REPUTATIONAL BANKRUPTCY: Of the American Dollar

Posted on April 9, 2025 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

By Vitaliy Katsenelson CFA

***

***

The Reputational Bankruptcy of the American Dollar
I am in an unenviable position. The policy coming out of the White House has a significant impact on economics, more than ever before in my career. If I say anything positive about that policy, I’ll be put in the MAGA camp. If I criticize it, I’ll be accused of suffering from Trump derangement syndrome. I am hired by you to make the best investment decisions possible. Rather than see me as engaged in political commentary, I’d ask that you view my remarks as purely analytical.

Let me give you this analogy. I live in Denver. Let’s imagine I am a huge Broncos fan, and the Broncos are playing the Chicago Bears. If I am betting a significant amount of money on this game, I should put my affinity for the Broncos and hatred of the Chicago Bears aside and analyze data and facts. The Broncos are either going to win or lose; my wanting them to win has zero impact on the outcome. The same applies to my analysis here. My motto in life is Seneca’s saying, “Time discovers truth.” I just try to discover it before time does.

When it comes to politics, I also have a significant advantage. I was not born in this country. From a young age, I was brainwashed about communism, not about team Republican versus team Democrat. The failure of the Soviet Union de-brainwashed me fast concerning the virtues of communism and converted me into a believer in free markets.

As a result, I never bought into either party’s ideology, and thus in the last four presidential elections I voted for a Republican, an independent, a Democrat, and wrote in my youngest daughter, Mia Sarah (not in that order). In my articles I have criticized the policies of both Biden (student loan forgiveness, unions) and Trump (Bitcoin reserve).

I remind myself that in times like these you have to be a nuanced thinker. Some of Trump’s policies are terrific, others … not so much (I am being diplomatic here).

Scott Fitzgerald once said “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” In 2025 we are taking this “first-rate intelligence” test daily.

What will happen to the US dollar? The US dollar will likely continue to get weaker, which is inflationary for the US. Let me start with some easily identifiable reasons:

We have too much debt. We ran 6-7% budget deficits while our economy was growing and unemployment was at record lows. Now we have $36 trillion in debt. Our interest expenses exceed our defense spending, and these costs will continue to climb. If/when we go into recession, we may see something we have not seen in a long time – higher interest rates. Our budget deficits will balloon to between 9–12%, and the debt market, realizing that inflation (i.e., money printing) is inevitable, will say, “Pay up!”

New competition from Bitcoin. President Trump’s approval of Bitcoin as a potential reserve currency is one of the most self-serving and anti-American things I’ve seen any president do. The US dollar is the world’s reserve currency. We still have little competition for that title. China could be a contender, but it is not a democracy and has capital controls. This policy has no upside for America, only downside.

A stronger Europe. Ironically, we may inadvertently create a stronger Europe by threatening to abandon NATO. I don’t want to insult European clients (or my European friends), but the following analogy describes the US-Europe relationship on some level: Europe gradually evolved into a trust fund kid (when it came to security) and the US turned into its sugar daddy. The trust fund kid was incredibly dependent on the sugar daddy. It criticized its parent for being a barbarian and money-driven, but it relied heavily on that parent to protect it from bullies.

President Trump cut off Europe’s allowance by threatening that the US might not protect Europe from Russia. This has forced Europe to spend more money on defense. Outside of Germany (which has little debt), few European economies can afford that. This may force Europe (or at least some European countries) to become more pragmatic – to cut social programs and bureaucracy. If this leads to a stronger Europe both economically and militarily, the euro will be competing with the US dollar. This is a big if.

Our new foreign policy.

When people describe President Trump’s foreign policy as “transactional,” they’re highlighting a fundamental shift in how America engages with the world – one with profound implications for our global standing, national interests, and the US dollar. The shift affects both types of capital – financial and reputational.

Reputational capital isn’t at risk in ‘one-shot’ transactions like house selling. Imagine you’re selling your primary residence and moving elsewhere. Do you disclose every flaw, or let the buyer figure things out? Your incentive is to maximize short-term profits. You’ll likely never meet this buyer again, and therefore there are incentives not to care what they’ll think of you afterward. You’ll be transactional, seeking the highest price possible for your biggest asset. This exemplifies a ‘one-shot’ system where future interactions aren’t expected.

Contrast this with a relationship- and trust-based system. Now imagine you are a homebuilder in a small town. Your suppliers only extend credit if you have a reputation for paying on time. Your employees do quality work only if you treat them fairly. Your buyers tell friends about their experience with you. The incentives naturally create a relational approach. In this trust-based system, incentives skew toward maximizing long-term profits, where reputational capital becomes the glue creating continuity.

Reputational capital radiates predictability – you know how someone will behave based on their history – but operating with low or negative reputational capital is difficult and expensive. People won’t enter long-term contracts with you or will demand external guarantees. Many potential partners will simply refuse to deal with you.

Building reputational capital works like adding pennies to a jar – each good deed incrementally adds to your standing. Yet reputational capital can collapse instantly by removing the jar’s bottom. A single breach of trust doesn’t just remove one penny; it can wipe out your entire balance and plunge you into reputational bankruptcy. The math is brutally asymmetric: good deeds might add a point or two, while bad deeds subtract by factors of 50 or 100.

