Roger Montgomery is the Founder and Chairman of Montgomery Investment Management. Roger has over three decades of experience in funds management and related activities, including equities analysis, equity and derivatives strategy, trading and stockbroking. Prior to establishing Montgomery, Roger held positions at Ord Minnett Jardine Fleming, BT (Australia) Limited and Merrill Lynch.
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On Market Moves with Bridie Barry Roger Montgomery reveals his top three A1 companies. Two are trading below their intrinsic values, with the third trading close to fair value. All are top ranking in terms of stability of their balance sheet, predictability of performance, have a low chance of collapse and whose intrinsic values are rising over the next couple of years. In this interview Roger also discusses Fortescue (FMG), Commonwealth Bank (CBA) and National Australia Banks (NAB) unsuccessful takeover of AXA. Watch the interview.
Roger Montgomery tells viewers there will be interesting opportunities if the market falls 600 points, but warns even in opportune times, never invest in anything other than A-class businesses. Roger also observes the enthusiasm in Wesfarmers as a result of the turnaround in Coles, but says Woolworths (WOW) is a much better business, Caltex is a stock going nowhere for next couple of years, Santos is worth around 30% of its current share price and if you are considering Newcrest Mining, don’t. You would be better off putting your money in a term deposit. Watch the interview.
There are no shortcuts in the world of investment. A single metric can only tell you so much. Read Roger’s article at www.eurekareport.com.au.
Serendibite is arguably the rarest gem on earth. Three known samples exist, amounting to just a few carats. When traded at more than $14,000 per carat, the price is equivalent to more than $2 million per ounce. But that’s serendibite, not coal.
Coal is neither a gem nor rare. It is in fact one of the most abundant fuels on earth and according to the World Coal Institute, at present rates of production supply is secure for more than 130 years.
The way coal companies are trading at present however, you have to conclude that either coal is rare and prices need to be much higher, or there’s a bubble-like mania in the coal sector and prices for coal companies must eventually collapse.
The price suitors are willing to pay for Macarthur Coal and Gloucester Coal cannot be economically justified. Near term projections for revenue, profits or returns on equity cannot explain the prices currently being paid.
To be fair, a bubble guaranteed to burst is debt fuelled asset inflation; buyers debt fund most or all of the purchase price of an asset whose cash flows are unable to support the interest and debt obligations. Equity speculation alone is different to a bubble that an investor can short sell with high confidence of making money.
The bubbles to short are those where monthly repayments have to be made. While this is NOT the case in the acquisitions and sales being made in the coal space right now, it IS the case in the macroeconomic environment that is the justification for the purchases in the coal space.
China.
If you are not already aware, China runs its economy a little differently to us. They set themselves a GDP target – say 8% or 9%, and then they determine to reach it and as proved last week, exceed it. They do it with a range of incentives and central or command planning of infrastructure spending.
Fixed asset investment (infrastructure) amounts to more than 55% of GDP in China and is projected to hit 60%. Compare this to the spending in developed economies, which typically amounts to circa 15%. The money is going into roads, shopping malls and even entire towns. Check out the city of Ordos in Mongolia – an entire town or suburb has been constructed, fully complete down to the last detail. But it’s empty. Not a single person lives there. And this is not an isolated example. Skyscrapers and shopping malls lie idle and roads have been built for journeys that nobody takes.
The ‘world’s economic growth engine’ has been putting our resources into projects for which a rational economic argument cannot be made.
Historically, one is able to observe two phases of growth in a country’s development. The first phase is the early growth and command economies such as China have been very good at this – arguably better than western economies, simply because they are able to marshal resources perhaps using techniques that democracies are loath to employ. China’s employment of capital, its education and migration policies reflect this early phase growth. This early phase of growth is characterised by expansion of inputs. The next stage however only occurs when people start to work smarter and innovate, becoming more productive. Think Germany or Japan. This is growth fuelled by outputs and China has not yet reached this stage.
China’s economic growth is thus based on the expansion of inputs rather than the growth of outputs, and as Paul Krugman wrote in his 1994 essay ‘The Myth of Asia’s Miracle’, such growth is subject to diminishing returns.
So how sustainable is it? The short answer; it is not.
Overlay the input-driven economic growth of China with a debt-fuelled property mania, and you have sown the seeds of a correction in the resource stocks of the West that the earnings per share projections of resource analysts simply cannot factor in.
