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Did you receive my email update earlier this month about the complexity of the gold coin on Value.able’s dust jacket?

Take a look to the left. See the One Dollar coin on the cover? I never imagined a little gold coin could cause so many headaches.

Some of you have told me to ‘forget the gold – its what is inside that counts’. I agree with you. However I went to a lot of trouble to get permission from the Royal Australian Mint to use the coin, so I don’t want to give it away.

I have also agreed to a production process with the printer that, at this late stage, I cannot change.

Whilst we are adept at digging gold out of the ground, refining it, looking at it and sticking it back underground again, replicating Australia’s One Dollar coin on the cover of my book has proved to be a far more difficult challenge.

Here is what my printer emailed to me last week…

“The foil on the green case won’t have the black printing over the foil. The coins have been made black and the image will be suitable for foiling. This method is the quickest way of producing the books. [however] Given the complex nature of the gold coin on the jackets and case cover with several runs through the press, we have to allow drying time to achieve the desired result.

If you have a hard back book in your collection take a look and you will see what I am alluding to.”

So I did. I looked at every hard back in my collection and wasn’t able to find one with a picture printed on it. When I briefed the designers I asked for something unconventional. I didn’t realise what they created for me had never been done before!

Your book will arrive in the week commencing 2 August.

Thank you for your patience and understanding. I am confident Value.able will become a valuable addition to your investment education and am looking forward to hearing what you think of it after you have read it.

Posted by Roger Montgomery, 13 July 2010.

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Companies, Insightful Insights, Investing Education.

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Did you buy an iPhone between October 2007 and December 2009? Over 41 million people did. Maybe you and 1.7 million others queued outside an Apple store because you had to have the new iPhone 4 in its first week of release, or you are one of the 45,000 people per day buying an iPad? The numbers are astounding.

If you are like Forrest Gump of River Road, Greenbow Alabama, who owns Apple shares, and even if you are not, you may be interested in my estimate of the company’s intrinsic value.

For those faithful to the PC, your loyalty may soon be tested. Apple’s strategy of dominating the home entertainment market is converting the world to its products, and is eating into the business world too.

While the number of sales are amazing are they enough for Apple to replace Microsoft? In the fast changing world of technology, why not?  But in the slow-moving world of value investing, who knows?  And thats the difficulty – working out if Apple will dominate in ten years time and betting that there aren’t two young guys in a garage somewhere cooking up the next apple, dell, windows or microsoft office.

Apple’s resurrection started with the return of its founder and prodigal son, Steve Jobs. Whilst off in the ‘wilderness’, Jobs kept himself busy acquiring a little animation studio called Pixar for $10 million, building it up and selling it to Disney for more than $7 billion. He also developed and subsequently sold to Apple his NeXt operating system – for $427 million.

Apple has a market capitalisation of $228 billion. It’s the second largest company in the US – currently bigger than its nemisis Microsoft and about $60 billion behind Exxon Mobil.

Yet as we know from Australia, market cap means little. It is Return on Equity, margins and revenue that reveal the quality and performance of a business. And in these areas Apple and Microsoft are similar.

It is however Apple’s revenue-per-employee number that truly causes the jaw to drop.  Microsoft’s revenue divided by its employees equals US$630,000. Apple’s is an astounding US$1.5 million.

Despite the company’s success, things haven’t always been rosy at Apple. In the 1980’s Apple lost the personal computer war to the PC and Windows became the standard.  This was in part due to the fact that the Windows platform had attracted the ‘killer app’ – Office. But dud Windows revisions and costly software upgrades left unhappy consumers to explore alternatives.

Re-enter Steve Jobs, as interim CEO of the company he co-founded twenty years earlier. Apple’s staff called him the ‘iCEO’… seriously. It was July 1997 and Apple had lost $1.8 billion in the previous 18 months.

Jobs set about replacing Apple’s board, dropped a case against Microsoft in return for Microsoft developing Office for the Mac, edified the grandeur around the brand, killed off the white labeled versions of its products that were cannibalising the company and most importantly simplified the product pipeline, killing every product except four top-end machines. This last move got the [remaining] staff more focused and inventory fell from $400 million to $100 million in one year.

