FY-2019…Hella Surprise Of A Year!?

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absolute valuation, Alphabet, annual review, buy and hold, coronavirus, Cpl Resources plc, Donegal Investment Group, Ebola, GARP investing, growth stocks, isolationism, KR1 plc, populism, portfolio performance, Record plc, relative valuation

It’s still January…so by now, I’m sweating to wrap this up by month-end (at the very latest!), while you’re probably feeling besieged (& bamboozled) by the media’s parade of talking heads who seamlessly re-write their broken #2019 narratives & still pitch their #2020 market prognostications with undaunted confidence. Which is a tad discouraging when I’m busy trying to come up with my own unique version & perspective…albeit, in the wake of a fantastic year (talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth!).

Seriously…name a market/asset class that actually declined!?

But rewind a year & check the gamut of their 2019 predictions, and (once again) you’ll remember/realise they’re full of highly paid shit! So before I even start – let alone, God forbid, pontificate – I’ll share the only piece of market wisdom you really need to know, above all else:

‘Nobody knows anything…’

And that quote’s about the movie business! Granted, for anyone who cares, Hollywood probably seems like the most impressive Rube Goldberg contraption in the world…but frankly, figuring it out is a total cake-walk compared to grappling with & predicting what might actually happen next in the markets & the global economy! But unfortunately, that’s how we all step up & play the game:

Like useless office work expanding to fill all available time…useless market forecasts expand to fill all available airtime & news holes!

Probably my greatest investing achievement in the last year was switching off the financial media – and yeah, I stopped paying attention to brokers years ago – is it any wonder I reported such negligible portfolio activity? [It’s a real travesty seeing #buyandhold investors re-classified as chumps over the years (& decades)]. And in reality, markets are primarily focused on trying to discount a 12-18 month time-horizon, which means a diet of narrative manufactured to simply explain yesterday & today’s market/stock zig-zags is just irrelevant & misleading anyway. And so, I recommend you do the same: Go on, just switch off that guy on the box, you know the one…he just happened to attend some ‘school in Boston’, and is now an instant expert on epidemiology and up & to the right #coronavirus charts! Again:

‘Nobody knows anything…’

H1-2019 Wexboy Portfolio Performance

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#GenerationWar, #WallofWorry, Alphabet, benchmarking, bubbles, crypto, Donegal Investment Group, floating world, KR1 plc, negative yields, portfolio performance, quantitative easing, Saga Furs

And once more…into battle!

Before the month is out, it’s time I look back & share a H1 portfolio update. Of course, in the wake of last year’s Q4 carnage, it wasn’t all that surprising to see markets chalking up a near-perfect YTD performance across the board. Equally unsurprising was the US market’s continued leadership…which seems like an inevitability these days, to the chagrin of long-suffering European & value investors. [Um, aren’t they synonymous?!] So here’s the scoreboard – as usual, my H1-2019 Benchmark Return is a simple average of the four main indices which represent the majority of my portfolio:

On average, a 13.4% benchmark gain…led by the S&P with a 17.3% gain (bested by the Nasdaq, which boasted a 20.7% gain). More surprising was the robust performance of the FTSE 100…despite a tsunami of Brexit nonsense, it still managed to deliver a 10.4% gain. [Not an index-related fluke – the more domestic FTSE 250 & the AIM All-Share (despite a glut of profit warnings) clocked up (on average) similar gains of 11.2% & 7.1%, respectively]. As for the ISEQ & Bloomberg Euro 500, they did themselves proud too, recording respective gains of 12.3% & 13.6%.

Overall, this is a reversal of the 13.5% benchmark loss I reported last year. Which, noting the S&P’s consistent out-performance, is an unwelcome reminder European markets are still actually lower/no better off than end-2017 levels! And really, I’m just cherry-picking here – my European benchmarks have pretty much gone nowhere for the last four years. And again, that’s another flattering perspective…believe it or not, Euro indices have mostly traded sideways for close to two decades now! [Read ’em & weep: FTSE 100, ISEQ, STOXX Europe 600]*. Sure, you still earned a dividend yield…but this savages the comforting notion that equities will always make you decent money/are the superior asset class in the medium & long-term. Though maybe, just maybe, there’s a silver lining to that bag you’re holding:

Wexboy Portfolio Prospects – Part II

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Alphabet, Applegreen, bubble thesis, Donegal Investment Group, GARP investing, Google, growth investing, KR1 plc, Kryptonite 1, portfolio allocation, portfolio performance, QEInfinity, Record plc, stock picks, stock tips, value investing

Ugh, collywobbles!

Sure, we can all breathe easier now, but still feels a little bumpy out there, eh? Though maybe you should ignore the incipient nausea…just relax & embrace the ride! ‘Cos I’m perversely encouraged by these fresh mini-bouts of panic we’ve been seeing this year. They’re a useful reminder investors still have a real wall of worry to climb here. Which is probably the most important & necessary pre-condition underwriting the durability of today’s bull market. [And yes, it’s only a bull market…when investors (esp. the man in the street) go from hoping they’ll make money, to knowing they’ll make money, that’s when we enter bubble territory]. However, we still need to see whether my macro investment thesis eventually plays out here – a thesis I express via a question:

Globally, we’re still conducting a truly unprecedented monetary (& fiscal) experiment…could we end up ultimately inflating the most incredible bubble ever?

