Coronavirus, Munger etc.

Munger
Munger is looking and sounding great at the DJ annual meeting (I wasn't there; just watched the video). His 'wretched excess' seems to be more about private equity and venture capital than the public stock market. In fact, he said that tech stocks now are not like the Nifty Fifty stocks (he mentioned Home Sewing (?) trading for 50x earnings, and said that the current big tech companies are better businesses).

TSLA
Munger also said he would never buy or short TSLA. As I wrote in a response somewhere on this blog, I can't believe how many people got caught in a short squeeze on this stock. If people don't care about the valuation of a company, then obviously, a really expensive stock can get much more expensive. Trying to short that is like trying to short soybeans during a drought. You know with 100% confidence that the price will mean revert at some point, but there is no way to tell when it will revert and how high it can get before reverting. I saw this in Japan in the 1980s, in the U.S. in the late 1990s etc.

Bubble
I've said this here many times before, but for the stock market to be in a real bubble, at these interest rates, the P/E ratio would have to get up to 50x or some such. Who knows, this might even happen. One of the greatest traders of all time recently said that this might happen; the NASDAQ could double from here if we have another late 1990s-type bubble, which is possible with the current, ongoing massive stimulation combining low rates and huge budget deficits. How can this massive stimulation on a historical scale not be matched by an equivalently massive bubble?

Of course, I would not invest with that expectation, but if it happened, it would not surprise me at all. Remember, from my previous analysis, I would find it completely normal and not at all out of line if the market P/E averaged 25x over the next 10 years... and that may include times the market trades at 50x P/E, and times it trades at 10x P/E. But we just can't know when these levels are reached; only that it is probable that they will be reached.

Again, this is not my prediction at all; I would not invest expecting such an outcome. I am just making a single statement that seems reasonable from the data I've seen.

Coronavirus
The market seems to fluctuate with each breaking news about the coronavirus, but I view it as a non-event. As value investors, we care about what a business is going to be worth five, ten years out, so it doesn't matter how bad this coronavirus gets. Well, unless it gets really, really bad. I didn't take any action, but my instinct during SARS was to just buy all the Asian stocks that were hit hard, especially airlines (Cathay etc.).

I feel the same way now. If the market tanks further on coronavirus (well, I know we are at highs recently but...), just stay sane and buy what becomes cheap and available. As Munger says, keep your head as others lose theirs (well, he was quoting Kipling).

But wait, I am no expert, so let's just say this does get really bad, like the 1918 Spanish Flu.  That was bad. 50 million people died around the world back then including 675,000 Americans.  Quick googling shows that the world population at the time was around 2 billion, and the U.S. population was around 100 million. So the flu killed 2.5% of the world population and 0.7% of the U.S. population. A similar event now would kill 193 million people around the world, and 2.3 million Americans. 

That would be quite a shocking event.  By the way, did you know that the flu has killed 12,000-61,000 per year since 2010 in the U.S.? Between 291,000 - 646,000 people die of the flu around the world each year. I don't mean to trivialize the coronavirus. We have to do what we can to stop it, of course.

Anyway, let's take a look at the economic impact of such a worst case scenario (well, I know, there can be worst cases than 1918, of course. I am a big fan of The Walking Dead, 28 Days Later, World War Z, Shaun of the Dead etc... )

This is the chart of deaths from the 1918 flu from the CDC website. Not easy to read, but I think the deaths peaked in the 4th quarter of 1918.

Deaths from the 1918 Flu

Now, hold this image in your head while you look at the next chart. I couldn't find anything to take a close-up view of this, but if you look at GDP from 1915-1920, there is no real visible blip.

Same with the stock market. Close-up views of the market between 1915-1920 also doesn't really show much worth responding to in terms of stock market activity.  There really is no visible or actionable blip as far as I can see. Again, you can google for a close-up and you won't really find anything, I don't think.

Of course, coronavirus is a terrible thing and it is disrupting a lot of people's lives. There is no doubt there is a huge impact to many people all over the place.

