 through 8, which are negative in my forecast,s and have a present value of $16,157 million. If these cash flows had not been considered, the value of the operating assets would have been $57,490 million and the value of equity would have been $48,282 million, a value per share of $284.41. In effect, we have applied a 33.46% discount to value, for future dilution. Implicitly, I am assuming that the firm will fund 88.06% of its capital needs with debt, consistent with the debt ratio that I assumed in the DCF, and that the shares will be issued at the intrinsic value per share (estimated in the valuation), with that value per share increasing over time at the cost of equity. That may strike some as unrealistic, but it is the choice that is most consistent with an intrinsic valuation. If Tesla is able to issue shares at a higher price (than its intrinsic value), we will have over estimated the value per share, and if it has to issue shares at a price lower than its intrinsic value, we will have under estimated value. There is one final reality check. While we have implicitly assumed that Tesla will have access to capital markets and be able to raise capital, there is a chance that capital markets could shut down or become inaccessible to the firm. That risk is not in the discounted cash flow valuation and has to be brought in explicitly in the form of a chance of failure. In my base case valuation, it is one of the reasons that I attached a chance of failure (albeit a small one of 5%) to the company.
A Viable Alternative: There is an alternative approach, where you forecast the number of shares that will be issued in future years to cover the negative cashflows, and count them as shares outstanding today. If you use this approach, you should set the cash flows for the negative cash flow years to be zero. The peril in this approach is that there is a circularity that can cause your valuations to become unstable, since you will need to forecast a price per share in future years to get an estimate of value per share today. To illustrate this process, assume that you believe that the issuance price for Tesla for the new shares will be $200, with a price appreciation of 9% a year for the next 8 years. The table below computes the new shares that will need to be issued each year, assuming that 88.06% of capital comes from equity, and the dilution that will result as a consequence:
Download dilution spreadsheetNote that, with the assumptions about the issuance price of $200, Tesla will issue 69.35 million shares over the next eight years. Adding that to the current share count of 169.76 million shares yields total shares outstanding of 236.85 million shares. If you set the cash flows in years 1-8 to zero and compute the value of equity, you arrive at a value of equity of $48,282 million, which can be divided by the 239.11 million shares to arrive at a value per share of $201.92. This is slightly higher than the value that I obtained in the cash flow approach, but it is partly because I have assumed an issuance price that is higher than the intrinsic value.But Never Do This: Reviewing the two approaches, you can either incorporate the present value of the negative cash flows into the value of operating assets today and use the current share count, in estimating value per share, or you can try to forecast expected future share issuances and divide the present value of only positive cash flows by the enhanced share count to get to value per share. You cannot do both, because you are then reducing value per share twice for the same phenomenon, once by discounting the negative cash flows and including them in value and then again by increasing the share count for the shares issued to cover those negative cash flows.
Share Based Compensation (SBC)The Cause: Over history, businesses have used equity to compensate employees, either to align incentives or because they lack the cash to pay competitive wages. That said, the use of share based compensation exploded in the 1990s due to two reasons. The first was an ill-conceived attempt by the US Congress to put a cap on management compensation, while not counting options granted as part of that compensation. Not surprisingly, many firms shifted to using options in compensation packages. The second was the dot com boom, where you had hundreds of young companies that had sky high valuations but no earnings or cash flows; these companies used options to attract and keep employees. Aiding and abetting these firm, in this process were the accountants, who chose not to treat these option grants as expensed at the time they were granted, and thus allowed companies to report much higher income than they were truly earning.
The Consequence: As companies shifted to share based compensation, there were two side effects that analysts had to deal with, when valuing them. The first was the drag on per-share value created by past option and share grants to employees, with options, in particular, creating trouble, since they could create dilution, if share prices went up, but could be worthless, if share prices dropped. The second was the question of how to factor in expected option and share grants in the future, since the value of these grants would be affected by expected future share prices. As with the dilution question, analysts faced a circular reasoning problem, where to value a share today, you had to make forecasts of the value per share in future years.
The Right Response: To deal with share based compensation correctly, you have to break it down into two parts:1. Past option and share grants: If you own shares in a company, the shares and options granted by the firm in prior years to employees represent claims on the equity, that reduces your value per share. The shares issued in the past are simple to deal with, since adding them to the share count will reduce the value per share today. The fact that employees have to vest (which requires staying with the firm for a specified time period) and that the shares have restrictions on trading can make them less valuable than unrestricted shares, but that is a relatively small problem. The options that have been granted in the past are a bigger challenge, since they represent potential dilution, but only if the share price rises above the exercise price. Option pricing models are designed to capture the probabilities of this happening and can be used to value options, no matter how in or out of the money the options are. In an intrinsic valuation, you should value these options first (using an option pricing model) and net the value out of the estimated value of equity, before dividing by the existing share count :SBC Adjusted Value per share = (DCF Value of Equity - Value of Employee Options)/ Share count today including restricted sharesNote that the shares that will be created if the options get exercised should not be included in share count, in this approach, since that would be double counting.2. Expected future grants: To the extent that a company is expected to continue to compensate its employees with options or restricted shares in future years, the most logical way to deal with these grants is to treat them as expenses in future years, and reduce expected income and cash flows. Rather than grapple with expected future share prices, you should estimate the expenses (associated with SBC) as a percent of revenues, and use that forecast as the basis for expenses in the future. Until Tesla uses stock based compensation, and its most recent annual and quarterly statements provide a measure of the magnitude.
