Inflation, deflation and investing

I must confess that I have never seen such dissension and disagreement among economists about whether we are going into a period of inflation or one of deflation. On the one side, there are those who are alarmed at the easy money, low interest rate policies that have been adopted by most central banks in developed markets. The surge in the money supply, they argue, will inevitably cheapen the currency and lead to inflation. On the other side, there are many who point to the Japanese experience where a stagnating economy and weak demand lead to price deflation. I have given up on trying to make sense of what macro economists say but you probably have a point of view on inflation and are wondering how inflation or deflation will affect your portfolio.

To understand how inflation affects the value of a company, let's get down to basics. The value of a company can be written as a function of its expected cash flows over time and the discount rate appropriate for these cash flows. In its simplest form, the value of a stable growth firm can be written as:
Value = (Revenues - Operating Expenses - Depreciation) (1- tax rate) / (Cost of capital - Stable growth rate)
Assume now that inflation jumps from 1% to 5%. For value to be unaffected, everything has to increase proportionately. Thus, revenues, operating expenses and depreciation all have to increase at the inflation rate, the tax rate has to remain unchanged and the discount rate will have to increase by that same percentage. So, what might cause this to break down?
a. Lack of pricing power: Even though the overall inflation rate may be 5%, not all firms may be able to raise prices by that magnitude. Put simply, firms with loyal customers, a strong brand name and significant competitive advantages will be able pass inflation through better than firms without those benefits.
b. Input costs: By the same token, not all input costs will increase at the same rate as inflation. If oil prices increase at a rate higher than inflation, an airline that lacks pricing power may find itself squeezed by higher costs on one side and stagnant revenues on the other.
c. Tax rate: The tax code is written to tax nominal income, with little attention paid to how much of the increase in income comes from real growth and how much from inflation. Thus, the effective tax rate you pay may increase as inflation increases.
d. Cost of capital: The effect on higher inflation will be felt most directly in the risk free rate, which will rise as inflation rises. However, equity risk premiums (which determine cost of equity) and default spreads (for cost of debt) may also change.

Historically, higher inflation has not been a neutral factor for stocks. Stocks have done worse during periods of high and increasing inflation and much better in periods of lower inflation. This graph, which I borrowed from a Wall Street Journal article, illustrates the stark divide:

That may seem puzzling because we are often told that it is bonds that are hurt by inflation and that stocks are good inflation hedges. Here is why I think the logic breaks down. When inflation increases, equity investors are hurt for two reasons. The first is that the discount rate (cost of equity and capital) increases more than proportionately, because risk premiums increase with inflation. For instance, the equity risk premium in the United States increased from 3.5% in 1970 to 6.5% in 1978 and default spreads also widened. The second is that the tax code is not inflation neutral. For companies that have substantial fixed assets, depreciation is based upon historical cost and not indexed to inflation. Consequently, the tax benefits from depreciation become less valuable as inflation increases; think of it as an implicit increase in your effective tax rate.

If I believed that high inflation was around the corner, I would first shift more of my portfolio from financial assets to real assets. Within my equity allocation, I would invest more of my money in companies that have pricing power (allowing them to pass inflation through to their customers), inputs that are not very sensitive to inflation (so that costs don't keep up with inflation) and few fixed assets (to prevent the depreciation tax impact). I can think of several technology, consumer product and entertainment companies that fit the bill. As a bonus, I would like the companies to have long term debt obligations at fixed rates; inflation is likely to dilute the value of the debt. These companies are likely to see their cash inflows increase at a rate faster than inflation and will be able to buffer the impact of inflation on discount rates. In my bond portfolio, I would steer my money to short term government securities, inflation indexed treasury bonds (TIPs) and floating rate corporate notes; they are least likely to be devastated by higher inflation.

If deflation was my concern, I would invest more of my portfolio in financial assets; bonds, even with 2.5% interest rates, would be a bargain. Within my equity allocation, I would steer away from cyclical companies. At least in recent decades, deflation has gone hand-in-hand with low or negative economic growth. Consequently, I would invest in companies that sell non-discretionary products and necessities.  In my bond portfolio, my holdings will be in more credit worthy entities, since default is a very real possibility in poor economic conditions.