The category killing machine for Apple in the late 1990’s was the iMac –  in fruity colours.  Remember those? And Jobs was serious about simplification. These iMacs did not even have a floppy drive. The user downloaded software from the internet and they were the first computer with a USB port. iMacs were thought of as being ahead of their time.

And being ahead of their time meant Apple could charge premium prices and generate better margins. The additional cash funded research that ultimately launched the iPod. Coinciding as it did with the emergence of the “digital life”, the iPod re-launched Apple.

Fast forward to 2010 – what is the intrinsic value of Apple? And is that value rising? Can Apple live up to the iPad’s promise that ‘…this is just the beginning’.

Apple’s Return on Equity from 2001 to 2005 looks like this: 22%, 24.4%, 27.2%. 29.6%. 28.4%. 29.3% and 27.1% forecast for 2011. I have access to a range of forecasts. While some analysts have projected iPad sales will continue for a year at the current rate of growth, others suggest that once the Mac aficionados have purchased, sales will slow significantly. Revenue estimates for 2011 range from $18 billion to more than $45 billion.  The 2011 estimated decline in ROE needs to be seen in that context.

As you may know I rate companies on a quality scale from A1 to C5, using metrics designed for bank credit departments. Apple is an A1, and that A1 has been consistent for several years. Microsoft, by comparison, is an A2, but its performance has recently been declining.

Why is Apple an A1? It has no debt and even though equity has grown (from retained earnings not capital raisings) from $3.5 billion to over $10 billion, returns have been maintained. This is exceptional.

Buffett says that he likes big equity and big returns on equity and on that score Apple makes the grade.  But Buffett avoids fast-changing sectors like technology because he cannot say with confidence where the company will be in terms of competitive positioning in, for example, a decade’s time.  And who knows that there isn’t a couple of university dropouts in a garage somewhere building the next apple, dell, office suite or google!

So with the share price at US$258, does a discount to intrinsic value exist? Moreover, is intrinsic value rising?

On the first score the answer is yes slightly. Apple’s intrinsic value is US$262.56.  On the second score intrinsic value is rising to a 2011 estimate of $305.03 – a 16 per cent increase.

For the last five years, intrinsic value has indeed increased substantially. Below is a little table to show you Apple’s share price and intrinsic values since 2005.

*Estimate. Not a recommendation. Seek and take personal professional advice.

Only a very small margin of safety exists today and while you may be optimistic about the fact that Apple’s intrinsic value is rising at a satisfactory rate, you do need to remember that the business is in a fast-changing industry. Future performance and intrinsic value will depend on whether Apple continues to strengthen its competitive advantages.  Thank you to the many investors who emailed me and asked for a quick look at Apple.

Posted by Roger Montgomery, 12 July 2010

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Companies, Technology & Telecommunications.

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Peter Switzer invites me every Thursday fortnight to join him on the Sky Business Channel. 4 June was like any other show. Except once Peter and I had finished discussing investing and stocks and the market, he invited me to stay on for his interview with OrotonGroup CEO Sally Macdonald.

For readers of my blog, you will know that Oroton is one of my A1 businesses. And I have often said that Sally Macdonald is a first-class manager.

Below are the highlights from that interview.

Each time a new video is uploaded to my YouTube channel I post a note at my Facebook page. On Facebook will also find my upcoming talks, editorial features, TV interviews, radio spots and the latest news about Value.able.

If you are yet to pick up the latest issue of Money magazine find it at the newsstand now, there are a bunch of terrific columns. Click here to read my monthly column. This month I write about ‘Great Retail Stocks’.

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Companies, Consumer discretionary, Insightful Insights, Investing Education.

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If you recently ordered my book Value.able, thank you and welcome! You have joined a small band of people for whom the inexplicable gyrations of the market will soon be navigated with confidence and far more understanding. If you have ever had an itch or the thought; “there must be a better way”, Value.able is your calamine lotion.

Its hard to imagine that my declaration to Greg Hoy on the 7.30 Report that Myer was expensive as it listed at $4.10, or elsewhere that JB Hi-Fi was cheap and Telstra expensive has anything to do with the 17th century probability work of Pascal & Fermet.