Tesla 10K for 2017 and Tesla 10Q, First Quarter 2018The compensation can take the form of restricted stock or options, and the annual filing provides the cumulative effect of this share based activity. At the end of 2017, according to Tesla's 10K, the company had 10.88 million options outstanding, with a weighted average exercise price of $105.56 and a weighted average maturity of 5.30 years and 4.69 million restricted shares. The restricted shares are already included in the share count of 169.76 million shares, but the options need to be accounted for. We value the options, using a modified version of the Black-Scholes model, to arrive at a value of $2,927 million. Netting this value out of the value of equity that we obtained from the cash flows allows us to get to a corrected value per share:
Download Tesla valuationThe value per share, after adjusting for options, is $171.99. There is an elephant in the room in the form of a gigantic grant of 20.26 million shares to Elon Musk, with the issuance contingent on meeting operating milestones (revenues and adjusted EBITDA) and market milestones (market capitalization). The complexity of the vesting schedule on this grant makes it difficult to value using option pricing models, but the effect of this looming grant is to lower value per share today and here is why. If Tesla succeeds in growing revenues and turning to profitability, these option grants will vest, creating large expenses in the year in which that occurs and putting downward pressure on margins. In making my forecasts of future margins for Tesla, I have been more conservative at least in the early years, simply for this reason.A Sloppy Alternative: There is an alternative approach to deal with options outstanding from past grants. They value options at their exercise value, i.e., the difference between the stock price and strike price today, and ignore out of the money options. This is called the treasury stock approach and the value of equity per share in this approach can be written as follows:Treasury Stock Value per share = (DCF value of equity + Exercise Price * # Options outstanding) / (Share Count today + Options Outstanding)By ignoring the time premium on options, this approach will over value shares today and by ignoring out of the money options, you exacerbate the problem. In the case of Tesla, using the exercise stock approach would yield the following value per share:Treasury Stock Value per share (Tesla) = ($32,124 + $105.56 * 10.88) / (169.76 + 10.88) = $184.19The analysts who use this approach often justify it by arguing that option pricing models can yield noisy estimates, but even the worst option pricing model will outperform one that assumes that options trade at exercise value.
And Nonsensical Practices: There are two woefully bad practices, when it comes to stock based compensation, that should be avoided. The first is to just adjust the share count for options outstanding and make no other changes. In this "fully diluted" approach, you are counting in the dilution that will arise from option exercise but ignoring the cash that will come into the firm from the exercise.
Fully Diluted Value per share = DCF value of equity / (Share Count today + Options Outstanding)With Tesla, for instance, this approach would yield the following:
Fully Diluted Value per share (Tesla) = $32,124/ (169.76 + 10.88) = $177.83This approach will yield too low a value per share, and especially so if you count out of the money options as well in the denominator. The second and even more indefensible practice is to add back share based compensation to earnings to get to adjusted earnings. The rationale that is offered for doing so is that share based compensation is a non-cash expense, a dangerous bending of logic, since it allows companies to use in-kind payments (shares, services) to evade the cash flow test. Using this logic, Tesla would add back the $141.6 million they had in share-based compensation expenses to their income in the first quarter of 2018 and report lower losses. Carried into future forecasts, this will inflate future earnings and cash flows, pushing up estimated value. Since these two bad practices push value away from fair value in different directions, the only logic for their continued use is that, in combination, the mistakes will magically offset each other. Good luck with that!
Shares with different rightsThe Cause: Founders and families who take their companies public have always wanted to have their cake and eat it too, and one way in which they have been able to do so is by creating different share classes, usually built around voting rights. The founder/family hold on to the higher voting right shares and thus maintain control of the company, while selling off large shares of equity to the public, and cashing out. In the United States, shares with different voting rights were rare for much of the last century, primarily because the New York Stock Exchange, which was the preferred listing place for companies, did not allow them. Again, the tech boom of the 1990s changed the game, by making the NASDAQ, which had no restrictions on shares with different voting rights, an alternative destination, especially for large technology companies. The floodgates on shares with different voting rights opened up with the Google listing in 2004, and the Google model, with shares with different voting rights, has become the default model for many of the tech companies that have gone public in the last decade.
The Consequence: When you have different classes of shares, with different voting rights, you have two effects on value. The first is a corporate governance effect, since changing management becomes much more difficult, and that can affect how you value and view badly managed firms. The second is a unit problem, since a voting right share and a non-voting right share represent different equity claims and cannot be treated as having the same value. Thus, you can no longer divide the aggregate value of equity by the total number of shares outstanding.