If you think that’s ridiculous, we really don’t need to debate it here. Or rehash a complete litany of facts & figures which prove history must repeat itself – the ever-flattening US yield curve being the latest bogeyman. But I have to ask, what’s so bloody alarming about entirely average market P/E ratios…when interest rates are still anything but average?! And despite their trajectory, we’ll obviously continue to enjoy ultra-low long & short-term rates in absolute terms, while central banks (in aggregate) also continue to print money:

Yep, there’s the real boiler-room of this market – in every sense of the word – as this chart nicely demonstrates:

H1-2017 Wexboy Portfolio Performance

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Alphabet, Applegreen, benchmarking, bull market, Fortress Investment Group, GARP investing, Newmark Security, portfolio performance, Rasmala, Record plc, value investing, Zamano

Benchmark Performance:

Let’s jump right in, here’s the H1-2017 performance for my usual benchmark indices:

Move along, nothing to report here…but that’s exactly what we should focus on! Of course, the financial media’s become more & more hysterical about the markets – de rigueur in an ADHD world – but cooler & more logical heads have also been sounding the alarm bells so often, I’m sure I’ve gone deaf. But sacrilegious as it may sound, a +8.2% YTD gain for the S&P 500 isn’t all that extraordinary… Sure, it’s within spitting distance of the market’s average annual return, but that doesn’t mean much – history confirms annual returns tend to rack up in just a few months, with the market faffing around for the rest of year.

And looking back, I’m hard-pressed to find this outrageous bull market everybody’s yammering about. In reality, the S&P soared a massive 6.6% pa over the last three calendar years (2014-2016). Seriously…that’s it!? [How many readers are reacting with disbelief right now?] Even my blind maiden aunt couldn’t get her knickers in a twist over that kind of return…

Of course, the nay-sayers will argue the S&P’s trajectory is irrelevant – we should really focus on how expensive it is today, in absolute terms. Hmmm…maybe if you cherry-pick the most damning P/E multiple comparison!? But taking a longer-term perspective, the Nifty Fifty actually peaked at 42x in 1972, while TMT stocks peaked at 60x in 2000 (with the S&P hitting 29x). Except isn’t that just a greater fool approach…shouldn’t we be evaluating the market vs. normal P/E multiples? Well, again I fail to understand the alarm: The S&P today actually sports an 18.8 forward P/E, a mere 9% premium to the average 17.2 forward P/E over the last 20 years (which included the dot-com bubble, but also the financial crisis).

And absurdly, the doubters choose to ignore gravity (i.e. interest rates)! Whereas I’m perfectly happy to defer to Buffett here – aside from secular earnings growth itself, interest rates are arguably the equity market’s greatest single driver (& valuation benchmark). This one 10 Year UST chart effectively tells you more than a dozen books could about the US equity market’s trajectory over the last 50+ years:

So Why Not Google It..?

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$GOOG, $GOOGL, advertising, Alphabet, artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, Buffett, DeepMind, economic moat, Google, Larry Page, machine learning, mobile, network effects, search, Sergey Brin, YouTube

Last month, I posed a serious question:

‘So Why Not Buy Apple..?!’.

Just days later, we got our first hint that Buffett himself was buying Apple! Followed shortly after by that bombshell CNBC interview (here’s the transcript), where he revealed an $18 billion+ Apple investment*, the vast majority bought by him in Jan/recent months (& the rest by Todd/Ted in early-2016). What better confirmation of my assertion that value investors – even the greatest of them all, at 86 years of age – would be wise to pose such a question to themselves!?

[*Pretty sure Apple is Buffett’s largest common stock investment ever (on a cost basis). In fact, I wonder if it’s the largest stock investment ever made by a single investor (again, in terms of cost)? Sure, Todd/Ted/Charlie did provide some inspiration/feedback here, but we can be damn sure Buffett never buys anything ’til he makes his own mind up! So: Your thoughts/feedback?]

Granted, I got lucky…

Was I confident I’d see Buffett talking up an Apple position just weeks later? Um, no… [Don’t forget, Icahn announcing a multi-billion holding some years back was a huge surprise too!] And maybe I chose it specifically as the largest & most obvious/controversial value stock out there. Not to mention, the head fake I pulled: While I did summarise its attractive fundamentals/valuation, my post clearly wasn’t intended to be a detailed thesis. But hey, it was still the right question at the right time, so I’ll take the kudos!? And Buffett’s purchase now serves as great inspiration to present a genuinely compelling investment thesis here. Yeah but, just not Apple – I mean, who even needs a thesis right now when Buffett’s put so much money where his mouth is?! Instead, we’ll focus on a company which is arguably the antithesis of Apple – therefore, I ask:

So Why Not Google It..?