Musings on Markets

Friday, June 19, 2020

A Viral Market Update X: A Corporate Life Cycle Perspective

Fear and greed are dueling forces in financial markers at all times, but especially so in periods of uncertainty, when they pull in opposite directions, causing wild market swings and momentum shifts. I think that no matter what your market views are right now, you would agree that we are in a period of intense uncertainty, with divergent views on how this pandemic will play out, not just in the coming months, but in the coming years. It is this divergence that have been at the heart of both the steep fall in equity markets in February and March, and the equally precipitous rise in April and May. As US equity markets climb back towards pre-crisis levels, the focus on market levels may be missing the underlying shift in value that has occurred across companies. In this post, I will focus on this shift, using the framework of a corporate life cycle, and record a redistribution of value from older, low growth, more capital intensive companies to younger, high growth companies. It is possible that this shift is the result of irrational exuberance on the part of young, inexperienced investors, but I think that a more plausible explanation is that it reflects not only the unique nature of this crisis, but also a changing business landscape.

Updating the Market

As with my previous updates, I will start with a chronicling of how markets have behaved in the two weeks since my last update, and overall, during the crisis. Let's start with equity indices, where we saw one week of relative stability (5/29-6/5) and a week of drama (6/5-6/12), after surges in April and May:

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For those who thought that the worst of the crisis was behind them, June 11 delivered the message that this crisis is not quite done, as the S&P 500 dropped 7%, and markets around the world followed. I have computed the returns since February 14, broken down into two time periods, with the first stretching from February 14 to March 20, and the second from March 20 to June 12. Every equity index that I list in this table dropped in the first phase, with some indices losing more than 30%, as fear stalked markets around the world. In the second phase, every index posted positive returns, with some climbing back almost to pre-crisis levels. I will return to look at equities in more detail in the next section, but as stocks were going through contortions, US treasury yields were also on the move:

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US treasury rates dropped in the first weeks of the crisis, and with 3-month yields dropping close to zero and 10-year rates declining below 1%. While it is convenient to attribute everything that happens to interest rates to the Fed, note that much of the drop in rates occurred before the Fed's two big moves, the first one on March 15, where the Fed Funds rate was cut by 0.5% (almost to zero) and a $700 billion quantitative easing plan was announced, and the second one on March 23, when the Fed lifted the cap on its easing plan and extended its role as a backstop in the corporate bond and lending markets. While treasury rates were not affected much by the Fed's actions, its entry into the corporate bond market played a key role in turning the tide, where default spreads across ratings classes had been on the rise since February 14:

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Default spreads followed the path of equities, widening significantly between February 14 and March 20, and falling back by June 12, albeit to levels higher then on February 14. The fear about how the pandemic would slow economic growth also affected commodity prices, and I chart the path of copper and oil, two commodities sensitive to global economic growth below:

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As with corporate bonds and equities, it is a tale of two periods, with commodity prices dropping between February 14 and March 20, before clawing their way back in the subsequent period. With copper, the market has retraced its entire decline, and it is now back to where it was trading at, on February 14. With oil, it is a different story, with a decline of more than 50% between February 14 and March 20 in both Brent and West Texas crude. and oil prices, notwithstanding a strong recovery between March 20 and June 12, are about 30% lower than they were on February 14. Finally, I look at gold and bitcoin, gold, because it has historically been a crisis asset and bitcoin, because it has been marketed by some as an alternative asset:

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Gold has held its value and is up 9.28% during the crisis, though it saw less upside during the first few weeks of this crisis than in prior ones. Bitcoin has behaved more like equity, and very risky equity at that, during this crisis, dropping almost 40% between February 14 and March 20, before recovering to close down only 10.67% by June 12.

Equities: A Breakdown

In keeping with a practice I have adopted on my prior updates, I downloaded individual stock data on 37,050 publicly traded global companies, with market capitalizations exceeding $5 million, and computed changes in market cap, by region:

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Looking at overall returns from February 14 to June 12, the worst performing regions in the world are mostly in emerging markets (India, Latin America and Africa), with the UK as the worst performing developing market, down about 20%. Breaking down the companies by sector, I look at returns across the period, broken down into two sub periods:

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The sectors with double digit negative returns over the entire period are energy, utilities, real estate, industrials and financials, with the first four being punished for their capital intensity and debt dependence, and financials reflecting the fear of debt defaults. Health care shows almost no change in value over the entire period, and tech is down only 3.2%. Breaking the sectors down into industries, and looking at returns over the crisis period, I list out the ten worst and best performing industries between February 14 and June 12, 2020:

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There are no surprises here, given the earlier sector assessment, with a strong representation of infrastructure and financial service companies among the worst performing sectors, and health care and technology on the best performing list.

Crisis Effects across the Corporate Life Cycle

In each update on the crisis, I have tried to look at a different facet of market performance, hoping to get some understanding of what the market is pricing in, and whether it makes sense. This week, I will use the concept of a corporate life cycle, a structure that I have found useful in thinking about both corporate financial questions and in valuation, and look at how this crisis has played out across the life cycle.

The Corporate Life Cycle

I believe that companies, like humans, go through a life cycle from newborn (start up) to toddler to teenager, peaking as successful growth companies, before becoming middle aged (mature) and then declining.

