Saturday, August 22, 2009

Take aways from Barrons, August 22nd, 2009

Stocks: Where's the demand-driven commerce? So far everything has been driven by government spending.
Gummy Bears

Banking and Finance: Commercial and Residential mortgages are worsening in some respects, in spite of all the green shoots. Some numbers and quotes from the Federal Reserve, and announcement that TALF will be extened.
Weekly Review

Technology: So where is the so-called PC Refresh cycle going to come from? Intel painted a rosy picture of the future, but three other tech companies have now joined the crowd of those who simply don't see any particular good news in the making.
View From the Top: No Rebound in Sight

Dividend Investing: Another piece on why reinvestment of dividends makes a good long term strategy. Read it if you haven't heard about that angle before. Skim for tickers if you have and like the idea. We think it makes sense to have some long term holdings in this phase of the business cycle in large cap companies with strong dividend histories. We'll leave it to the reader to judge whether Greek history provides any value to the theory.
Marathon Investing

Bonds: The best may be over for the bond market unless we get a sell off in corporates and munies and a rally in Treasuries for another buying opportunity. You can look for bond yields at your favorite quote provider, but there's also a good story on the municiple market. Suffice to say spreads between Treasury and corporates have narrowed in the last few months making it harder to find corporate bonds with a good chance of covering potential drop in purchasing power from quantitative easing. We might as well stick with the safety of Treasurys.
Seeking Yields on Munis That Aren't Puny

Speculative Plays:
Long MELA: "Taking Aim at Skin Cancer"
Short SHLD: "Washed Out"

Strategic Thinking:
Stocks are overpriced unless utopia breaks out real soon now. Commodity prices are priced right as long as China keeps buying what it doesn't presently need and India keeps it's capitalism in tact. Western economies are most likely going to see muted growth while Asia continues it's expansion of the middle-class demand for goods and services. The mindset "follow the money" suggests being invested directly in Asia and Brazil if not indirectly through domestic companies that get a high volume of revenues from them.

The off-the-cuff allocation at this point is long blue-chip dividend paying companies, short US indexes, and long commodity based companies or funds that pay dividends (or short their puts for dividends and purchases on pull-backs).

Caveat: While we are bullish on commodities in the one year time frame, we don't want to hide the fact that this week Barron's has a story that this might be a dangerous outlook. See "Base Metals on Borrowed Time"

Best of the Week
BRIC - forget Russia -- go where the commerce is. The interview with Christopher Wood contains some good insight into the macro-economics of the global economy, and why Brazil, India, and China have some specific characteristics about each of them that makes a focused investment in the right places a good idea. We highly recommend paying particular attention to his analysis of decoupling (in economics as well as the stock market) and what signs to look for that indicate decoupling of Asia equities.

What's our take on his expose?
Look for falling interest rates in Brazil. If FOREX fundamentals are right, Brazil bonds might be choice instruments there for income and long-term capital gains. One might also use the yields to buy something that is a domestic currency hedge in case your FOREX eats away at the gains.

India has the best of the equity markets of the three. See the interview for why that is. Our take then would be to look for small cap companies that supply goods and services to businesses.

In China, the strength is in state-owned companies, as they get the best of command economic privelidges. Thier financial services are especially inviting as corruption and greed that ruined Western finance is dealt with in China via execution. You may not share our opinion on the death penatly, but we think it provides a strong incentive for bank managers in China to be careful of thier actions.

3 comments:

  1. Update: HP was mentioned above in the technology section. Today Barrons reports a large HP insider sale, and the story details suggest (as we point out with select quotes below) this is not just another in a series of repetitive sales.


    Hewlett-Packard CEO's $4.3 Million Sale


    Lesjak had not sold shares in the company since 2007...The options that each director exercised were not expiring until at least 2011.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Is there a website that will explain or show an example of how to buy bonds and currencies for stocks?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Here's one, courtesy of bing.com:

    http://www.ehow.com/how_5109050_buy-stocks-bonds.html

    Search term I used was "how to buy bonds and currencies for stocks"

    ReplyDelete