Why BRK?

Every now and then, BRK comes up in conversations with people (and often with people not in the business) and the topic becomes, what to do with BRK post-Buffett. I tell them I own BRK and plan to own it for a long time, and sometimes I wonder why myself.

Too Big
First of all, it's really big now so it's going to be hard to grow the way they used to. With a market cap of more than $500 billion, it's going to be hard to keep growing at a high pace. This used to be sort of the cap in big company capitalizations; a lot of the bit techs went to $500 billion in 1999/2000 before they all came crashing down. The barrier today seems to be $1 trillion; Maybe these $1 trillion companies hit that wall and come crashing down. Who knows.

In any case, BRK is just too big to get too much alpha going forward.

Buffett
Buffett is not so young anymore, so the historical performance is getting increasingly less relevant; Buffett created the performance of the last half a century, but he is clearly not going to lead the charge for the 50 years. This doesn't mean BRK can't outperform.

Buffett hired some great managers to help manage the equity portfolio, but their historical performance is sort of irrelevant too.  Those guys posted great returns with a much, much smaller capital base. They will eventually inherit a $200 billion+ equity portfolio. If they want to stay focused, they will need to invest in companies they can buy $10-20 billion worth of. And there aren't a lot of those. Their universe will be no bigger than the one Buffett is fishing in now, so it's hard to imagine they will improve on what Buffett can do with this size.


Returns Not So Great Lately
And people say that BRK hasn't even been performing all that well lately, underperforming in the past five years. The rolling five-year BPS growth vs. the S&P 500 index total return has been negative for the last five years in a row (through 2017):

2013  -4.0%
2014  -3.9%
2015  -2.3%
2016  -3.2%
2017  -2.7%

People often point to this to show that the era of BRK outperformance is over.

But this sort of misses the fact that back in 2008, the S&P 500 was down -37% while BRK's BPS declined only -9.6%. So in a sense, the S&P 500 index had a lot of catching up to do compared to BRK. Looking only at the above table of the last five years misses a lot of crucial information.

Having said that, it's true that the supergrowth of BRK ended back in 1998, but has been a steady grower since then.

Check out the below log chart since 1980. You can see two clearly different eras in terms of performance. 1980-1998 was just amazing, but 1998-2018 has been much more modest (data just happened to be available since 1980 as I was playing with daily data; no cherry-picking start/end points. Good enough for this analysis).

BRK, Log Scale Since 1980

BRK's BPS grew +28%/year from 1980 through 1998 vs. +18%/year for the S&P 500 index for an outperformance of 11%/year. BRK's stock price rose +33%/year in that period, beating the index by 15%/year.

Since then, things have flattened out a little, but the returns aren't that bad at all. 

BRK vs. S&P 500
I haven't updated this table in a while, but let's take a look at BRK's performance against the S&P 500 index (total return) in various time periods.

BRK vs. S&P 500: Various Time Periods

Of course, we know how great the performance has been since 1965. But check out the past five years. On a BPS basis, BRK underperformed the S&P 500 total return, but outperformed based in BRK's stock price.

If you look at all the time periods, though, BRK has outperformed both on a price and BPS basis in most time periods.

This year, it just so happens that the 2007-2017 is the same as the 10-year comparison so be careful to not double count...  

But to me, more interesting than looking at the past 5 and 10 year returns (which are no doubt important), is to look at 'through-cycle' performance.

The lower part of the above table shows returns from various market peaks (year-end basis). You will see that on a BPS basis, BRK has outperformed the S&P 500 index since the 1989, 1999 and 2007 market peaks, and also on a price basis in most of those time periods.

The 1998-2018 BRK log price shows a more modest pace of growth than the 1980-1998 period, but you will see that BRK has still grown 10%/year since then, bettering the S&P 500 index (including dividends) by 3%/year on a BPS basis and 2%/year on a price basis. Not like it used to be, but not bad! (How many funds can you name that has done as well?)

So all this talk of Buffett not performing well is not so relevant to me.

It looks funny to have both 1998 and 1999 in there, but 1999 is there as a market peak, and 1998 for sort of a momentary peak in relative performance of BRK, and sort of the end of the high-growth era for BRK.

Why BRK?
Despite the size, and the potential risk of a post-Buffett BRK, why do I still like BRK? First of all, the recent performance, I don't think, is as bad as people make it out to be. They are still outperforming in most time periods, especially from various market peaks.

There is something about BRK that makes me more comfortable than owning the S&P 500 index, even with the post-Buffett risk. The first thing is that BRK will probably not do anything irrational or stupid. This is not an assurance we get when investing in the S&P 500 index. The index committee will add bubble-ish stocks at bubble-ish prices. BRK will not be 'forced' to buy stocks just because they are 'big'. They will only buy stuff when it is high quality and is priced rationally. These are two things that the S&P 500 index committee do not seem to care about too much.