But as investors, we have to keep our cool and not freak out over every new data point. There is no doubt that the numbers will rise over time, and I honestly don't believe at all that there is no coronavirus in NYC, for example. I think the odds of that are ZERO. There is no way that there is no coronavirus here. It's just that we don't know yet how many we have, as apparently, NYC still doesn't have a test for it so has to send samples down to Atlanta. Plus, most people I know do NOT go to the hospital for a fever and a cough. I certainly don't, unless there is a reason to do so, or else I am told to.

So honestly, nobody knows how much is already here in NYC, and how much it is spreading. We won't know for a long time, and we may never know.

This can get worse, may peak out soon, or they may come up with a vaccine soon too. Who knows.

Many argue that the globalized supply chain will make the impact of this flu worse than previous cases, but there are positives about globalization too, like communication and technology, that might make responding to the virus much more effective. But again, who really knows.

I just don't think it's worth spending too much time on.

Bullish
Well, actually, I am not bullish or bearish. I just am. But if I had to guess, I tend to think these 'events' are hugely bullish. This is sort of true for most exogenous events. Why? Because governments / central banks tend to overreact. We are so afraid of negative economic impacts that they will overcompensate. This often leads to bubbles, which is usually not good.

Think about the bubble in Japan in the 1980s; much of that was a response to the yen-shock (Plaza accord of 1985); the fear that the strong yen will destroy the Japanese economy contributed to the bubble in the late 1980s there. In fact, the same sort of FX bickering between the US and the UK contributed to the 1920s bubble. Greenspan's fear of Ravi Batra's Great Depression contributed a lot to the bubble in the late 1990s (and the various meltdowns from Russia, Turkey, Asia, LTCM etc. all of these contributed to the bubble as the Central Bank(s) overcompensated).

This happened again after the Great Recession, and will now happen again due to fears that the coronavirus will plunge us into a recession (and was sort of happening due to fears that the trade wars will kill the economy).

So every time something bad happens, it has just been enormously bullish, every time. Of course, this can't go on. At some point, we will start pushing on a string, and the old tricks will stop working. That is also a certainty. And bubbles will pop every now and then, but only after a bubble becomes a real bubble, usually.

But, we can't really know when this (the end) will happen. Unless you are sure that we have reached the end of the line, you have to asssume that these negative events will just be hugely and incorrectly overcompensated for resulting in huge rallies everywhere.

Anyway, this is not really a bullish proclamation on my part. I will remain neutral (but invested), but just an observation.

Malone Interview (CNBC), Iger Book, Bubble Watch

People keep talking about how crazy the market is, up more than 25% this year. It's a big year to be sure. But on the the other hand, even though the market has been decent in recent years, it hasn't been particularly bubblicious.

To put the 25% return into context, I think it's a good idea to look at it over 2 years or 3 years.  Since the end of 2017, for example, the market has return an annualized 8.4%/year.  Pretty good to be sure.  Since the end of 2016, its up around 12%/year.  Going back five years, it's up 8.8%/year (these figures exclude dividends).

Not bad at all, but not bubble-like either. If you were going to train an AI machine to look for bubbles, you would look at valuations (interest rate adjusted), sentiment etc. But one of the biggest factors that I would include would be historical returns over various time frames; strong performance reinforces the positive loop of increasing positive sentiment -> higher prices -> better-looking historical returns -> increasing optimism and 'proof' (both statistical and social) of the greatness of stocks etc.

The 10-year return is 10.9%/year, but that's off a depressed level due to the great recession. Over 20 years, the market has gone up only 4%/year.

Here is a table of the S&P 500 index change over various time periods.

S&P 500 Annualized Returns Through November 2019 (excl. dvd)

1-year return:    25.30%
2-year return:      8.39%
3-year return:    11.95%
4-year return:    11.34%
5-year return:      8.81%
10-year return:  10.91%
20-year return:    3.87%
30-year return:    7.55%
50-year return:    7.31%

S&P 500 Annualized Returns Through December 1999 (excl dvd)

1-year return:   19.53%
2-year return:   23.05%
3-year return:   25.64%
4-year return:   24.28%
5-year return:   26.18%
10-year return: 15.31%
20-year return: 13.95%
30-year return:   9.67%
50-year return:   9.36%


This is pretty insane. The annualized return over 5 years to December 1999 was 26%! And we are sort of freaking out that the market is up over 25% year-to-date in a single year, and not even double digits annualized over 2 years.