The Right Response: When valuing firms with different voting rights, you have to deal with it in two steps. When valuing the firm, you have to incorporate the fact that changing management is going to be more difficult to do in your estimates. Thus, if you firm borrows no money (even though it can lower its cost of capital by moving to an optimal or target debt ratio fo 40%), you should leave the debt ratio at zero rather than change it. This will lower the value that you estimate for the operating assets and equity in the firm. Once you have the value of equity, you will have to make a judgment on how much of a premium you would expect the voting shares to trade at, relative to non-voting shares, in one of two ways. In the first, you can look at studies of voting shares in publicly traded companies in the US and Europe, which find a premium of between 5-10% for voting shares, and use that premium as your base number. In the second, you can use an approach that uses intrinsic valuation models to estimate the premium, which I describe in my paper on valuing control. Once you have the estimate, you can use algebra to complete your estimate of value per share. Value per non-voting share = Aggregate Value of Equity/ (# Non-Voting Shares + (1+ Voting Share Premium) # Voting Shares)For example, if the value of equity is $210 million, there are 50 million non-voting shares and 50 million voting shares and the voting share premium is 10%, your value per non-voting share will be:Value per non-voting share = 210/ (50+ 1.1*50) = $2.00/shareValue per voting share = $2.00 (1.10) = $2.20/share
The Bottom LineI know that some of you will view this post as nit-picking, but you will be surprised at how much of an effect on value you can have by not being careful about share count. Those of you who use multiples (PE, EV/EBITDA) may be secretly happy that you don't have to deal with the issues of share count, since you don't do discounted cash flow valuations. Unfortunately, that is not true. Dilution, share based compensation and shares with different rights are just as much an issue when you compare multiples across companies, and ignoring them or using short cuts (like full dilution) will only skew your comparisons and lead to mis-pricing stocks. I would suggest four general rules:Aggregate versus Per-share numbers: Given how dilution and options can play havoc with share count, it is better to use aggregate than to use per share numbers, in valuation and in pricing. Thus, to obtain PE, divide the market capitalization of the company by its total net income, rather than price per share by earnings per share.When SBC is rampant, control for differences: If the use of restricted stockand options vary widely across sector, you need to control for those differences when comparing pricing in the sector. If you do not, companies that have large option overhangs will look cheap, relative to those that do not.Don't use SBC adjusted earnings: Adjusting earnings and EBITDA, by adding back stock based compensation, is an abomination, used by desperate companies and analysts to show you that they are making money, when they are not even close. Don't fall for the sleight of hand.With forward multiples, check on and control for dilution: Analysts, when valuing young companies, often divide today’s market capitalization or enterprise value by expected revenues or EBITDA in the future. The dilution that will be needed to get to future EBITDA has to be brought into the equation.YouTube Video
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A Tesla 2017 Update: A Disruptive Force and a Debt PuzzleTwists and Turns in the Tesla Story: A Boring, Boneheaded Update!
June 28, 2018
Twists and Turns in the Tesla Story : A Boring, Boneheaded Update!
There are lots of complaints that you can have about Tesla, but being boring is not one of them. It helps to have a CEO who seems to find new ways to make himself newsworthy, in good and bad ways. In fact, if Tesla were a reality show, the twists and turns in its fate would give it sky-high ratings and put the Kardashians to shame. Consequently, it should comes as no surprise that there is no other company where investors disagree more about the future than Tesla, with bulls finding new reasons for pushing it price up and short sellers picking the stock as their favorite, albeit elusive, target.
Tracing my Tesla Past
I am often tabbed as a Tesla bear, and while I have never found it to be an attractive investment, I have admired the company, and by extension, Elon Musk, for shaking up the auto business. In my first valuation of Tesla in September 2013, I valued it as a luxury car company that would require large cash infusions to get to steady state. Factoring in the resulting negative cash flows and failure risk, the value per share that I obtained was well below the market price then. In the years since, I have revisited the company many times, and what I have learned about the stock has led me to to call it the ultimate story stock, which is how I described it in a post in 2016, explaining both its price volatility and its capacity to weather bad news. I also argued in that post that investors in Tesla were investing in Elon Musk, not the company, with the company reflecting his strengths, a surplus of vision and out-of-the-box thinking, and his weaknesses, which include an unwillingness to pay attention to operating details and financial first principles in running the company.
While Tesla's consistent failure to deliver on production targets over its lifetime is well documented, its failure to heed financial first principles may be even more damaging to it in the long term, as evidenced in at least two major decisions that the company has made in the last two years.1. The acquisition of Solar City: In acquiring Solar City, a company where Musk was a lead stockholder and his cousin was CEO, Tesla had to not only overcome the perception of conflicts of interest, but it acquired a company with negative cash flows in a rapidly commoditizing business, not a great fit for a company that had its own cash flow problems.2. The turn to debt: Tesla's decision to borrow more than $5 billion in September 2017 to fund its capital needs, was almost incomprehensible, given Tesla's standing at the time. As I noted in a post at that time, there was no good reason that could be offered for that borrowing, since none of the usual arguments for debt applied.Tesla gets no tax benefits from debt: When a company is losing money, as Tesla was in 2017, there are no tax benefits to borrowing money, and to the argument that they might make money in the future, the response is that it then best to wait until then to borrow money. Borrowing money in anticipation of future profits is not just stupid, but it is dangerous.Tesla has easy access to equity capital: It is true that Tesla needed capital to build up its production capacity, especially given its promise to deliver hundreds of thousands of Tesla 3s in 2018, but it is also true that the best way to raise this capital for a company with negative earnings and cash flows and significant growth potential is to use equity, not debt. To the counter that this will cause dilution, it is better to have a diluted share in a much valuable company than a concentrated share of a defaulted entity.Musk's control of Tesla is absolute: There is the possibility that the debt issue was motivated by Elon Musk's desire to keep control of Tesla, but given his exalted status with shareholders and a rubber stamp board of directors, I see very little threat to his absolute control from issuing more shares in the company.In sum, the Solar City acquisition was ill-advised in 2016, and there were no good reasons for the Tesla debt issue in September 2017, suggesting either that the company does not have a functioning CFO in Deepak Ahuja or that Elon Musk is taking on that role as well.