The geneology of both modern finance and separately, the rejection of it, runs that far back. From Fermet to Fourier’s equations for heat distribution, to Bachelier’s adoption of that equation to the probability of bond prices, to Fama, Markowitz and Sharpe and separately, Graham, Walter, Miller & Modigliani, Munger and Buffett – the geneology of value investing is fascinating but largely invisible to investors today.

It seems the intrinsic values of individual stocks are also invisible to many investors. And yet they are so important.

My 24 June Post ‘Which 15 companies receive my A1 status?’ spurred several investors to ask what the intrinsic values for those 15 companies were. You also asked if I could put them up here on my blog so you can compare them to the valuations you come up with after reading Value.able. Apologies for the delay, but with the market down 15 per cent since its recent high, I thought now is an opportune time to share with you a bunch of estimated valuations.

I have selected a handful from the 15 ‘A1’ companies named in my 20 June post and listed them in the table below. The list includes CSL Limited (CSL), Worley Parsons (WOR), Cochler (COH), Energy Resources (ERA), JB Hi-Fi (JBH), REA Group (REA) and Carsales.com.au (CRZ).

If you are surprised by any of them I am interested to know, so be sure to Leave a Comment. And when you receive your copy of my book (I spoke with the printer yesterday who informed me the book is on schedule and will be delivered to you very soon), you can use it to do the calculations yourself. I am looking forward to seeing your results.

The caveats are of course 1) that the list is for educational purposes only and does not represent a recommendation (seek and take personal professional advice before conducting any transactions); 2) the valuations could change adversely in the coming days or weeks (and I am not under any obligation to update them); 3) these valuations are based on analysts consensus estimates of future earnings, which of course may be optimistic (or pessimistic, and will also change).  They may also be different to my own estimates of earnings for these companies; 4) the share prices could double, halve or fall 90 per cent and I simply have no way of being able to predict that nor the news a company could announce that may cause it and 5) some country could default causing the stock market to fall substantially and I have no way of being able to predict that either.

With those warnings in mind and the insistence that you must seek advice regarding the appropriateness of any investment, here’s the list of estimated valuations for a selection of companies from the 15 A1 companies I listed back on 20 June.

Posted by Roger Montgomery, 6 July 2010

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Companies, Investing Education.

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Value.able can now be pre-purchased online at my website, www.rogermontgomery.com. My book is on the printing press and will be delivered in about 21 days.

There will only be one print run.

In Value.able I share my stock investing rules for long-term value investing and online trading that you can follow to reproduce my excellent stock market returns (have a look at the June issue of Money magazine).

Click here to pre-purchase your copy today.

Posted by Roger Montgomery, 30 June 2010.

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Companies, Insightful Insights, Investing Education.

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As you would all know by now, I like to invest in great quality companies when they are cheap. Nothing too special about that because that is true of a line of value investors from Buffett and Munger, all the way down to us. For me, ‘quality’ is not difficult to ascribe to a company, provided you remove the subjective elements. You can decide, for example, to simply look at the return on equity, but of course that alone will not be enough to separate two companies that each share the same return on equity. One company could have more debt, or two retailers with the same return on equity could have very different inventory turns or different cash flows from working capital. One retailer’s inventory management may be improving and the other declining. The absolute value of many ratios and their trends can all help to determine quality in an absolute and relative sense. That is how I arrive at my A1 ratings (not to mention A2, A3….C5 etc) – ratings that you have seen me discuss on the Sky Business Channel and heard me chat about on 2GB.

Perhaps the simplest way to think about quality is the way that Buffett has done it using his subscription (complimentary for life one presumes) to Value Line, which was launched in 1931 in the United States.

Applying Buffett’s approach to an Australian company is delightfully simple. Start by having a look at the profit some time ago – lets use ten years. Compare that ten year-old profit to the most recent one, or even next year’s expected profit. Is it up or down? In his 1996 Chairman’s letter to shareholders Buffett said; “Your goal as an investor should simply be to purchase, at a rational price, a part interest in an easily-understandable business whose earnings are virtually certain to be materially higher five, ten and twenty years from now. Over time, you will find only a few companies that meet these standards – so when you see one that qualifies, you should buy a meaningful amount of stock. You must also resist the temptation to stray from your guidelines: If you aren’t willing to own a stock for ten years, don’t even think about owning it for ten minutes. Put together a portfolio of companies whose aggregate earnings march upward over the years, and so also will the portfolio’s market value.”