So anyway, that's why it doesn't really feel like a bubble. People aren't quitting their jobs (to trade stocks), buying new cars (with their capital gains), bigger houses and things like that we saw back in 2000. Most people I talk to still tend to hate stocks, the financial crisis still fresh in their minds.


Iger Book

I just finished the Iger book, and it was also a pretty great read. Iger seems like a genuinely nice guy. CEO's tend to have an image of not being nice guys, so it's great to see someone like him make it to the top. It's possible to be decent, honest and honorable and still do well.

Buffett did mention DIS as one of the well-managed companies (along with GE at one point); his relationship with DIS goes back to when DIS bought Capital Cities during the Eisner years (and Iger was working for Thomas Murphy / Dan Burke). And I think it goes even further back than that, actually.

It's fascinating to read about the events that we've been reading about in the newspapers from the people that were involved. This one involves Buffett / Murphy / Burke, Steve Jobs, George Lucas, Pixar and a lot of what is going on in media today. This connects (unintended) to the Malone interview below.

Anyway, this book is a quick read so go get it. By the way, I have not subscribed to Disney+ yet as I am big into Netflix and there is just so much stuff there that I can barely scratch the surface of what I want to watch (by the time I cancelled the DVD part of my Netflix subscription, I had more than 400 DVD's in the queue). My favorite things are the European cop dramas (French, Belgian, German, Norwegian etc.), the Indian and Japanese shows, and of course many U.S.-based shows too. I just watched The Irishman which is really good (creepy is the special effects to make these close-to-80 year olds look middle-aged), but at the same time I also thought, gee, do we really need another wise-guy movie?

OTT Tangent
People keep talking about the competition in direct-to-consumer streaming and how increasing competition will hurt Netflix etc. This is probably true to some extent; when Netflix was the only game in town, that's one thing, but with many participants jumping in, that's another story altogether.

On the other hand, when you think about it, this is not really an either-or world. People aren't going to sit there and debate whether to switch from Netflix to Disney+ or Apple. Netflix charges $14/month or some such thing, and Disney+ is even cheaper.

A lot of people are still paying $100/month or more for the conventional video package ( I dropped that a couple of years ago mostly because I don't watch most of the channels (ESPN, for example), but what bothered me even more was that they were charging me $14/month for each cable box in the house, which seemed ridiculous to me. Those things can't cost more than $100 (look at Roku at $20; and if it actually does cost more than $100, it's for functionality that I don't need), and they are charging $14/month forever; this makes absolutely no sense.

If you cut the chord, you have $100/month in video budget you can allocate (you still need to pay for the internet), so you can have Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO and a few other things and still be under $100...


Malone Interview
There are a few annual events that are really exciting to me. Of course the Berkshire annual meeting (I just watch the video later), annual report, JPM annual report etc.

And another one of those is the CNBC John Malone interview by David Faber. Faber is one of the few people (of the reporters/anchors), if not the only one, who seems to understand the market and business.

Anyway, I jotted down some notes while watching the recent interview (done during the Liberty Media investor day). This is not everything, though, but a large part of it. He also talked about regulation, GOOG etc, for example, so go check out the video.

Here are Malone's thoughts on various topics:

Who is best positioned in streaming right now?
Malone answered by rephrasing the question to, "Who will be around in five years?"
Disney and Netflix.

DIS
Disney has great content, a great global brand, but doesn't have a large direct relationship with customers so must piggy back on those who do, like Verizon.

NFLX
Netflix, so far in the lead, good base / revenue stream.

AAPL
Apple may surprise. Slim content, but has great distribution in their direct customer relationships. They offer free for one year to buyers of AAPL products etc...
AAPL has optionality; see how it goes and decide how much they want to spend (how much they can afford).