While there are companies that find pathways to reincarnation (IBM in 1992, Apple in 1999, Microsoft in 2013), they remain the exceptions to the rule that fighting corporate aging creates more costs than benefits. The life cycle is useful not just as a device for chronicling corporate age but also in identifying the challenges that companies face at each stage. It is also worth noting that the free cash flows, i.e., cash flows left over after taxes and reinvestment, vary as companies move through the life cycle:

In general, negative cash flows (cash burn) are a feature of young companies, cash build ups occur as companies grow and mature, and declining companies return cash as they shrink. Finally, to understand how companies change as they move through the life cycle, I will draw on another general construct, the financial balance sheet:

Note that young companies derive their value mostly or even entirely from growth assets, i.e., the value of investments that they are expected to make in the future, and that the portion that is attributable to assets in place increases as companies age, with mature and aging firms deriving most or all of their value from existing investments. Young companies, lacking the earnings and cash flows to service debt, are also more dependent on equity to fund their businesses than mature firms.

The Crisis Effect across the Life Cycle

A crisis tests all companies, but the dimensions on which they get tested will vary depending on where they fall in the life cycle.

Start up and very young companies: For young companies, the challenge is survival, since they mostly have small or no revenues, and are money losers. They need capital to make it to the next and more lucrative phases in the life cycle, and in a crisis, access to capital (from venture capitalists or public equity) can shut down or become prohibitively expensive, as investors become more fearful. These companies will either have to shut down or sell themselves at bargain basement prices to larger, deeper-pocketed competitors.
Young growth companies: For young growth companies that have turned the corner on profitability, capital access still remains critical since it is needed for future growth. Without that capital, the values of these firms will shrink towards assets in place, and in a crisis, these firms have to hunker down and scale back their growth ambitions.
Mature firms: For mature firms, the bigger damage from a crisis is the punishment it metes to assets in place, as the economy slows or goes into recession, and consumers cut back on spending. The effect will be greater on companies that sell discretionary products than on companies that sell staples.
Declining firms: For declining firms, especially those with substantial debt, a crisis can tip them into distress and default, especially if access to risk capital declines, and risk premiums increase.

In summary, the answer to the question of which companies (young or old) get affected more in a crisis will depend on how the crisis affects the real economy and capital access. In most crises, it is access to capital that takes the early hit, with the pain from economic effects showing up more gradually. As a result, in the first parts of the crisis, it is the firms at either end of the life cycle (young companies and declining ones) that are most dependent on new capital to survive that are hurt the most, with the pain spreading more slowly to mature firms, and least to firms that sell consumer staples. How has this crisis played out in terms of damage to companies across the life cycle? Let me start with a very simplistic measure of life cycle, company age, as measured from the year of founding:

Download data

The table tells an interesting story. In the down phase (2/14-3/20), there was little distinction between younger and older firms, as firms in every age group lost about 30% of value. In the second phase from 3/20 to June 12, younger companies have seen a much more robust comeback than older firms, resulting in much lower negative returns over the entire period for younger firms (the bottom five deciles) than older ones (the top five deciles). You could argue that company age is not a composite measure of where a company falls in the life cycle, since some companies move through the life cycle faster than others. To counter this critique, I break firms down by expected revenue growth, as estimated prior to the crisis, building on the assumption that expected revenue growth should be highest for young firms and lower for firms further along in the life cycle:

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Note that expected revenue growth estimates are available for just over a third of all the firms in my sample, and across those firms, the differences are stark. Firms in the lowest revenue growth decile are down substantially over the crisis period (2/14 - 6/12) whereas the firms with the highest expected revenue growth, coming into the crisis, have seen their values increase over the same period.

In summary, this crisis seems to have had a much greater negative impact on older, more mature companies than on younger, high growth ones. perhaps because it started at a time, when capital markets were buoyant and investors were eagerly taking on risk, with risk premiums in both equity and bond markets at close to decade-level lows, with a global economic shut down, with a cessation of most business activity. That shut down came with a time frame, though there was uncertainty not only about when economic activity would start up again, but how vigorously it would return. Young companies have also benefited from the fact, that after being on hold in the first few weeks of the crisis, risk capital came back in the middle of March, both in public and private markets. The big story, still unfolding, from this crisis is that access to risk capital has held up remarkably well, coming back into markets earlier and in larger magnitudes, than in prior crisis. The Fed has undoubtedly played a role in this comeback, especially with its intervention in lending markets, but it has succeeded only because it tapped a willing investor base.That access to risk capital has also benefited distressed companies at the other end of the life cycle, explaining why you have seen surges in airline stock prices and in portions of the oil sector. To those who attribute the shift to amateur investors, subject to so much scorn from market watchers, there is collectively too little capital in the hands of these investors to have caused this much of a change in markets.

The divergence in the market treatment between young and older companies during this crisis also explains why value has underperformed growth, since value investing strategies skew towards more mature companies and growth investing is more focused on younger companies. It may also explain why so many market "pros" have been left in the dust by amateurs, since many of the former have been using scripts developed in prior crisis to decide when and where to invest, and this one has followed a different path. While value investors and pros may still be vindicated, the lesson that I would take from this crisis is that while it is true that those who do not remember history are destined to repeat it, it is also true that those who let history alone drive their investment decisions are in just as much danger.

Conclusion

The trajectory of markets in this crisis has followed the path of the virus, with markets rising and falling on news about viral breakouts in different parts of the world, and vaccines/medication to mitigate its effects. It should therefore come as no surprise that just as the virus has had its most deadly effects on the elderly and the infirm, the market is meting out its biggest punishment to mature and aging companies. As we pass the four-month mark since this crisis started roiling financial markets in the US and Europe, it is still an evolving story and there will be more twists and turns before it is done.