Sure, this inflexibility with regard to price and quality will be a drag on performance during certain time periods (like now, and back in the late 1990s), but I would feel more comfortable when my money manager is not chasing big stocks.

Also, check out the below chart. It's just the S&P 500 index since 1980 along with the BRK/S&P 500 index ratio. I just wanted to see, visually, how BRK has performed (price-wise) versus the index over time.

And what I see is kind of interesting.

S&P 500 Index and BRK/SP500 Ratio Since 1980

BRK seems to not do too well in late periods of raging bull markets (like the late 1990s) but seems to pick up a lot of relative performance during rocky times. This is kind of important for conservative investors. Whatever you think of the stock market now, there are pockets of bubbliness, and if that pops, it wouldn't surprise me if BRK has another big step up in relative performance like in the two circled periods above.

This sort of makes sense, right? As BRK doesn't have a whole lot of exposure to FANG/FAANG stocks. And if the market does decline a lot, that will provide a lot of opportunities for BRK to deploy cash so you are kind of sitting on cash optionality by owning BRK.

Yes, BRK declined 50% during the crisis, no better than the S&P 500 index, but if you look at the above table and charts, you will see that BRK does ratchet up relative performance during tough times. So just comparing peak-to-trough drawdowns sort of misses some important information.

By the way, here are some large declines in BRK stock over their history (from the 2017 Letter to Shareholders):

Stunning Discovery
OK, maybe not. But I just noticed something. Look at the above chart again; BRK price / S&P 500 index ratio. If you look at this chart, you will notice that the uptrend is pretty consistent and linear. OK, I am not going to go back and put a regression line on it (too lazy), but you can sort of imagine a straight line going through it from the mid-90's even through today.

Here is the chart again with the line I sort of see (this is not a regression line, but one I just drew by hand). The lower chart is the BRK/S&P index ratio:

And, importantly, there is no kink, bend or flattening after 1998!.

What does that mean?! It means the rate of BRK's outperformance against the index has been pretty consistent and hasn't tapered off at all! 

The ratio will measure the 'rate' of outperformance, not the absolute difference.

Here's what I mean. The above chart is based on prices, but I will look at BPS growth instead as the prices data is a little too spikey (and too sensitive to start/end points). As we saw above, in the period 1980-1998, BRK's BPS grew at a rate of 28.2%/year versus 17.7%/year for the S&P 500 index (total return), for an outperformance of 10.5%/year.  Since then, BRK's BPS grew 9.5%/year vs. 6.2%/year for the index for an outperformance of 3.3%/year. Looks like big degradation in relative performance.

But the linearity of the above ratio chart made me look at this another way. The 1980-1998 28.2%/year is 1.6x the index return, and the 1998-2017 BPS growth of 9.5%/year is 1.5x the index return! 

So, from now on, I am inclined to answer the question, "How do you think BRK will perform vs. the S&P 500 index in the future?" with, "I think it will do 1.5x better!".

Nonsense? Maybe. But it looks interesting to me. This is the danger with playing with charts.

Optionality at Low Cost
Moving on. This is not a new idea, but we can see all the cash at BRK as optionality (even though I have long said that the cash is matched pretty closely to float so wonder how much of the cash is actually immediately deployable. Some of the float might be 'fast', meaning maybe they actually can deploy a lot of that cash and run down the float if necessary).

A lot of funds held a lot of cash since the crisis and have severely underperformed the index. The worst fund managers have actually been net short since the crisis and have catastrophically posted negative returns for years on end. Sure, these guys had plenty of opportunity because they were short; if the market went down, they could profit on the decline and then use the profits to go long and make even more money! But, those guys were neither prudent nor rational, and it is unlikely they will ever be able to make up the damage as it is just too big to overcome.

And yet, here, we have BRK with all that cash and it seems like they haven't sacrificed all that much in terms of performance. That is really amazing when you think about it.

Leverage
By the way, BRK has $97 billion of cash/cash equivalents on the balance sheet just looking at the Insurance and Other segment.  This makes people say that Buffett is bearish the stock market. Well, it's true that Buffett has been having trouble finding stuff to buy, but that doesn't necessarily make him 'bearish'. There is a difference between not finding things to buy, and being bearish (and expecting a market decline).

One thing that occurred to me when thinking about this huge amount of cash and short term investments on the b/s is how small the investment in fixed maturity securities is: $18 billion.

So first of all, the amount of cash/cash equivalent sort of seems to me like more of a bearishness or unwillingness to buy bonds than stocks. There is only $18 billion worth of bonds in the insurance segment versus, what, $200 billion in stocks? That's not bearish stocks to me, that's more like, bearish bonds!

Not to mention BRK has been net purchasers of stocks; not the act of a bear.

Here's the other thing. When we look at insurance companies, we often look at investment leverage. For me, since I like risk, I look at the percent of shareholders equity invested in stocks. Markel looks at and talks about that, as it's a big source of their expected BPS growth.

