Tag Archives: stocks

Personal finance trends – the good and bad

Positive developments in 2013

1)      Lower expense ratios on many Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). Last year, Schwab started the trend of lowering ongoing management fees on their ETFs and eliminating the transaction costs to buy and sell these products on the Schwab platform. This move attracted the attention of competitors and now many ETFs are cheaper to own than ever before. These products allow the broadest diversification across entire market segments at the lowest possible cost.

2)      The government has increased the contribution limits for retirement accounts for the first time since 2008. Annual IRA contributions were bumped up by $500 to $5,500 for people 49 and under and $6,500 for 50 and over investors. Employer retirement plan contributions also increased. Individuals under 50 can contribute $17,500. The over-50 catch up contribution can add another $5,500 to get to $23,000 total.

3)      Congress adopted higher federal estate tax thresholds ($5.25 million per person and $10.5 million per couple in 2013) than expected by most pundits. This effectively eliminates the prospect of paying federal estate tax for 99.86% of estates according to the Tax Policy Center. It also provided much more clarity for estate planning professionals who work with high net worth individuals on estate planning issues. Many states still have lower estate tax thresholds, however. For example, in Washington state the limit is $2 million. If a person dies with an estate value of $1,999,999 no state estate tax is due. But reach $2,000,001 and an estate tax return and payment are necessary.

4)      Investors have returned to markets. According to Leuthold Group, through April 24, net cash flow into mutual funds was at its strongest pace ever with year-to-date positive cash flow $223 billion.

Trends that concern us:

1)      Regarding that cash flow, the point of concern is that $106 billion of the incoming investments have gone to bond mutual funds. We think bonds will be severely challenged to generate meaningful returns over the next several years. Combine the premium many bonds are trading at with current low yields and the fact that total return could turn negative when interest rates rise and particularly U.S. government bonds will struggle to post returns anything like the past decade. By comparison, $22 billion of new investments have entered U.S. stock funds so far this year.

2)      The low interest rate policy set by the Federal Reserve Board. This policy has lowered the borrowing costs for the U.S. Government, but it has also changed the way that we all invest. Bond investors who are searching for yield are taking considerably more investment risk with their fixed income portfolios than ever before. When the Fed finally increases interest rates, three things may happen: inflation could increase dramatically, bond default rates may rise, and returns for bonds could turn negative as investors seek newer bonds at different increasing interest rates.

3)      Less affordable long-term care insurance. A few trends are becoming clearer for the LTC marketplace. A) most residents of nursing homes are women, b) Most baby boomers don’t have long-term care insurance because they either feel that it is too expensive or they don’t think that they will ever need it, C) Rates paid for LTC policies are becoming gender based, and although they have stabilized somewhat in the past year, the combination of the continuation of the low interest rate policies by the federal government and higher claims rates by women will force LTC prices to continue to grow at higher rates than inflation.

~ Allyn Hughes, CFP® — Brooks, Hughes & Jones – Partners in Wealth Management, Tacoma, WA

www.BHJadvisors.com

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Stock market rally justified by earnings, reasonable market value

The U.S. stock market turned in a strong first month of 2013 as the S&P 500 gained 5.2%.

This coming after a 16% total return for the S&P 500 in 2012 has some wondering if the rally is close to exhaustion.

While we don’t expect double-digit gains to build throughout 2013, we don’t think the market is close to being overheated either. We’re not making a forecast but thought it might be helpful to see a couple charts that help explain value of the market. Of course, these charts and analysis portray a rational view and markets can become irrational from time to time. There’s no sense in trying to predict a return for the year or any short time frame. As Warren Buffett has said: “short-term market forecasts are poison and should be kept locked up in a safe place, away from children and also grown-ups who behave in the market like children.” However, we can confidently forecast that you’ll want stock market exposure over long periods regardless of short-term results.

So on with the show.

Two charts from presentations I’ve watched recently demonstrate how market prices may have room to grow to catch up with the reported earnings of U.S. companies.