In the last year and a half, property speculation has reached epic proportions in China and much like Australia in the early part of this decade, the most popular shows on TV are related to property investing and speculation. I was told that a program about the hardships the property bubble has provoked was the single most popular, but has been pulled.
Middle and upper middle class people are buying two, three and four apartments at a time. And unlike Australia, these investments are not tenanted. The culture in China is to keep them new. I saw this first hand when I traveled to China a while back. Row upon row of apartment block. Empty. Zero return and purchased on nothing other than the hope that prices will continue to climb.
It was John Kenneth Galbraith who, in his book The Great Crash, wrote that it is when all aspects of asset ownership such as income, future value and enjoyment of its use are thrown out the window and replaced with the base expectation that prices will rise next week and next month, as they did last week and last month, that the final stage of a bubble is reached.
On top of that, there is, as I have written previously, 30 billion square feet of commercial real estate under debt-funded construction, on top of what already exists. To put that into perspective, that’s 23 square feet of office space for every man, woman and child in China. Commercial vacancy rates are already at 20% and there’s another 30 billion square feet to be supplied! Additionally, 2009 has already seen rents fall 26% in Shanghai and 22% in Beijing.
Everywhere you turn, China’s miracle is based on investing in assets that cannot be justified on economic grounds. As James Chanos referred to the situation; ‘zombie towns and zombie buildings’. Backing it all – the six largest banks increased their loan book by 50% in 2009. ‘Zombie banks’.
Conventional wisdom amongst my peers in funds management and the analyst fraternity is that China’s foreign currency reserves are an indication of how rich it is and will smooth over any short term hiccups. This confidence is also fuelled by economic hubris eminating from China as the western world stumbles. But pride does indeed always come before a fall. Conventional wisdom also says that China’s problems and bubbles are limited to real estate, not the wider economy. It seems the flat earth society is alive and well! As I observed in Malaysia in 1996, Japan almost a decade before that, Dubai and Florida more recently, never have the problems been contained to one sector. Drop a pebble in a pond and its ripples eventually impact the entire pond.
The problem is that China’s banking system is subject to growing bad and doubtful debts as returns diminish from investments made at increasing prices in assets that produce no income. These bad debts may overwhelm the foreign currency reserves China now has.
Swimming against the tide is not popular. Like driving a car the wrong way down a one-way street, criticism and even abuse follows the investor who seeks to be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy. Right now, with analysts’ projections for the price of coal and iron ore to continue rising at high double digit rates, and demand for steel, glass, cement and fibre cement looking like a hockey stick, its unpopular and decidedly contrarian to be thinking that either of these are based on foundations of sand or absent any possibility of change.
The mergers and acquisitions occurring in the coal space now are a function of expectations that the good times will continue unhindered. I hope they’re right. But witness the rash of IPOs and capital raisings in this space. Its not normal. The smart money might just be taking advantage of the enthusiasm and maximising the proceeds from selling.
A serious correction in the demand for our commodities or the prices of stocks is something we don’t need right now. But such are the consequences of overpaying.
Overpaying for assets is not a characteristic unique to ‘mum and dad’ investors either. CEO’s in Australia have a long and proud history of burning shareholders’ funds to fuel their bigger-is-better ambitions. Paperlinx, Telstra, Fairfax, Fosters – the past list of companies and their CEO’s that have overpaid for assets, driven down their returns on equity and made the value of intangible goodwill carried on the balance sheet look absurd is long and not populated solely by small and inexperienced investors. When Oxiana and Zinifex merged, the market capitalisations of the two individually amounted to almost $10 billion. Today the merged entity has a market cap of less than $4 billion.
The mergers and takeovers in the coal space today will not be immune to enthusiastic overpayment. Macarthur Coal is trading way above my intrinsic value for it. Gloucester Coal is trading at more than double my valuation for it.
At best the companies cannot be purchased with a margin of safety. At worst shares cannot be purchased today at prices justified by economic returns.
Either way, returns must therefore diminish.
Posted by Roger Montgomery, 19 April 2010.
Experts, including Roger Montgomery, give the lowdown on picking stocks in a neutral economy. Read article.
With the market circling 5000, and riding high on resources, what stocks should you buy? Tony Featherstone interviews Roger Montgomery to find out. Read article.
