Valuentum Exclusive Analysis for the Discerning Investor

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Feb 22, 2020

Is a Stock Market Crash Coming? -- Coronavirus Update and P/E Ratios
Image Source: World Health Organization, Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), Situation Report -- 32. We don’t think this is the environment to put new capital to work, and we remain highly cautious of what COVID-19 means for global economic growth not just in the first quarter of 2020 but for the rest of this year (maybe longer). Right now, the US markets are not really factoring in anything related to COVID-19, and perhaps may be adjusting to China’s stimulus in artificially propping up the markets as if the outbreak is somehow a “positive thing.” With the S&P 500 trading at 19.0 forward earnings estimates--estimates that are likely too high given the evidence we are seeing with respect to a slowdown due to COVID-19--and corporate debt levels more elevated than ever before (note, a high net debt level should depress the P/E in enterprise valuation--US corporate debt has advanced 50% over the past decade, to $10 trillion), it is our contention that the current market reflects a “situation-equivalent” forward P/E (i.e. rightsizing for new net debt relative to the dot-com peak and adjusting for lower forward earnings expectations compared with current forecasts) perhaps greater than 24.4, which was recorded at the peak of the dot-com bubble. Though interest rates are lower than they were at the time of the dot-com crash, suggesting a modest reasonable bump to normalized forward P/E ratios of ~15 times to reflect “fair valuations,” we could seriously be in for fundamental-driven crash soon, as both the earnings multiple and earnings estimates contract aggressively. Hypothetically, a contraction to a 16x forward multiple on earnings estimates just 10% lower than currently forecast implies an S&P 500 of 2,566, or a swoon of about 20%-30% from current levels--and that would just get us down to 16x still-respectable forward numbers. How quantitative-driven price-agnostic trading may impact this scenario is not known either, and all of this could be setting up for a wild ride in the coming weeks and months. Fasten your seatbelts. We’ll have a few newsletter portfolio alerts coming Monday.

Feb 21, 2020

Cole Haan Files to Go Public
Maker of footwear, handbags, sunglasses, and various other accessories Cole Haan has filed to go public. One thing that makes this planned IPO particularly interesting is that Cole Haan was free cash flow positive in both fiscal 2018 (period ended June 2, 2018) to fiscal 2019 (period ended June 1,2019), generating $35 million and $38 million in free cash flows, respectively. The firm plans on trading on the NASDAQ Global Select Market, run by Nasdaq Inc, under the ticker CLHN. Additionally, please note that after the planned IPO, funds advised by British private-equity firms Apax Partners LLP and Apax Partners are expected to continue to own a “majority… of the shares eligible to vote in the election of our directors” according to Cole Haan’s S-1 filing with the SEC.

Feb 10, 2020

‘Value Trap’ Shoots and Scores!
Author Brian Nelson is the President of Investment Research at Valuentum. In his role, he has updated and overseen over 20,000 discounted cash flow models during the past 10 years. Prior to Valuentum, he worked as the Director of Methodology at Morningstar, a large independent research firm in Chicago, developing the company’s discounted cash-flow model used to derive the fair value estimates for the company’s coverage universe.

Feb 4, 2020

Visa Reports Earnings and Mildly Adjusts Guidance
Image Shown: Shares of top weighted holding in our Best Ideas Newsletter portfolio Visa Inc continues to outperform the S&P 500. On January 30, Visa reported earnings for the first quarter of its fiscal 2020 (period ended December 31, 2019). While shares sold off on the news, V has since recovered some lost ground and it’s important to keep in mind Visa is up ~42% over the past year as of this writing while the S&P 500 (SPY) was up just ~19% during this period. We continue to like Visa as a top weighted holding in the Best Ideas Newsletter portfolio and given the combination of the firm’s strong long-term technical and fundamental performance (on a historical basis) along with its bright outlook going forward, shares of V could test the upper end of our fair value estimate range which sits at $228 per share.

Jan 23, 2020

Resetting Your Mental Model
Image Source: affen ajlfe. Having the right mental model and using the right information can be the reason why you win or lose in investing.

Jan 15, 2020

JPMorgan's Quarter Shows Higher Sustainable Growth Potential
Image Source: JPMorgan Earnings Presentation. We are raising our fair value estimate of JPMorgan to $160 per share to reflect higher sustainable growth than we’d previously been expecting.

Jan 4, 2020

Valuentum Exclusive Success Rates Trump Even the Best Quant Hedge Funds
Image: President of Investment Research Brian Nelson, CFA. A new book, “The Man Who Solved the Market,” hit bookshelves last year, and thus far it has been a hit. The text goes into the story of quant hedge fund Renaissance Technologies and its hedge fund, the Medallion Fund, which has put up mammoth returns since inception.

Jan 2, 2020

Apple, Microsoft Dominated This Decade
Source: Marketwatch. Data by Andrea Riquier, through December 27, 2019*.The three best contributors to the S&P 500 return during 2019 have been included in the Best Ideas Newsletter portfolio for a long time, two of them, Apple and Facebook are top weighted (see image at the end of this article). Three of the biggest contributors to the S&P 500 return during this decade have been included in the Dividend Growth Newsletter portfolio for a long time (see image above). Sure -- these are household names, but it's important you understand that mispricings can occur anywhere, even with some of the most popular names. Investing is synonymous with identifying mispriced securities.

Dec 25, 2019

5 Things We Learned in 2019
Image: The Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. "The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it." -- George Orwell

Nov 25, 2019

Primer on the Banking Sector: Where Are We in the Cycle?
Image Source: GotCredit. We’ll talk about how banks make money, and the three most important costs of running a bank. The Great Financial Crisis revealed the tremendous risks of banking equities, and we’ll walk through these in depth. We’ll discuss how to conceptualize where we are in the banking cycle, and how that helps inform our valuation process for banks, which is different than traditional operating entities. The stress tests have helped many of the big banks from pursuing hazardous endeavors during the past decade, and we’ll go into how to think about the yield curve in the context of banks. Investors should expect ongoing digitization of banks and increased M&A as the competitive environment only intensifies. Three of our favorite banks are JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and US Bancorp, and we’ll be looking to consider adding any of these to the Best Ideas Newsletter portfolio or Dividend Growth Newsletter portfolio at the right price.