Global Market Comments
November 30, 2018
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Global Market Comments
November 5, 2018
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November 2, 2018
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October 3, 2018
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June 25, 2018
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May 25, 2018
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Are you looking for an investment that does well during modest economic growth, a flat to slightly falling dollar, continued low interest rates, and a stock market that periodically hits the panic button?
Then General Electric (GE) is the stock for you.
I have just spent my day surfing the web for tidbits about GE and found quite a lot that I liked.
Want to get a great deal on a new diesel electric locomotive with teaser financing? That?s why customers flock to GE.
What I found was one of the largest corporate restructuring stories in history.
You can summarize it as ?Out with glitz, leverage, and volatility, and in with the plodding, the stable, and the reliable.? In stock market terms this means out with low price/earnings multiples and in with high ones.
For a start, GE is run by Jeffrey Immelt, considered by many to be one of the most superb large cap managers in the world. He has been cutting costs and ditching business lines not considered essential to its core heavy industrial origins.
Immelt has indicated that he expects that by 2018, General Electric will be earning 90% of its profits from "selling equipment for airplanes, railroads, oil extraction and electricity generation," all safe stuff.
By the way, these are great plays on a recovering Chinese economy as well. No coincidence there.
The most immediate trigger to pile into this stock was its planned sale of GE Finance, which is why wags used to call GE ?The hedge fund that sold light bulbs.?
GE was dragged into this business during the 1990s by predecessor, Jack Welsh, using the logic that ?Everyone else was doing it.? Welsh never inhaled a breath of humility in his life, and chronically suffered from confusing brilliance with a bull market.
In the end, his strategy almost took the company under, requiring a bailout from Warren Buffett during the dark days of 2009, in the form of a 10% convertible preferred stock issue.
If only I could get such terms!
In the most recent quarter, GE had to write off $4.33 billion for the sale of damaged securities left over from this ill conceived venture.
A $30 billion portfolio of such dross was recently sold to Wells Fargo (WFC). GE has also indicated that it will soon spin off consumer finance business Synchrony Financial (SYF).
This is yet another step in the company's plan to divest $200 billion of GE Capital assets as GE returns to its industrial roots.
And how can you not like that 3.10% dividend in this zero return world? This is with a price earnings multiple of 25 for current year earnings, and 19 times next year earnings.
GE?s aviation business is climbing to higher altitudes. Its backlog has ballooned some 36% over the past two years, to $150 billion.
It has been spurred on by a new engine that uses 15% less fuel, enabling their hyper competitive airline customers to cut one of their largest costs.
This will pave the way for GE to grow its installed base of engines from 36,000 to an impressive 46,000 by 2020. Did you know the Chinese have to buy 1,000 airliners over the next decade?
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After an 18-month battle with the French government, GE managed to close its purchase of Alstom for $13.8 billion, a major European energy company. It had to promise to create 1,000 new jobs in France to do so.
The deal brings GE's capabilities that it had previously lacked in renewable energy and heat recovery steam generators. The latter are key components of combined cycle gas-plus-steam plants, which GE forecasts will account for 70% of all future gas-fired plant orders.
Acquiring this capability roughly doubles the General Electric share of the revenues it could capture from orders for such plants.
With it comes considerable expertise in plant design and construction, allowing GE to move from being a supplier to a lead contractor on such projects.
Alstom also delivers a significant presence in China and India, as well as sophisticated products in transmission technology.
(GE)?s sale of its appliance unit to Sweden?s Electrolux (ELUXY), which came with the Alstom deal, is pending antitrust review.
To top all this, activist investor Norman Peltz?s Trian Fund has taken a 1% stake in (GE) (or $2.5 billion worth) with the intention of shaking it up so a few more coins will fall out for shareholders.
That is quite an ambitious bet. Peltz wants the company to ramp up an already ambitious share repurchase program. And you get in at a great price today.
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All in all, GE seems to be the right kind of stock to buy in the market we have at the moment. It also fits neatly into my scenario of new money moving into value, at the expense of growth (click here for ?Switching from Growth to Value?.