This view of S&P 500 inflection points is from J.P. Morgan. Look at the first peak, March 2000. A measure of market value is the price/earnings ratio of the market. What price are investors paying for each dollar of company earnings. At this euphoric time, the P/E ratio (based on forward earnings expectations) was over 25. It had become excessive and the market needed a cleansing to get back down to a P/E ratio closer to historic norms.

The recovery from the internet bubble peaked in October 2007. At that time, even though the price of the S&P 500 had surpassed the March 2000 price, the price/earnings ratio was 15.2, 40% below the 2000 P/E ratio. The market had not been bid up by speculative investors quite like in 2000. Of course, that didn’t stop a significant bear market due to the credit crisis and recession of 2008.

So where are we at today? The recovering S&P 500 has crossed a price of 1,500 again. But corporate earnings have also grown at a strong rate. This means the price is generally justified by the earnings. The forward price/earnings ratio at the end of 2012 was just 12.5, roughly half of the irrational exuberance peak of March 2000.

Add January’s price appreciation and the forward P/E ratio is about 13.3.

SP500InflectionPoints

The combination of earnings and investor confidence in the trajectory of those earnings will be critical to determining how long this rally will continue.

Here’s another view – from economist Fritz Meyer – demonstrating how the market price has some catching up to do if history can be trusted as a guide.

SPearningsJan2013

 

The black line of the S&P 500 price over the past 25 years has generally kept an edge above the red line (S&P 500 earnings). It’s clear to see however, that the late 1990s S&P 500 value and the 2007 value grew disconnected from the reality of earnings.

Since 2010, though, good corporate earnings have not been reflected in stock prices that grow at the same pace. The S&P 500 black line has spent most of the time below the earnings line. Look at projected earnings going forward for 2013 and 2014 and you could rightfully judge that there is justification for stock prices to continue growing without getting too expensive.

Recovering investor confidence could have something to do with that. If cash flows shift back toward stocks and away from the bond market, gains may continue.

Of course, there are many potential shocks to the global economy which could erode emerging confidence and disrupt the growth in corporate earnings. But at this point, even significantly lower earnings would justify the current value of the S&P 500.

The S&P 500 is a stock market index based on the market capitalizations of 500 leading companies publicly traded in the U.S. stock market, as determined by Standard & Poor’s.

  • How confident are you in the stock market?
  • Have you changed the weight of stocks in your portfolio recently?

~ Gary Brooks, CFP® – Brooks, Hughes & Jones – Partners in Wealth Management – Tacoma, WA

www.BHJadvisors.com

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Global stock market correlation increases risk

Correlation is a measure of how much or little investments move in sync with each other. Complete correlation is 1.0. Opposite correlation is -1.0.

To construct a truly diversified portfolio, it is preferred that holdings respond differently to various market conditions and economic cycles. If investments move together with high correlation, they offer less risk management.

Historically, non-U.S. stocks have added diversifying qualities to an overall investment portfolio because their correlation to U.S. stocks was not high. But that has changed significantly. While international stocks do provide access to different economies, currencies and sources of earnings, their performance pattern has become less distinguishable from U.S. stocks.

Consider this information from J.P. Morgan.

During the 2008 financial crisis, many investors realized that although a concentrated portfolio may build wealth, a diversified portfolio protects it. High correlations among volatile asset classes can rapidly reduce a portfolio’s value, and although equity correlations have remained elevated since the crisis ended, this is not a post-crisis phenomenon. As shown in this week’s chart, the correlation among international equity markets has been on an upward trend over the past 20 years, likely due to these markets becoming increasingly interlinked through technological advancement and easier investor access. Thus, given that markets remain macro-driven and average correlations are 5x higher today than in the mid 1990s, under-diversified investors could be at serious risk, once again making a strong case for taking a balanced and diversified approach to investing.

Source: MSCI, Standard & Poor’s, FactSet, J.P. Morgan Asset Management.