HBO, AMZN
HBO is a decent service, but doesn't have the revenue stream to match Netflix.
AMZN has a totally different monetization strategy so... not primary biz.
Content is for marketing. AMZN may evolve to become a bundler of others' content

Tech companies want to be the platform, get info on customers, be gateway,
let others waste money on content.

DIS will be successful.

Direct relationship w/ customer in scale with growth and pricing power is a powerful business model.
DIS knows they need direct consumer relationship.

HBO Max: HBO content budget was $2bn/year.
If you want HBO, you already have it, so not much gain in new customers in the U.S.?   Malone doesn't see the growth. Maybe even attrition.
HBO budget is not enough to protect for the long term.  Takes years to develop content internationally. Don't own rights to intl distribution.  Problem seeing scale at HBO to get to top of direct consumer biz.  HBO is the same as it's been for 25 years. If you want it, you already have it so where is the growth?HBO may capture wholesale spread (as big bundle moves to direct).

ATT will face challenges. Historically has been the biggest dog in every fight, but not now, and not in this space (streaming media). About scale and globality. Need global scale, or won't get enough scale to compete in this space. This will be the challenge for ATT, HBO. FANG companies are all global. If you're only in the U.S., how do you compete?

Sports is glue that keeps big bundle together... will eventually blow up. Not sure when... big bundle still overpriced due to sports content...

Content Cost
At some point, hail Mary passes for some will prove to not be working so content cost will moderate. Some will fail (and stop spending) etc...

NFLX will have to moderate spend at some point.  Bundling of these services will happen too. Distributors may bundle too, if it reduces churn etc... will evolve like traditional cable. Comcast offers Netflix etc.

Cord cutting will level off. Erosion won't stop completely, though...

Cutting video increases margins at cable companies as margins for broadband is higher. Happening naturally.

Satellite will end up serving people with no other options, rural etc.

Linear TV will lose subscribers, ads, but as you get direct relationships, value of ads go up as you know more about customers.  Ad rev potential goes up; more focused ads etc.  Have to fight decline in reach due to decline of big bundle.  Provide content direct through app and sell content to others etc. Random access via app; if you subscribe to Discovery Channel, you get stuff through app too (not everything).

Cable industry changed when congress changed retransmission constraints; Margins started to go down. Content providers were able to extract more and more...

Will be profitable for people with unique situations, consistent, stable demand, pricing power, level of uniqueness...  those businesses ultimately gets regulated. 

Discovery
Discovery owns content globally, generating free cash, need to migrate to direct to consumer.
Malone bought more stock this week (November 2019).  Discovery will solve issues. Stock is dramatically undervalued. Malone bought $75 mn worth of stock. Growing, generating free cash. Market cap to levered free cash flow, cheapest on screen... They own all their content, generates tons of cash, investment grade b/s, they are growing while others are shrinking (5.5x cash flow). Cheap for good company...
Malone paid $28.03/share. 

CBS/VIA
They have no global presence. Lot of content is bought. CBS is totally dependent on sports rights so not sure about long-term profitability.  Not sure if CBS has enough power to carry all the channels.
VIA underinvested for many years, bought back stock at high prices, tactical mistake.
How important is MTV, Nickleodean to distributors? Question sustainability of model, and also they are U.S. only.

Yes, stock is historically cheap, but...  licensing out content to others. Ice cube melts faster when you don't put content on your own channel.

CBS/VIA needs to get global for long term sustainability. Find niche, glue to make customers sticky. Something unique.

Lions Gate
Sold LionsGate; didn't see them execute strategy of using library/content to drive Starrs. They focused too much on selling content instead of driving their own distribution.

Need global scale, or niche in small area that big guys don't care about to survive.

Wired and Wireless Together
Liberty Global followed strategy based on belief that combination of wired and wireless would lead to synergies. Turned out to be true.  Belgium, Holland (combined with Vodaphone).  Once they built scale, they were able to acquire. Synergies were real and very substantial.