All we need to get in is a decent pullback from its recent parabolic move.
For more background on General Electric, click here for ?The American Onshoring Trend is Accelerating?.
Jeff?s Got Some New Tricks Up His Sleeve
I have seen the future, and it works.
In my never-ending search for my readers for ?ten-baggers,? or investments that will rise in value tenfold over the foreseeable future, I keep circling back to the solar industry.
Tesla founder Elon Musk never does anything small.
Last year he announced the first ever, economical home battery electrical storage system, which he calls the Powerwall.
The device will enable your roof-mounted solar panels to supply power to your home 24 hours a day, not just when the sun is shining.
It is an innovation on the scale of Thomas Edison?s invention of the light bulb in 1879, or the launch of the Internet in 1969, in terms of the long-term impact on our economy.
Shifting the source of a third of our power supply is a big deal.
You may recall that the early investors in these earlier transitions made fortunes, General Electric (GE) in Edison?s case, and Netscape that spun out of the early Internet days.
Today, General Electric is the only company that has remained in the Dow Average for the past 100 years. So, investors take note.
During the day, the panels will charge up the battery mounted on your garage wall, which is about the size of a big screen TV. At night, you can then run your home off battery power.
Alternatively, you can engage in what is known in the industry as ?load shifting.? Charge your battery at night when you can buy electricity for as little as 4 cents a kilowatt hour, and sell it back to your local utility during a power demand surge the next afternoon for as much as 50 cents a kWh.
Buy low, sell high, it works for me!
And what is the cost of the miracle technology?
Only $3,000 for a 7 kWh battery or $3,500 for the 10 kWh version for energy hogs, like me, who has to charge a Tesla Model S-1 every day, soon to be two.
You can also include as immediate customers for this new product sports addicts, who watch multiple games on ESPN 24/7, paranoids who keep the lights on all night and indoor pot farmers, whose energy needs are said to be prodigious. Of course, the military will be another big consumer.
I ran some numbers on the possibilities for the Powerwall and they are mind-boggling.
The average home in the US has 2,500 square feet, which uses 7,000 kWh per year, or 19 kWh per day. The current cost for this power will be around $2,000 a year, depending where you live, more in California, and less in Texas, Oklahoma, and North Carolina.
A solar/ battery combination for such a home should cost about $14,000, including installation, the panels, the inverter, and all the gizmos. Net out the alternative energy investment tax credit of 30% (IRS Form 5695 http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f5695.pdf ), and your cost falls to only $10,500.
That means your power savings will cover the cost of your solar investment in a mere 5 years, compared to the present 7 or 8 years. After that, your home will have free electricity for another 20 years, as the life of these systems is usually 25 years.
Make the investment, and the value of your home rises, by $2 for every dollar spent, or so local real estate agents tell me.
You also will be guaranteed against any future power rate increases, an absolute certainty. America?s power grid is currently in a woeful state of disrepair, with much of the hardware 50 years old, or more.
The demands on the power industry are also about to take a quantum leap forward, as millions of consumers buy electric cars. Tesla plans to ramp up production of vehicles from 40,000 units last year to 500,000 by 2020, when the $35,000, 300 mile range Tesla 3 achieves mass production.
Some of my over-the-horizon-thinking hedge fund friends believe that figure could hit 15 million by 2030.
Add to that new, competing electric models produced by every other major carmaker, and that?s a lot of juice that will be needed. As a result, electric power utilities will probably have to endure more structural changes to their business model than any other industry.
Trillions of dollars are needed to modernize it, and all of that is going to come out of your pocket, but only if you remain an existing power customer.
Indeed, I have already been notified by my own utility, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PGE), that I am due for two consecutive 7% price increases over the next two years.
The battery will also provide a backup power supply for home for when the grid crashes. Twice in the last two decades I have lost a freezer full of venison, pheasants, quail, trout, and salmon that I hunted and fished when storms knocked out power, for a week each time.
The Powerwall prices are so low that they beat the cost of a conventional backup diesel or gasoline generator.