While we believe it is important to be a global investor, it is also important to include investments in your portfolio that are not highly correlated with global stocks. Using low correlation assets can be very important, particularly in times when global stocks are declining. Notice in the graphic that the peak of correlation among global stocks came at the height of the 2008-09 crisis, exactly when less correlation would have been most valuable.

Do you know what level of correlation your investments have to each other?

Is your portfolio built to buffer down-market risk more than chase all the return of bull markets?

What is your definition of diversification?

Past performance does not guarantee future results.

Diversification does not guarantee investment returns and does not eliminate the risk of loss.

By Gary Brooks, CFP® — Brooks, Hughes & Jones, Partners in Wealth Management — Tacoma, WA

www.BHJadvisors.com

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“Heads I win, tails you lose” — Challenges of investing in corporate bonds

I had a chance to read David Swenson’s “Unconventional Success, A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment” recently. Swenson is the head of investing for Yale’s endowment.

This book was published in 2005 and does a good job of presenting Swenson’s thinking about investing before the market meltdown of 2008-2009. Before ’08-’09 he and his team created an enviable investment track record at Yale by investing in a variety of asset classes—many that had different performance attributes than U.S. stocks, but that also offered higher returns over long periods of time.

Although Swenson and his team invested in asset classes like timberland and commodities, the performance of Yale’s endowment during the melt down, however, was more like stocks than was expected. Yale’s endowment declined 24.6% ($5.6 billion) in fiscal year 2009 (7/01/08 through 6/30/09). Over the same time, the broad U.S. stock market – as measured by the Russell 3000 Index—lost 26.58%.

Swenson did lead the endowment to a solid recovery. The University’s longer term results remain in the top tier of institutional investors. Yale’s endowment posted average annual returns of 10.1% over the 10 years ending June 30, 2011, surpassing results for stocks, which returned 3.9% annually, and for bonds, which returned 5.1% annually.

Although somewhat out of date, the book gives Swenson’s insights about all aspects of the investment markets. One section that feels most relevant now highlights his thoughts about including corporate bonds in an individual’s investment portfolio.

Swenson doesn’t like corporate bonds because they have asymmetrical risks built into them. If a corporate bond is held to maturity, all that the investor can get for this investment is the coupon payments due and the principal returned. If interest rates decline, most corporate bonds will be called which will pay the investor a slight premium. Then the bondholder will have to go out and invest in another (lower paying) bond. Finally, the company could experience financial problems and the bond could become worthless. These characteristics give Swenson little reason to own corporate bonds. He sees very little upside and potentially a large downside.

Here is a little more information about the specific risks he sees with corporate bonds:

Credit Risk—Although the cash flow to debt ratios of most large U.S. companies have improved over the past two decades, the credit ratings of many of these companies have decreased. He thinks this is likely because two kinds of companies don’t take advantage of the debt market often–those companies that are relatively new and are fast growing, and those very large and successful (often highly rated) companies that have enough cash flow and other assets to internally finance their debt. That leaves the “middle-market” companies that need the financing but that may have higher levels of debt to their equity than these other firms.

Callability/Interest Rate Risk—Corporations frequently issue bonds with a call provision. This allows the issuer to redeem the bond if interest rates decline. If rates increase, the firm has locked in favorable funding for the bond until it matures. Swenson calls this a “heads I win, tails you lose” proposition because it favors the bond-issuing company regardless of the direction of interest rates—an asymmetrical result.

Liquidity—Compared to U.S. Treasury bonds, investment-grade (highly rated) corporate bonds offer yields that are slightly higher because of their less liquid nature. Swenson contends that these higher rates don’t necessarily pay for all of the additional risk that corporate bond holders take on compared to Treasury bonds.

Alignment of Interests—Shareholders of the stock in a company are helped when the value of the company’s debt obligations are reduced. Therefore, many corporate executives, whose compensation is likely tied to the share price, may make decisions which focus on the needs of the stock holders, and not the bond holders.