So the first step is to compare the change in earnings over a reasonable period of time. Ideally you would like the profits to be “marching upwards” and be confident that the future holds the same pattern.

The next step is to look at the change in the contributed equity. The reason you want to do this is explained with a simple example. Lets say I start a business with $10 million and in the first year I earn $2 million. The next year I earn $4 million and the year after I earn $6 million, and so on. I suspect you would be as thrilled as me with the decision to start this business. What if we started another business that produced the same profits over time as the first example, but in addition to the initial $10 million to get things started, we were required to inject many millions more in equity back into the business, annually? My guess is that you would be far less excited.

Airlines are particularly adroit at performing these riches-to-rags economics. But having harped on about that for a decade, you already know my thoughts on airlines.

How about we take a look instead at Incitec Pivot (IPL)? Here is a business that in 2002, after two years of losses, reported a profit of $18.3 million. Equity contributed by shareholders amounted to $65 million at that time and retained earnings (profits that shareholders had not received as dividends) had built up to $84.4 million. Now fast forward to 2010 and Incitec Pivot is forecast to earn about $400 million. So in just 8 years profits have grown more than 20-fold!

As an owner of the whole business, you would be pretty happy with this result, particularly in light of Buffett’s comments about “marching upwards” and all. The real questions however are 1) have you had to contribute any additional money to the business or leave any in there? and 2) How much?

While profits have grown by $382 million, the amount of money the shareholder/owners have had to contribute to produce this result is even more startling. Imagine owning a business that grew profits from $18 million to $400, but required an initial investment of $65 million and then an additional $3.2 billion! And we haven’t yet mentioned that borrowings have increased from $120 million in 2002 to $1.6 billion at the end of 2009.

These sorts of economics do not receive my A1 accolade. The only A they get is the one for ‘Agony’. By comparing the increase in profits to the increase in equity, you can get an understanding of the returns the additional capital has generated. In the case of Incitec Pivot that number is about 11%. If the debt is included, the return on additional capital is 8%. Not as shockingly low as other companies (I can think of half a dozen off the top of my head), but not anywhere near the 30% rates achieved by Woolworths, for example.

At the 1998 Berkshire Annual Meeting, Buffett said: “Time is the enemy of the poor business and the friend of the great business. If you have a business that’s earning 20%-25% on equity, time is your friend. But time is your enemy if your money is in a low return business.”

He was perhaps referring to Graham’s own metaphor about the market being a weighing machine over long periods. Over long periods of time, prices tend to track the underlying performance of the business. If returns in the business are low, so will be the returns be from owning the shares.

And thats why I like to stick to A1s. And there’s not that many. So who are the A1’s?  Well, here is fifteen. They’re ranked in order of market capitalisation (biggest to smallest). And don’t forget, this is a purely didactic exercise. Its educational, so you must seek and take personal professional advice before doing anything. Also remember I am offering no assessment about whether the shares will go up or down. The shares could all halve (or worse). I have no way of predicting what the shares will do.

One of the most frustrating things about having high standards is that the pond gets very small. There just aren’t as many “fish in the sea” as your parents may have led you to believe. But as John Maynard Keynes said in a letter to F. C. Scott on August 15, 1934: “As time goes on, I get more and more convinced that the right method in investment is to put fairly large sums into enterprises which one thinks one knows something about and in the management of which one thoroughly believes. It is a mistake to think that one limits one’s risk by spreading too much between enterprises about which one knows little and has no reason for special confidence… One’s knowledge and experience are definitely limited and there are seldom more than two or three enterprises at any given time in which I personally feel myself entitled to put full confidence.” My quality ratings can and do change. Not often, but they will. Recently, for example, quite a number of companies raised capital to pay down their debt. Even before they report their full year results, I can see that the raisings will dilute return on equity and dilute intrinsic value, but I can also see that the balance sheet will be stronger and so, the quality rankings will rise. Importantly however for me, my A1’s are those companies in which ‘I personally feel myself entitled to put full confidence’ (in terms of quality, not share price direction or prediction!).

