Value Beginning to be Valued?

Many sectors of value stocks have been murdered with horrible under-performance over the past decade to 14 years. Set the Fed Funds Rate to zero, have the ECB go negative with rates and even Greek bonds throw up a negative yield. Literally junk bonds with negative yields.

Greece’s three-year debt turned negative on Friday, and then the country received more good news after the surprise decision by Moody’s Investors Service on Friday night to upgrade the nation’s debt. The upgrade, from Ba3 from B1 previously, still leaves Greek debt in junk market territory, and three notches away from becoming investment grade.

With such a low benchmark from bonds, shouldn’t value stocks look relatively attractive?

Even the Greek 10-year recently yielded 0.77% down from 35% in 2012. How dystopian does one’s view of the future need to be in order to justify those prices? And if one’s view is that dystopian do they think central banks won’t print & should they be in government bonds? Wouldn’t they be better off in gold, with a small slice of gold miners and bitcoin?

There are a couple big pieces of value under-performance. With central banks paying nothing the value of far off growth is higher & with the COVID-19 lockdowns murdering the value of physical infrastructure while attention and activity moves online, that creates a hell of a lot of momentum for high-margin fast-growing software & digital platform plays. And at some point momentum creates its own media coverage, brand value & further self-reinforcing momentum – at least until something breaks.

The Wall Street Journal noted a big part of the recent underperformance of value stocks was due to not valuing intangible assets correctly.

Intangibles refer to a company’s investments in things such as research and development, patents and intellectual property. Generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) treat such investments as an expense rather than an asset on the balance sheet, so instead of being viewed as something that potentially enhances a company’s value, intangibles are treated as something that reduces it. “That makes no sense,” Prof. Harvey says.

The study they cite mentioned how intangible assets went from being 25% of book value to 100% of book value from 1963 to the early 2000s.

What’s more with the above is many online plays tends to lead to monopoly market dominance to where the dominant player can give kickbacks to prevent competition from entering the market.

Google owns search. When the UK studied the search market they found even if Bing gave Apple a 100% revenue share that would under-earn what Apple earned from selling the Safari default search position to Google.

Facebook owns social. Twitter trades around where it did at their IPO. Facebook bought Instagram and Whatsapp. Facebook intervened to get the US political machinery to gum up Tiktok’s growth & prospects.

Google and Apple split the mobile app store game with a fat 30% rake.

Amazon owns e-commerce. Their white label products & large ad unit sizes force brands to buy brand-related ads to protect their pre-existing brand equity. This means Amazon has margins other online retailers can not match & if there is particularly strong competition in a category they can use the subsidized profits from AWS to sell goods below cost in that category to kill their competitor’s growth like they did with Diapers.com. Walmart’s big Jet acquisition changed their narrative but ultimately was a shut down in spite of costing $3.3 billion.

Intangible assets aside, value stocks have had their worst performance in centuries:

According to Mr Samonov, the value factor is now down 64 per cent from its peak in 2007, going beyond the previous record — a 59 per cent tumble suffered from the late 19th century until a nadir in 1904.

As soon as the election was called journalists were quickly writing about how value will continue to under-perform since there was no blue wave. On Pfizer’s announcement of a 90% effective COVID-19 vaccine (after the election, of course) the stock market was up huge.

“I think people are going to stop having anxiety everyday…I think we see the beginning of the end. That’s a big deal,” said Tom Lee, Fundstrat head of research. “I think the market was happy to wait until we got vaccine progress before we got the rotation. There was a huge amount of underperformance in these cyclicals and epicenter stocks. We could see months and months of this. This could rally for awhile.”

Safe havens like gold (and FANGs) fell while beaten down value sectors like financials and energy massively outperformed technology today.

As much as some habits have moved across online many people want to get out and explore the world, be with friends, and connect with nature. It is hard to suggest Expedia should be at 52-week highs (people want to book a flight & hotel to go across the country or to the other side of the world) while suggesting a Walgreens Boots should be barely scraping along (it is to dangerous to go to the local drug store). At the same time, the market cap of GoodRX is about half of that of Walgreens Boots. Is that sustainable? A fast-growing coupon app worth about half as much as a company that has $140 billion in revenues and serves about half the market?