In U.S, for Charter, same idea. Keep growing until they understand the economics of a combination. At the moment, not far along enough on that path.  Once scale is achieved, think about building own network. Hybrid tranmission over time. Could be joint ventures, mergers etc.

Malone interested in Altice, but Patrick wants control etc...

Uber
Not an expert, but doesn't understand Uber, how is scale going to make it profitable? Like selling hot dogs at a loss and making it up in volume. Can't see how scale changes economics. Can't understand why Dara took job.

Politics
Worries about attack on success and wealth in this country.
Worries about where country is going.

If Warren wins, wealth destruction will exceed wealth transfer.  Has places in Ireland, Canada, Bahamas etc... (that he can escape to),  but Malone rather stay here, be optimistic about balance.

Malone is Libertarian, would vote for Bloomberg.

Trump has right strategy, but not the right guy; he doesn't build a team. A lot of people that worked for him trying to take him down now. 

Bubble Yet?

Bubblicious?
People still speak of bubbles a lot, bubble in the bond market, stock market, unicorns etc. But I still don't really see a bubble except in certain areas of technology. Otherwise, things seem to be in a normal range to me, except interest rates. They do seem a bit low, but having said that, I still see 4% as a decent 'normalized' long term rate for the U.S. (as I have said here before many times).

The Valuation Sanity Check shows the Dow trading at 20.6x current and 16.4x forward P/E,  and the Berkshire portfolio (largest holdings) trading at 17.4x and 14.3x their current and forward earnings. Browsing down that page, there is nothing really alarming about anything, really. Some things look expensive, but nothing insane.

Also, here are some charts I plucked off the internet. The first bunch is from the JP Morgan Asset Management's Guide to the Markets. This is a nice report that they put out every quarter, and is fun to flip through. 

These charts too show nothing really crazy.

I keep hearing people talk about how crazy it is that the market is up 20% this year, but given that a lot of that is recovering from losses last year, it doesn't sound crazy to me.

Also, people keep saying that the returns of the last 10 years suggests the market is overvalued. But again, given that the much of the returns is recovering from the financial crisis bear market, I think it's irrelevant. If the market had double digit returns over 10 years from a market high, then I would be more inclined to agree; something bad might be about to happen.

But this is clearly not the case here. In fact, from the October 2007 high, the market has gone up less than 6%/year (excluding dividends), and 3.4%/year since the 2000 peak. This is hardly the long term performance figures you see in a real bubble.

I won't look for them, but look at the similar figures for the 2000 peak, Nikkei 1989 peak etc. It is very different from today.

S&P 500 Index Forward P/E Ratio

The above forward P/E chart shows a normal range, nothing alarming. Of course, people will argue that the market has been consistently overvalued for the past 25 years so this is not indicative of anything. But interest rates are a lot lower now than in the past too, and this chart doesn't show any abnormally high P/E level due to lower rates. I suppose one can argue about the validity of EPS estimates a year out. That is certainly a valid point.

Forward P/E and Future Returns

This X-Y plot of forward P/E ratio versus future returns show potential returns solidly in the positive. I did something similar using Shiller's CAPE ratio and found similar results.

One year forward returns based on P/E

My analysis goes back to 1985, so is longer term than the JPM study (which goes back to 1994), but hasn't been updated (a couple of years shouldn't make a difference!).

MSCI World vs. S&P 500 Index

These charts show nothing extraordinary either. Yes, the U.S. market is doing really well versus the rest of the world. But who cares, right? Unless you are some sort of mean-reversion trader, it's not really relevant. I too tend to like investing in U.S. businesses, mostly because I live here and have access to all the filings, conference calls and things like that, and I do feel U.S. companies are more responsive to shareholders and the system works better (compared to Japan, for example, where I have very little faith that managements care about shareholders).

Median P/E Ratio
And here's something I found. The S&P 500 is market-cap weighted, so the index P/E ratio tends to be influenced by the large cap stocks. When you have a bunch of large caps that are overvalued, it tends to push up the P/E ratio of the whole index.

To get a more 'typical' P/E ratio of the random stock, a median P/E can be more useful, as half the companies would be more expensive, and half would be cheaper than this level.