They will also wipe out most of the existing back up battery industry, as Tesla?s advantages gained through massive economies of scale are enormous. Musk is talking about producing billions of batteries.
The Powerwall is a game changer for the solar industry, which has long been hobbled by the limitation that it could only supply power for 12 hours a day, and less in the winter, depending on your latitude.
It certainly gives a shot in the arm for the solar industry, which I have been banging the table about for years. My favorite is Solar City (SCTY). Other names to look at are First Solar (FSLR) and SunPower (SPWR), which manufactures my own solar panels.
It also casts Musk?s own Tesla (TSLA) in a new light. It is no longer just a car company, but a comprehensive energy solution. Musk has already made one of the largest capital investments in history to build a $5 billion ?Giga? factory near Reno, Nevada.
Much of that plant?s production has already been pre sold, and I understand that the decision has already been made to build a second one. Wow!
Consumers are able to purchase the new batteries from the Texas based retailer, TreeHouse, (their link https://treehouse.co/treehouse-is-first-retailer-to-sell-tesla-home-battery/ ).
Musk explains that the world consumes 20 trillion kWh per year of electricity.
In the US, 1/3 of our fossil fuel consumption goes to transportation, and another 1/3 generates electric power, which is the equivalent to consuming 225 billion gallons of gasoline per year (or 8 billion barrels of oil per year, or 22 million barrels a day).
His goal is nothing less than to largely substitute those fossil fuel uses with solar energy, cutting our fossil fuel consumption by 2/3.
I guess there is no point in setting the bar low.
Meet the Next Light Bulb
I firmly believe that simple solutions to our energy problems are in the process of coming out of the blue, and are something no one is thinking about now.
Add up the contributions of many small improvements, and the cumulative change will alter our economic future beyond all recognition. Here are two of them.
General Electric (GE) is now mass-producing their ?Smart Energy LED Bulb,? which can screw into a conventional socket and produce the same amount of light as a 60-watt bulb, but consume only nine watts of power.
Some 22% of America?s electric power supply is used for lighting, and this bulb could cut our total consumption by 17.6%.
Other bulb manufacturers are getting into the game, like Philips, Osram, Toshiba, and Panasonic, which are already offering more efficient designs. The downside is that, while they last 25,000 hours, or ten times longer than a conventional incandescent bulb, they will initially cost $15-$25.
Economies of scale are expected to bring costs down dramatically in a few years. The Department of Energy has selected Seattle as the test bed for an all LED (light emitting diode) public lighting system.
Here is another game changer for our energy woes. If you double conventional car engine efficiency, US oil consumption drops by half. This is not so hard to do. The US government has already mandated that US car makers achieve an average fleet mileage of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.
They are hoping this will lower the cost of gasoline to $1 a gallon by then. They may get their wish this year instead.
One of the first things you learn in a freshman level physics class is how inefficient an internal combustion engine is, using hundreds of moving parts operating at 500 degrees to convert only 25% of the energy input into to motion.?
Tesla?s (TSLA) entire electric drive train has just 11 moving parts, operate at room temperature, and convert 80% of its energy into motion. When they go to the mass market in two years with the $35,000 Tesla 3, it will have a huge impact on our overall energy picture
Add this in with the surging supplies of American shale oil, and the utter collapse of the price of Texas tea (USO) over the past six months is suddenly starts to make incredible sense.
All good things must come to an end.
For most of 2015, growth stocks far and away have been the outstanding performers in the US stock market.
Almost daily, I delighted in sending you trade alerts to buy winners, like Palo Alto Networks (PANW), Tesla (TSLA), and the Russell 2000 (IWM).
And so they delivered.
The reasons for their impressive gains were crystal clear.
The expectation all year was that the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates imminently. This gave us a perennially strong dollar (UUP).
Thus, one could only direct focus towards companies that were immune from plunging foreign currencies and falling international earnings.
It really was a year to ?Buy American?.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the bear market for bonds. It never showed up.
The final nail in the coffin was Fed governor Janet Yellen?s failure to move on September 17. She looked everywhere for inflation, but only found the chronically unemployed (the 10% U-6 discouraged worker jobless rate).