Positioning for More Trump

Donald J. Trump may not be a great person, but it is hard to make him sound any less appealing than the following

If you give into terrorist garbage the terrorists do not suddenly become decent human beings. There is no end to the “social” justice inversion of reality until outcomes are (more than) equalized and productive members of society are enslaved to the pay-to-breed crew.

There are now cities where the citywide IQ level is more than a standard deviation below the national average.

The guy guilty of walking while white almost certainly paid the other “person’s” parents to breed.

If a person finds that sort of lawlessness enviable they can just move to Africa rather than voting for more of it in the United States.

JPMorgan Says Investors Should Prepare for Rising Odds of Trump Win

Alternatively stated, …

Things that are likely to do well under Trump 2.0…

  • private prison companies: the social justice hoodrats will be aggressively prosecuted & there will be lots of bodies demanding more cells after there is a violent crescendo on the media once again claiming the Trump victory was a farce. Tickers: CXW – CoreCivic, GEO – The GEO Group
  • rural & suburban real estate: fewer people will want to live in the hollowed out, racist, violent bombed out landscapes where cities once stood. there is a positive feedback loop here where as the wealthy who are most able to leave do the tax base shrinks & public services further decline making the top 1% of payers ask repeatedly “what exactly am I paying for” as the pay-to-breed crew hits them or their neighbors in the back of the head with concrete while they walk down the street. Tickers: MAS – Masco, OC – Owens Corning, BECN – Beacon Roofing Supply Inc, W – Weyerhaeuser, PPG – PPG Industries, HD – Home Depot, LOW – Lowe’s, SHW – Sherwin-Williams, LPX – Louisiana-Pacific, OSB – Norbord, UFPI – UFP Industries, BMCH – BMC Holdings, BCC – Boise Cascade, AMWD – American Woodworking Corporation, CSTE – Caeserstone, AYI – Acuity Brands, LII – Lennox Inernational Inc., AOS – A. O. Smith Corporation, EXP – Eagle Materials, DOOR – Masonite International Corporation, many others
    • good suppliers can more easily pass inflationary pressures onto homebuilders while homebuilders (like DHI, LEN, KBH, TOL, PHM, LGIH, MTH, TMHC, BZH, etc.) will face rising municipal permit fees, labor tightness driving up wages, etc
    • added: the trend of children living with their parents well into adulthood has exceeded Great Depression era highs “In July, 52% of young adults resided with one or both of their parents, up from 47% in February, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of monthly Census Bureau data. The number living with parents grew to 26.6 million, an increase of 2.6 million from February.”
    • the above trend of living with parents is with the massive federal deficit, massive bond buying by the Federal Reserve along with widespread unemployment checks. These numbers will get higher over time as those financial supports fall away & rental contracts expire as foreclosures also rise dramatically.
    • larger families will want space from one another, leading to further moves not only from urban to suburban or rural, but also to dwellings with more rooms for a home office, the kids, the grandkids, etc.
  • computing at home: even after the pandemic ends, people will still spend more time at home because they have grown more acclimated to it. some of the hardware companies are priced as though growth will never come back even though it has already started happening. Tickers: INTC – Intel, WDC – Western Digital, STX – Seagate, many others
    • Intel has heavily missed out on mobile & their stock was beaten down on announcing delays with their next generation devices vital to having powerful computing in small devices like cell phones, but they can still do well on desktop.
    • Seagate, Western Digital & Toshiba basically own the hard drive market between them
    • Chinese competition will take time to come online
    • computers are powerful & relatively cheap all-purpose entertainment & work devices.
  • guns: people who bought guns in advance of a Biden presidency already own them. but the resulting violence from another mainstream media led election nullification effort will lead to a lot of subsequent demand among radicals along with families who want to protect their loved ones from radicals. Tickers: SWBI – Smith & Wesson Brands Inc, RGR – Strurm, Ruger & Co., VSTO – Vista Outdoor
  • telecom equipment: as Huawei & ZTE gear get branded as spyware the only serious existing competitors are Ericsson & Nokia. Tickers: ERIC, NOK.
    • China’s thuggish nature is an advertisement for the competition

Riots & Private Prisons

I first pitched this idea on Twitter about a week ago in response to celebrities lining up to bail out violent protestors. I figured this would be the almost ideal hedge on #WOKE culture that escalates and excuses violence.

