When I switched from deep value investing to defensive value investing in 2011, the first stock I purchased with the new approach was BP.
Six volatile years later, this has turned out to be a mildly disappointing investment. That’s partly because of bad luck, but it’s also because I paid too much in the first place. That’s a mistake I don’t plan on making again.
Continue reading “I’m selling BP because of its high debts and uncertain future”In this blog post, I review my decision to buy Rio Tinto shares in 2012, and my decision to sell them last week.
Here’s the executive summary:
Rio Tinto was a volatile investment with some extreme ups and downs, but when I eventually sold its shares the returns were okay.
The investment also rammed home the importance of buying highly cyclical companies at extremely low valuations, which is something I recently learned from my investment in Braemar Shipping.
Continue reading “Why I’ve sold my Rio Tinto shares”Braemar Shipping Services PLC joined the model portfolio way back in early 2011, just a couple of months after the portfolio’s inception.
Continue reading “Selling Braemar Shipping Services: Important lessons from a volatile investment”Like banks, supermarkets were once seen as super-defensive investments, capable of delivering steady growth regardless of the economic environment.
That was still the mainstream viewpoint when Morrisons joined my model portfolio in 2013, and even the great Warren Buffett owned a significant slice of Tesco.
Of course, we now know that supermarkets are not quite as low risk as we thought.
Tescos, Sainsburys and Morrisons have all cut or suspended their dividends in recent years and Buffett sold all of his Tesco shares while wishing the company the best of luck for the future.
The problem was not so much that supermarkets are not defensive, because they are. Instead, these supermarkets ran into trouble because of a “perfect storm” of:
After several years in my portfolio, Morrisons is still in turnaround mode and I am not especially enthusiastic about its future. However, the share price has largely recovered so I have decided to sell and move on to better things.
Continue reading “Why I’ve finally decided to sell Morrisons”After almost six years BAE Systems, one of the first companies to join the UKVI model portfolio, has been sold.
In terms of raw numbers, the results look like this:
In the rest of this post, I’ll cover why I bought it, what happened during its time in the model portfolio and why I’ve decided to sell.
Continue reading “Sold: BAE Systems returns 141.5% over six years”Over the last few years, Standard Chartered has not turned out to be a good investment, with shareholders being hit by both a rights issue and a suspended dividend.
The root cause was the bank’s balance sheet, which was not able to withstand significant loan impairments caused by a delayed aftershock of the financial crisis.
Having sold my Standard Chartered shares just a few days ago, I think now is a good time to look back at what happened. However, rather than simply crying over spilt milk, I want to focus on why the milk was spilt in the first place and how I (and perhaps you) can try to avoid this sort of unpleasant situation in future.
But before I get into the details, here’s a quick snapshot of the results of this investment.
Continue reading “Standard Chartered and the importance of a strong bank balance sheet”When TP ICAP joined the UK Value Investor model portfolio in 2011 it was called Tullett Prebon and was the second largest interdealer broker in the world behind ICAP PLC.
I invested in Tullett Prebon for the usual reasons: it appeared to be a good company whose share price was depressed by what I hoped were some hopefully short-term problems.
Although the company had an excellent track record of growth, in my original analysis I mentioned that its rapid growth may have been driven by the pre-2009 boom in financial markets rather than by any enduring traits of the company itself.
In the end, and after a five-year holding period, I think that somewhat pessimistic viewpoint was largely correct; Tullett Prebon was a good company, but its pre-2009 growth rate of more than 20% per year was not sustainable in the post-financial crisis world.
After 2009 the company’s fortunes began a decline which continued beyond its entry into the model portfolio in 2011 and has only recently shown signs of slowing down.
Tullett Prebon did not perform as well as I had hoped, but it wasn’t a bad investment.
However, at today’s share price, I see no compelling reason to continue to hold and so at the start of January, I sold the entire position. The overall results are below and, as I said, they are not quite as I hoped for but are nonetheless not too bad:
Those simple statistics do not quite do the investment justice as it was a bumpy ride from the very beginning. The share price chart below should give you a better idea of how the investment actually went:
Note: The sell price in the chart is 433p as that was the price when I did the sell analysis. By the time I sold a few days later, the price had jumped up to 469p.
In the years before Tullett Prebon joined the model portfolio it had exactly the kind of track record I look for. It had a long history of revenue, earnings and dividend growth, and that growth was relatively consistent as well.
Consistent and rapid growth usually produces a premium share price and that was the case here, with Tullett Prebon trading as high as 525p per share back in 2008.