If you have a list of companies in which you have full confidence and are happy to share, feel free to leave a comment.

Posted Roger Montgomery, 20 June 2010

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Companies, Investing Education.

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I was on the Sky Business Channel’s Your Money Your Call a couple of weeks ago. The next day Phil let me know how disappointed he was on my Facebook page – his email wasn’t featured on the show and he couldn’t get through on the phone. I should let you know that until I am hosting a program (don’t get any ideas!), I don’t have a say in which calls are taken and what emails are featured. I did however promise to share my observations on Ausenco with the disclaimer that they are didactic.

Up until 2008 Ausenco (AAX) was a darling of the market – indeed it had reason to be. It had a track record of being an A1 business and in 2007 was generating a profit $41.5m on only $56m of equity – a stellar 95% return. A 2007 estimate of AAX’s intrinsic value would be something like $15.07.

But with the share price now trading around $2.33 and my current valuation at $1.54, something has changed. Why has Ausenco fallen on such tough times?

In 2007-8 Ausenco went on somewhat of a buying binge. To diversify away from the operations of mining and minerals processing, PSI, Vector and Sandwell were added to Ausenco’s business. Looking at the share price today, compared to two years ago it appears Ausenco paid a very high price for this strategy.

At the end of 2007 a significant portion of Ausenco’s $56m of equity was cash. The business had only $7m of debt. Up until that time shareholders had grown the business by simply investing $11.5m of their own equity and retaining a cumulative $45.7m in profits. A nice position and in my opinion, very attractive. Ausenco was a small, highly profitable, organically-grown and well-run business.

By the end of 2008 growth was turbocharged. The combination of substantial acquisitions however saw an additional $106.6m of equity raised and debt jumped to $66. In other words, shareholders equity ballooned by 325%, to $182m, compared to the previous year.

With this aggressive growth came a host of challenges. Running a focused small business is a much easier task than steering a larger ship that has diversified into a ‘pit to port’ engineering business.

And by 2009 the numbers agreed. A profit of $20.3m was reported, but $260m was needed to produce it. So the profit was lower than 2007, but significantly more money had been contributed.

Ausenco was far more valuable as a small business than it is as a larger one, as anyone holding the shares through this period can attest.

As an investor, you should ask questions when a small, highly focused and highly profitable business becomes enamoured with the idea that bigger is better. Some may argue that the GFC is partly to blame. My response is to take a look at another business in the same sector, Monadelphous – one of my A1s and a business that has never attempted to grow beyond what Buffett refers to as its circle of competence.

Unlike Monadelphous, Ausenco has slipped from an A1 to an A4. Yes its still high quality (A), but with a performance rating of 4 (5 being the lowest), its predictability is not something to be excited about.

Posted by Roger Montgomery, 18 June 2010

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Companies, Energy / Resources.

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In March this year I shared my insights about QBE with readers of Alan’s Eureka Report. Since that time QBE’s share price has fallen from over $22.00 to $19.00 – a decline of around 15%. That may explain why I have received a few requests asking for an updated estimate for QBE’s value?

If you take your cues from price action, you would probably conclude something might be wrong with the company.

Open up a newspaper, flick on the TV, or do both on your new iPad and you will be overwhelmed with the events in the US, the debacle that is the Euro zone, and BP’s oil spill – one of man’s greatest catastrophes.

With 40% of gross written premiums being derived in the US and a further 40% from London and Europe, it is likely QBE is exposed, somewhere.

Even at home the company appears to be right in the firing line of the Lennox Head twister, Victoria’s bushfires and recent floods.

It’s not all bad news though – the declining Australian Dollar ensures QBE’s overseas earnings are now worth more.

So is there something wrong at QBE? Or is the market just reacting to bad news? Buffett says you pay a high price for a cheery consensus, so maybe bad news is just what’s needed to make QBE attractively priced…

You have to remember that QBE is in the business of forecasting and betting against bad news – it exists to manage risk and spread it around when there is too much for it to shoulder alone. And given its successful decade-long track record of doing so, I can strongly argue that it performs this activity significantly better than many, if not most, of the other insurers listed on the ASX.

Things that you and I perceive as negatives are usually positives for insurance companies. Think of the last time you had to make an insurance claim. Did your premium rise the next time you chased around for a better price?