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Viral Market Update Posts

Thursday, June 4, 2020

A Viral Market Update IX: A Do-it-Yourself S&P 500 Valuation

It has been close to four weeks since my last viral market update, and I could come up with a whole host of excuses for the delay, but the truth is that I have not had much to say that is original, and I am naturally lazy. That said, markets have settled in, mostly with an upward bias in these last few weeks, and the big question, as US equities climb back towards pre-crisis levels is whether the market has lost its bearings. After all, the news, whether on macroeconomic indicators or company-level earnings, is not just bad, but historically so, and it seems incongruous that markets should be rising, when consumer confidence and spending are plummeting, the ranks of the unemployed rising and professional economists are painting a picture of impending doom. There are some market gurus who are pointing to this disconnect as evidence that markets are just wrong and that a major correction is around the corner, but their credibility is undercut by the fact that many in this group have been forecasting this correction for the last decade, and with metrics (PE, CAPE, Shiller PE) that have lost their potency. I have absolutely no shame in admitting that I am not a market timer, but I do believe that embedded in market action is always a link, though sometimes tenuous, to fundamentals. In this post, I will start with my usual updates of what has transpired in the last few weeks across markets, in general, and equities, in particular. I will then revisit my framework for valuing the S&P index, which I first presented in my first viral market post on February 27 and then expanded on in subsequent posts on March 9 and March 16. While I will update my valuation of the index, given what we have learned since, I will also follow a template that I developed when I valued Tesla earlier this year, and offer a Do-it-yourself (DIY) valuation of the index.

Market Update

My crisis clock started on February 14, 2020, shortly after US equities hit all time highs, and in the weeks since, I have tracked the ups and downs of equity indices.

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Between February 14 and March 20, it was a precipitous drop with almost equity index in the world down between 30-40%, with the Chinese markets being the exceptions, a bear market compressed into five weeks. Since March 20, though, it has been not just an up market, but one that has climbed steeply. For instance, the S&P 500 which dropped a little over 28% between February 14 and March 20, had recouped most of those losses by June 1, and is now down only 5.29% since February 14. Two emerging market indices, the Bovespa (Brazil) and the Sensex (India), and one developed market index, the CAC (France), have still lost more than 20% of their value over the period. Moving on to treasuries, the immediate effect of the crisis was a flight to US treasuries, where yields dropped across the board:

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Note that almost all of the yield drop occurred before March 15, when the Fed announced its quantitative easing actions. The fear factor in the first few weeks that caused the flight to treasuries also pushed up default spreads on corporate bonds:

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Note the dramatic surge in spreads between February 14 an April 3, with a tripling in the spread on BBB rated bonds. Like equities, corporate bonds seem to have entered a more sanguine period, with spreads on June 1, 2020, down significantly from their highs in early April. I have also been tracking two commodities, oil and copper, to measure how a global economic showdown is affecting prices:

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Copper prices are down about 7% on June 1, from February 14 levels, but that is as improvement from the almost 14% drop in mid-March. The oil market has had volatility that cannot just be explained by the COVID crisis, as oil prices plunged in late April, with West Texas crude dropping below zero on April 19, but even oil prices have seen recovery in the last few weeks. Finally, I look at gold and bitcoin, the former a crisis asset of long standing and the latter a new entrant.

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Gold has held up, and is up just over 9% in the weeks since February 14, but bitcoin has behaved more like a risky speculative investment than a crisis asset, dropping more than 50% by mid March before recouping most of its losses, as equities came back April and May.

Equity Breakdown

I have been downloading company-level data on publicly traded companies, at the end of each week for the last 15 weeks, and looking at changes in market capitalization across different classes of stocks. That allows me to see to not only get a more complete measure of market damage than just looking at indices, but to also use the data to double check assertions about causality.

Region

The problem with indices, especially those that contain only handfuls of stock, is that it is easy to miss changes that are occurring at smaller and lower profile companies. I used the company-level data to break down the market changes since February 14 by region:

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As with the equity indices, the divide is clear, both in terms of time, with the drop occurring between February 14 and March 20 and the rise from March 20 to June 1, but also in terms of geography, with emerging markets showing bigger declines in percentage terms over the entire period. If you prefer your data on a country level, you may find this picture more revealing:

Download country-level data

The full list of countries is available at this link. Note that all of the values in the data are in US dollar terms to allow for comparability, but that does mean that exchange rate effects will add to local stock market effects.

Sector/ Industry

While market behavior was characterized as chaotic in the first few weeks, this is clearly a market that has been orderly in how it doles out rewards and metes out punishment, as you can see in the breakdown of market cap changes by sector in the table below:

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As you browse the table, note that health care, as a sector, is now in the plus column and that technology and consumer goods (both staple and discretionary) show much less damage than the rest of the market. In effect, the overall market may have recovered much of its losses, but along the way, value has been reallocated from financials, real estate and energy into health care and technology. Breaking down sectors into industries provides for more detail, and the ten best performing and ten worst performing industries between February 14 and June 1, 2020 are listed below:

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The list of best and worst performing industries has stayed stable for most of the last seven to eight weeks, but the rise in the market in the last few weeks has led to some of the best performing industries now delivering positive returns, with software, precious metal, biotech and healthcare info/tech now posting returns exceeding 10%, since February 14, 2020.