So I think about BRK in the same way. Forget about cash vs. float and all that stuff for now.

Let's just look at how levered BRK equity is to 'equity'.

First of all, the portfolio (including KHC) is $219 billion at the end of 3Q 2018. That's against $379 billion in total shareholders equity (including minority interest). So the ratio of shareholders equity invested in stocks is 58%.  That's a lot higher than any other insurance company, and I think higher than MKL has been recently (maybe they are much higher now; too lazy to check now).

Of course, this is not like the old BRK, but not at all overly conservative either.

Now, keep in mind that BRK has a lot of unlisted businesses. For example, the various businesses in the railroad, utilities and energy used to be listed companies. If these were still listed, they would be included in equities. As far as growth potential is concerned, other than not having to mark to market, these businesses are basically no different than the equity portfolio (ignore the advantages of wholly owned businesses etc.).

So from the 'leverage' point of view, we can add this to the equity portfolio. The book value of this segment is $96 billion. With a similar argument for the Finance and Financial Products segment, we can add another $24 billion.

Sum that up and you get 'equity investments' of $339 billion.  That's against total shareholders equity of $379 billion. So that's already like 90% of BRK's shareholders equity invested in equity of businesses. That's really not all that bearish!

This, by the way, doesn't even include the other unlisted businesses, the Manufacturing, Service and Retailing Operations (MSR), which is the 'other' in the Insurance and Other segment. BRK doesn't disclose the balance sheet in detail for this segment, but in 2016, BRK equity in the MSR segment was $92 billion or so. Add this to the above $339 billion and you get $431 billion worth of equity investments at BRK against it's shareholders equity of $379 billion.

This is why you get equity-like returns on BRK despite BRK having so much cash/cash equivalents on the balance sheet. This is hardly the balance sheet of a bearish CEO.

Conclusion
I haven't even touched valuation here, but from all of the above, I like BRK a little more now than I have liked it in recent years.

I don't want to time the market and call a peak or anything. I have made it clear that even though we may enter a bear market or have a severe correction at any time, there doesn't seem to me to be a strong case to be made for an extended bear market in the U.S. at the moment (famous last words... I know!)

But the more frothy things seem (well, less so now with the October/November corrections), the more interesting BRK becomes for the above reasons.

AND, it is possible that you won't give up much in terms of performance to buy this 'optionality', with, of course, the greatest investor of all time ready to pounce if we have any big disruption in the market. And we can't forget that BRK has a lot more levers to pull than most conventional funds or even hedge funds; they can buy private businesses too, or do add-on deals to augment the many businesses they already own.

Plus, all that cash on the balance sheet doesn't mean it's as much a drag on BRK's performance as people make it out to be.

As for a post-Buffett world, I think what we need is intense rationality and discipline not to do stupid things. We know BRK is not going to jump into Bitcoin, or buy into bubble stocks (I fear we may find AMZN in the 13-F at an entry price of $3000 some day; that may be a sell signal!), panic and sell out stocks during a crisis or anything like that. And they will not be subject to quarter-to-quarter performance pressure in fear of redemptions. Many of these (and other) advantages are enough to keep me comfortable with BRK for a long time.

Also, even though BRK is not growing the way it used to, and it doesn't look like they are outperforming as much against the index, it looks like a lot of this is due to lower returns in the market in general as the rate of outperformance has been remarkably consistent even after 1998.

By owning BRK, you sort of get paid at least market performance while you wait for the optionality to be exercised!

BRK Corporate Governance, MSFT, Market Volatility etc.

So Buffett finally buys some JPM. He owned a bunch in his PA years ago and said it would be a conflict to own both JPM and WFC within BRK, or some such thing. I guess recent events (WFC scandals) have made him change his mind (as he may be starting to dump WFC). I've been a big fan of JPM for years, so naturally, I like this move. I wonder if Jamie Dimon would ever make it onto BRK's board; he would be a great fit there and would give the board some real, hands-on expertise in the financial industry (there is plenty of talent there, but noone with Dimon's experience/background).

This is the 13-F that was just filed (includes only positions over $1 billion):




Market Cap to GDP
Someone asked in a comment the other day what I thought about the market cap to GDP ratio, Buffett's once favorite stock market valuation indicator. This, like many other valuations measures, is really dependent on interest rates. If you believe (like I do) that interest rates drive the valuation of assets, then prices are high when rates are low and vice versa. So, of course, if interest rates are low, the market cap to GDP ratio will be high. But that tells us nothing about the valuation of asset prices as it has to be compared to interest rates. Plus, it doesn't really tell you anything about interest rates either. (A lot of bears like to point to 'overvalued' indicators, like this market cap to GDP, P/E, CAPE, EVITDA/EV, Dow-to-Gold ratio etc. But often, it's all the same thing, so it's like double counting. They all point to one thing: asset levels are high because interest rates are low. But, people still think of these above factors as separate, discrete pieces of evidence to show the market is overvalued.)