Tesla: News and Data UpdatesAs I said at the start of this post, the Tesla story is never a dull one and the last few months has brought that lesson home. Not only have their been multiple news stories about the company, but Elon Musk has outdone himself as a newsmaker:Financial filings: There have been three quarterly filings since my last valuation of Tesla and the company has only made the hole it is in, as a result of its operating losses, worse by adding debt to the mix. The chart below captures the trend lines in revenues, operating income and net income for the company on a quarter-by-quarter basis:
Looking at the last three quarterly reports delivered since my last valuation of Tesla, there is little that would lead me to radically reassess what I think about the company. The good news is that revenues continue to grow but the bad news is that losses are growing proportionately, since there is no improvement in margins. Backing up the point made in the last section about the debt issue, Tesla's borrowing has made the hole that the company is in much deeper.Earnings Call: Earnings calls are normally staid affairs, where top managers stick to the script and analysts dance with them, asking questions about operations and seeking guidance on future growth. The Tesla earnings call after the most recent earnings report certainly did not fit this script, since Elon Musk, a few minutes into the call, blew up at at Toni Sacconaghi, a Sanford Bernstein analyst, calling his question about future capital needs "boring and boneheaded". He then proceeded to stop taking questions from analysts entirely and answered only questions posed by investors gathered by a recent YouTube start-up. While the market reaction to the bizarre earnings call was negative, with the stock dropping 5.5%, the stock, as it has so many times before, recovered in the weeks after and climbed to close to all-time highs.
Other News: In the weeks after the earnings call, Musk has added to the news stories with more announcements, many of them taking the form of tweets. First, he announced that given Tesla's financial constraints, the company would focus. at least for the next few months, on turning out the higher priced version of the Tesla 3, priced at $75,000 rather than the $35,000 base price that he had announced as part of the original rollout. His reasons for doing so, i.e., that shipping the lower cost model would cause Tesla to "lose money and die" suggest that the lower priced version may not be viable in the long term. Second, he also announced that Tesla would lay off 9% of its employees, mostly from the Solar City portion of the company, explaining that the company needed to move towards sustained profitability. The need to become "profitable" is one of two constraints that Musk has added to the company's objective, with the other being that the company will be "cash flow positive" by the third quarter. In fact, Musk has been categorical that Tesla will not need to raise capital to cover its investment needs in the near future, in response to stories in the press that Tesla would need to raise between billions to cover its growth plans. In fact, much of Tesla's focus seems to be on delivering one part of a long-standing promise, which is manufacturing 5000 cars from its assembly lines each week, a meager number for most auto makers but driving decision making at Tesla. It is in pursuit of this goal that Tesla has augmented its Fremont plant with additional tented assembly lines, Musk has been "sleeping on the factory floor" and at least partly pulled back on its plan to replace workers with robots.
Tesla's Value DriversNo matter what your story is for Tesla, the value of Tesla is determined by four big drivers and to help in construction your story, it is worth looking at background:Revenue Growth: In the trailing twelve months, ending March 2018, Tesla had revenues of about $12.5 billion and to justify the market capitalization at which the company trades at currently, these revenues have to grow significantly. To get perspective on how large revenues can become, I looked at the twenty largest auto companies in the world, ranked based upon trailing revenues:
Note that most of the companies on this list are mass market auto companies, with Daimler (arguably) and BMW being the only exceptions. Put differently, the question of whether Tesla will be able to deliver on a $35,000 Tesla 3, now or in the future, becomes central to estimating revenue growth.Operating Margin: No matter how you slice it, Tesla is losing money, and it happens to operate in a sector where profit margins have been under pressure for a while, driven partly by competition and partly by changes in the business itself. In the chart below, I have a distribution of operating margins for global auto companies in June 2018:
Global Auto DataNote that the median pre-tax operating margin for auto companies is only 4.81%, with double digit operating margins putting you at the 80th percentile of all auto companies. It is also worth noting that among the ten largest auto companies, there is not a single one that generates an operating margin higher than 10%; BMW has the highest margin, at 9.89%.Reinvestment: Scaling up revenues will require significant reinvestment, especially in the auto business. One simple measure of this reinvestment is the sales to invested capital ratio, measuring how much revenue a dollar in invested capital generates. Looking at this measure across the global auto business, here is what I see:
Note that the global auto business is capital intensive, with a dollar in capital invested generating only $1.29 in revenue at the median firm, and that Tesla, over its history, has been even more capital intensive, generating less revenue per dollar invested than the typical auto firm, with capital intensity increasing after the Solar City acquisition. Tesla's counter to this has been that by bringing in technology into assembly lines, they will become more efficient than other auto companies, but that argument has lost some of its luster after the last few months, with Musk openly admitting that the robots that Tesla had hoped to put on the factory floor were not doing their jobs. Risk: There are two dimensions through which risk affects Tesla's value. The first is the cost of capital, which reflects the operating risk at the company. As an auto company, Tesla is exposed to economic cycles and its cost of capital will reflect that risk:
Global Auto DataThe second is the risk of failure and distress, and while being a small, money-losing company is one reason for exposure, Tesla has magnified its risk by borrowing billions of dollars. Possible, Plausible and Probable Tesla StoriesI have long argued that every valuation tells a story and that one way to check your valuation is to check to pass your story through the 3P test: Is it possible? Is it plausible? Is it probable? If this sounds like a play on words, note that each test sets a higher standard than the previous one. There are lots of possible stories, a subset of plausible stories and an even smaller set of probable stories.