Forecasts of new highs for gold and a takeover bid have returned Lihir to two year highs. But what is it really worth? Read Roger’s article at eurekareport.com.au.
Assessing the value of stock can be quite confusing and if you get it wrong can have disastrous effects. The trick is to look for businesses that are trading at a discount to their intrinsic value and rank potential stock market investments in terms of quality and predictability of performance. Read article.
If you have ever paid a high price for a share, it is time to turn your back on speculating and start investing. Stop hoping for a spectacular short-term return and start being certain of a great long-term one. Read Roger’s 5-step plan that will teach you how to make value-investing work for you.
The other day, Andrew Robertson interviewed me for ABC’s Lateline Business Program about property trusts (you can find the transcript in the Media Room, On TV). I thought you might benefit from an expanded précis.
For a very long time, property trusts were described rather derisorily as the investments of widows and orphans – boring, uneventful and staid. Then with the advent of a name change to REITS (Real Estate Investment Trusts), cheap credit and a healthy dose of me-too-ism, property trust managers trotted down the path that took them to near extinction.
Managers of today’s REITS are falling over themselves to once again describe themselves as staid boring old property trusts. But don’t be fooled, while a decade of stable returns and the life savings of so many are gone, many of the managers responsible are not.
With some basic arithmetic, let me explain what has occurred. Company A has $10 of Equity per Share that is returning 7% to 11% year-in and year-out. Somewhere between 2005 and 2006, like a kid at a toy shop screaming “I want one too”, the managers of property trusts started expanding in a debt-fuelled binge to get bigger.
Arguably led by Westfield a year earlier in 2004, and as one might expect, the increased debt produced rising Returns on Equity. But it didn’t last.
The party’s last song may have been August 29, 2007. That’s when Westfield was leading again. It sold a half share of Doncaster Shoppingtown for $738 million to one of the world’s largest property managers, LaSalle, on a yield of 4.7% – a record low. Westfield also sold half of its Westfield Parramatta centre for $717 million at a time when Centro, for example, was still loading up on debt. It sold another $1.3 billion in property-linked notes, launched a UK wholesale fund into which it sold $1.3 billion of its inventory, and sold more than A$750 million of US assets. And while it was selling assets, it was raising $3 billion of capital through a rights issue ostensibly to acquire more assets.
Unfortunately for many investors, the managers of other property concerns thought they were smarter than the Lowys. Have a look at the debt to equity ratios in 2007 and compare them to the corresponding ratios in 2004. And the US was reported to be heading into recession.
While it would be some time before the revelers turned into pumpkins and mice, the band had packed up and gone home.
If you want to set your kids on the road to financial success, tell them this: “If you can’t afford to buy it with cash, you don’t deserve to have it.” Its harsh, but I grew up on that advice. There were a few lay-buys for Christmas, but there wasn’t a single card in my Mother’s glomesh purse.
The lesson however was lost on the property trust managers, and it wasn’t their money anyway!
Eventually everything did turn to pumpkins and mice, and what happened next saved the entities and protected many of the executive jobs but arguably did far fewer favours for the unit holders.
In 2008 Company A writes down its properties, triggering loan covenants and LVR limits. Debt to equity ratio explodes. Bank tells Company A to sort it out. Company A’s share price falls to meaningless price and far below even the written down NTA. Company A conducts a capital raising anyway and issues hundreds of millions of new shares at a discount to the price and in complete annihilation of the equity per share, as the following tables demonstrate.
The result of all this activity, quite apart from the corporate finance fees it generated, was a dilution of Equity per unit, Earnings per unit and Return on Equity.
GPT’s, ING’s and Goodman’s Returns on Equity are expected to average 5 per cent or less for the next two years – that’s less than a bank account. Stockland and Dexus are expected to average 7 or 8 per cent – a little better, but nothing to write home about.
And finally, you can’t dilute Equity per Share, Earnings per Share and Returns on Equity without a reduction in the intrinsic values of these entities, and that’s precisely what has happened.
Stockland’s intrinsic value has fallen from $4.00 in 2008 to $2.16 today. Westfield from $8.25 to $6.71, Dexus from $2.74 in 2007 to 15 cents today and GPT, from $4.10 in 2007 to 30 cents today. Those intrinsic values aren’t going anywhere in a hurry either, unless Returns on Equity can rise significantly, but with debt now substantially lower that appears less likely.
Posted by Roger Montgomery, 9 April 2010.