Not to mention, many U.S. companies are growing globally, so their sales and earnings from non-U.S. business will be capitalized in the U.S. stock market while the GDP will not include those new territories. If a U.S. company merges with a European company, the stock market valuation may well increase (while GDP does not). Also, when Yahoo owned Alibaba as Alibaba took off, the U.S. market cap of Yahoo (and therefore the U.S. stock market) increased (with no increase in GDP).

So in that sense, I don't think it's a relevant measure of anything these days. I still like to adjust interest rates to what we might think is a normalized rate, and then price assets off of that.

BRK Corporate Governance
Again, from the comment section, someone mentioned an analyst or author that is comparing BRK to fraudulent companies; BRK's corporate governance standard is comparable to historical frauds (ENR etc.).

Well, I am preaching to the choir here, and maybe I am just an ignorant, blind, cool-aid drinking BRK groupie, but every time I read these comments, I think it's ridiculous. It just takes a little bit of common sense to figure out the difference between BRK and the big corporate frauds in the past.

First of all, just for fun, I took a quick look at the corporate governance score of BRK on the Yahoo Finance page, and was surprised at the high score: 9 out of 10!

Corporate Governance

Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s ISS Governance QualityScore as of November 1, 2018 is 9. The pillar scores are Audit: 1; Board: 10; Shareholder Rights: 8; Compensation: 6.
Corporate governance scores courtesy of Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS). Scores indicate decile rank relative to index or region. A decile score of 1 indicates lower governance risk, while a 10 indicates higher governance risk.

Not bad! But then, reading further, I realized that 10 means high risk, lol... Oops. So it is, in fact, the way I thought it would be. Just to be sure, I checked this at the ISS website.

From the ISS website:

THE METHODOLOGY BEHIND THE SCORES

Governance QualityScore uses a numeric, decile-based score that indicates a company’s governance risk relative to their index or region. A score in the 1st decile (QS:1) indicates relatively higher quality governance practices and relatively lower governance risk, and, conversely, a score in the 10th decile (QS:10) indicates relatively higher governance risk. Companies receive an overall QualityScore and a score for each of four categories: Board Structure, Compensation/ Remuneration, Shareholder Rights, and Audit & Risk Oversight.

WFC, by the way, with all it's scandals, has a QualityScore of 1.

Out of curiosity, I looked at MSFT and check this out: 

Microsoft Corporation’s ISS Governance QualityScore as of November 1, 2018 is 1. The pillar scores are Audit: 1; Board: 1; Shareholder Rights: 1; Compensation: 3.

Amazing!

MSFT
OK, and check this out from the proxy:

The vast majority of our global employees participate in an annual anonymous poll. Here is a selection of results:

That sounds crazy too, for a large corporation. I don't know how 'real' this is, as we all know how people may be 'nudged' to fill out surveys in ways favorable to management. Well, they say it's anonymous, so OK, maybe it's legit. 

I have become in recent years a big fan of MSFT, both as a user and an investor.

My MSFT Experience

I have been tied to MSFT for most of my career as company PC networks were usually run on Microsoft and desktops were usually Windows NT or whatever. Of course, we also had Unix machines running the serious stuff, but most office work, spreadsheet work and whatnot were done on Windows machines. 

After going out on my own, I stuck to Windows, but I got increasingly frustrated at how often Windows would crash/freeze. Some days, I thought I spent more time waiting for things than actually doing any work. And then they killed XP (which I had on some of my old machines).

A programmer friend suggested I look at Linux, so I did. I installed Linux on my old laptop and eventually one of my old PC's, and I loved it. It was rock-solid and stable, like the Sun workstations (Unix) I used to work with that you never had to reboot or restart. I was seriously contemplating switching everything over to Linux and ditching MSFT altogether. 

One thing holding me back was that a lot apps written for Windows is not available in Linux (well, you can still run Windows apps with Wine, but I was a little skeptical/worried that there would be issues if there was another layer). Otherwise, I loved everything about Linux. I use GIMP now all the time for photo processing (like the Buffett photo in my last post), Libre Office is great and is getting better etc. Plus my Linux machines never just randomly go into these long updates. 

Well, one of my favorite things is how easy it is to run cron jobs in Linux versus Windows; I really hate the Windows task manager. A lot of other things are just so much easier to do off the command line in bash (although Powershell is getting pretty powerful, but it's so clumsy/clunky, I don't feel like learning how to use it properly). 

Back to Windows

But OK, I never abandoned Windows. But what sucked me back in and made me abandon the idea of switching over completely to Linux was Windows 10. I was skeptical, but upgraded all my Windows machines to Windows 10 (forgot when), and I have been very happy. Yes, if you are not careful and don't set your 'active' time, it can go into long update cycles rendering your computer unusable until the updates are done. This is forced so you can't stop it. But you can tell Windows what hours of the day you will not be using the machine, so the forced updates will happen in those inactive hours. 