Tesla is a stock where there are widely divergent stories, with bullish investors telling big stories with happy endings, that deliver large values for the company, and bearish investors pushing much smaller stories, some with bad endings. In this section, I will start by offering some solace for Tesla bulls by looking at a plausible story that delivers a value greater than the current stock price, then argue that Elon Musk's story for the company, or at least the version that he is telling right now, is an impossible story and close with my (still upbeat) story for the stock and resulting value.
Getting to $400/share: A Plausible Story?Is it plausible that Tesla, notwithstanding all of the troubles weighing it down, is under valued, at its current stock price of $340/share? Yes, but only it can put together the following results:Increase revenues ten-fold over the next decade: Tesla's current revenues of $12.5 billion will have to increase to $120 billion or more in the next ten years, giving it revenues close to those of BMW today. Assuming an average car price of $60,000, that would translate into 2 million cars sold in year 10, illustrating why the focus on whether Tesla can hit its target of 5,000 cars a week is missing the big picture.Improve operating margins to match the most profitable auto companies: While Tesla scales up its revenues, it will not only have to become profitable (a minimal requirement) but much more so than the typical auto company. In fact, its pre-tax operating margin will climb to 12%, well above the median auto margin of 4.81% or BMW's 9.89%, powered by brand name and pricing power.Invest more efficiently than the sector: To accomplish its objectives of increasing revenues and ramping up profitability, Tesla will have to reinvest and reinvest efficiently, delivering about $2.25 in revenues for every dollar of capital invested, much higher than than the typical auto firm. To provide perspective, Tesla in year 10 will have to deliver BMW-like revenues ($120 billion) with about a third of BMW's invested capital; with the estimated sales to capital ratio, Tesla's invested capital in year 10 will be $64 billion, whereas BMW's invested capital in 2018 was $185 billion).Navigate its way through debt to safety: Finally, as it moves towards becoming a much larger, more profitable firm, Tesla will also have to meet its commitments on current debt and not add to the mix, at least for the near term. In terms of operating risk, Tesla will have to face a cost of capital of 8.29%, in line with the typical auto firm.
Download spreadsheetWith these assumptions in place, the value that I get per share is $412, but as you can see from the assumptions, it would be the equivalent of a Royal Flush in poker. Note also that in this optimistic story, Tesla will have to have to raise $14 billion in fresh capital over the next few years and will not become operating cash flow positive until 2025. I am sure that there are people who will be unfazed by this story, especially if they are true believers in Elon Musk, but I am not one of them.
The Musk Story for Tesla: A Fairy Tale?With a story stock, it is imperative that you have a CEO who not only is able to get the market to buy into a big story, but one who stays focused and disciplined. To me, there is no better example of how to do this well than Amazon, where Jeff Bezos has been consistent in telling the same story for the company, since its inception in 1997, and delivering on that story. Elon Musk is a gifted story teller, but as the last few months have shown, focus and discipline are not his strong points.
If you are a Tesla investor, your primary concern should be that Musk, with his numerous and often conflicting claims about the company, has muddled the Tesla story and perhaps put the company at risk. If Musk is to be believed, and the company will turn the corner on profitability soon and will not need to go back to capital markets in the near future, while also scaling up production and revenues. While that would be wonderful, from a value perspective, it is fantasy. Put bluntly, there is no chance that Tesla can deliver what it needs to, in terms of scaling up revenues and improving profitability, to justify its market capitalization, without raising new equity along the way. Either Musk knows this, and really does not mean what he says, in which case he is being deceptive, or he does not, in which case he is delusional. Neither is a good character quality in a CEO, especially one at a young company that needs investors on its side.
The fact that Tesla's stock price has remained at elevated levels, and even risen, may lead some to conclude that Musk's behavior has no consequences, but I believe it not only will, but it already has hurt the company. For instance, I think that Tesla has got a bum's rap for some of the accidents that its cars have been in, either from malfunctioning auto-pilots or combustible cars. However, Tesla's hand is weakened by Elon Musk not only acting as the spokesperson for the company but by his responses, which are a mix of arrogance and victimhood (blaming the media, short sellers and analysts) that sap whatever sympathy bystanders may have for the company.
My Tesla Story in June 2018My story for Tesla is still an optimistic one, but it is much less so than the Royal Flush story that delivered a value in excess of $400. I do think that Tesla will be able to grow revenues substantially over the next decade and improve margins to rank among the more profitable auto companies. I also think that Elon Musk will back track on his promise of not having to raise fresh capital and that Tesla will invest billions into new plant and equipment, and do so more efficiently than other auto companies, partly because it is not saddled with legacy investments. On the risk front, I am comfortable with assuming that operating risk will stabilize over time, but I do think that the debt burden will pose a danger to survival, at least for the next year or two. Pulling these assumptions together, I revalued the firm at about $186/share.
Download spreadsheetIn this story, Tesla's capital needs will be even higher than under the Royal Flush story, with negative cash flows for the next eight years, and $22 billion in new capital over that period. That may strike some as pessimistic, but notwithstanding all the talk about robots and technology, this remains a capital intensive business. It is entirely possible that over the next few weeks, Tesla might be able to get its production up to 5000 cars a week, using tents and spare parts, but that is not a long term solution. There is no tent big enough to produce 30,000 cars a week, which would be Tesla's target in my story, in year 10.