In March this year a sensible price to pay for QBE was $19.83. Now a sensible price is $19.92. So even with all the negative news and natural disasters, the only thing that appears to have changed is the market price.

The truth is that the business operations that make up QBE’s brand have been moving much slower than its share price would suggest, and the rising valuation suggests things are believed to be improving.

While the price was well above the estimated valuation three months ago, I couldn’t have predicted the share price would fall below it.

I did say that “With a gun to my head and forced to make a decision, I would bet with Frank O’Halloran at QBE every time”. That remains the case today.

I do get excited when the market, in its wisdom, decides that it temporarily dislikes great businesses. The result is a fall in the share price. Who doesn’t like to buy more of a good thing for less? The price however may not have declined far enough to provide the sort of Margin of Safety Ben Graham said should be required in Chapter 20 of his Intelligent Investor – arguably one of the two most important teachings in investment history.

There are a bunch of insurance businesses listed on the ASX. Some are pure insurers and some have insurance divisions within the business. I am interested to hear what you think of any of them. Have you had to deal with them and have you had a good or not so good experience? Do you work in the industry? Can you shed some light on who you think is the best and why? Share your thoughts by clicking Leave a Comment below.  AND REMEMBER – YOU MUST OBTAIN PERSONAL PROFESSIONAL ADVICE BEFORE CONDUCTING ANY TRANSACTION OF ANY KIND IN ANY SECURITY IN THE MARKET.

Posted by Roger Montgomery, 11 June 2010.

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Companies, Insightful Insights, Insurance.

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“Roger, would you buy Nick Scali (NCK) over the likes of TRS, ORL and JBH?” This last week, its been a frequently asked question.

Let me start by saying that I consider Nick Scali to be a high quality business. While the business listed in May 2004, I have run my ruler over the business financials since the year 2001. In every single year its been an A-Class company and an A1 in most. This is impressive. Few businesses have such an excellent track record, which speaks highly of management.

Indeed, given my tough quality and performance criteria, NCK would be in the top 5% of all companies listed on the ASX.

But are high quality financials and a good track record of performance enough to justify buying a business?

Let’s consider the businesses of NCK and The Reject Shop – another high quality retailer.

NCK is engaged in sourcing and retailing of household furniture and related accessories. The Company’s product portfolio includes chairs, lounges, outdoor, dining, entertainment  – what are called ‘big-ticket’ items as well as and furniture care products. It has 28 showrooms located in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia under the Nick Scali brand, and additional showrooms in Adelaide under the Scali Living and Scali Leather brand.

TRS on the other hand is engaged in discount variety retailing. Its footprint of around 187 ‘convenience’ stores is focused on low price points, offering a wide variety of merchandise. Stores are spread throughout Australia.

TRS has an exceptional history of quality and performance, and in that respect is not dissimilar to NCK.

While NCK and TRS both have top tier fundamentals, there is one major difference; their business models. And this is the important difference that puts TRS far ahead of NCK in my mind from an investor’s perspective.

Consider the economic cycle and the impact it could have on each business; NCK is a retailer of ‘big ticket’ items and TRS is a retailer of ‘low price point items’. Cast your mind back just a few years to when the stock market was crashing, and depression talk filled the media. Do you think spending on big-ticket items like a sofa or a $2 tube of parallel imported toothpaste selling at a cheaper price than a major supermarket, would have been reined in first? This is where TRS offers arguably a more stable and slow-changing revenue stream. TRS of course has its own issues and risks, just as any business has, but the stability of earnings is perhaps superior to that offered by NCK.

TRS has positioned itself as providing ‘low price points’ on everyday goods. Things you always need – daily essentials. I’m guessing you wouldn’t stop brushing your teeth, even during a credit crunch, but you may defer the purchase of that new sofa or outdoor furniture. TRS gets you in by offering really low prices on the daily essentials and then tempts you to fill your basket with other cheap items that have a higher margin for the retailer.

The problem for investors deciding between TRS and NCK is therefore not the quality of each business – they are both very high quality and have excellent management teams – it lies in the cyclical nature of NCK’s earnings.