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Jerome Kerviel is sentenced: Ruminations on risk and trading scandals

A French court has sentenced Jerome Kerviel, the SocGen trader who caused the company to lose 5 billion Euros, to five years in prison and a fine of 4.9 billion Euros.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/oct/05/jerome-kerviel-jail-sentence
I think we can safely assume that Mr. Kerviel is now bankrupt for life. Reading about the case did raise a question in my mind. How can one person cause this much damage and how did the damage remain undetected until too late? I know that people have pointed to the asymmetric reward structure (where huge bonuses are paid if you make large profits and you really don't share in the losses) at banks as a culprit, but I think there are three "behavioral" factors that contribute to disasters such as this one.

1. Selection bias: Experimental economists have been exploring differences in risk aversion across sub-groups of people and their conclusions are fairly strong. For the most part, their studies find that younger people tend to be less risk averse than older people, single people are less risk averse than married folks and men are less risk averse than women (especially young). Now think about your typical trading room in any investment bank. It is over populated with 25-35 year old males, selected primarily because they had the right "trading" instincts. In fact, I think you can safely assume that if you were picking the least risk averse group in a population, it would look a lot like that trading room.

2. House money effect: You tend to be much less careful when taking risks with "house" money than with your own. Traders almost always are playing with house money, especially when they are doing proprietary trading, and not surprisingly are more cavalier about taking risk than they would be with their own money.

3. Break even effect: Here is a phenomenon that every casino owner knows. When a gambler loses money, he tries to make it back, and the deeper he gets in the hole, the rasher he becomes in his risk taking. So, a trader who loses $ 100 million will try to win it back with big bets (even if those bets don't make much economic sense); the more he loses, the wilder his risk taking will become.

One of the problems with the risk management systems that we have is that they deal with the symptoms and not the causes of erratic and bad risk taking. If we want to reduce the likelihood of more Jerome Kerviels in the future, here are some things we should do:

a. Create more diverse trading rooms: I am not a fan of diversity for the sake of diversity, but I think that opening up trading rooms to a wider range of people will dampen some of the excess risk taking. Maybe we should hire every trader's mother or grandmother to trade side by side with him; in fact, I would give her the next desk. Seriously, though, this will require investment banks to revamp their hiring processes and look more kindly on those "not cool" kids on campus who right now would not make the cut.

b. Restrict or eliminate proprietary trading: I know that proprietary trading is viewed as too lucrative to let go by banks, but I have my doubts as to whether it actually generates long term profits for any of its architects. One side cost of the increase in proprietary trading at banks has been the increase in house money that traders have to play with.

c. Information systems: To stop the "break even" effect from kicking in, we have to intervene much earlier when traders start losing money to prevent them from accelerating the cycle. To intervene, we need to know how much traders are making or losing in real time and have automated or computerized systems step in and stop trading at a defined loss point. Traders will try to devise ways around the system, but the system has to be responsive enough to adapt.

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High dividend stocks: Do they beat the market?

I was browsing through the Wall Street Journal this weekend and came across this story about "high dividend" stocks:
http://bit.ly/b0MrBt
Briefly summarizing, the author argues that investing in five high dividend paying stocks is a better strategy for an investor than investing in an index fund, and that the "loss of diversification" is made up for by the higher returns generated on the dividend paying stocks.

It may be surprise you, but I don't disagree with the core of this strategy, which is not a new one. In fact, in what is known as the "Dow dogs" strategy, you invest in the five highest dividend yield stocks in the Dow 30. A more detailed sales pitch for this strategy can be found here:
http://www.dogsofthedow.com/
Over time, its proponents argue that the strategy would have paid off richly for investors.