Swenson’s concept of the bond holder “having the deck stacked against them” seems all too important—especially in today’s very low interest rate environment.

This is reflected in Yale’s current asset allocation targets for the fiscal 2012 year:

  • Private Equity: 34%
  • Real Estate: 20%
  • Absolute Return: 17%
  • Natural Resources: 9%
  • Foreign Equity: 9%
  • Domestic Equity: 7%
  • Bonds and Cash: 4%

Traditional publicly-traded stocks and bonds make up 20% or less of the Yale portfolio. It’s not that Swenson doesn’t like corporate bonds, he doesn’t much care for Treasuries or foreign bonds either. Unfortunately, individual investors don’t have the same access to certain investment opportunities that multi-billion dollar endowments do.

~ Allyn Hughes, CFP®, ChFC®, CLU® — Brooks, Hughes & Jones, Partners in Wealth Management — Tacoma, Washington

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Tough to hit bull’s eye in turbulent markets

I recently read John Mauldin’s Little Book of Bull’s Eye Investing: Finding Value, Generating Absolute Returns and Controlling Risks in Turbulent Markets.

Mauldin also writes a weekly e-newsletter that provides outstanding perspective on risk management, global markets and the economy. I read it regularly so I had an understanding of his positioning. The book does a nice job of clarifying realities of investing that don’t often get communicated to the general public.

Mauldin thinks we are in for several more years of lackluster stock market returns as the world deleverages from burdensome debt.

“Investing is about seeking value and controlling risk and working with the trends rather than against them,” Mauldin writes. As simple as it seems to find value, manage risk and ride trends during rising markets, it can be very difficult to do the same when markets behave like they have over the past 12 years.

Some of Mauldin’s key points:

Bear markets can be very long-lasting despite the regular appearance of bull market rallies within the longer-term downtrend.

  • If you invested in the S&P 500 in 1966, it was 16 years before you saw a gain and 26 years before you had an inflation-adjusted gain
  • It is clear that there have been long periods of history when the market did not grow at all, let alone the 10 percent per year reported by Ibbotson.

Markets overreact in both directions:

  • In the 17 years from the end of 1964 to the end of 1981, the Dow gained exactly one-tenth of 1 percent. That’s 0.1 percent. In the bull market that followed, from 1982 to the peak of March of 2000, the Dow rose from 875 to 11,723—a spectacular gain of 1,239 percent, nearly a 13-fold increase.
  • An overvalued market doesn’t just return to normal value; it keeps falling and goes far below normal.

There is not a strong correlation between a strong economy and exceptional stock returns.

  • From 1964 through 1981, while the stock market was piling up its 0.1 percent gain, gross domestic product (GDP) actually grew 374 percent. During the bull market period from 1981 until the beginning of 2000, the economy grew only 197 percent, or about half of the earlier period. If you take out the effects of inflation, you find the economy grew exactly 76 percent in both periods
  • The experience from 1964 to 1981 is bald proof that the stock market and the economy can go their separate ways for long periods. And that experience wasn’t an anomaly. The economy more than doubled in real terms from the end of 1930 through 1950. Yet in 1950, stock prices were roughly the same after 20 years.

Emotion and perceptions drive the stock market as much, or perhaps more so, than earnings of publicly traded companies.

  • Citing research from Dreman and Lufkin: “investor perceptions are more important than the fundamentals (statistical measures of a stock’s value) … the cause of the major price reversals is psychological, or more specifically, investor overreaction.”

On finding mutual fund managers who can repeat market-beating performance:

  • Some managers have what appears to be a very good track record, but when you look into their actual performance, it turns out to be based on a very few big-payoff trades. The rest of the portfolio simply moved with the market. If you invest with such a manager, you are hoping he can keep hitting more than his share of home runs. This is very hard to do year after year. (While Mauldin questions the ability of mutual fund managers to outperform consistently, he does not alternatively prefer index funds that simply buy the market. Reduced expenses are one thing but full exposure to a lot of unattractive investments is not worth the lower cost according to Mauldin.)