But then the financial crisis arrived, the shares fell below 150p, and the interdealer market changed forever.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t looking for defensive value stocks back in 2009, otherwise, I might have invested in Tullett Prebon during the crisis at that 150p price point. Instead, I was investing in “net net” stocks, companies selling for less than the value of their fixed assets minus all liabilities (a crude approximation of their liquidation value, and a favourite metric of Ben Graham).
By 2011 that had changed and I was in the early days of becoming a defensive value investor, but my approach was very different to the one I use today. I didn’t look at profitability, dividend growth, capex ratios, or any number of other factors that I now take into account. In fact, my approach was much closer to the one detailed in Mary Buffett’s book, The New Buffettology.
I focused on calculating a company’s rate of return on retained earnings and then using that to project future earnings and dividend growth over the next few years. Armed with future growth rates, I could then calculate an “expected” future share price based on the company’s historically average PE ratio.
Somewhat embarrassingly, my projection in 2011 for Tullett Prebon’s 2016 share price was 1,484p; not exactly close to my eventual exit price of 469p.
That was the somewhat optimistic basis for the investment, but I wasn’t completely optimistic and did know about some of the major headwinds the company was likely to face in the years ahead.
These were primarily the financial sector’s reduced appetite for speculative trading and impending tighter regulations on the all-important OTC (over-the-counter) financial markets (in my opinion both welcome side effects of the financial crisis). So it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, but the outlook was rosy enough for me to invest.
The table below compares the 2011 versions of Tullett Prebon and the FTSE 100 using my current metrics (which you can calculate yourself for any suitable company using these investment spreadsheets). Even though I didn’t use these metrics at the time, the company still comes out looking attractive relative to the market.
The investment in Tullett Prebon did not exactly get off to a flying start. Within a few short months, the share price had fallen by more than 25% and the Chief Operating Officer had resigned. However, more important than share price movements or musical chairs in the boardroom were the company’s unfolding results, which were consistently negative.
This initial period of weak results is entirely normal in the world of value investing; after all, companies usually only become attractively valued when they are facing obvious problems of one sort or another. Generally, a best-case scenario is that both the problems and the depressed share price are short-lived.
In this case, the initial period of weak results continued into 2012, 2013, 2014 and, to a lesser extent, 2015.
For example, the 2012 results were neatly summed up by the Chairman:
“Market conditions remained challenging throughout 2012 as the overall level of activity in the financial markets remained subdued.”
And the CEO had this to say:
“Our customers are operating in a more onerous regulatory environment and there is considerable uncertainty over the impact of new regulations covering the OTC markets. It is therefore prudent to expect that financial market activity will continue to be subdued.”
Subdued activity is not good for a broker, and this was reflected in the company’s declining revenues and earnings.
In 2013 the CEO’s statement was almost identical, as was the decline in the company’s results:
“The overall level of activity in the financial markets that we serve has been subdued for the last eighteen months reflecting persistently low volatility, the more onerous regulatory environment for our customers and the considerable uncertainty over the impact of new regulations covering the OTC derivatives markets, particularly in the United States.”
That statement was then largely repeated in 2014.
Despite the gloom, one helpful aspect in the face of falling revenues was the company’s relative lack of fixed overheads.
Instead of huge factories filled with expensive machinery, “voice” brokerages like TP ICAP generate revenues primarily through a mixture of humans, telephones and technology, with humans being one of the largest and most flexible parts of the cost structure (in 2013 broker compensation was equal to more than 50% of broker revenues and came to an average of £259,000 per broker; nice work if you can get it).
This is helpful in a downturn because costs can be reduced almost in line with revenue declines (i.e. brokers can be laid off), and that reduces operational gearing and helps maintain earnings in the face of lower revenues.
While low operational gearing helped the company avoid a collapse in profits, it was not enough on its own to turn things around. For that, the company looked to major acquisitions.
The first major acquisition was PVM Oil Associates in 2014 and then, much more importantly, ICAP’s voice brokerage business in 2016, which roughly doubled the size of the group.
These acquisitions are intended to be transformative, but I am not the sort of investor who pins their hopes on an unproven future and so they did not sway my decision to remove TP ICAP from the portfolio.
So why have I decided to sell now? The main reason is, as usual, that TP ICAP is now ranked lower on my stock screen than almost any other holding in the portfolio, with only BAE Systems having a lower rank. This change in the company’s relative attractiveness has come about for two reasons.
The first reason is that its financial track record has completely changed from the high growth record it had in 2011. The company’s results have declined almost every year since 2009 and that has had a massive impact on its growth rate, growth quality and profitability metrics.
The second reason is that while the company’s financial results have been declining, its share price has increased. As a result, its valuation ratios are no longer attractive given the company’s unimpressive track record of recent years.
The table below compares Tullett Prebon at the time of purchase to TP ICAP as it stands today:
Overall, the company’s combination of financial results and valuation ratios is far less attractive than it was five years ago.