To add even more ammunition to dividend seekers, studies over the last three decades have also shown that stocks in the top decline in dividend yield generate about 2-3% higher returns, after adjusting for risk, than the rest of the market. This newsletter nicely summarizes the evidence:
www.tweedy.com/resources/library_docs/papers/highdiv_research.pdf

So, is this a winning strategy? In my book, "Investment Fables", I have a chapter on this strategy which you can download by clicking below:
http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pdfiles/invfables/ch2new.pdf
Briefly summarizing, I argue that as with all investment stories, there are caveats and these are the most significant ones for "dividend" heavy strategies:
1. Dividends are not legally binding: Unlike coupons on bonds, where failure to pay leads to default, companies can cut dividends without legal consequence. The fact that "dividends are sticky" and companies don't usually cut dividends does not take away from this point.
2. Higher tax liability: At least in the United States, for much of the last century, dividends have been taxed at a higher tax rate than capital gains. (Since 2003, the tax rates on the two have been the same, but that law is set to expire on December 31, 2010, returning us to the old tax laws).
3. May be "liquidating" dividends: When companies are in decline, they may pay large liquidating dividends, where assets are sold to fund the dividends. While these dividends are cash flows, they are not sustainable and will run out sooner rather than later.
4. Sector concentration: If you pick the highest dividend yield stocks across a market at any point in time, you may find yourself holding stocks in one or two sectors. In early 2008, for instance, you may have ended up with five banks in your portfolio. If there is a shock to that sector, your portfolio will collapse.
5. The market "knows" something you do not: Remember that the dividend yield for a stock shoots up almost always because the price drops, not because the dividend is increased. In other words, it is a sudden drop in the stock price that makes the stock look attractive. It is true that markets make mistakes, but it is also true that sometimes price drops of this magnitude occur because there is a serious problem looming on the horizon.

Here is how I would modify the strategy to protect myself against these three issues:
1. Look for companies with positive earnings, low debt burdens and high cash balances. They will be under less pressure to cut dividends.
2. Use this strategy for "tax protected" portions of your portfolio. Even in the US, investments made in pension plans are allowed to accumulate income, tax free. Even if you cannot pick individual stocks in your pension fund, you may be able to redirect the money to a high dividend yield mutual fund.
3. Steer away from companies with dividend payout ratios that exceed 80% and have negative revenue growth. That may help keep liquidating companies out of your portfolio.
4. Try for some sector diversification. In other words, classify companies at least broadly into sectors and look for the highest dividend yield stock in each sector, rather than across the whole market.
5. Check every news source that you can find for news stories or even rumors about the company. 

In short, buying high dividend yield stocks makes sense for a long-term, tax-advantaged investment. One point that I disagree on is that this strategy requires you to give up on diversification. I don't see why you cannot construct a reasonably diversified portfolio (of 30-40 stocks spread across sectors) of high dividend yield stocks.

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A Corporate Governance Risk Manual

About a year ago, I agreed to do a series of seminars for the IFC, an arm of the World Bank that invests in privately owned businesses, primarily in emerging markets. The focus of the seminars was risk governance and the audience was directors in companies. While I was leery of getting entangled in the layers of bureaucracy that characterize the World Bank, I agreed to do it for two reasons. First, I had done the bulk of the work already in my book on Strategic Risk Taking (published by Wharton Press), published a couple of years ago. Second, I thought it would be interesting to talk about risk management, from a broader perspective.

Risk management, as practiced currently, is splintered among different disciplines. The risk hedging and measuring part has been taken over and reshaped by the finance folks, using numerical measures of risk such as beta and Value at Risk. The risk taking part has been hijacked by strategists, many of whom talk a good game, but are reluctant to put their ideas to any numerical test. Economists have largely sat out the debate, preferring to debate risk aversion in the rarefied world of utility functions. Statisticians have nipped at the edges, primarily pointing out what the rest of the crowd is doing badly.

I put together a presentation for a one-day seminar on risk management, from a corporate governance standpoint, and  delivered it in four venues: Antigua (Caribbean), Bogota (Colombia), Lima (Peru) and St. Petersburg (Russia). I have turned over my slides for others to use in more venues, but my task is done. For closure, I decided to pull together the slides and create a manual for directors. While the IFC will be officially printing and distributing a variant of this manual, I want to make it available to anyone who wants it. You can download this manual by going to the following link:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1681017

For those of you who have my Strategic Risk Taking book, this is a compressed version, with the added bonus of tasks that you can use to assess how good risk management is in your firm. For those of you who do not have the strategic risk taking book, this manual captures the essence of my argument.

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Past performance is no guarantee of future performance... but is anyone listening?