The Mystery of Markets

As markets have recovered from their mid-March lows, there are many who are puzzled by the rise. For some, the skepticism comes from the disconnect with macroeconomic numbers that are abysmal, as unemployment claims climb into the tens of millions and consumer confidence hovers around historic lows. I will spend the first part of this section arguing that this reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what markets try to do, and a misreading of history. For others, the question is whether markets are adequately reflecting the potential for long term damage to earnings and cash flows, as well as the cost of defaults, from this crisis. Since that answer to that question lies in the eyes of the beholder, I will provide a framework for converting your fears and hopes into numbers and a value for the market.

Markets and the Economy

The notion that stock markets and economies are closely tied together is deeply held, simply because it appeals to intuition. After all, how can stocks keep going up if the economy is doing badly? While I concede that the right answer is they cannot, there are three factors that may delink the two.

The first is that stocks are driven by earnings, not real growth in the economy or employment, and to the extent that companies can continue to generate income, even in stagnant or declining economies, you may see stock prices rise.
The second is that the “economy” that stocks are tied to does not always have to be the domestic one, since globalization has made it possible for companies to continue to prosper in slow-growing economies.
The third is time, since stock markets are prediction machines, albeit with a lot of noise and error, the link between markets and the economy, even if it exists, will be with a lag of months or longer.

To those who prefer a data-based argument, the graph below plots US stock market returns against real GDP growth in the United States, using quarterly data.

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Note that there is almost no correlation between stock returns and real GDP growth contemporaneously, and while the correlation grows as you look at GDP is subsequent quarters, it is still modest even four quarters ahead. If the relationship between stock returns and measures of economic activity is weak, as both logic and the data suggest, it should be even weaker right now, where every measure of economic activity is ravaged by the crisis-driven shutdown. To those in the media and the investment community who profess to be shocked by the latest economic numbers, my question is whether you are just as shocked to see your speedometer at zero, when your car is parked in the driveway, or when your pie does not bake in an oven that is not turned on? In short, there is almost nothing of use to investors from poring over current macroeconomic data, which is one reason why markets have started ignoring them. That will change, as the economy opens up again, and markets start looking at the data for cues on how quickly it is coming back to life.

Valuing the Market
In my first viral market update, I sketched a picture of the drivers of value for the market, drawing on fundamentals. I revisited that picture and tweaked it to reflect the uncertainties that investors face about the future, broke down into near term (2020 & 2021) and the long term (in the years through 2024):

While the picture looks daunting and your estimates are fraught with uncertainty, we are now in a better position to estimate the effects than even a few weeks ago:

Earnings and Growth: In 2019, the companies in the S&P 500 reported 163 in earnings, and analysts were forecasting modest growth of about 4% over the next five years, prior to the crisis. It is beyond debate that the economic shut down will be devastating for earnings in 2020, with the damage spilling over in 2021. In my valuation in March 2020, there was almost no information on the extent of this damage, but as companies have reported first quarter earnings, we are getting preliminary estimates of future earnings. In the picture below, I look at three sets of predictions from analysts who trace the index:

Sources: Yardeni, Thomson Reuters, Factset

I follow up by also reporting on what market strategists at major banks are forecasting:

As of right now, there seems to be only nascent attempts to forecast long term damage to earnings, but a consensus is forming that there will be some.
Cash Return: In 2019, companies in the index returned 146.30 in cash to stockholders, 57.5 in dividends and 87.8 in buybacks, amounting to 89.75% of earnings in that year. This represented a continuation of a trend through the decade of increasing buybacks and cash return:

As with earnings, this crisis will result in cash flow shocks, and dividends and buybacks will drop this year. Given that dividends tend to be stickier than buybacks, the drop will be lower fro the former than the latter. Analysts vary on how much, though, with a range of a drop of 30-70% in buybacks and 10-30% in dividends.
Risk: Every crisis has consequences for risk premiums, as I noted in this post, and it is for that reason that I have been updating equity risk premiums, by day, since February 14.

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In the early weeks of this crisis, equity risk premiums soared, peaking at more than 7% in mid-March, and have steadily dropping since, though at 5.3-5.5% on June 1, they remain above pre-crisis levels.

Using this information, I made my best judgments, assuming that earnings for the S&P 500 will be 120 in 2020 and 150 in 2021, at the more conservative end of the analyst estimates, and that dividends and buybacks would drop in 2020, the former by 20% and the latter by 50%. I also assume that companies will return far less cash in future years, partly in response to the crisis:

With these assumptions, I can value the index and I capture the valuation in the picture below. My estimated value for the index is about 2926, which would lead to a judgment that the index was over valued by about 6% (based upon the level on June 1, 2020).

As with my March 2020 valuation, I am fully aware that my numbers are just a reflection of my story and that each of the inputs has a range around it, and I have brought in that uncertainty into a simulation below:

Download simulation results (Oracle Crystal Ball used in simulation)

Note that I have centered the simulations around the median estimates of earnings for 2020 and 2021 from analysts, while building in the range in the estimates into the distributions. The median value from the simulation is 2932. On June 1, the S&P 500 was trading at close to 3100, putting it near the 80th percentile of the distribution, bolstering the "market has gotten ahead of itself" camp, but there is something here for everyone. If you are more optimistic about earnings in 2020 and 2021 than the the median analyst, and about how quickly and completely the market will recover from the crisis shock, you will arrive at a higher value than mine. If you are more pessimistic about the future, perhaps because you think the market is under estimating the likelihood of a second wave of shutdowns or a surge in company defaults, your valuations will be much lower.