Not only did we NOT get the rate hike, the prospects are that WE MAY NOT SEE A SUBSTANTIAL INCREASE IN THE COST OF MONEY FOR YEARS!
At this point, the worst-case scenario is for the Fed to deliver only two 25-basis point rises over the next six months, AND THAT?S IT!
This reinforces my belief that the top of the coming interest rate cycle may only reach the bottom of past cycles, since deflation is so pernicious, and so structural.
All of a sudden, the bull case for the dollar, which has been driving our US stock selection all year, went wobbly at the knees.
Europe, Japan, and China are all now in between new quantitative easing and stimulus cycles, giving a decided bud to the Euro (FXE), the Yen (FXY), (YCS), the Yuan (CYB), the Aussie (FXA), and the Loonie (FXC).
New round of QE will come, but those could be months off.
Therefore, I am sensing a sea change in the market leadership. Rushing to the fore are the shares of companies that benefit from flat interest rates and a flagging greenback.
Those would be value stocks.
Value stocks are easy to find. Do any quantitative screen based on low price earnings multiples, low price to book value, and low price to cash flow, and you will find thousands of them. This is what the big boys do.
There is another reason to refocus on value stocks, but it is more psychological than analytical.
We are now into our sixth year in this bull market, one of the strongest in history. Portfolio managers are very wary of paying high multiples at market tops, as many did at the summit of the Dotcom bubble in 2000.
At least if they buy cheap share at market highs they have adequate job preserving explanations for their actions. There is also some inherent built in safety in increasing weightings in companies that haven?t appreciated very much.
I probably don?t know you personally (although I call about 1,000 of you a year), but I bet you don?t have 100 in-house analysts at hand to help you sift through the wheat and the chaff.
So let me do the heavy lifting for you. I?ll distill down the value play to a handful of high quality, high probability sectors.
1) Industrials ? Remember those, the decidedly unsexy, heavy metal bashing companies that you have been ignoring for years? With global businesses and hefty borrowing for capital spending, they do very well in a flat interest rate environment. What?s my favorite industrial? The former hedge fund that made light bulbs, General Electric (GE). They make really cool jet engines and diesel electric locomotives too.
2) Consumer Discretionary ? Finally, people are spending their gas savings, now that they realize it is more than a temporary windfall. A housing market that is on fire is creating enormous demand for all the things owners stuff in their homes, both in new purchases and upgrades. Low rates will keep the 30-year mortgage under 4% for longer. You already know my best names here, Home Depot (HD), and Disney (DIS).
3) Old Technology ? Tired of paying 100 plus multiples for the latest non yielding cloud highflyer? Mature old technology stocks offer some of the cheapest valuations in the market. As, yes, they pay dividends now! I?ll go with Microsoft here (MSFT) as the action in the options market has suddenly seen a big spike.
And what about the biggest old tech stock of all, Apple (AAPL)? I think this will be a 2016 story, and investors reposition themselves to take advantage of the run up to the iPhone 7 launch in a year. But as the recent price action shows, some portfolio managers may not want to wait.
4) Financials ? Are not the first sector to leap to mind when looking for a low interest rate play. Overnight interest rates will remain depressed as far as the eye can see. However, rates at the long end, maturities of five years or more, are rising.
This steepening yield curve is where it really matters for banks, as it allows them to expand their profit margins. On top of that, bank valuations are at the bargain basement end of the market, with many still trading at below book value. Go for Citibank (C), Bank of America (BAC), and Goldman Sachs (GS).
New leadership from low-priced sectors could give us the rocket fuel for a melt up in the indexes into the end of 2015. It could take us right to the low end of my forecast yearend range for the S&P 500 I made on January 6 of 2,200-2,300 (click here for ?My 2015 Annual Asset Class Review?).
After five months of derisking, both institutions and hedge funds are underweight stocks and shy of exposure. As a result this underperforming year has ?chase? written all over it.
Keep your fingers crossed, but stranger things have happened.