I found this chart in Yardeni's September report: Yardeni P/E report

Here's the median forward P/E ratio:

Again, nothing spectacular here. Looking at this (and the other charts), if someone is net short the market, you would have to examine their brains. Why would anyone be net short in a market like this? It doesn't really make sense to me.

Just flip through these charts again, and imagine you are the head of the trading desk at a hedge fund or bank somewhere. And say some guy is massively net short the market. You ask him why he is so short, and he tells you that it's because the market is way overvalued. What would you say? Would you feel comfortable going home and sleeping well? Of course, this trader may contribute to reducing the overall exposure of your desk, but don't think of it that way as you can always adjust your market exposure with futures.

If you think of it this way, it's sort of insane.

The other non-bubble thing is that you don't hear people talking about the market at all. Usually, in a real bubble, people really like to talk about the stock market in situations where that is not normal. A couple of years ago, everyone was talking about bitcoin. I don't hear much about that anymore these days.

Also, the news flow is so negative these days, whether it be Brexit, Trump tweet, U.S./China trade, Iran... Wherever you look, it's just bad, scary news. And yes, the market responds by going down, but it comes right back up. This is not to say that the market will always come back up. We will have a bear market at some point.

But if you are net short and all these 'favorable' developments to your position is not making you money, that's kind of a serious problem.  What happens when any of these things resolves itself? What if we do get a blowoff that has happened in most other bubble tops (2007 top was not really a bubble in terms of valuations, so bear markets can happen from normal valuations too).

Value-Growth Gap
The other thing is the huge gap between growth and value stocks. I am not that big a fan of this as the division seems arbitrary and kind of meaningless. But what is encouraging is that despite this slightly higher valuation of the overall market, the gap between value and growth seems to suggest that one can avoid a lot of pain by being more in the value area than growth.

Back in 2000 when the market was actually really overvalued, value investors did fine despite a 50% drop in the S&P 500 index as the drop was driven mostly by expensive companies going down in valuation. I think value stocks actually went up back then.

This may be true this time around too.

Market Timing
Most of us value investors don't believe in market timing at all. It is so amusing to watch the market go down 200 pts (or more) on a tweet only to reverse itself within a day or two by another tweet. Why anyone would trade based on this stuff is beyond me. I am a believer that headlines almost never mark turning points in the market. If the market is making a new high and then plunges on some negative headline, you can bet that that high will not be a high of any significance. I have seen various attempts over the years to analyze peaks and troughs in the market and matching it with news headlines; there usually is no headline that marked the top or bottom of a market.

It's just silly to try to figure out when the next bear market will happen.

There is one thing, though, that I would watch out for. If the U.S. market goes into a situation like the Japanese stock market in 1989, then I would obviously react. I would definitely lighten up equity holdings (still on a case-by-case basis based on valuations, of course) and maybe even consider buying puts, going short or whatever (OK, maybe not as I watched many bears lose a lot of money in 1998-2000 period only for them to be proven right but already having lost too much money made no money on the decline).

In any case, it would be a valuation call; I would lighten up when I can't accept the valuation levels. And it would be by each individual holding, not some vague notion about the directions of the overall market or economy.

Japanification of Markets?
The other worry is the Japanification of global markets. We were all baffled by the low interest rates in Japan for decades, and here we are with multiple countries and trillions of dollars in debt trading with negative interest rates.

Many commentators thought it won't happen here, and yet here we are with long term rates under 2%.

What about the stock market? Can the U.S. go into a bear market like Japan's that lasts 30 years? This sort of thing worries me too a little. We can't say it won't ever happen here as we were wrong about interest rates. Well, I've actually been in the camp of "lower for longer" so am not really all that surprised by how low our interest rates are.

But it would not be fun if the market went into a 30-year bear market.

