Cash levels have constantly remained low throughout this bull market.
The majority are invested & any turbulence sees central banks step in, saving the day.
However, low cash will eventually be a concern when forced liquidation starts since there will be no marginal buyers.
S&P 500 is approaching a record valuation of 3 times forward-looking sales.
Even if the market was to crash by -30%, valuations would be expensive since the market would trade at around 2X revenue — this was a top back in the year 2000.
CBs have created a monster bubble.
Jeff Gundlach is saying the US stock market is incredibly overpriced by any traditional metric and the next crash will be for the history books.
Thinks the $VIX will spike to never-before-seen levels surpassing the crash of 1987 & 2008.
US high yield credit spreads continued to tighten in the last days of March.
The spread of just over 3% against similar-maturity Treasuries is reaching the lowest level since September 2018 — just before the QT correction started.
While tight credit spreads can persist at times, often spread tightness is associated with too much optimism, which produces complacency — the riskest of all investor behaviors.
Low-quality CCC spreads are now at the tightest level since 2014.
Within the 12-month time frame, central bank stimulus has made us turn from a "love to a hate relationship" on the US small caps sector.
In March & April 2020, regular followers might recall that is all I tweeted about — these stocks were cheap.
Today?
We want to stay away!
In today's public fixed income sector, Junk bonds are trading at investment grade yields, while investment-grade corporate bonds trade at DM sovereign debt yields.
In our opinion, the SUPER low returns don't justify higher levels of risk being taken by yield-hungry investors.
Michael Burry — who successfully shorted the US subprime bubble — warned about gamblers taking on margin debt a couple of months ago.
“People say I didn't warn last time. I did, but no one listened. So I warn this time. And still, no one listens."
— Michael Burry
Things are seriously heating up as margin debt explodes higher than a year ago.
Some of the periods where gamblers took on too much leverage were:
1972*, 1978, 1987*, 2000*, 2007* and today.
The ones with a star went on to crash, in 1978 the market fell around -20%.
Investing is a "no-common-sense" activity where shoppers panic during a sale/discount and buy as much as they can at premiums.
Here is an example:
No one wanted to touch stocks when they traded below 10X earnings in 2008, but everyone wants them at 22X earnings in 2021.
US household exposure to equities, mutual funds, & other forms of corporate ownership is probably at record highs, according to JP Morgan.
This indicator has over 90% positive correlation factor with future expected returns over the next decade.
Risks continue to increase!
Unlike the majority of the market participants, I was surprised to see Blackrock's CIO says they are holding the highest level of cash in many years while trimming down equity holdings.
Bank of America private clients' exposure to the US stock market is now at a record high.
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Unless there is a year-end rally, the Chinese stock market is on track for the fourth down year in a row. This is exceptionally rare for any global market.
Several key names — Alibaba, JD, Tencent, etc — show just how much corporate value creation fundamentals (FCF per share in blue) have completely disconnected from sentiment-driven, market expectations (share price in black).
In many cases, FCF per share is at or near record highs while the share price is near multi-year lows (in some cases decade lows).
See the $JD chart below.
Alibaba $BABA corporate value creation fundamentals (FCF per share in blue) have completely disconnected from sentiment-driven, market expectations (share price in black).
Tencent $TCEHY corporate value creation fundamentals (FCF per share in blue) have completely disconnected from sentiment-driven, market expectations (share price in black).
Despite a very strong 10-month rally in stocks, most global fund managers are still overweight bonds (risk averse) and underweight stocks (risk seeking).
Some sentiment surveys do suggest bulls are back, but the lion's share of capital (managed by funds) is still defensive.
Asset allocation by an average retail investor (AAII) and an average fund manager (BofA).
The sentiment correlation is quite close over the last two decades, but it starts breaking down in 2016.
We think more & more passive LT indexers, hence retail is persistently bullish.
In February of this year 4 out of 5 fund managers expected China's GDP to outperform. We know quite a few investors who held this consensus view, as well.
The Chinese economic GDP has disappointed since. Today, only 1 out of 5 fund managers believe China's GDP will reaccelerate.
1) Global economy has completely changed since the 1970s.
Today, intangible asssts (brands, patents, software, licenses, IP, etc) are twice as large as tangible assets (factories, plants, etc), which dominated the company investments 50 years ago.
This has many consequences.
2) Intangibles are expensed via the P&L statement, so they often don’t show up on the balance sheet the way tangible assets do (they are capitalised via cash flow statement).
Now, think how framing an investment as an “expense” will have a meaningful on financial metrics.
3) Intangible investments artificially suppress the net income (all of a sudden you have all these additional “expenses” which are really investments).
Therefore the P/E ratio is becoming obsolete and probably (almost) irrelevant.
If ROC is higher than WACC, growing revenue adds shareholder value.
If ROC is lower than WACC, focusing on growth destroys shareholder value.
If a money losing business attempts to grow faster by cutting prices to gain even more market share, it leads to an adverse outcome.
How should management think about growth vs profitability?
If the business is generating excess ROC (above WACC) then focus on stable growth is intelligent.
However, if the business isn’t generating excess ROC, the focus should turn from growth to improvement in profitability.
The management teams should refocus on growth drivers only when the cash return on operating capital employed has increased in excess of weighted cost of capital and that is now validated & consistent pattern (not a multi year cyclical event, like with commodity businesses).
Buffett repeatedly stated that value and growth are two sides of the same coin.
Graham purists (who disregard the asset's quality) commonly fall into value traps, because valuations tell them nothing without understanding the business's growth potential.
Simplified example. 👇🏽
Alphabet $GOOGL currently trades at 15.7x forward operating income.
Is that cheap or expensive?
We think that using such quick-and-easy metrics cannot help us in our due diligence process — it only leads to decision-making errors.
Simplified answer:
a) if the business can grow meaningfully from here the current multiples entry will prove to be cheap
b) if the business's economic moats start narrowing abruptly, resulting in disappointing grow and market share loss, it might prove to be a value trap
"What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact." — Warren Buffett
It seems Alibaba investors are falling victim to confirmation bias the whole way down the slippery slope, which started in October 2020.
While some disagree, an attempt to pump the IPO by cutting the prices of services is a clear sign of management's short-termism culture and lack of capital allocation discipline.
Artificially generating revenue at any cost is not how most great CEOs and management teams think.