The relative percent of the US population which is incarcerated is absurd by international standards. 2.3 million people are currently incarcerated in U.S. jails and prisons. The U.S. is 4% of the world’s population while housing 21% of its prisoners.

While county jails have let many people out amid the COVID-19 crisis far fewer have been released from prisons.

The prison companies Corecivic Inc (CXW) and The GEO Group (GEO) have rather low valuations, high yields, and have not recovered anywhere near as well as the broader stock market. Of course value plays tend to respond more slowly than capital compounding machines, but the downside risk on these is not too big unless we blow through the March lows.

TickerCXWGEO
P/E9.5810.97
Div Yield12.76%13.84%
52 week high$24.38$24.03
52 week low$8.33$9.95
current price$13.79$13.87
annual revenues$1.99 billion$2.47 billion
market cap$1.65 billion$1.68 billion
enterprise value$3.65 billion$4.42 billion

Since the riots started & other REITs have taken off these stocks have also had a good week, but their movements have been smaller than those at mall companies like Simon Property Group (SPG) or Tanger Factory Outlet Centers (SKT). Of course their move to the downside was less extreme than some other names. Falling from $24 to $8 is losing about 66% of market cap whereas Tanger fell from $18 to $4 before bouncing back to about $9.

The election likely determines longer term outcomes for the prison companies, but either candidate could promote making marijuana legal & letting many nonviolent drug offenders out of prison.

This is likely a winning trade if the stock market holds up and sort of stagnates along or if there is a big rotation away from growth toward value plays. It also likely does well if the riots last right up until election and so many people are turned off by the #woke movement that Trump gets re-elected. And if people learn to ignore and tune out the daily COVID-19 death totals then that would remove some of that risk.

If Biden wins the presidential election and there is a Democrat sweep of congress there is a good chance a lot of prisoners would be released, particularly if the SJW movement remains in force after inauguration. If a blue wave sweep seems likely these could sell off in advance.

This is also likely a losing trade if municipal and state budgets get slashed so much that many prisoners are let out soon, or if on the continuing COVID-19 flare up there is a mass push to let prisoners out.

The narrative on prison labor already has a rather ugly past associated with it. The widely contagious disease spreading through prisons combined with some prison labor being used in poultry plants in Louisiana certainly has the seeds of another social justice movement. Some poorer countries have already done mass releases as COVID-19 spread. And a lot of people who end up in prison are from poorer backgrounds, so when visitors come to visit them many of them are also poor living in congested areas where COVID-19 is likely to spread.

Long XOM

Today may be the bottom for ExxonMobil. A triple (or quadruple? quintuple? octuple?) lindy of factors confluence in a culmination of pure culmination.