Here's why I don't think it would happen, at least any time soon:

• The Japanese market went up to 60-80x P/E at the time. That sort of valuation takes decades to grow out of, and it's that much harder when there is no growth! We are nowhere near that kind of valuation. 
• The Japanese government and companies spent most of the time since then hiding things rather than fixing them. When the U.S. had a credit crisis, banks were encouraged to raise capital and fix their problems, not hide them. 
• Regulations are meant to maintain the status quo, protect large companies (who are contributors to the LDP) etc.
• In Japan, companies are discouraged from right-sizing. They run under a system the Canon CEO, Fujio Mitarai, calls corporate socialism. He says that since the Japanese government doesn't offer much of a social safety net, that burden falls to large corporations; they are strongly discouraged from firing employees. This is why there is a word for this category of employee: madogiwazoku (google it!). Here's an article about it: Boredom Room. It's no surprise that the stock market has been dead for so long with so many zombie employees at zombie companies. This is very different than in the U.S.

There are many other problems, but those are just some big ones off the top of my head... You may think of better reasons why Japan has been stuck for so long.

None of these are true in the U.S. That doesn't mean we can't go into a 30-year bear market, of course. But it just seems to me that it is not likely at the moment.

Hard Left Turn in Politics?
Others worry about the progressive left; Leon Cooperman joked the other day that if Elizabeth Warren gets elected, the market won't open. I understand that fear, and as a big fan of JP Morgan, I totally get it.

I am actually pretty progressive myself (I used to be conservative but have been moving left over time), but I wouldn't worry about this at all.

First of all, we really have no idea what's going to happen. We don't even know who is going to be the democratic candidate; it's possible that someone else not even running now will come up out of nowhere (well, not sure if that's possible, actually, but we still have a long time to go).

We do know that Warren is as progressive as she presents herself, so this may not apply, but it's possible that she runs hard left to take Sanders' and other voters only to run back towards the middle if she wins the nomination.

We don't know what she can accomplish even if elected, right? This is a president, not a dictator. Did FDR or Kennedy destroy the country? I haven't looked at the market action around their elections, but I don't really think there is a big, visible dent or bend in the long term charts based on who was president.

So this is certainly a risk factor, but my guess is that things, as usual, will not turn out the way we expect even if Warren wins the election. It's a complex model and things aren't going to be so easy to predict.

Bubble Watch

Shiller said the other day that the market can go up 50% from here. OK, so I fell for it and clicked to watch the CNBC video. This was sort of a surprising comment coming from the creator of the CAPE ratio, one of the main indicators bears use to argue that the market is way overvalued.

Of course, this is not Shiller's forecast or expectation. In fact, he says that this is very unlikely, but it is possible. His point was simply that the CAPE ratio is 30x now, and in the 1990's it went up to 45x. So if that happened again, that's a 50% increase.

This is totally possible, especially now. I would not invest in the market with that expectation, of course. Actually, I would invest with the opposite expectation (when pressed, Shiller said the market is more likely to go up 50% than down 50%).

Trailing P/E
Let's put the CAPE aside for now and just look at regular trailing P/E's. Back in 1999, that went up to 30x, and in 1987, it went up to 21.4x (this is from the Shiller spreadsheet).

We keep hearing from the bears that the market is as expensive as it was during previous peaks, so we are in dangerous territory; they say we are in a bubble.

OK. That is possible.

But in previous posts, I argued that if 10 year rates stabilize at 4% over time (it's at 2.3% now), it is possible that the market P/E can average 25x during that period. Maybe the market fluctuates around that average, so the market can easily trade between 18x and 33x P/E without anything being out of whack. (Buffett also said at the recent annual meeting that if rates stay around this area, then the stock market could prove to be very undervalued at current levels.)

So we have a problem. This 18-33x P/E range puts the market in bubble territory according to the bubble experts. But we are saying here that if rates stay at 4%, that's the normal range the market should trade at.

So then, how can we tell when we are in bubble territory?

Since we are using interest rates to value the stock market, we will have to interest rate adjust our bubble levels too.

Interest Rate Adjusted Bubble P/E
So just looking back at 1999 and 1987, here are the indicators at the time:

               PE          EY       10yr
1987      21.4x      4.7%     8.8%
1999      30.0x,     3.3%     6.3%

Both 1987 and 1999 had the feel of a rubber band stretching and then snapping. You will see that the earnings yield was 4.1% lower than the 10 year rate in 1987 and 3% lower in 1999.