In all of this discussion, you will note that I have not mentioned the Fed, and to those who are Fed-focused, it may seem like I am ignoring the elephant in the room. I have argued, for much of the last decade, that analysts and investors over estimate the effect that the Fed has on markets. To the counter that it is low interest rates that are keeping the index level high, my response is that low interest rates cut both ways, first by lowering the discount rate (and thus increasing value) but also by signaling much lower growth in the long term (which I capture by lowering growth in perpetuity to the risk free rate). In fact, in my valuation spreadsheet, I offer the option of raising interest rates to what you may believe are more normal levels over time, and you can check out the effect on value, and don't be surprised if it is not as large as you expect it to be, since I also adjust growth rates and equity risk premiums to reflect changed rates. In fact, use the spreadsheet to and make your disagreements with me explicit, come up with your value for the index, and let's get a crowd valuation of the S&P 500 going. (It is a google shared spreadsheet, where you can enter your estimated value for the index).

Bottom Line
Every investor has a narrative, sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit, about how the economy and markets will evolve over time. Markets reflect a collective narrative across investors, and there are times when your narrative will be at odds with that of the market. It is during those times that you will feel the urge to label markets as crazy or irrational, and to view yourself as the last sane investor left on the planet. While I understand that urge, it is my experience that projecting your personal fears and hopes on to the market, and then getting angry when the market responds differently is a recipe for frustration and dysfunctional investing. That is not to say that markets cannot be wrong, but even if they are, a dose of humility is always in order, and there is always something that can be learned from market movements. Right now, it is true that markets are collectively more upbeat about the future than most economists/market experts, but given their relative track records over time, are you really more willing to trust the latter? I most certainly am not!

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Spreadsheets

Google Shared Spreadsheet (for your S&P 500 valuations)

Google Shared Spreadsheet

Viral Market Update Posts

Wednesday, May 13, 2020

A Viral Market Update VIII: A Crisis Test - Value vs Growth, Active vs Passive, Small Cap vs Large!

In the weeks since my first update on the crisis on February 26, 2020, the markets have been on a roller coaster ride, as equity markets around the world collectively lost $30 trillion in market cap between February 14, 2020 and March 20, 2020, and then clawed back more than half of the loss in the following month. Having lived through market crises in the past, I know that this one is not quite done, but I believe we now have lived through enough of it to be able to start separating winners from losers, and use this winnowing process to address three big questions that have dominated investing for the last decade:

Has this crisis allowed active investors to shine, and use that performance to stop or even reverse the loss of market share to passive vehicles (ETFs and index funds) that has occurred over the last decade?
Will this market correction lead to growth/momentum investing losing its mojo and allow value investors to reclaim what they believe is their rightful place on top of the investing food chain?
Will the small cap premium, missing for so many decades, be rediscovered after this market shock?

I know each of these is a hot button issue, and I welcome disagreement, but I will try to set my biases aside and let the data speak for itself.

Market Action

As with my prior updates, I will begin by surveying the market action, first over the two weeks (4/17-5/1), following my last update, and then looking at the returns since February 14, the date that I started my crisis clock. First up, I look at returns on stock indices around the world, breaking them up into two periods, from February 14 to March 20, roughly the low point for markets during this crisis and from March 20 to May 1, as they mounted a comeback.

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The divide in the two periods is clear. Consider the S&P 500, down 28.28% between 2/14 and 3/20, but up 22.82% from March 20 and May 1, resulting in an overall return of -11.92% over the period. While the magnitudes vary across the indices, the pattern repeats, with the Shanghai 50 close to breaking even over the entire period, and the Bovespa (Brazil) and the ASX 200 (Australia) delivering the worst cumulative returns between 2/14 and 5/1. As stock markets have swooned and partially recovered, the yields on US treasuries dropped sharply early in the crisis and have stayed low since.

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The 3-month treasury bill rate, which was 1.58% on February 14, has dropped close to zero on May 1, and the treasury bond rate has declined from 1.59% to 0.64% over the same period. The much talked about inverted yield curve late last year, that led to so many prognostications of gloom and doom, has become upward sloping, and staying consistent with my argument that too much was being made of the former as a predictor of recession, I will not read too much into its slope now. Moving to the corporate bond market, I focused on 10-year corporates in different ratings classes:

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Early in this crisis, the corporate bond markets did not reflect the worry and fear that equity investors were exhibiting, but they caught on with a vengeance a couple of weeks in, and the damage was clearly visible by April 3, 2020, with default spreads almost tripling across the board for all ratings classes. Since April 3, the spreads have declined, but remain well above pre-crisis levels. There should be no surprise that the price of risk in the bond market has risen, and as the crisis has taken hold, I have been updating equity risk premiums daily for the S&P 500 since February 14, 2020:

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The equity risk premium surged early in the crisis, hitting a high of 7.75% on March 23, but that number has been dropping back over the last weeks, as the market recovers. By May 1, 2020, the premium was back down to 6.03%, with pre-crisis earnings and cash flows left intact, and building in a 30% drop in earnings and a 50% decline in buybacks yields an equity risk premium of 5.39%. For good reasons or bad, the price of risk in the equity market seems to be moving back to pre-crisis levels. I don’t track commodity prices on a regular basis, but I chose to track oil and copper prices since February 14:

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At the risk of repeating what I have said in prior weeks, the drop in copper prices is consistent with an expectation of a global economic showdown but the drop in oil prices reflects something more. In fact, a comparison of Brent and West Texas crude oil prices highlights one of the more jaw-dropping occurrences during this crisis, when the price of the latter dropped below zero on April 19. The oil business deserves a deeper look and I plan to turn to that in the next few weeks. Finally, I look at gold and bitcoin prices during the crisis, with the intent of examining their performance as crisis assets:

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Gold has held its own, but I think that the fact that it is up only 7.4% must be disappointing to true believers, and Bitcoin has behave more like equities than a crisis asset, and very risky equities at that, dropping more than 50% during the weeks when stocks were down, and rising in the next few weeks, as stocks rose, to end the period with a loss of 16.37% between February 14 and May 1.