  • The stock has went nowhere in a decade & is off about 13% so far this year after under-performing the market last year. We are not trading far off the 2010 lows.
  • Jim Cramer compared oil stocks to smoking stocks.
  • The stock’s performance is weighed down by cash concerns from counter-cyclical investments – which is when it is best to make said investments:
    In 2019, Exxon produced $6.6 billion in free cash flow and spent $14.7 billion on dividend payments. Analysts at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) wrote after the earnings report that the deficit between the company’s free cash flow and its dividend payments is expanding rapidly.
  • The Guyana development appears to have some solid economics:
    Exxon Mobil Corp.’s oil-production contract with Guyana is so heavily weighted in the supermajor’s favor that it will deprive the tiny South American country of some $55 billion over the life of the agreement, according to human-rights group Global Witness.
  • Goldman Sachs finally downgraded the stock yesterday:
    The decline came after Goldman Sachs analyst Neil Mehta downgraded shares to Sell from Neutral on concerns that the company’s return on common equity were lagging behind its targets. He dropped his price target to $59 from $72. At the root of these concerns are Exxon’s failures to improve its cash production.
  • The PBoC cut reverse repo rates & then injected money into the Chinese market for the second day in a row, causing their stocks to close up on the second day of trading, after a single huge down day tied to the coronavirus outbreak.
    • On Monday 3,257 stocks fell by their 10% daily limit: “All but 162 of the almost 4,000 stocks in Shanghai and Shenzhen recorded losses, with about 90% dropping the maximum allowed by the country’s exchanges.”
    • Macau is shutting down their casinos for weeks. China is going to keep on printing.
    • China complained that the US was both not doing enough about the coronavirus outbreak AND that the US was fanning fears. There is also rumors that the trade deal could be breaking down as China does their world famous after the contract is signed negotiations can begin trick.
    • The Federal Reserve is still pumping FOMO into the markets to paper over the coronavirus. If they and China are both pouring money into the markets eventually that is going to spill over into commodity prices.
  • Oil prices have fallen the most of any January in the past 30 years, recently entering a bear market. OPEC is conducting a meeting, looking to cut production by a half-million barrels per day. While ExxonMobil may need to sell assets or raise debt to pay dividends, some Middle East countries would outright collapse if oil prices stay low for an extended period of time.
  • The stock goes ex-div on Monday & some will buy the recent dip ahead of that (though there will be a downdraft of selling after it).

Buying oil stocks today is the inverse trade of being long Tesla, without the carrying cost of potentially toxic shorts which can trigger margin calls as other shorts are forced to exit their positions, or the theta time decay factor tied to options.

Tesla is up another 16% this morning after jumping nearly 20% yesterday, giving them a market cap of about $158 billion. For comparison sake, …

  • Fiat Chrystler is valued at about $26 billion
  • Ford is valued at about $36 billion
  • Honda is valued at about $47 billion
  • GM is valued at $48 billion
  • Toyota is valued at about $232 billion

It would take serious balls to short Tesla with any scale. An easier way to take that trade with a bit less leverage is to by a solid oil major. They are beaten down and left for dead.

Commodities have had a brutal run of late

Central bankers & politicians fighting coronavirus with massive stimulus will eventually put a bid under commodities.

If oil stocks have been dead money for a decade is it a sound bet it will be dead money for another decade? Perhaps if you have a $7,000 to $15,000 price target on Tesla, the bitcoin of cars.

Here’s to Tesla’s trillion dollars in annual revenues in the next decade!

It’s Probably Nothing

QE4 is well underway…

… orderly markets are contained globally.

While the market as a whole is treading water, some software names continue to get beaten down. And some of the “pilot to copilot, we goin down in flames” names have seen their sharpest reversals in decades.

PETS recently had its biggest one-day gain in 17 years, up about a third the day after beating expectations. That’s a proper short squeeze.

The company reported earnings of 33 cents per share, while analysts were expecting earnings per share of 26 cents, according to Refinitiv. PetMed has missed estimates the last three quarters.

Markets being what they are, one might expect some other names in the same category to go up on the positive news. Maybe Chewy (CHWY) goes down due to this showing an existing competitor still has a bit of strength, but what happens to a fellow poorly performing company in the category like Covetrus (CVET)?

They continued to bomb out, as the day after PETS beat expectations the CEO of CVET stepped down, causing shares to fall as much as 18% on the day.

Many names which were weak earlier this year have recovered.

  • CVS is trading the like February sell off never happened
  • SKT is up over $4 a share off its lows, which is a huge move for a stock which was trading in the $13s
  • ABBV is up nearly a quarter from its Allergan-acquisition announcement lows
  • WY recently closed at new 52-week highs even after interest rates have recently rose
  • T is up nearly 50% off their last December lows

There seems to be little to no political volatility priced into health companies.

Almost nobody is expecting inflation.