OK, small problem. 

But since switching to Windows 10, I have had very, very few problems I used to have. Random crashing, random freezing etc. I have not had that occur much at all and it's been a pleasant surprise.

Also, Windows 10 comes with Ubuntu bash so if you like Linux command line stuff, you can do it all in a bash terminal right on the Windows 10 machine and in those drives/folders that Windows runs on (goodbye cygwin?!). 

The other major thing that drew me back to Windows is OneDrive. I used to do work on my home desktop and my laptop, and I used to have to email files back and forth to work on them. You can use Google Drive, Dropbox, Box etc. to sync files on your various machines, but I never got around to doing that with the above, and I didn't like how Google Drive seemed to keep altering my files (especially programs) when I uploaded them. 

But OneDrive was so easy and is basically already set up from the get-go in Windows 10. Now my most active folders are on OneDrive, I never have to worry about syncing anything; it's all done automatically.  

I think this is one of the big things that got me tied to Windows now. 

Plus, I am playing with Azure now and it is very easy to create Linux instances (basically virtual machines in the cloud) so you can write bots and set them up to run as cron jobs and your tasks will be done whether your PC/laptop is on or not. Plus they have databases and many other cloud services (I use Amazon too, but mostly for fun/experimenting). 

So when you think about how all of this is integrated and everything works great with each other, you can see how excited I am about MSFT. A programmer relative told me a few years ago that MSFT sucked for most of their existence, but that with C#, Azure and other cool things, they are becoming a really incredible company. (I am also experimenting with C# but haven't created anything for actual use). Of course, at the time, I didn't really look into it or understand. 

Anyway, this is sort of relevant, right? As IBM just bought Red Hat, which is a Linux business. Anyway, I still love Linux and have a Linux box sitting next to my main Windows 10 machine. Linux will continue to grow, and behind the scenes, Linux runs everything, and will run even more going forward.

And check this out. I just recently noticed that Stanley Druckenmiller is big into MSFT: 

So he is probably seeing and hearing the same things I am talking about. Well, OK, I have no idea why Druckenmiller is long MSFT. But I would assume it has something to do with what I'm talking about.

Oh yeah, and I really enjoyed Nadella's book: Hit Refresh.

With the FANG/FAANG stocks so popular, who knows, maybe MSFT is the tortoise that surprises everyone!

Back to BRK

OK, so there is probably not much I need to say on how silly it is to criticize BRK's corporate governance. Check this out from the BRK 2018 proxy: 

This list doesn't show a group of people who really need the money. I think the average compensation for a big company director is something close to $300,000. If you wonder why so many board members seem to be yes-men to the CEO, this may be one reason why; it's good money! Don't rock the boat, keep quiet and keep cashing your checks!

It's clear from the above table that BRK directors are not there for the money. And sure, they are friends with Buffett so are they really independent? I would rather have directors that understand Buffett and BRK well, and have enough of a spine to express themselves if they see something they don't like.

There is a lot more to say on this but one of the biggest arguments in support of BRK's structure is that Buffett himself is the largest shareholder of BRK, so if this was a fraud, who is he defrauding? Himself? That's laughable. He takes a $100,000 salary but the bulk of his wealth is created by BRK's stock.

This is the opposite of most situations, where managements own token amounts of stock (and dump their stocks whenever they exercise their options) and pay themselves massive amounts of money. When you own very little stock but pay yourself huge amounts, I think that incentivises fraud more. Don't you think?

When a CEO has 99% of their wealth tied up in a stock, that is stronger than any corporate governance factor I can think of.

But corporate governance specialists, critics and academics don't seem to understand that. They would rather check the boxes on what they inflexibly think of as good corporate governance practice and that's it. I guess part of it is laziness, and part of it is just practicality.

Institutions that own a large number of companies can't possibly evaluate that many CEOs, BODs, etc. so they need some simple measure to save time. Like P/E ratios, maybe. Those that don't know how to evaluate businesses may have to depend on P/E ratios to evaluate cheapness, but if you know how to evaluate businesses, P/E ratios often don't really matter (as they don't tell the whole story, like, in the case of BRK!). 

Abdication/Transparency
I mentioned this in the comments section of another post, but the other issue is that Buffett is so hands off the businesses to the point of abdication. But this is misleading. We all know Buffett watches numbers like a hawk. He said he gets faxed sales figures every day from various businesses and he looks at them carefully every day.

What he means when he says he is hands off is that he doesn't micromanage. He doesn't insist on seeing every ad before airing. He doesn't want to interview and approve every new hire. He is not going to approve every paint job of a store, or pricing/marketing strategy of each business. He is not going to approve each detail of every budget for every line of business.

But this doesn't mean that he isn't watching every penny that goes in and out of the businesses. We all know that all of the free cash of a business is sent to Omaha, so if something is wrong, he will know right away.