However, I don’t just mechanically sell when the stock screen tells me to. I like to think at least a little bit about what the future might hold for a company, and in some cases, if I’m particularly optimistic I might hold on for a while longer, even if the company’s stock screen rank is not that appealing.
In TP ICAP’s case, I might have argued that a weakening financial track record is normal in cyclical companies, especially if they are purchased after a cyclical boom which is then followed by a cyclical bust. I might then have held on in the hope that the cycle would soon turn towards a boom, driving revenues, profits and share prices upwards.
In fact, I do think TP ICAP is caught in a cyclical downturn, but I also think it could be a very long time before we see another financial sector boom.
I could be completely wrong, but my understanding is that credit-driven financial crises can take many many years to recover from, rather than just several years, so TP ICAP’s turnaround could be a very long way off.
In summary, TP ICAP’s track record is not great, its price is not great and there is no obvious reason why things are going to get better anytime soon. That, in a nutshell, is why I’ve sold.
The proceeds will be reinvested into a new holding next month, following my usual portfolio maintenance strategy of buying or selling one holding each month.
Hopefully, the new company will return something better than the reasonable but unspectacular 9% per year that TP ICAP has returned these past five years.
I’ll leave the final word to TP ICAP’s Chairman, taken from the 2015 annual report:
“It is not possible to predict when the structural and cyclical factors currently adversely affecting the interdealer broker industry will ease, or when the level of activity in the wholesale OTC financial markets may increase. Our recent performance has benefited from the buoyant level of activity in the Energy and commodities markets, particularly in oil and oil related financial instruments, and this level of activity may not persist.”
Note: Tullett Prebon joined the model portfolio before I’d started publishing the UK Value Investor newsletter, so the original pre-purchase review appeared in this 2011 blog post instead.
Every year throws up many valuable investment lessons, and 2016 was no different.
For me, these investment lessons come primarily from the companies I buy and sell, both winners and losers, mistakes and successes.
I uncover these lessons by writing a post-sale review at the end of every investment. My hope is that these lessons can then be incorporated into my investment strategy to make it, and any real-world portfolios which use it, perform better in the future.
Recently I published a 2015 investment lessons ebook to bring all of 2015’s post-sale reviews together into one document.
That seemed to be quite popular among readers of this blog, so with 2016 over I’ve decided to do it again by collecting together all of the post-sale reviews from 2016 into a single, downloadable ebook.
Continue reading “2016 Investment lessons and case studies”While some investments are difficult, others are easy, and my recently ended investment in Homeserve PLC was definitely of the second kind.
As the chart above shows, this was a classic value investment: 1) Buy a good company at a time of difficulty and when other investors are pessimistic; 2) hold while the company and its situation improve and then; 3) sell when other investors become optimistic.
When I looked at Homeserve in 2013 it had a long track record of financial success, but the announcement of an investigation by its regulator in 2011 had unnerved the market and sent the shares crashing by around 50%.
Having investigated the company in some detail I thought the odds were good that it would continue to prosper in the longer term, so I added it to my defensive value model portfolio and personal portfolio.
As luck would have it I was right, and so after a relatively short three-year holding period, I have decided to sell in order to lock in some impressive and largely unexpected gains.
Continue reading “Sold: How Homeserve PLC returned 134% in 3 years”One of the best ways to become better at investing (or anything else for that matter) is to learn from the successes and failures of others.
The idea is simple enough, but finding detailed reviews of those successes and failures, along with information about any lessons learned, is not so easy.
And that’s true even though I’ve been writing post-sale reviews of my investments for almost a decade, and regular reviews of the UKVI portfolio since 2012.
Each of those reviews also draws out any lessons learned, but what I haven’t done is collect them together into a single document and then put that document in an easy-to-find place on the website.
That’s where The Investment Lessons eBook: 2015 Edition (PDF) comes in.
Continue reading “The Investment Lessons eBook: 2015 Edition”Chemring was one of the very first investments I made as a defensive value investor back in early 2011 and today that lack of experience definitely shows.
Continue reading “Chemring and the dangers of growth by acquisition”Reckitt Benckiser is the owner of many famous brand names such as Dettol, Air Wick and Nurofen, and it’s a company I like so much I’ve invested in it twice.
Continue reading “Why I’ve sold Reckitt Beckiser after its recent post-Brexit surge”When I added Tesco to the UKVI model portfolio in mid-2012 the company was still riding high, having produced an amazing run of rapid and consistent growth over the previous decade.
Even the financial crisis seemed powerless to stop Tesco’s march towards global domination.
Despite this success, in mid-2012 its share price had fallen back to levels last seen in the depths of the financial crisis and first seen in 2005, when the company was literally half its 2012 size.