Meanwhile negative rates have caused real estate bubbles, leading cities like Berlin to freeze rent growth:

Berlin’s governing parties struck a deal to freeze rents for five years, marking one of the most radical plans to tackle spiraling housing costs in a major city and hitting the shares of major apartment owners. … The initiative put forward by the Left party’s Katrin Lompscher, head of urban development and housing, is intended to ease the burden on tenants after a property boom caused rents to double over the past decade. The political intervention has spooked investors as a separate campaign attempts to force Berlin’s government to expropriate properties from large landlords.”

One price control to offset another.

Should be sustainable so long as Commerzbank is heavily invested in Slack & Beyond Meat.

If they hurry they might still be able to get in on the WeWork restructure! SoftBank only owns 80% of the firm.

Free Trade & Investment

The stock markets are up big over the past couple days on optimism around trade talks between China and President Trump.

Trump is really trying to goose the stock market, talking past the sale

Monday is Columbus day, so when trade discussions conclude with tariffs delayed but no actual deal that will likely be ugly for investors over the extended holiday weekend. I expected the hopium to burn out by 3 to 3:30 PM absent a large announcement, though the Federal Reserve follow on today virtually guarantees a Trump-friendly close. Shorts are getting absolutely murdered today.

About the only thing down big today is the Russian search engine Yandex. YNDX is off nearly 20% today – trading around $29 a share, not too far off the end-of-world styled lows from last . The Kremlin is promoting a draft law which would limit foreign ownership of local tech companies to 20% of the float.

Yandex, which has expanded from Russia’s largest search engine to embrace services including taxis and food-delivery, has a free-float of 85% of its shares in the U.S. The draft law would hurt investments and restrict international development for Russian companies if passed in its current form, Yandex General Director Elena Bunina said at the hearings.

There was similar scuttlebutt from the US about potentially delisting Chinese securities from US exchanges if they do not follow securities laws and/or limiting government pension investments into Chinese companies.

Further goosing the markets today in the spirit of FOMO (& directly against the concept of free markets), the Federal Reserve announced they were extending their “temporary” overnight funding operations through January & they will be expanding the size of their balance sheet. They are doing QE4 (buying $60 billion in Treasury bills per month starting next week at least into Q2 next year) but are calling it something else

My view on Bitcoin is it is a binary bet on financial chaos. When the regular capital markets increase in prices & investors have confidence in the stock market going up Bitcoin often slides on big moves up in the stock market. I sold out of my remaining Bitcoin yesterday for a small gain & it is off a couple percent today. There was also a new guideline published a couple days ago that would make regular use of Bitcoin for smaller transactions an accounting nightmare, rendering it largely good exclusively for speculation. Even hard forks can be treated as income the moment new chains are created, which would further discourage those.

I also traded in and out of a bit of Kroger & Zillow yesterday while also selling off an ExxonMobil position I had. Coming into today the only stock I was holding (other than a bit of Apple & Disney that I have had for a long time) was some Zillow in my IRA that I bought on yesterday’s dip & sold it today for a couple percent gain.

The Federal Reserve guaranteeing they’ll expand their balance sheet into Q2 of next year virtually guarantees a Trump reelection. Some sectors may still sell off on a Warren headline risk, but if Trump does a trade deal with China ahead of the election & the Fed’s goosing of the economy runs through the first half of next year it is hard to see how he loses re-election.

I’ve made solid gains going in and out of ABBV over the past couple years & have ate some solid losses on what was perhaps too large of a WBA position, though if the healthcare sector starts selling off at all on Warren headline risk with the Federal Reserve expanding their balance sheet I might back up the truck buying a bit of each.

Indexes Hide Carnage

One year ago tomorrow Jay Powell said we’re “a long way” from neutral interest rates. That was the cue for the stock market to crater. Which it did right until Christmas of last year.

This year’s strong performance is nothing but the market offsetting last year’s Q4 carnage.

Zoom out to the beginning of 2018 and we’re flat since the January 2018 high.