For the businesses where things may get funky, like the insurance businesses, those are highly regulated, and Buffett is very closely monitoring those businesses and is very involved as he says, with big blocks of business (talks to Jain several times a day etc...).

As for transparency, I don't know. I never thought BRK lacked transparency. It could disclose more, of course, but I never thought of BRK as a complete black box or anything like that. Major business lines are presented clearly and in detail. Some of the non-insurance businesses might be opaque, but each of them are just too small to disclose separately.

Some fuss is made about the Sokol incident, but those things will happen every now and then to any company. Goldman Sachs has a lot of legal and compliance infrastructure, is highly regulated and constantly audited, and yet we now have the 1MDB scandal. So I don't know that the Sokol incident proves anything about BRK either way. You have to look at the big picture and see the kinds of problems they've had over the years, and the record is pretty good. Will another scandal happen? Yes. These things will happen. It's how management deals with it that will determine the fate of BRK, and I have faith that they will deal with any issues in the future promptly.

As Munger says, it's all about incentives, and I think BRK people are properly incentivized.

Remember what Buffett said after the crisis. He said that there was a regulator who had one job, and that was to regulate FNM and FRE, I think. And they failed. So just because you have someone watching and regulating, if the incentives are not correct, you are going to have problems. 

Market Volatility

So, I was a little irked when the market was down 600 points the other day when I was on my way out of the house. I know I don't really care, but still, at the back of my mind, I think, is this it? Is this the end of capitalism? Are we going to go down 90% like we did in 1929-1932? OK, I wasn't that worried, actually.

But it made me curious. Why are we so scared of big market moves like this? 600 points is a little more than 2%. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a 2% move would have been a 50 point move. 600 points is psychologically shocking because Black Monday was a 500 point drop. So it feels like Black Monday again (that was before my time!).

I tend to buy into narratives I don't really care about. The HFT/quants are making the markets more volatile. ETFs, especially leveraged ETFs are making the markets more volatile. More regulation in the markets and the resulting decrease in liquidity (thinner bid/ask from market-makers/specialists) are making the markets more volatile etc...

I go, hmm... OK. Probably true. But whatever. Doesn't matter to me.

But sometimes, I suddenly think, wait a minute. Is all of this true?!

Let's take a look!

First of all, let's just take a look at the market's volatility on a rolling 100-day basis. This is what derivatives traders would call the 100-day historical volatility. I looked at this going back to 1950. All of the following charts include data up to this past Monday (11/12/2018).




So, looks pretty normal. Even with the big moves in the past few weeks, nothing out of the ordinary here. In fact, I would have guessed things were pretty wild since Trump was elected, but if you look back to even 2012, 100-day vols have been in a normal range. It certainly doesn't feel that way.

OK, so maybe vols don't tell the whole story. Let's look at some other things.

We've had a few days where the market was down more than 2% recently. Or it feels like it happens a lot. So, I looked to see how often the market went down more than 2% on the day. To make it a readable chart, I just summed up how many times the market declined by more than 2% in the past 200 days.

Here's that chart:




So yes, it's a little elevated, but nothing really out of the ordinary. Look at the period during the crisis! Also, look at the mid to late 1990s, even before the bubble collapsed.

What about those days the market opens down 800 points and closes up 300, or some such crazy thing? It seems like that sort of thing happens a lot these days. If I had to guess, I would tell you that that happens more often these days than in the past.

To measure that, I just subtracted the day's high from the day's low and divided it by the day's close, and then took a 100-day average of that.

Here is that chart going back to 1962 (hi-lo data only goes back to 62):

...and surprisingly, this too is in a very normal range, and far below the levels of even the mid-90s (I guess the day traders used to make this really wide). Nothing out of the ordinary here.

And let's look at the number of days in the past 100 days that the day's range exceeded 2%. 

Totally normal range. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Conclusion
JPM is now a BRK stock. Get Jamie on the board! He would be the person I trust most next to Buffett.

BRK scores low on corporate governance, but so what? Look at the incentive structure, which is more important than committees, bureaucracies like compliance/legal departments etc.

People who write to complain about BRK are people who just don't understand, or just use BRK to grandstand and gain attention by making astounding claims against consensus (this is why people like to say "the market is going to crash 50%!", or "the market will get to 500,000!"). So ignore those people.

Microsoft is pretty awesome. I never made a post about it as an investment; I should have when I started to get interested, but oh well. Maybe eventually, but I don't really have anything to add to MSFT in terms of financial analysis/valuation.

And, the markets seem like they are crazy and more volatile than ever, but the above charts don't bear that out. People, the press, keep freaking out over 2% moves as if they are 10% moves. The markets, despite all the things that should make markets more volatile than ever, are just as volatile as they ever were and no more.  So relax! 

Has Buffett Lost It?!

Wow.  Apple (AAPL) was a $28 billion position at the end of 2017, with 167 million shares, but now BRK owns 252 million shares as of the August 13-F (November will be out soon), for a position size of  $47 billion then and $52 billion now (as of 11/4/2018).