Equities: A Breakdown

Starting with the market capitalizations of individual companies, I measured the change in market capitalization on a week to week basis, allowing me to slice and dice the data to chronicle where the damage has been greatest and where it has been the least. Breaking down companies by region, here is what the numbers updated through May 1 look like:

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Latin America has been the worst performing region in the world, with Africa, Australia and Russia right behind and China and the Middle East have been the best performing regions between February 14 and May 1. I continue the breakdown on a sector-basis in the table below:

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Health care, consumer staples and technology have been the best performing sectors and financials are now the biggest losers. Extending the analysis to industries and looking at the updated list of worst and best performing industries:

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Repeating a refrain from my updates in earlier weeks, this has been, as crises go, about as orderly a retreat as any that I have seen. The selling has been more focused on sectors that have heavy capital investment and oil-focused, burdened with debt, and has been much more muted in sectors that have low capital intensity and less debt.

Value versus Growth Investing

In the tussle between value and growth investing, value investors have held the upper hand for a long time. In addition to laying claim to being the custodians of value, they also seemed to have all the numbers on their side of the argument, as they pointed to decades of outperformance by value stocks, at least in the United States. The last decades, though, have delivered numbers that are more favorable to growth investors, and this crisis is perhaps as good a time as any to reexamine the debate.

The Difference

For decades, we have accepted a lazy categorization of stocks on the value versus growth dimension. Stocks that trade at low PE or low price to book ratios are considered value stocks, and stocks that trade at high multiples of earnings and book value are growth stocks. In fact, the value factor in investing is built around price to book ratios. If you are a value investor, your reaction to this categorization is that this is no way to describe value and that true value investing incorporates many other dimensions including management quality, sustainable moats and low leverage. Conceding all those points, I would argue that the key difference between value and growth investing can be captured by looking at a financial balance sheet:

Thus, the real difference between value and growth investors lies not in whether they care about value (sensible investors in both groups do), but where they believe the investing payoff is greater. Value investors believe that it is assets in place that markets get wrong, and that their best opportunities for finding "under valued" stocks is in mature companies with mispriced assets in place. Growth investors, on the other hand, assert that they are more likely to find mispricing in high growth companies, where the market is either missing or misestimating key elements of growth.

The Lead In

Until the last decade, it was conventional wisdom that value investing beat growth investing, especially over longer time horizon, and the backing for this statement took the form of either anecdotal evidence (with the list of illustrious value investors much longer than the list of legendary growth investors) or historical data showing that low price to book stocks have delivered higher returns than high price to book stocks:

Source: Raw Data from Ken French

Looking across the entire period (1927-2019), low price to book stocks have clearly won this battle, delivering 5.22% more than high price to book stocks, and this excess return is almost impervious to risk and transaction cost adjustments. Value investors entered the last decade, convinced of the superiority of their philosophy, and in the table below, I look at the difference in returns between low and high PE and PBV stocks, each decade going back to the 1920s.

It is quite clear that 2010-2019 looks very different from prior decades, as high PE and high PBV stocks outperformed low PE and low PBV stocks by substantial margins. The under performance of value has played out not only in the mutual fund business, with value funds lagging growth funds, but has also brought many legendary value investors down to earth. Pushed to explain why, the defense that value investors offered was that the 2008 crisis, Fed interventions and the rise of the FAANG stocks created a perfect storm that rewarded momentum and growth investing, at the expense of value. Implicit in this argument is the belief that this phase would pass and that value investing would regain its rightful place.

The COVID Crisis

In the early days of the crisis, there were many value investors who viewed at least some of the market correction as punishment for investor overreach on growth and momentum stocks in the past decade. As the weeks have progressed, that argument has been quelled by the cumulating evidence that the market punishment perversely has been far worse for value stocks, i.e., stocks with low PE ratios and high dividend yields than for momentum or growth stocks. To illustrate this, I first look at how the market effects have varied across stocks in different PE ratio classes:

Note that it is the lowest PE stocks that have lost the most market capitalization (almost 25%) between February 14 and May 1, whereas the highest PE stocks have lost only 8.62%, and to add insult to injury, even money losing companies have done better than the lowest PE stocks. I follow up by looking at stocks broken down by price to book ratios:

The results mirror what we saw with PE stocks, with low price to book stocks losing far more value than the highest price to book stocks. I then break down stocks based upon dividend yields:

Low dividend yield stocks and even non-dividend paying stocks have fared far better than high dividend yield stocks. Finally I look at companies, based upon net debt ratios:

Put simply, here is what I see in the data. If I had followed old-time value investing rules and had bought stocks with low PE ratios and high dividends in pre-COVID times, I would have lost far more than if I bought high PE stocks or stocks that trade at high multiples of book value, paying little or no dividends. The only fundamental that has worked in favor of value investors is avoiding companies with high leverage.