This goes a long way to explain why the tax cuts absolutely did not pay for themselves. The central bank raising interest rates increased debt service costs while causing financial asset prices to collapse.

That turned out to be a losing move in terms of overall market stability.

Growth was priced to perfection until WeWork tried going to market … and that didn’t work!

We’ve had one of the biggest rotations from growth to value in the history of the market, a massive spike in oil prices on the Saudi Arabia oil refinery attack, and recent IPOs have been crapping the bed one after another.

While the index is sort of flat some rocket ship growth names have been cut in half.

  • Lyft is 56% off their peak. Uber has fallen about 40%.
  • Direct listings Spotify & Slack are far from their highs.
  • Baidu is trading where it was in December of 2010, and there is rumors the U.S. may try to block listings of Chinese stocks on United States exchanges.
  • With Beyond Meat having a market cap about 40% the size of Kroger, what’s the thesis of being long there? Maybe one needs a full load of Tilray to use while driving in their Tesla to make sense of it all.
  • I like Roku & think they will benefit from marketing spend by various streaming platforms, but their 52-week range is quite extreme with a current price of $104, a recent high of $176 & a low last December of $26. Netflix is over 1/3 below their 2018 high.

The recent large rotation into value may not have been a rotation into value but rather a lifting of shorts against the sector:

Over the past few years, I have been increasingly concerned about the massive structural imbalances in the world, along with excess debt and asinine monetary policy leading to an epic equity market bubble. Remember, your investment returns are directly correlated to the price you pay, not your analytical ability and I refuse to play in the greater-fool theory of finance. … There’s been a massive VAR unwind where “momentum” gets sold and “value” gets bought—yet there aren’t actual flows into value. Rather, funds are pulling in exposure and reducing “value” shorts. While it looks like a sector rotation—I see it as a massive “risk-off” event. Vision Fund, a prominent Ponzi Scheme literally detonated overnight and destroyed confidence in all similar VC ventures. Global Crossing, Worldcom and Adelphia destroyed confidence in “new age” telecom, Tyco did it to industrials while Madoff destroyed the last vestiges of structured finance. Capital gets scarce when you cannot trust the data. Is a massive risk-parity fraud about to be exposed and complete the cycle? … the best defense against the coming crash is to not be exposed to it. … My shorts are mostly clustered in indices, though I have my fair share of exposure to Ponzi Sector stalwarts, along with a hillbilly bank exposed to Miami real estate (guess which??) and another West Coast bank exposed to Ponzi Sector fraud. I laid into Hong Kong as the country has forever been changed. I already have a lot of put exposure, but I feel like now is the time to get more aggressive and I don’t want to keep burning theta on my options. This is the first time since 2007 that I have shorted anything.

Recently there was a research note which highlighted how market stability and low trading volumes have crimped Virtu’s prospects. If Virtu specialized almost exclusively in the indexes that thesis would be correct, but many enterprise software and other hot sectors have taken a brutal beating over the past couple months. A flatish market with tons of sector rotation (due to trade headline risk, fear of recession, chaos in the Middle East, the deflationary nature of web-based software, value plays being overleveraged with debt, etc.) is likely a market where Virtu is making decent money as a market maker.

VIRT doesn’t really care what the narrative of the day is so long as the narrative regularly changes.

A couple days ago the WSJ reported about how VIRT is off 36% year to date. They’ve fallen further since.

The average number of shares traded each day in the U.S. stock market fell to 6.9 billion in the current quarter from 8.5 billion in the fourth quarter of 2018, according to a Sept. 24 research note from Sandler O’Neill + Partners. The Cboe Volatility Index—a widely watched gauge of expected U.S. stock-market volatility—fell about 25% over that period, while volumes and volatility also dropped in overseas markets

I haven’t been trading much over the past month or so, but I recently traded in and out of Virt a couple times. I am still holding a chunk of it that is down a bit, but the bits I went in-n-out were up at least a couple more grand than the chunk I am holding is off now.

Falling $5 a share for a $20 stock is a rather substantial move in a couple weeks!