That sounds crazy as it's the largest position ever, and it's a 'tech' company. OK, maybe it's a consumer products company and not a tech company. Either way, wow, that's a big bet, exceeding 10% of the market cap of BRK.  Well, for focused investors, 10% is not such a big deal, and even 25% of the equity portfolio may not be that crazy as AAPL isn't some obscure micro-cap, or over-leveraged industrial cyclical or anything like that.

But, I am not the biggest fan of AAPL, so it is interesting. Coming right off his IBM miss, I guess many shareholders would be a little surprised.

Of course, I don't recommend it, but this is an easy position to hedge against; you can just short AAPL shares against whatever BRK owns.

Here is the 13-F from August; I only show positions of more than $10 billion here:

You can get the whole sorted table here.
(oops, the above link shows an error for some reason. You can click 'website' below and then just go to the 13-F section and click BRK).

I know a lot of stuff on the website is broken. When I have time, I will fix it and maybe add some stuff to it. When Google finance/Yahoo finance dropped their financial data API's, a lot of things broke and it got to the point where I would have to pay for data to update stuff, and I don't want to do that. I recently noticed that a form of the Yahoo Finance API is back up, so I will be able to update some stuff, but I will have to rewrite a lot of the code, so I am in no rush to do it at the moment (I have a lot of work I need to do for others etc...  this stuff goes to the back of the queue, unfortunately).

The bull and bear argument has been the same for years, so I don't want to get into it again here, but I feel like AAPL has sort of been chasing the crowd lately rather than leading it or disrupting it like they used to during the Jobs years. But again, this would get the AAPL fans all fired up and angry, so maybe I'll leave it at that. I'll just say that moving up to higher end products to make up for declining growth momentum reminds me of retailers/restaurants that hid declining traffic/unit volumes by moving up-market or raising prices. It works for a while until people finally say, no mas, and will no longer pay high prices. Sort of reminds me of J. Crew, P&G etc.

The Markets
The markets have been going nuts too. Well, I don't mean to imply that Buffett has gone nuts, really. AAPL has a strong brand name/franchise, high returns on capital, decent margins, too-strong balance sheet, repurchases a lot of shares etc. So a lot of the boxes are checked in this case. Can't blame someone for buying a company like that.

The markets can be down hundreds of points overnight, but then be up hundreds by the close (if not an hour after the open), and vice versa. It has always been meaningless to stare at the market during the day (and futures overnight), but it seems even more so these days. I guess bots can be part of it. Risk parity is probably also a part of it. Leveraged ETF's. In any case, it's important to remember that we shouldn't be responding to markets. You should never be selling anything when the market is down 800 points. That's just obvious. If anything, if you have something to buy, you should be buying. But if you sit there and stare at the markets or otherwise follow it too closely, all sorts of bad thoughts can go through your mind. If it is too upsetting or scary, just turn off the TV, or don't look at the market for a while. It's like the weather in Amsterdam; if you don't like it, just wait. It will change. (Did I get that right?)

Interest Rates
I hear all the time that interest rates are going up so the market must go down, but all of my work in previous bubble posts were based on the baseline assumption that the 'normalized', sustainable long term interest rate is probably around 4.0%. Using a lot of historical data, I showed that if the long term rate averages 4% over the next 10 years, the market could easily average a P/E ratio of 25x over that time frame. This is not a prediction, of course. It's just an observation based on history: if it's not different this time, and if interest rates average 4% over the next 10 years, then, based on history, a 25x P/E would be completely normal.

Yes, this is basically the Fed model, which has been a subject of debate if not completely discredited by some. One debate is that the relationship between P/Es and interest rates held only for a brief period in time and not for the whole 100+ years of recent history, but my feeling is that since interest rates were regulated for much of the early 20th century, it's hard to say if there is any meaning in the lack of correlation going too far back in history. The other argument is that P/E or E/P is 'real' whereas bond yields are not. But this argument only strengthens the above argument. A low E/P is even more attractive than a low bond yield as the E will increase with inflation whereas the bond yield will not.  And comparing earnings yields to the TIPS yield (which would take care of the real versus nominal problem) would just be silly as the TIPS yield 10 years out is 1.2%, suggesting a P/E multiple of 83x. 

So, watching the market throw conniptions because interest rates went above 3.0% didn't worry me at all. I thought, OK, well, whatever. All else equal, higher rates may equal lower equity prices, so people dump stocks when rates go up. But as I've said in my bubble posts, I don't see the rubber band stretched at all, so the market is not in need of a violent correction. Of course, if we are on our way to 6-8% long term rates, then that's a different story.

Hedging
When markets go crazy like this, people tend to ask me about hedging. Well, first of all, hedging is something to do before the market goes down, not after. It's interesting that people start to want to hedge after the market starts to go down and volatility goes up (hedging costs go up).