A Personal Viewpoint

I believe that value investing has lost its way, a point of view I espoused to portfolio managers in Omaha a few years ago, in a talk, and in a paper on value investing, titled Value Investing: Investing for Grown Ups? In the talk and in the paper, I argued that much of value investing had become rigid (with meaningless rules and static metrics), ritualistic (worshiping at the altar of Buffett and Munger, and paying lip service to Ben Graham) and righteous (with finger wagging and worse reserved for anyone who invested in growth or tech companies). I also presented evidence that it was bringing less to the table than active growth investing, by noting that the average active value investor underperformed a value index fund by more than the average growth investor lagged growth index funds. I also think that fundamental shifts in the economy, and in corporate behavior, have rendered book value, still a key tool in the value investor's tool kit, almost worthless in sectors other than financial services, and accounting inconsistencies have made cross company comparisons much more difficult to make. On a hopeful note, I think that value investing can recover, but only if it is open to more flexible thinking about value, less hero worship and less of a sense of entitlement (to rewards). If you are a value investor, you will be better served accepting the reality that you can do everything right on the valuation front, and still make less money than your neighbor who picks stocks based upon astrological signs, and that luck trumps skill and hard work, even over long time periods.

Active versus Passive Investing

Some of the readers of this blog are in the active investing business and I apologize in advance for raising questions about your choice of profession. After all, any discussion of active versus passive investing that comes down on the side of the latter implicitly is a judgment of whether you are adding value by trying to pick stocks or time markets. Consequently, these discussions quickly turn rancid and personal, and I hope this one does not.

The Difference

In passive investing, as an investor, you allocate your wealth across asset classes (equities, bonds, real assets) based upon your risk aversion, liquidity needs and time horizon, and within each class, rather than pick individual stocks, bonds or real assets, you invest in index funds or exchange traded funds (ETFs) to cover the spectrum of choices. In active investing, you try to time markets (by allocating more money to asset classes that you believe are under valued and less to those that you think are over valued) or pick individual assets that you believe offer the potential for higher returns. Active investing covers a whole range of different philosophies from day trading to buying entire companies and holding them for the long term.

Put simply, active investing covers a range of philosophies with different time horizons, different and often contradictory views about how markets make mistakes and correct them,

The Lead In

Until the 1970s, active investing dominated passive investing for two simple reasons. The first was the presumption that institutional investors were smarter, and had access to more information than the rest of us, and should thus do better with our money. The second was that there were no passive investing vehicles available for average investors. Both delusions came crashing down in the late sixties and early seventies.

First, the pioneering studies of mutual fund performance, including this famous one that introduced Jensen's alpha, came to the surprising conclusion that rather than outperform markets, mutual funds under performed by non-trivial amounts. In the years since, there have been literally hundreds of studies that have asked the same question about mutual funds, hedge funds and private equity, using far richer data sets and more sophisticated risk adjustment models to arrive at the same result. You can see Morningstar's 10-year excess return distribution for all active large-blend mutual funds, from 2010-2019, below (with similar graphs for other classes of active mutual funds):

If the counter is that it is hedge and private equity funds where the smart money resides today, the evidence with those funds, once you adjust for reporting and survivor bias, mirrors the mutual fund results. Put bluntly, "smart" money is not that smart, and the advantages that it possesses (bright people, more data, powerful models) don't translate into returns for its investors. Ironically, over the same period, there were hundreds of other studies that claimed to find market inefficiencies, at least on paper, suggesting that there is no internal inconsistency in believing that markets are inefficient and also believing that bearing these markets is really, really difficult to do.
Second, Jack Bogle upended investment management in 1976 with the Vanguard 500 Index fund, the most disruptive change in the history of the investment business. Over the next three decades, the index fund concept expanded to cover geographies and asset classes, allowing investors unhappy with their investment advisors and mutual funds to switch to low-cost alternatives that delivered higher returns. The entry of ETFs tilted the game even further in favor of passive investing, while also offering active investors new ways of playing sectors and markets.

The shift of funds from active to passive has been occurring for a long time, but the shift was small early in the process. In 1995, less than 5% of money was passively invested (almost entirely in index funds) and that percentage rose to about 10% in 2002 and 20% in 2010. In the last decade, that shift has accelerated, as you can see in the graph below:

Source: Morningstar

The increase in passive investing's market share has come primarily from almost $4 trillion in funds flowing into passive vehicles, but active investing has also seen outflows in the last five years. While some have attributed this to failures of active investors in the last decade, I believe that active investing has been a loser's game, as Charley Ellis aptly described it, for decades, and that the shift can be more easily explained by investors having more choices, as trading moves online and becomes close to costless, and readier access to information on how their portfolios are performing.

The Crisis Performance

Active investors have argued that their failures were due to an undisciplined bull market, where their stock pricing expertise was being discounted, and that their time would come when the next crisis hit. There were also dark warnings about how passive investing would lead to liquidity meltdowns and make the next crisis worse. If active investors wanted to have a chance to shine, they have got in their wish in the last few weeks, where their market timing and stock picking skills were in the spotlight. With their expertise, they should have managed to not only to avoid the worst of the damage in the first few weeks, but should have then gained on the upside, by redeploying assets to the sectors/stocks recovering the quickest. While there is anecdotal evidence that some investors were able to do this, with Bill Ackman's prescient hedge against the COVID collapse getting much attention, I am sure that there were plenty of other smart investors who not only did not see it coming, but made things worse by doubling down on losing bets or cashing out too early.