I am skeptical the broader markets now, but this chop-n-grind range bound stuff with a bit of a downside bias should be a pretty fertile market environment for VIRT.

Interactive Brokers announced free stock trading which led to Charles Schwab adopting the same approach & the stock broker shares cratered, causing TD Ameritrade to announce they too would offer commission free trading. E*TRADE will also stop charging trade commissions by the end of this week.

New exchanges coming online will create more opportunities to arbitrage across markets.

New exchanges can add value to the market, but also add complexity and may make illiquid stocks harder to trade, said Tal Cohen, head of Nasdaq’s North American market services.

That is true even if the cost of accessing order flow goes up as core exchanges try to retrench.

The stock market is off nearly 2% today with volatility being up big & VIRT is roughly flat on the day. That is the market expressing a lack of faith in Virtu. They might be right, but the risk vs reward should be decent for a small position here.

Taking a Break

The market is up higher on optimism around trade, or increased central bank intervention to prevent market risk from being realized, or something else.

And so many of the momentum stocks have been crushed of late. Meanwhile some beaten down value play stocks have been moving like penny stocks, with 5% daily moves. And so many of the momentum stocks have been crushed of late.

Value is seeing the light of day finally. A huge rotation out of momentum stocks is underway as investors pile on bets on economically sensitive, cheap stocks on renewed hopes for a U.S.-China trade deal. The ramped-up wagers on underpriced, cyclical stocks are supported by the view that interest rates have bottomed for now as sentiment around trade uncertainty improved. At the same time, investors are dumping those expensive growth stocks which they had used as a defensive play early this year.

CNBC

Is that the great rotation trade that marks value is finally in? Or is it something else entirely?

A couple weeks ago I started helping a friend when they launched a new company. My initial impression was that it was going to be mostly light touch & I would assist a bit here or there, but it quickly became a bit more certain I was a life raft working double shifts. And I guess I will continue to do so until they are up and running with things smoothly.

That said, there is no way a person can have 2 or 3 full time jobs while being a successful day trader on the side in the age of Trump tweets. So the Friday before last I liquidated all my active positions to take a break for a bit.

Of course, after having done so SKT was up about 5% a day a couple days in a row & CARS was up 9.4% on Friday on a deal with GM to provide web services to their 4,000+ dealership clients.

I certainly still am up a good bit on the year, but I think doing a couple things really well is more sustainable than doing many things poorly, particularly with how competitive the capital markets are.

I still might trade time to time on the IRA account or if I see something I think is an utterly fantastic set up, but I am probably going to do minimal trading for the next couple months at least. That IRA has done well so far this year with really only a few losers out of about 20 trades.

I find humor in it being just under a clean double.

It reminds me of the time my mom told me I had an IQ test result I left in the car when I didn’t even remember taking such an exam. All I remembered was the comedy of her telling me about that while I was so aloof about it & the bonus joke of being 1 point short of genius.

He who finishes second is first to lose. 😀

Sadly, this hiatus likely means I will be missing out on the WeWork IPO.

Softbank remains bullshit, I mean bullish, on WeWork
A trade of the century for he who is willing to hold his position for a century

I am a big fan of the company

At least I can still watch the theatrics from the sidelines

100-year Treasury bonds might be on offer soon. They might be a better investment than the WeWork IPO, but I’ll stick in cash for now, at least until I have at least 20 free hours a week to devote to the capital markets.

Trillion Dollar Tweets, Again

It makes sense for the stock market to be on fire today.

The US president recently taunted Russia over an accident with a failed nuclear weapon

China is amassing troops near the Hong Kong border & there was violence at the Hong Kong airport.

Argentina’s stock market lost 48% of its value in USD terms in a single day in response to a primary vote

That marked the second-biggest one-day rout on any of the 94 stock exchanges tracked by Bloomberg going back to 1950. Sri Lanka’s bourse tumbled more than 60% in June 1989 as the nation was engulfed in a civil war.

The mainstream media is starting to eat some home cooking. They’ve got their paying subscribers so used to a particular slant that honest reporting drives subscription cancelations.