As a result, the dividend yield was very enticing at 4.9%, especially given the company’s historic dividend growth rate of almost 10% per year.
The share price in mid-2012 was low following a dramatic near-20% decline in early January, which came as a reaction to a disappointing Christmas trading statement.
It was becoming increasingly obvious that some of the company’s international expansion efforts of recent years were not working, while the core UK business was coming under increasing price competition in a tough post-financial crisis world.
At the time I thought it likely that Tesco would easily cope with these issues, but I was wrong. The company’s fortunes went from bad to worse as Tesco became a classic value trap, as shown in the share price chart below.
Continue reading “Some lessons learned from the Tesco value trap”Hill & Smith Holdings is a highly successful small-cap company which I added to the UKVI model portfolio back in 2013.
It was a relatively easy investment in the end and the results were more than satisfactory.
Continue reading “Selling Hill & Smith Holdings plc for an 83% return in less than 3 years”When I added Amlin PLC to the UKVI model portfolio three years ago it was a classic case of buying a good company at an attractive price because it was facing some short-term problems.
Three years later and the investment has produced a very nice return of 25% annualised, largely thanks to the fact that Amlin has recently been taken over.
Continue reading “The takeover of Amlin PLC produces a 25% annualised return from this investment”JD Sports was the third holding to join my defensive value model portfolio way back in March 2011. Little did I know then that this small-cap retailer of trainers and all things “sports fashion” would turn out to be by far the best investment over the following five years.
Things were not always so rosy though. The company went through a difficult period between 2002 and 2005 following a major acquisition where it purchased 209 First Sports stores for £53m. This was at a time when JD sports had just 166 stores of its own and profits of around £10m.
It was a debt-fuelled acquisition and, as if often the case, the combination of large interest payments and distracting acquisition integration efforts proved to be more difficult to cope with than was expected.
However, by the time I added the company to the model portfolio in 2011 it had successfully integrated those stores and paid down its debts.
The investment got off to a slow start in 2011 and 2012 – due to a weak UK economy and losses from another acquisition – but rapid growth eventually returned and the share price increased dramatically. As a consequence of those gains the valuation is now a little too high for my liking.
Continue reading “Selling JD Sports: This investment returned 33% annualised over almost 5 years”Cranswick plc was added to the UK Value Investor Model Portfolio back in November 2012. Over the last three years, it has been a far more successful investment than I ever could have expected.
Continue reading “Selling Cranswick PLC for a 135 percent return in 3 years”RSA Insurance Group was the first insurance company to join the UKVI Portfolio back in 2012 and it has been a mostly disappointing – although not catastrophically bad – investment.
In short, it was a value trap and the most important thing to do if you’re stuck in a value trap is:
This investment review covers why RSA was added to the UKVI Portfolio, what went wrong, why it’s being sold now and how this investment has helped improve the underlying investment methodology.
Continue reading “Selling RSA Insurance Group: A lucky escape from this value trap”Serco is the first investment to produce a net loss for the UKVI portfolio. As inevitable as this was, selling at a loss is still an unpleasant thing to do. But rather than cry over spilt milk, my task now is to try to understand why the milk was spilt in the first place in order to avoid spilling it again in future.
The fact that Serco has performed badly is not a complete surprise; when it joined the portfolio in May 2014 it was already in trouble.
In 2013, an independent audit by the UK Ministry of Justice found irregularities in the billing of one of its UK Government contracts. Initial findings suggested the company could have benefited by tens of millions of pounds.
As a result, Serco launched its own review as the Government expanded its investigations to include other contracts. By late 2013 Serco’s CEO was gone and shortly afterwards a Serious Fraud Office investigation began.
My assumption at the time was that Serco stood a decent chance of recovering well. However, that’s not what happened.
One problem followed another until the dividend was suspended, a £550m rights issue was launched and the shares fell by 50%. The only plus is that Serco has provided important lessons that will improve the stock selection process going forward.
Continue reading “Some lessons from an investment in Serco”When I invested in Balfour Beatty in 2011, the company was still performing well despite some obvious headwinds in the UK and US due to recession-like conditions and government spending cuts in both countries.
I thought the company stood a reasonable chance of getting through the slowdown without major problems, and for a couple of years, that was true. However, Balfour gradually became riskier and existing risks, which I hadn’t spotted, began to have a serious impact.
A few days ago I removed Balfour Beatty from both my personal portfolio and the UKVI model portfolio and Balfour has become the first defensive value investment that I’ve sold at a capital loss. Including dividends, it still produced a positive return, but not a particularly good one.
Continue reading “Balfour Beatty and the risks of investing in contract businesses”