As we look at the bigger picture, the results are, at best, mixed, and hopes that this crisis would vindicate active investors have not come to fruition, at least yet. I looked at Morningstar's assessment of returns on equity mutual funds in the first quarter of 2020, measured against returns on passive indices for each fund class:

Source: Morningstar

Note that the first quarter included the worst weeks of the crisis (February 14- March 20), and there is little evidence that mutual funds were able to get ahead of their passive counterparts, with only two groups showing outperformance (small and mid-cap value), but active funds collectively under performed by 1.37% during this period. Focusing on market timing skills, tactical asset allocation funds (whose selling pitch is that they can help investors avoid market crisis and bear markets) were down 13.87% during the quarter, at first sight beating the overall US equity market, which was down 20.57%. That comparison is skewed in favor of these funds, though, since tactical asset allocation funds typically tend to invest about 60% in equities, and when adjusted for that equity allocation, they too underperformed the market. Looking at hedge funds in the first quarter of 2020, the weighted hedge fund index was down 8.5% and saw $33 billion in fund outflows, though there were some bright spots, with macro hedge funds performing much better. Overall, though, there was little to celebrate on the active investing front during this crisis. On the market liquidity front, while much has been made of the swings up and down in the market during this crisis, the market has held up remarkably well. A comparison to the chaos in the last quarter of 2008 suggests that the market has dealt with and continues to deal with this crisis with far more equanimity than it did in 2008. In fact, I think that the financial markets have done far better than politicians, pandemic specialists and market gurus during the last weeks, in the face of uncertainty.

A Personal Viewpoint

I have been skeptical about both the reasons given for active investing's slide over the last decade and the dire consequences of passive investing, and this crisis has only reinforced that skepticism. For active investing to deal with its very real problems, it has to get past denial (that there is a problem), delusion (that active investing is actually working, based upon anecdotal evidence) and blame (that it is all someone else's fault). Coming out of this crisis, I think that more money will leave active investing and flow into passive investing, that active investing will continue to shrink as a business, but that there will be a subset of active investing that survives and prospers. I don't believe that artificial intelligence and big data will rescue active investing, since any investment strategies built purely around numbers and mechanics will be quickly replicated and imitated. Instead, the future will belong to multidisciplinary money managers, who have well thought-out and deeply held investment philosophies, but are willing to learn and quickly adapt investment strategies to reflect market realities.

Small versus Large Cap

The small cap premium was among the earliest anomalies uncovered by researchers in the 1970s and it came from the recognition that small market capitalization stocks earned higher returns than the rest of the market, after adjusting for risk. That premium has become part of financial practice, driving some investors to allocate disproportionate portions of their portfolios to small cap funds and appraisers to add small cap premiums to discount rates, when valuing small companies.

The Difference

There are two things worth noting at the outset about the small cap premiums. The first is that market capitalization is the proxy for size in the small cap studio, not revenues or earnings. Thus, you can have a young company with little or no revenues and large losses with a large market capitalization and a mature company with large revenues and a small market capitalization. The second is that to define a small capitalization stock, you have to think in relative terms, by comparing market capitalizations across companies. In fact, much of the relevant research on small cap stocks has been based on breaking companies down by market capitalization into deciles and looking at returns on each decile. One reason that the small cap premium resonates so strongly with investors is because it seems to make intuitive sense, since it seems reasonable that small companies, with less sustainable business models, less access to capital and greater key person risk, should be riskier than larger companies.

The Lead In

As with value investing, the strongest arguments for the small cap premium come from looking at historical returns on US stocks, broken down by decile, into market cap classes.

Going back to 1927, the smallest cap stocks have delivered about 3.47% more annually than than the rest of the market, on a value-weighted basis. That outperformance though obscures a troubling trend in the data, which is that the small cap premium has disappeared since 1980; small cap stocks have earned about 0.10% less than the average stock between 1980 and 2019. The table below breaks down the small cap premium, by decade:

The data in this table is testimony to two phenomena. The first is the belief in mean reversion that lies at the heart of so many investment strategies, with the mean being computed over long time periods, and primarily with US stocks. The second is that once bad valuation practices, once embedded in the status quo, are very difficult to remove. In my view, the use of small cap premiums in valuation practice have no basis in the data, but that does not mean that people will stop using them.

The Crisis Performance

As with active and value investing, there are some who believe that the fading of the small cap premium is temporary and that it will return, when markets change. To the extent that this crisis may constitute a market shift, I examined the performance of stocks, broken down by market capitalization into deciles between February 14, 2020 and May 1, 2020.

I know that it is still early in this crisis, but looking at the numbers so far, there is little good news for small cap investors, with stocks in the lowest two declines suffering more than the rest of the market. In fact, if there is a message in these returns, it is that the post-COVID economy will be tilted even more in favor of large companies, at the expense of small ones, as other businesses follow the tech model of concentrated market power.

A Personal Viewpoint

It is still possible that the shifts in investor behavior and corporate performance could benefit small companies in the future, but I am hard pressed trying to think of reasons why. It is my belief that forces that allowed small cap stocks to earn a premium over large cap stocks have largely faded. I am not arguing that investing in small cap stocks is a bad strategy, but investing in small companies, just because they are small, and expecting to get rewarded for doing so, is asking to be rewarded for doing very little. Markets are unlikely to oblige. It is possible that you can build more discriminating strategies around small cap stocks that can make money, but that will require again bringing something else to the equation that is not being tracked or priced in by the market already.

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