Today’s stock market liftoff was based in part on waiting to apply additional tariffs against Chinese imports until December 15th instead of September 1st.

The Trump administration abruptly offered China—and U.S. consumers—a reprieve from sweeping tariffs that were poised to hit on Sept. 1, sending stocks sharply higher and raising hopes for reviving talks on a trade deal.

That will prevent the tariffs on toys, computers & cell phones from providing any consumer sting until the holiday shopping season is over & just about everything sold through Christmas will be pre-stocked.

Trump uses Twitter to announce imposing new prospective tariffs, but this announcement of delay came through the press versus being a Tweet.

On yesterday’s sell off (which also had the bonus of being an ex-div day for XOM, providing an additional organic down draft in pricing) I picked up some XOM which I sold off today on the rebound. I also bought a bit of OZK which I sold today.

I also exited a big chunk of Cars.com. Yesterday CARS hit a low of $8.71 & I think I bought a big slug of the bottom to the penny. I sold that as it rebounded yesterday & also sold a bit more today at a hair under $9.50 a share.

Workiva has pulled back from their recent all time high on announcing a secondary offering where existing shareholders will be selling 1,287,038 shares while the company is not issuing any new shares.

Roku once again crushed earnings:

Roku “is an arms dealer,” Martin wrote. “It is indifferent about which over-the-top services or business models win. Roku negotiates a 20-30% revenue share from every over-the-top service that wants access to its 30 million homes. At 3.5 hours a day per household of viewing in the second quarter of 2019, it would be impossible…to launch a new over-the-top service without access to Roku’s 36% of connected TV homes.”

As subscriptions fail to appear in adequate quantity (as competition saturates the streaming marketplace), old media players who dumped billions into acquisitions will ramp up marketing spend & account trials to try to prolong recognition of malinvestment (hey, we are investing in growth). Roku will be one of the primary beneficiaries of that capital misallocation bubble.

A Dealership Full of Cars.com

I think the Cars.com sell off is more than a bit overdone and have been an avid dip buyer over the past couple days. It hasn’t felt particularly comfortable watching the stock careen lower and lower, but in reality the company is valued at about 1/3 of what it was valued at when a deep value investor took a strategic position in it. It doesn’t have a huge network of dying retail stores & ultimately is still a leading vertical search play in one of the biggest search categories.

Cars.com CEO & president Thomas Alex Vetter bought 20,000 shares on August 7th at $10.19 a share. And as of close today shares were trading at $9.20 after reaching an all-time low of $9.16 earlier in the day.

Lots of stocks have been up huge or down huge this week. One of my favorite names ROKU was up over 20% today. VIRT fell over 18%. I went in and out of VIRT for a small gain today, but will probably wait at least until Monday before buying more than a small position.

The New York Times warned they would have weak earnings in the second half of the year. They fell from above $35 to under $29. I bought just about the bottom tick on that and sold out after a quick gain of about a percent.

New Media also bombed on their Gannett merger. They are up almost 24% today, but that is still off about 16% from where they were before the acquisition was announced. Zillow fell 15% today. Kraft Heinz fell almost 9%.

5%, 10% & 20% swings in a day are not the mark of a stable market.

Bond yields appear to have bottomed out on a realization China wasn’t going to massively devalue the Yuan. Bitcoin is trading around $11,823. It’s rise has paused while the financial market has jumped back into traditional asset classes today. Alt-coins appear to be dead, with Ethereum back at $216.55 & Bitcoin dominance closing in on 70% at 69.1%.

I sold out of my remaining Kroger yesterday after they were up over 7%. Good thing, as they slid over 2% today.

Funko was up 7% during regular hours today & another 7% after close on a revenue & earnings beat.

CVS has recovered from most of the plunge it took over the past half year while Walgreens is still down quite a bit more.

All 30 Dow Jones Industrial Average components were up on the day & so were about 95% of the S&P 500 components.

Other than individual names that missed on earnings (& the seemingly perpetual downward vortex on CARS) it seems volatility was about the only thing off hard today.