On gold

  • I divide gold into two piles: “insurance” gold and “investment” gold. I feel strongly about insurance gold. I think everyone should have some. I continue to by physical gold every month. In February 2002, I turned bullish on gold as an investment, and I still am. I expect to remain so for some time. There is significant chance that the U.S. Congress will fail to get the federal government’s deficit under control. That would mean an even bigger rise in the price of gold.

On commodities

  • Commodity funds add true diversification to your portfolio because their returns do no correlate with returns on stocks or returns on bonds. They are part of what I consider to be a core part of a diversified portfolio.

On the future

  • I am not certain about much, but I am certain about this: the future will be different from what we think it will be today. The changes are coming at an ever-accelerating pace. We can plan and dream. But more than ever we need to think about Plans B and C and D. The odds are your personal world is going to change dramatically in the next 10 years. How you cope with the change will be the measure of how well you live. Change is like a train. Either it can run over you, or you can catch it to the future.

~ Gary Brooks – Brooks, Hughes & Jones, Partners in Wealth Management, Tacoma, WA

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Warren Buffett warns about bonds and gold

The annual report from Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway presents much anticipated reading every spring. A few of the most compelling snippets follow. If you’d like to read Warren’s letter in its entirety, you can find it here. The section titled The Basic Choice for Investors and the One We Strongly Prefer starting on page 17 is the source of these notes.

Berkshire Hathaway owns dozens of companies across a variety of industries with an emphasis in insurance businesses. It also owns common stock of another dozen-plus publicly traded companies such as Coca-Cola, Wells Fargo, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, American Express and ConocoPhillips.

Buffett’s preference for equity in well-managed companies is long held and has allowed Berkshire Hathaway to outpace the S&P 500 by an annual average of more than 10.6% per year since 1965.

Buffett prefaces his commentary with a thought about the misperception of risks between stocks and bonds, particularly when considering their ability to beat inflation.

Assets can fluctuate greatly in price and not be risky as long as they are reasonably certain to deliver increased purchasing power over their holding period. And as we will see, a non-fluctuating asset can be laden with risk.

He goes on to document his assessment of fixed income investments:

Investments that are denominated in a given currency include money-market funds, bonds, mortgages, bank deposits, and other instruments. Most of these currency-based investments are thought of as “safe.” In truth they are among the most dangerous of assets. …

Current (interest) rates do not come close to offsetting the purchasing-power risk that investors assume. Right now bonds should come with a warning label. …

Today, a wry comment that Wall Streeter Shelby Cullom Davis made long ago seems apt: “Bonds promoted as offering risk-free returns are now priced to deliver return-free risk.”

Buffett’s comments are mostly reflective of the environment for U.S. government bonds and they support our current preference for using corporate bonds and foreign bonds to complete fixed income allocations in our clients’ portfolios.

The amount of money still flowing into the bond market probably confounds Buffett but what he really struggles to understand is the fascination with gold. He presents a compelling example of why gold should not be sought at such a premium.

Today the world’s gold stock (editor’s note: mined reserves, not stock as in investment security) is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce – gold’s price as I write this – its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A. Let’s now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world’s most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?

Admittedly, when people a century from now are fearful, it’s likely many will still rush to gold. I’m confident, however, that the $9.6 trillion current valuation of pile A will compound over the century at a rate far inferior to that achieved by pile B.

Many of our clients have just fractional exposure to gold via broader commodities-oriented investments. We have not chosen to invest specifically in gold largely for the reasons Buffett outlines.

Regardless of whether the stock market is currently fairly valued or even overvalued after a five-month bull market, Buffett clearly prefers holding stocks rather than fixed income investments or gold.

I believe that over any extended period of time this category of investing will prove to be the runaway winner among the three we’ve examined. More important, it will be by far the safest.