Bottom LineThere is no denying the fact that Elon Musk has been central to the Tesla story and that his vision and charisma have been largely responsible for pushing the stock price to its current levels. That said, we are at a point in Tesla's history where I think that the question can be raised as to whether the negatives that Musk brings to the job are starting to catch up with, and perhaps overwhelm the positives. Picking fights with equity research analysts and short sellers may get the blood flowing for Tesla bulls, but they are distractions from what Tesla has to do right now. Promising the market that the company will turn the corner on profitability and be cash flow positive soon may signal Musk's faith in his own story, but they do more harm than good for the company's long term value. I know that it is inconceivable for many investors to think of Tesla without Elon Musk at its helm, but this is a company in clear need of checks and balances, either from a strong management team or a powerful board of directors. Unfortunately, neither exists at the company now, and if you are bullish on Tesla, that should scare you.
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Keystone Kop Valuations: Lazard, Evercore and the TSLA/SCTY dealTesla: It's a story stock, but what's the story?A Tesla 2017 Update: A Disruptive Force and a Debt Puzzle
Tracing my Tesla Past
I am often tabbed as a Tesla bear, and while I have never found it to be an attractive investment, I have admired the company, and by extension, Elon Musk, for shaking up the auto business. In my first valuation of Tesla in September 2013, I valued it as a luxury car company that would require large cash infusions to get to steady state. Factoring in the resulting negative cash flows and failure risk, the value per share that I obtained was well below the market price then. In the years since, I have revisited the company many times, and what I have learned about the stock has led me to to call it the ultimate story stock, which is how I described it in a post in 2016, explaining both its price volatility and its capacity to weather bad news. I also argued in that post that investors in Tesla were investing in Elon Musk, not the company, with the company reflecting his strengths, a surplus of vision and out-of-the-box thinking, and his weaknesses, which include an unwillingness to pay attention to operating details and financial first principles in running the company.
While Tesla's consistent failure to deliver on production targets over its lifetime is well documented, its failure to heed financial first principles may be even more damaging to it in the long term, as evidenced in at least two major decisions that the company has made in the last two years.1. The acquisition of Solar City: In acquiring Solar City, a company where Musk was a lead stockholder and his cousin was CEO, Tesla had to not only overcome the perception of conflicts of interest, but it acquired a company with negative cash flows in a rapidly commoditizing business, not a great fit for a company that had its own cash flow problems.2. The turn to debt: Tesla's decision to borrow more than $5 billion in September 2017 to fund its capital needs, was almost incomprehensible, given Tesla's standing at the time. As I noted in a post at that time, there was no good reason that could be offered for that borrowing, since none of the usual arguments for debt applied.Tesla gets no tax benefits from debt: When a company is losing money, as Tesla was in 2017, there are no tax benefits to borrowing money, and to the argument that they might make money in the future, the response is that it then best to wait until then to borrow money. Borrowing money in anticipation of future profits is not just stupid, but it is dangerous.Tesla has easy access to equity capital: It is true that Tesla needed capital to build up its production capacity, especially given its promise to deliver hundreds of thousands of Tesla 3s in 2018, but it is also true that the best way to raise this capital for a company with negative earnings and cash flows and significant growth potential is to use equity, not debt. To the counter that this will cause dilution, it is better to have a diluted share in a much valuable company than a concentrated share of a defaulted entity.Musk's control of Tesla is absolute: There is the possibility that the debt issue was motivated by Elon Musk's desire to keep control of Tesla, but given his exalted status with shareholders and a rubber stamp board of directors, I see very little threat to his absolute control from issuing more shares in the company.In sum, the Solar City acquisition was ill-advised in 2016, and there were no good reasons for the Tesla debt issue in September 2017, suggesting either that the company does not have a functioning CFO in Deepak Ahuja or that Elon Musk is taking on that role as well.
Tesla: News and Data UpdatesAs I said at the start of this post, the Tesla story is never a dull one and the last few months has brought that lesson home. Not only have their been multiple news stories about the company, but Elon Musk has outdone himself as a newsmaker:Financial filings: There have been three quarterly filings since my last valuation of Tesla and the company has only made the hole it is in, as a result of its operating losses, worse by adding debt to the mix. The chart below captures the trend lines in revenues, operating income and net income for the company on a quarter-by-quarter basis:
Looking at the last three quarterly reports delivered since my last valuation of Tesla, there is little that would lead me to radically reassess what I think about the company. The good news is that revenues continue to grow but the bad news is that losses are growing proportionately, since there is no improvement in margins. Backing up the point made in the last section about the debt issue, Tesla's borrowing has made the hole that the company is in much deeper.Earnings Call: Earnings calls are normally staid affairs, where top managers stick to the script and analysts dance with them, asking questions about operations and seeking guidance on future growth. The Tesla earnings call after the most recent earnings report certainly did not fit this script, since Elon Musk, a few minutes into the call, blew up at at Toni Sacconaghi, a Sanford Bernstein analyst, calling his question about future capital needs "boring and boneheaded". He then proceeded to stop taking questions from analysts entirely and answered only questions posed by investors gathered by a recent YouTube start-up. While the market reaction to the bizarre earnings call was negative, with the stock dropping 5.5%, the stock, as it has so many times before, recovered in the weeks after and climbed to close to all-time highs.