I've spent a lot of time in the derivatives business, and a lot of it is about hedging. There are a lot of good and valid hedges; interest rates, FX, commodity prices etc. But when it comes to the stock market, a lot of hedging is baloney. Some large institutions may use futures to synthetically adjust their asset allocation (sometimes cheaper than selling stocks, paying taxes and buying something else).

But when it comes to just directional hedging of the stock market, I think more money has been lost trying to do that over the years than any money actually lost in the stock market. I know for sure that if you try to hedge a stock portfolio with futures, options or swaps, it's going to cost you. If you need to hedge your portfolio using any of these, most of the time, you are just better off lightening up your position and forget about hedging. If you feel like you need to hedge your portfolio with put options, you probably just own too much.

If you hedge all the time, it's going to be very costly. I'm not going to do it, but just go look at some put option quotes on the S&P 500 index, for example. And imaging rolling that over every three months, or every year. It is not cheap at all. And if you think you can time it and put on hedges only during risky times, well, that usually doesn't work out either. Some very good investors thought the market was expensive a few years ago and hedged their portfolios and it was a disaster. Even the smartest can't time their hedges.

If you look at how wealth is built up over the years, most of the time, it's been created by people who hold very good assets for very, very long periods of time. Nobody gets rich by being very good hedgers of their portfolios. OK, there are some hedge fund managers who have done it over the years, but that's pretty rare. Most other people, if you look at the richest people list, just own good assets and don't try to get in and out according to how they feel about the market or the economy.

In a sense, people like Buffett and Bill Gates are kind of lucky in that they can't get in and out of their positions anyway, even if they wanted to. Imagine Gates calling Goldman Sachs, "I want to put on a zero-cost collar on Microsoft because I don't like where we are going in this economy!". Nope. Won't happen. I know hedging CEO holdings used to be a big business for derivatives desks a while back; maybe it still is. But if you look at the guys who create tremendous wealth, most of the time, they just own and hold onto great assets for long periods of time.

Real estate wealth is built the same way (but they get leverage, and their buildings are not marked to market so they never get margin-called; that's a huge advantage versus leverage in the stock market). They can't just buy and sell futures, options or swaps against their holdings. And they can't trade their buildings short-term either.

As I've said before, the stock market suffers a sort of "curse of liquidity". Since you can just liquidate your entire portfolio by pushing one button on your iPhone (OK, well, maybe not some rich people, but many of us can...), it is easy for us to do stupid things. And you can see how much you are losing every second of the day on your iPhone. You can't do that with real estate; there is no way to tell exactly what it is worth until you put it on the market and get some bids. In other words, there is no manic-depressive Mr. Market knocking on your door every micro-second in real estate (unlike stocks) tempting you into doing stupid things. So 1. there is no stupid-behavior-inducing signals (crashing prices) and 2. there is no way to act immediately on impulse in the real estate market. Most people would do better in the market if they treated their equity portfolio like their home.

GE
What a total disaster GE is. I've always admired GE and it was one of those companies that I really wanted to like and wanted to own, but it never quite worked for me. First of all, Jeff Immelt must be the worst CEO of all time. OK, there are CEOs that bankrupted companies, committed fraud etc. So in that sense, maybe he's not the worst. But as a non-criminal, blue-chip CEO, he's got to be one of the all-time worst. And it's not just about the stock price; the businesses are just horrible. It looks like he stood up and got hit with a left hook, ducked to avoid the next shot only to get a big upper-cut to his chin. Whatever he did seemed just wrong.

I remember when Buffett was talking about CEOs, and this was around the time that Irene Rosenfeld sold the frozen pizza business for cheap and overpaid for Cadbury. He was talking about how many CEOs are great operators but many have issues with capital allocation. We all thought he was talking about Rosenfeld, but it didn't occur to me that he was probably also talking about Immelt.

He often said how wonderful Immelt was as a CEO but never actually bought GE stock (or in any size that I can recall; it was never a top holding), and I always wondered about that. In hindsight, well, he was probably also talking about Immelt.

GE is really tempting now at under $10, and the CEO is a really good one, but I'm not sure how GE gets out of this. Frankly, I haven't taken a close look at this in a while; maybe I will. If I find anything interesting, I will probably make a post here. But I just don't like (and never liked) the businesses these guys are in. It's mind-boggling how Immelt just seemed to run the other way than the world was moving.

Has Buffett Lost His Mind?!
OK, so back to Buffett. Has he lost it? Is he buying more AAPL shares? Does he need intervention? Should he undergo some tests to make sure he is OK?

I have no idea. I'm sure he is fine, and all accounts (from the annual meeting etc., and is interviews on TV) seem to indicate he is fine.

I guess AAPL is so big because it's the first time in a long time that he really got to like something and it was large enough so that he can actually buy a ton of it. Remember, he was capped at 10% on Wells Fargo due to bank regulations.

I own BRK, and I don't really like AAPL, but I'm not going to hedge out the AAPL piece.

We'll see.