Most mutual funds end their advertisements with this statement: "past performance is no guarantee of future results". I don't know why they bother because investors don't seem to act like they care. In fact, one phenomenon that we know characterizes investors is that many of them try to invest in whatever asset class, fund or stock has done well in the past.

I was reminded of this return chasing phenomenon by an article I read on Permanent Portfolio, a fund that has been around a while but has generally struggled to survive for most of its life, with about $ 50 million in money under management a few years ago.  Starting in 2007, the fund's assets have exploded and it is now up to $ 5 billion. Its growth coincides with its superb performance over the period.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704858304575497662644720960.html?mod=WSJ_hps_MIDDLEThirdNews
So what? Only about a third of the fund is invested in stocks; 25% is invested in gold and silver and 35% in cash. Its performance over the last three years can be explained largely by the fact that it is under weighted in stocks and over weighted in precious metals. In other words, its success comes almost entirely from its asset allocation, rather than asset selection.

History provides a cautionary note on why return chasing often comes to a bad end. Momentum investing, which is what this comprises, requires two components to succeed:
1. Long runs in returns. You need asset prices to move in the same direction for long periods. If good years are followed by bad years and vice versa, you will end up with whip lash as a momentum investor. In statistical terms, you need strong positive correlation in returns across time. Whether there are long runs in returns is an empirical question and there is evidence that is hopeful. There have been long historical runs (positive and negative) in returns in stock and bond markets and even longer runs in currency and commodity markets. The evidence is less positive when it comes to individual stocks; while there is some short term momentum, it is much weaker than in the asset marekts. Thus suggests that momentum investing is more likely to pay off for market timers playing the asset allocation game than for individual stock pickers.

2. Detecting the end of the runs: All good things come to an end and long runs in prices (up or down) end at some point in time, with the size of the correction directly proportional to how long the run lasted in the first place. A momentum investor can see years of positive returns wiped out in the course of a few weeks or even days. The evidence is not as positive on this factor. Models and investors that claim to detect imminent market corrections don't do very well, at least in the long term.  However, there may still be hope. I am not a great believer in technical analysis, but this is is one place where price and volume charts may help, especially in assessing how close to the cliff you are. I have a chapter on momentum investing in my investment philosophies book that you may find interesting and you can download it by clicking below.
http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pdfiles/invphil/ch7.pdf

If you are a momentum investor, making money on your gold investment right now, I am happy for you. I just hope that you have a mechanism that  will tell you when it is time to get out. With momentum investing, knowing when to sell is even more important than knowing when to buy.

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Checks and Balances: Eisner and Disney

I just read about a forthcoming book, written by Michael Eisner, ex-Disney CEO, titled "Working Together: Why great partnerships succeed". My first reaction was incredulity.. What next? Madonna on "The Importance of Celibacy" and Bernie Madoff on "Investing Wisely"...

As some of you may know, I have used Disney as my laboratory case study in my applied corporate finance book through three editions and fifteen years. I love the company and its products but have not always cared for its management. In fact, I have been particularly harsh about Eisner, who I think did serious damage to the company, especially in the last decade of his tenure.

While I have not had a chance to read Eisner's book yet, I was interested to read that he used his partnership with Frank Wells as one of the great partnerships that succeeded. On that count, I completely agree. When Eisner came to Disney as CEO, from Paramount, the company was moribund; its theme parks were getting old, its animated movies lacked pizzazz and the ghost of Walt Disney wandered through the halls. Eisner, with his then side-kick Jeff Katzenberg, brought a fresh energy to the company that was complimented by the operating savvy of Frank Wells, Disney's Chief Operating Officer. Wells operated as a check on Eisner, channeling his visions to practical success. By 1994, the two men had turned Disney around and put it on the path to being an entertainment powerhouse.

In 1994, Wells died in a helicopter crash and the only person in the company capable of reining in Eisner was gone. Eisner packed the Disney board with me-too directors, far too eager to rubber stamp whatever he did, and he let his manias and paranoia run rampant. Disney made investments it should not have made (buying Capital Cities was a mistake; it is revisionist history to claim, as Eisner does, that he bought ABC to get ESPN, since he could have bought just ESPN for a fraction of the $ 18 billion he paid for the entire company) and did not make investments it should have (buying Pixar early in the game for millions rather than wait a decade and pay billions), fired people who should not have been fired and did not fire people it should have. By 2003, stockholders in Disney were in full revolt and deservedly so; the company's earnings had plateaued and its stock under performed the market.