Other News: In the weeks after the earnings call, Musk has added to the news stories with more announcements, many of them taking the form of tweets. First, he announced that given Tesla's financial constraints, the company would focus. at least for the next few months, on turning out the higher priced version of the Tesla 3, priced at $75,000 rather than the $35,000 base price that he had announced as part of the original rollout. His reasons for doing so, i.e., that shipping the lower cost model would cause Tesla to "lose money and die" suggest that the lower priced version may not be viable in the long term. Second, he also announced that Tesla would lay off 9% of its employees, mostly from the Solar City portion of the company, explaining that the company needed to move towards sustained profitability. The need to become "profitable" is one of two constraints that Musk has added to the company's objective, with the other being that the company will be "cash flow positive" by the third quarter. In fact, Musk has been categorical that Tesla will not need to raise capital to cover its investment needs in the near future, in response to stories in the press that Tesla would need to raise between billions to cover its growth plans. In fact, much of Tesla's focus seems to be on delivering one part of a long-standing promise, which is manufacturing 5000 cars from its assembly lines each week, a meager number for most auto makers but driving decision making at Tesla. It is in pursuit of this goal that Tesla has augmented its Fremont plant with additional tented assembly lines, Musk has been "sleeping on the factory floor" and at least partly pulled back on its plan to replace workers with robots.Tesla's Value DriversNo matter what your story is for Tesla, the value of Tesla is determined by four big drivers and to help in construction your story, it is worth looking at background:Revenue Growth: In the trailing twelve months, ending March 2018, Tesla had revenues of about $12.5 billion and to justify the market capitalization at which the company trades at currently, these revenues have to grow significantly. To get perspective on how large revenues can become, I looked at the twenty largest auto companies in the world, ranked based upon trailing revenues:
Note that most of the companies on this list are mass market auto companies, with Daimler (arguably) and BMW being the only exceptions. Put differently, the question of whether Tesla will be able to deliver on a $35,000 Tesla 3, now or in the future, becomes central to estimating revenue growth.Operating Margin: No matter how you slice it, Tesla is losing money, and it happens to operate in a sector where profit margins have been under pressure for a while, driven partly by competition and partly by changes in the business itself. In the chart below, I have a distribution of operating margins for global auto companies in June 2018:
Global Auto DataNote that the median pre-tax operating margin for auto companies is only 4.81%, with double digit operating margins putting you at the 80th percentile of all auto companies. It is also worth noting that among the ten largest auto companies, there is not a single one that generates an operating margin higher than 10%; BMW has the highest margin, at 9.89%.Reinvestment: Scaling up revenues will require significant reinvestment, especially in the auto business. One simple measure of this reinvestment is the sales to invested capital ratio, measuring how much revenue a dollar in invested capital generates. Looking at this measure across the global auto business, here is what I see:
Note that the global auto business is capital intensive, with a dollar in capital invested generating only $1.29 in revenue at the median firm, and that Tesla, over its history, has been even more capital intensive, generating less revenue per dollar invested than the typical auto firm, with capital intensity increasing after the Solar City acquisition. Tesla's counter to this has been that by bringing in technology into assembly lines, they will become more efficient than other auto companies, but that argument has lost some of its luster after the last few months, with Musk openly admitting that the robots that Tesla had hoped to put on the factory floor were not doing their jobs. Risk: There are two dimensions through which risk affects Tesla's value. The first is the cost of capital, which reflects the operating risk at the company. As an auto company, Tesla is exposed to economic cycles and its cost of capital will reflect that risk:
Global Auto DataThe second is the risk of failure and distress, and while being a small, money-losing company is one reason for exposure, Tesla has magnified its risk by borrowing billions of dollars. Possible, Plausible and Probable Tesla StoriesI have long argued that every valuation tells a story and that one way to check your valuation is to check to pass your story through the 3P test: Is it possible? Is it plausible? Is it probable? If this sounds like a play on words, note that each test sets a higher standard than the previous one. There are lots of possible stories, a subset of plausible stories and an even smaller set of probable stories.
Tesla is a stock where there are widely divergent stories, with bullish investors telling big stories with happy endings, that deliver large values for the company, and bearish investors pushing much smaller stories, some with bad endings. In this section, I will start by offering some solace for Tesla bulls by looking at a plausible story that delivers a value greater than the current stock price, then argue that Elon Musk's story for the company, or at least the version that he is telling right now, is an impossible story and close with my (still upbeat) story for the stock and resulting value.
