Valuentum Exclusive Analysis for the Discerning Investor

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Oct 30, 2023

The Dividend Growth Newsletter Portfolio’s Outperformance
Image: The Dividend Cushion ratio is one of the most powerful financial tools an income or dividend growth investor can use in conjunction with qualitative dividend analysis. The ratio is one-of-a-kind in that it is both free-cash-flow based and forward looking. Since its creation in 2012, the Dividend Cushion ratio has forewarned readers of approximately 50 dividend cuts. We estimate its efficacy at ~90%. Large cap growth names in the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, and Cisco form a solid foundation for continued dividend growth across the portfolio thanks in part to their fantastic Dividend Cushion ratios. Not only this, but we like the defensive characteristics of garbage hauler Republic Services and McDonald’s, and the tried-and-true dynamics of Home Depot, Honeywell and UnitedHealth, which can handle just about any economic environment that is thrown at them. Today, the 10-year Treasury rate stands at close to 5%, so while many dividend growth stocks don’t yield as much, we still like their cash-based sources of intrinsic value, as such dynamics offer substantial support to their equity prices, despite competing sources of income.

Oct 22, 2023

There Will Be Volatility
Image: An ETF tracking Russell 1000 "growth" stocks has outperformed an ETF tracking Russell 2000 "value" stocks since the beginning of 2021. To us, the market remains hypersensitive to almost every economic data point that hits the wires, and we’re just not going to play that game. The macro headlines and never-ending news flow are what many quant and algorithmic traders are trading on, and to a very large extent, for investors with a long-term horizon, these macro data points just don’t factor into the equation. When valuing equities, we’re always after mid-cycle expectations, not peak or trough performance, so our valuations implicitly embed a "normal" recession. Warren Buffett didn’t become a billionaire buying and selling on macro data points, and volatility is simply to be expected given the proliferation of price-agnostic trading these days. Instead of panicking over higher interest rates, we think investors should view the Fed’s work thus far as future potential dry powder to stimulate both the economy and the markets. Whenever you feel like stocks are no good, have a read of Warren Buffett’s classic piece written during the Great Financial Crisis, “Buy American. I Am.” To us, we still like stocks for the long run. Happy investing!

Sep 24, 2023

Report Updates: Amazon Registers the Lowest Rating on Our Scale
Check out the latest report updates on the website. The biggest takeaway of this refresh is that Amazon is poised to generate significantly negative free cash flow in 2023, and while we think the firm will turn this measure around materially in the long haul, shares are coming out as overvalued on our discounted cash-flow process, while technically its stock price is breaking down. An overvalued stock on both an absolute and relative value basis with negative technical/momentum indicators registers the worst rating on our methodology, the Valuentum Buying Index (1=worst, 10-best).

Sep 20, 2023

ICYMI: Questions for Valuentum’s Brian Nelson
Valuentum's President Brian Nelson, CFA, answers your questions.

Sep 12, 2023

Oracle’s Shares Have Performed Fantastically
Image: Oracle’s shares may have sold off aggressively during the trading session September 11, but they have done quite well as a component of the Dividend Growth Newsletter portfolio. On September 11, Dividend Growth Newsletter portfolio holding Oracle Corp. reported first-quarter fiscal 2024 results that missed expectations modestly on the top line. Shares tumbled aggressively on the trading session September 12, but we think most of the sell-off is just profit taking. Prior to the report, Oracle’s shares were up more than 50%, while they are up over 64% during the past year. The high end of our fair value estimate stands at $136, while the firm yields ~1.3% on a forward estimated basis.

Jul 20, 2023

Stock Report Updates
Check out the latest report updates on the website.

Jun 21, 2023

Expect Huge Equity Returns This Decade, Much More Volatility However
Image: Without question, the stylistic area of large cap growth has been the place to be for almost 15 years now. We think it remains the place to be. We expect huge equity returns this decade, but much more volatility – the kind of volatility that will make holding stocks painful at times (and shake out some investors at the worst possible time), but it is what it is, as it has always been. We’re as bullish today as we’ve ever been. Cheers!

Jun 13, 2023

Oracle Hits All-Time Highs; Larry Ellison Pumps AI Opportunity
Image: Newsletter portfolio holding Oracle surges to all-time highs! “Oracle's Gen2 Cloud has quickly become the number 1 choice for running Generative AI workloads. Why? Because Oracle has the highest performance, lowest cost GPU cluster technology in the world. NVIDIA themselves are using our clusters, including one with more than 4,000 GPUs, for their AI infrastructure. Our GPU clusters are built using the highest-bandwidth and lowest-latency RDMA network—and scale up to 32,000 GPUs. As a result, cutting edge companies doing LLM development such as Mosaic ML, Adept AI, Cohere plus 30 other AI development companies have recently signed contracts to purchase more than $2 billion of capacity in Oracle's Gen2 Cloud.” – Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison

May 30, 2023

Paper: Value and Momentum Within Stocks, Too
Abstract: This paper strives to advance the field of finance in four ways: 1) it extends the theory of the “The Arithmetic of Active Management” to the investor level; 2) it addresses certain data problems of factor-based methods, namely with respect to value and book-to-market ratios, while introducing price-to-fair-value ratios in a factor-based approach; 3) it may lay the foundation for academic literature regarding the Valuentum, the value-timing, and ultra-momentum factors; and 4) it walks through the potential relative outperformance that may be harvested at the intersection of relevant, unique and compensated factors within individual stocks.

May 25, 2023

Nvidia Rockets Higher to Propel Large Cap Growth
Image: Nvidia powers higher after releasing better-than-expected second-quarter fiscal 2024 guidance. The company continues to be a driver behind the outperformance of large cap growth as a stylistic area. We haven’t seen a quarterly guidance beat like this since Synaptics put up a monster quarter when Apple started using its innovative click-wheel technology in the first-generation iPod, almost 20 years ago. Nvidia Corp.'s outlook for the second quarter of its fiscal 2024 was phenomenal thanks to tremendous interest in its chips that power artificial intelligence [AI]. We expect a material increase in our fair value estimate of Nvidia, but shares remain quite pricey, in our view. Revenue during Nvidia’s fiscal second quarter is expected to be ~$11 billion versus consensus that had been looking at ~$7 billion, implying a forward outlook more than 50% better than what the Street was looking for. Interestingly, Synaptics’ click-wheel technology started the wave of Apple products, which have been the go-to tech platform for years, and Nvidia may very well be the driving force behind AI proliferation, the next great technology platform.