~ Brooks, Hughes & Jones, Partners in Wealth Management, Tacoma, WA

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Keeping up with inflation – income vs. dividends

Inflation is a critical measure that determines whether our income (from employment and investment) allows us to keep up with our cost of living.

Two charts caught our eye recently, each using inflation to put financial security and investment opportunities in a relative context.

First, John Maudlin’s newsletter Outside the Box relays this chart from Greg Weldon (weldononline.com). It presents information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics comparing the Consumer Price Index and U.S. Disposable Income from 1996-2011. The copy is a bit blurry but the lines tell the story. Since 2005, disposable income (black line) has trailed inflation (pink line) and the difference grew significantly in 2011.

Personal disposable income, mostly generated by earned income from employment, is flatlining but another form of income is growing at a faster pace than inflation.

This next chart looks at the amount of dollars paid out as dividends by the stocks in the S&P 500 Index of large U.S. companies. The green bars show how the amount of dividend payments has easily surpassed the level of inflation over the past 20 years. The dollar amount of dividends came down during the 2008-09 recession when some companies reduced or eliminated their dividends. Even at the rate much lower than the 2007 peak, dividends offer an alternative that keeps up with the cost of living.

http://www2.blackrock.com/US/individual-investors/education/shareholder-magazine/article-1

Of course, dividend-paying stocks are not a risk-free asset and the stock prices of the companies paying dividends are more volatile than the bonds of high-quality companies. But for investors who expect to hold the dividend-paying stocks through market ups and downs and use the dividends to supplement their income, the ability to outpace inflation has been consistent.

~ Brooks, Hughes & Jones, Partners in Wealth Management, Tacoma, WA

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The premium for taking stock risk is shrinking

Following up on Gary’s Tacoma News Tribune column on February 2, here’s another way to look at expected investment returns.

Portfolio construction principles start with what is perceived to be the “risk-free return.”

In order to take a step up the risk ladder, investors need to be rewarded with more return than the risk-free asset. This return above the risk-free asset is called the equity risk premium. The historical equity risk premium for broad stock markets has generally been considered to be 4.5-6.0% per year. It used to be that the 10-year Treasury bond paid 4%. If you start at 4% and added 4.5-6.0% of equity risk premium, you could reasonably expect 8.5-10% returns on stocks, in line with historical averages.

Today, the return expectation has been squeezed from both ends. Currently, 10-year Treasuries pay approximately 2%. A recent survey by the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Institute of prominent money managers suggested that the equity risk premium is now in the 3.5-4.0% range. So you add the two together and now you’ve got expected returns of the broad stock market at 5.5-6.0% per year. Oddly, at a time when risk seems more prominent, and therefore should command an even greater premium to take on the risk, prudent expectations for returns have declined considerably.

You could conclude that if stocks aren’t expected to reward you at the historical rate, why bother to take the risk? Instead, you could just focus on bonds. The problem is that bonds, especially in the U.S. seem less attractive than stocks on a risk-adjusted basis.

For many years, a common assumption of investors has been that with a broadly diversified mix of stocks and bonds, you should be able to double your money every 10 years. This rule of thumb requires an average annual return of 7.2%, assuming no withdrawals. Therefore, if returns are reduced, the double-your-money formula takes longer. At 6% returns, it takes 12 years to double. At 5% returns – assuming that some bonds have lessened the overall return expectation for a balanced portfolio – it’s closer to 14.5 years to double.

For someone who is still working and saving, there is opportunity to save more or work longer to overcome these lower expected returns. The big problem confronts current retirees who are withdrawing money to supplement their income. Lower returns on their remaining invested capital mean that even the “safe” withdrawal rate of 4% could be too high to guard against exceptional longevity or unexpectedly high expenses.

Ideally, over time, global debt and economic challenges will improve and expected returns will revert to more normal levels. But investment performance can be fleeting. That’s why it’s important to have an understanding of “what if?” as part of your retirement income plan.

~ Brooks, Hughes & Jones, Partners in Wealth Management, Tacoma, WA

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