Getting to $400/share: A Plausible Story?Is it plausible that Tesla, notwithstanding all of the troubles weighing it down, is under valued, at its current stock price of $340/share? Yes, but only it can put together the following results:Increase revenues ten-fold over the next decade: Tesla's current revenues of $12.5 billion will have to increase to $120 billion or more in the next ten years, giving it revenues close to those of BMW today. Assuming an average car price of $60,000, that would translate into 2 million cars sold in year 10, illustrating why the focus on whether Tesla can hit its target of 5,000 cars a week is missing the big picture.Improve operating margins to match the most profitable auto companies: While Tesla scales up its revenues, it will not only have to become profitable (a minimal requirement) but much more so than the typical auto company. In fact, its pre-tax operating margin will climb to 12%, well above the median auto margin of 4.81% or BMW's 9.89%, powered by brand name and pricing power.Invest more efficiently than the sector: To accomplish its objectives of increasing revenues and ramping up profitability, Tesla will have to reinvest and reinvest efficiently, delivering about $2.25 in revenues for every dollar of capital invested, much higher than than the typical auto firm. To provide perspective, Tesla in year 10 will have to deliver BMW-like revenues ($120 billion) with about a third of BMW's invested capital; with the estimated sales to capital ratio, Tesla's invested capital in year 10 will be $64 billion, whereas BMW's invested capital in 2018 was $185 billion).Navigate its way through debt to safety: Finally, as it moves towards becoming a much larger, more profitable firm, Tesla will also have to meet its commitments on current debt and not add to the mix, at least for the near term. In terms of operating risk, Tesla will have to face a cost of capital of 8.29%, in line with the typical auto firm.
Download spreadsheetWith these assumptions in place, the value that I get per share is $412, but as you can see from the assumptions, it would be the equivalent of a Royal Flush in poker. Note also that in this optimistic story, Tesla will have to have to raise $14 billion in fresh capital over the next few years and will not become operating cash flow positive until 2025. I am sure that there are people who will be unfazed by this story, especially if they are true believers in Elon Musk, but I am not one of them.The Musk Story for Tesla: A Fairy Tale?With a story stock, it is imperative that you have a CEO who not only is able to get the market to buy into a big story, but one who stays focused and disciplined. To me, there is no better example of how to do this well than Amazon, where Jeff Bezos has been consistent in telling the same story for the company, since its inception in 1997, and delivering on that story. Elon Musk is a gifted story teller, but as the last few months have shown, focus and discipline are not his strong points.
If you are a Tesla investor, your primary concern should be that Musk, with his numerous and often conflicting claims about the company, has muddled the Tesla story and perhaps put the company at risk. If Musk is to be believed, and the company will turn the corner on profitability soon and will not need to go back to capital markets in the near future, while also scaling up production and revenues. While that would be wonderful, from a value perspective, it is fantasy. Put bluntly, there is no chance that Tesla can deliver what it needs to, in terms of scaling up revenues and improving profitability, to justify its market capitalization, without raising new equity along the way. Either Musk knows this, and really does not mean what he says, in which case he is being deceptive, or he does not, in which case he is delusional. Neither is a good character quality in a CEO, especially one at a young company that needs investors on its side.
The fact that Tesla's stock price has remained at elevated levels, and even risen, may lead some to conclude that Musk's behavior has no consequences, but I believe it not only will, but it already has hurt the company. For instance, I think that Tesla has got a bum's rap for some of the accidents that its cars have been in, either from malfunctioning auto-pilots or combustible cars. However, Tesla's hand is weakened by Elon Musk not only acting as the spokesperson for the company but by his responses, which are a mix of arrogance and victimhood (blaming the media, short sellers and analysts) that sap whatever sympathy bystanders may have for the company.
My Tesla Story in June 2018My story for Tesla is still an optimistic one, but it is much less so than the Royal Flush story that delivered a value in excess of $400. I do think that Tesla will be able to grow revenues substantially over the next decade and improve margins to rank among the more profitable auto companies. I also think that Elon Musk will back track on his promise of not having to raise fresh capital and that Tesla will invest billions into new plant and equipment, and do so more efficiently than other auto companies, partly because it is not saddled with legacy investments. On the risk front, I am comfortable with assuming that operating risk will stabilize over time, but I do think that the debt burden will pose a danger to survival, at least for the next year or two. Pulling these assumptions together, I revalued the firm at about $186/share.
Download spreadsheetIn this story, Tesla's capital needs will be even higher than under the Royal Flush story, with negative cash flows for the next eight years, and $22 billion in new capital over that period. That may strike some as pessimistic, but notwithstanding all the talk about robots and technology, this remains a capital intensive business. It is entirely possible that over the next few weeks, Tesla might be able to get its production up to 5000 cars a week, using tents and spare parts, but that is not a long term solution. There is no tent big enough to produce 30,000 cars a week, which would be Tesla's target in my story, in year 10.
Bottom LineThere is no denying the fact that Elon Musk has been central to the Tesla story and that his vision and charisma have been largely responsible for pushing the stock price to its current levels. That said, we are at a point in Tesla's history where I think that the question can be raised as to whether the negatives that Musk brings to the job are starting to catch up with, and perhaps overwhelm the positives. Picking fights with equity research analysts and short sellers may get the blood flowing for Tesla bulls, but they are distractions from what Tesla has to do right now. Promising the market that the company will turn the corner on profitability and be cash flow positive soon may signal Musk's faith in his own story, but they do more harm than good for the company's long term value. I know that it is inconceivable for many investors to think of Tesla without Elon Musk at its helm, but this is a company in clear need of checks and balances, either from a strong management team or a powerful board of directors. Unfortunately, neither exists at the company now, and if you are bullish on Tesla, that should scare you.
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Auto companies dataTesla - Royal Flush Valuation (June 2018)Tesla - My Valuation (June 2018)Past posts on Tesla
Keystone Kop Valuations: Lazard, Evercore and the TSLA/SCTY dealTesla: It's a story stock, but what's the story?A Tesla 2017 Update: A Disruptive Force and a Debt Puzzle
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