Right now, the P/E ratio is 23.4x, for an earnings yield of 4.3% versus the 10-year rate of 2.3%. So it's a full 2.0% higher, not lower. But even I think 2.3% on the 10 year is too low. I use 4.0% these days for what I think is a non-bubbled up, unmanipulated-by-the-Fed, sustainable, normalized rate.

Using this spread, long term rates would have to go up to 7-8% for me to worry about an overstretched rubber band snapping.

How about the stock market? How high would it have to go before I think we are really in bubble territory?

With interest rates at 2.3%, we can't deduct 3% or 4% from it to get a bubble-level earnings yield.
So we'll look at it as a ratio.  In 1987, earnings yield got to as low as 0.53x the bond rate (4.7%/8.8%) and in 1999 it got to 0.52x (3.3%/6.3%)

Using the current 2.3% 10-year rate, earnings yield would have to get to 1.2% for me to really think that maybe we are in a stock market bubble.  That comes to 83x P/E!  At that level, trust me, even I won't be talking much about long term investing, and would probably be net short with a bunch of put options too.

But wait, let's not use 2.3% because we all know that's too low. Let's use my normalized 4%.  Even with a 4% bond yield, earnings yield would have to get to 2% to be considered really bubble level.  That is a P/E ratio of 50x.   That's more than a double from here.

So for me, the market would have to actually more than double from here before I see it as really bubbly. (If you want to see what a real bubble is like, look at Bitcoin!)

Narrow Market
The other thing I hear a lot is that the market is up only because of the very few hot tech stocks like the FANG stocks. They make it sound like the market would be doing nothing without them. Maybe.

But just as a quick check, I compared the S&P 500 index (ETF: SPY) to the S&P 500 equal-weighted index (ETF: RSP); the super-large caps would have no more impact than the smallest S&P 500 companies.

Check this out:
  (The blue line is the RSP, green is SPY)

SPY versus RSP Long Term

SPY versus RSP 10 Years

SPY versus RSP 5 Years

In all of the above time periods, the RSP outperforms SPY, which I don't think would be the case if it was only a few of the super-large caps that is pulling the S&P 500 index up.

Just for fun, I looked at the S&P 500 index versus the Russell 2000 index too. If only a few super-large caps were pulling up the averages, then obviously, the S&P 500 index should be outperforming the Russell 2000 too.  The blue line is the Russell 2000, and the green line is the S&P 500 index.

S&P 500 Index versus Russell 2000 - 5 Years

S&P 500 Index versus Russell 2000 - 10 Year

Here too, I don't see the S&P 500 outperforming in a big way lead by the supers.  To the contrary, the S&P 500 index is behind the Russell in the 10 year period.

I had no idea what I would see when I put up these comparisons. Looking at them now, I am a little disappointed in active managers who claim that they are underperforming because they don't own the FANG stocks; the above shows that maybe that's not the issue.

Anyway, that's another ongoing topic here.

Conclusion
All of this stuff, I just do sometimes to satisfy my own curiosity; not to make any claims either way. I have no idea what the market will do, but I don't believe we are in a stock market bubble at all. OK, if interest rates got up to 7-8% and valuations are still here in the 23-24x P/E area (trailing basis), then yes, I would agree we have a valuation problem.

Otherwise, it would take a market P/E of 50-80x for me to think we are in a stock market bubble (and I would put on shorts and load up on puts! But even then, I wouldn't expect an immediate payoff. If the market took off like that, it would be very hard to pick the top).

Otherwise, we are just, in terms of stock market valuation, in the "zone of reasonableness", to borrow Buffett's phrase from a few years ago.

Also, keep in mind, this 50-80x P/E ratio range is not a target, of course. That's where it has to go before you convince me we are in a stock market bubble.

Also, this doesn't mean the market can't enter a bear market at any time. There was no interest rate / earnings yield rubber band in 1929 and 2007.