After determining the quality and risks for a business, the next step is determining its intrinsic values. If you don’t complete this step, you are not investing, you are speculating.

Now to me, investing in a business like TRS is a fairly straight-forward decision. An investment decision in NCK on the other hand requires much more thought about consumer sentiment toward big-ticket discretionary purchases and how susceptible leveraged households are to increases in interest rates. Buffett once said find the one-foot hurdles that you can step over.

I’m not saying I would never buy shares in NCK. There is always a time and a price at which even a cyclical business is cheap, provided its of the highest quality of course.  I just prefer to stick to the one-foot hurdles rather than trying to jump over seven footers.

I’m off to brush my teeth. Don’t forget to leave your thoughts.

Posted by Roger Montgomery, 5 June 2010.

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Companies, Consumer discretionary.

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It was as a young boy that I became enamoured with the outdoors and the unique landscape of Australia. I discovered the easiest way for me to experience it was by participating in cubs and scouts. I will never forget the motto “be prepared”. It has served me well in many ways, and while nothing is ever failsafe, it is sound advice when it comes to investing.

The market and its associated commentary is on tenterhooks. You can attribute that to the supertax’s contribution to a foreign investing exodus, nerves surrounding the property bubble in China, rising interest rates, or whatever else seems to be fashionable on the day with which to attribute the market’s conniptions to. I believe however, quite simply, that prices are generally expensive compared to my estimates of intrinsic value. That means that the performances of the underlying businesses do not justify current prices.

Of course if you are a trader of stocks valuations don’t matter. You will sell on the emergence of the Greek storm-in-a-teacup and buy the day after, when another bail-out package is revealed. Alternatively, you will buy when one newsletter says the coast is clear and sell when yet another contradicts it. The people pointing out worries about China today are those that said the banks would rise to $100 before the GFC hit. One of the easiest things to observe in the markets is that predictions of a change in direction are far more frequent than they are accurate. And anyone can explain what has happened, but few seem to be able to look far enough ahead to be positioned well.

With arguably the exception of my warnings earlier this year about the impact of a decline in infrastructure spending in China (thanks to an unsustainable commercial property and capital investment scenario) on the demand for Australian resources, I don’t try to predict the direction of markets or the macro economic determinants. I simply look at whether there are many or any good quality businesses available to purchase below intrinsic value. If there aren’t many or any great businesses to buy cheaply, the only conclusion must be that the market is not cheap.

I cannot predict what the market will do next, but its worth being prepared. When the market is expensive compared to my valuations, one of two things can happen. On the one hand, share prices can drop. That is more likeley to be the case if values don’t rise – which of course is the second scenario. Valuations could rise and make current prices represent fair values (or even cheap if values rise substantially).

In the event that prices fall (remember I am NOT making any predictions), I thought its worth looking at some of the big cap stocks (not necessarily A1’s) and how much their current intrinsic values are expected to rise over the next two years. These estimates of course can change, and its worth noting that none of the companies are trading at a discount to their current intrinsic value.

My estimates of intrinsic value  don’t change anywhere nearly as frequently as share prices, but they do change. I expect some adjustments to start flowing through as companies begin what is called ‘confession season’ – that period just ahead of the end of year and the release of full year results, when companies either upgrade or downgrade their guidance to analysts for revenues, market shares and profits. These adjustments could, in aggregate, make the market look cheap, but that will require 2011 valuations to rise significantly.

If prices fall (I am not predicting anything), and one is not overly concerned about quality, then one strategy (not mine) may be to buy the large cap companies expected to lead any subsequent recovery. Many investors and their advisers still subscribe to the idea that ‘blue chips’ exist and are safe. They tend to think of the largest companies as blue chips (I don’t) and if they are going to buy any after a correction, we might expect they will buy those whose values are going to rise the most. Of course, they may not know nor care about my valuations, nor do they know which companies are going to rise the most (in intrinsic value terms), but over the long term, the market is a weighing machine and prices tend to follow values. It follows on this basis then that Telstra’s value increase of just a couple of percent per year over the next two years may not put it in an as attractive a light as, say NAB.

I think you get the idea. To share your thoughts click “Leave a Comment”.

Posted by Roger Montgomery, 15 May 2010

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Companies, Investing Education.

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