My larger point, though, is not about Disney, but about why we needs checks and balances in positions of power. Even the smartest, best-intentioned individuals have weaknesses. At some point in time, without constraints, these weaknesses rise to the surface and subsume the successes. When we push for stronger, more independent boards of directors, it is not because we operate under the illusion that such boards will make bad managers into good ones, but that they will keep good managers from going over to the dark side. We will never know how much good Eisner could have continued to do in Disney, if he had a strong board of directors to guide him, confront him and sometimes stop him or slow him down.

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Capital Structure: Optimal or Opportunisitic?

Contrary to the prediction of doomsayers during the banking crisis of 2008, firms seem to be returning with a vengeance to the debt markets. Today's story in the Wall Street Journal provides some details:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703453804575479712501514050.html?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTWhatsNews

Finding the right mix of debt and equity to fund a business remains one of the key components of corporate finance. The contours of the choices are clearly established.
On the plus side: Using debt instead of equity to fund investments generates tax benefits in most countries, since interest expenses are tax deductible and dividends are not. Debt may also provide some "discipline" to managers of mature companies with large positive cash flows.
On the minus side: Debt increases the possibility of financial distress and/or bankruptcy, with all its potential costs. The tussle between whats good for stockholders and bondholders' interests manifests itself in covenants that restrict investment and financing choices and in monitoring costs.
 There are tools for assessing optimal capital structure as well. One is the cost of capital; in effect, the mix of debt and equity that yields the lowest cost of capital is the "optimal" mix. Another is Adjusted Present Value (APV), where a firm is first valued as if it were all equity funded (unlevered) and the net value added from debt is computed as the difference between the tax benefits and the expected bankruptcy costs. The mix that maximizes overall firm value is the "optimal" mix.


So, what has changed between a few months ago and now that would explain this surge of debt financing? It is unlikely that the tax benefits of borrowing have surged or that expected bankruptcy costs have dropped; the former explanation would have made sense if corporate tax rates were expected to rise in the future and the latter would have worked if the economy had strengthened significantly over the period.  I think the answer lies in evidence that behavioral finance has uncovered about how companies make financing decisions; my colleague at NYU, Jeff Wurgler, has the seminal paper on the topic. Rather than weigh the costs and benefits of debt and come up with optimal or target debt ratios, firms seem to make their financing choices based upon perceptions of the cheapness (or costliness) or debt as opposed to equity. Thus, they tend to flood the market with bond offerings, when they perceive the cost of debt to be low and with equity offerings, when they perceive their stock to be over priced. I would term this "opportunistic capital structure". The drop in treasury bond rates and the decline in default spreads (as the Greek crisis has receded) has led to much lower borrowing rates, especially for highly rated companies.


What's wrong with this? There are two potential dangers:
a. Perception may not be reality: Perceiving the cost of debt is low does not make it so. When CFOs make assessments of the relative costs of debt and equity, they are trying to be market timers. Given the sorry track record that portfolio managers have on timing equity and bond markets, I would be wary about CFOs who claim special powers on this issue.
b. Short term gain versus long term pain: Even if CFOs are good market timers and the cost of debt is low (relative to equity), is it a good idea to go out and fund your projects predominantly with debt? I don't think so. Over time, the firm will end up with too much debt, and over time, the cost of debt will revert back to historic norms. As with homeowners who borrowed because rates were low between 2004 and 2007, the day of reckoning will come and it will be painful.

Here is my compromise solution. Rather than pick an optimal or target debt ratio, a firm should choose a range for the optimal; in other words, a 20-40% optimal debt ratio, rather than 30%. Firms can then be opportunistic but only within this range; thus, you would move to a 40% debt ratio, if you believe that that the cost of debt is low or to a 20% debt ratio, if you think your equity is over priced. That would constrain over confident CFOs from pushing the debt ratio to unsustainable levels.
 

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