This doesn’t mean transactions shouldn’t be profitable. If you’re accumulating reputational capital while consistently losing money, you’re probably in the wrong business. Each deal should be evaluated considering both long-term financial and reputational capital.

Individual transactions can sacrifice some profit but cannot afford to lose reputational capital. A “one-shot” transactional approach used in a trust-system environment may provide greater short-term profitability, but if this success comes at the expense of reputational capital, the long-term consequences for America’s global position could be devastating.

This brings us to our current foreign policy.

Relationships between nations are a trust-based system. I’d argue it’s a super-relational system because it’s multigenerational, lasting beyond the life of any one human. Reputational capital is paramount here.

Part of the US’s strength has been the soft power – the reputational capital – it exerted. We had a lot of friends, which helped us to be more effective in dealing with our foes. We keep telling ourselves that America is an “exceptional” nation. This exceptionalism didn’t just come from our financial and military might – it accumulated based on our reputational capital.

Though we don’t always succeed, we are a people who try to do the right thing. Our exceptionalism has been earned through our actions. We are the country that helped rebuild Europe and gave it six decades to repay lend-lease. We toppled communism.

I don’t know the nuances of the Ukraine mineral deal, but initially it had the optics of extortion. Though I think the renegotiated and signed version appears to be fair to both sides, forcing repayment while Ukraine is dodging Russian missiles made the US look transactional.

Actions by President Trump over the last month have undermined our reputation. We are quickly becoming a “one-shot” transactional player in a trust-based environment. Imposing tariffs on Canada on a whim to try to get it to become the 51st state erodes American reputational capital. So does not ruling out America invading Greenland. This puts us on the same moral plane as Russia invading Ukraine.

The conversation about tariffs has many nuances. For instance, I don’t know anyone who opposes reciprocal tariffs – they seem fair and don’t consume any reputational capital. But tariffs that are used as weapons in a trade war in order to annex another country erode reputational capital. Threatening to leave NATO and not protect countries that don’t spend enough on their defense diminishes reputational capital. Maybe the only way to get European countries to spend on defense was to threaten not to defend them – you can agree or disagree with the rationale behind each of Trump’s decisions, but what can’t be argued is that they undermined our reputational capital.

As we lose soft power, our influence will diminish, and thus so will perceptions of our power. The world will start looking at us not from the perspective of the continuity of generations but of presidential cycles. The word of the American president will have an expiration date of the next presidential or mid-term election.

There are two negotiation styles – Warren Buffett’s and Donald Trump’s. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Buffett will give you one offer and one offer only. Once the deal is agreed to, even just verbally, that is the deal. Critics would say that there is downside to that predictability, as foes know how you are going to respond. Donald Trump’s style is to be unpredictable, which has its own advantages when you deal with foes – it keeps opponents guessing. But it destroys trust with your allies.

In a world of fiat currencies, all currency is a financial and reputational promise. President Trump, with the help of DOGE (and maybe even tariffs) may increase our financial strength. I hope he does, but it will likely come at a very high cost to our reputational capital, and therefore US global influence and the US dollar will continue its decline.

How are we positioned for this?

About half of our portfolio is foreign companies whose sales are not in dollars. They will benefit from a weaker dollar. We also have exposure to oil, which is priced in the US dollar and usually appreciates when the dollar weakens.

A weaker dollar means our imports will become more expensive, which is inflationary. We own many companies with pricing power and also companies that have claims on someone else’s revenues. Take Uber for example: they get about 20% of each ride. If the cost of the ride goes up, so does their dollar take.

Why does President Trump keep pushing crypto?

In July 2019, Trump said the following: “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air.” Five years later he promised to establish the US Crypto Reserve, and in 2025 he did.

What changed? There is no logical reason for an American president to endorse crypto. None. Here is the honest answer: Crypto bros made mega-contributions to his campaign.

To top it off, three days before he took office he issued $TRUMP – a shitcoin. Believe it or not, “shitcoin” is a technical term in the crypto community (any coin other than Bitcoin is called a shitcoin by Bitcoin “maximalists”, folks who believe Bitcoin is the one and only digital currency). The future sitting president literally issued – I don’t want to call it a currency, so I guess shitcoin is the right name – that will at some point decline to zero in value. In other words, he’ll fleece his loyal followers who purchase $TRUMP of billions of dollars.

I previously referenced both reputational capital and soft power. These types of acts by a sitting president subtract from both.

***

***

COMMENTS APPRECIATED

Refer and Subscribe

***

***

***

Filed under: "Ask-an-Advisor", Alternative Investments, Experts Invited, Financial Planning, Funding Basics, Glossary Terms, Investing, LifeStyle, Op-Editorials, Portfolio Management | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

CES: Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show

Posted on February 24, 2025 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

FULL ARTICLE WITH TAKE AWAY POINTS

By Vitaliy Katsenelson CFA

***

***

Key Take Away Points

  • The Consumer Electronics Show revealed that robotaxis are expanding beyond just Waymo, with multiple players entering the market – this fragmentation could actually benefit Uber’s switchboard system and transform sectors like school transportation.
  • Chinese EV manufacturers have leapfrogged traditional auto manufacturing much like Africa skipped landlines for mobile phones – their fresh designs and cost advantages could seriously challenge Western incumbents if tariffs weren’t a factor.
  • Autonomous and remote-controlled equipment is set to revolutionize traditional industries like construction, mining, and farming – transforming physically demanding jobs into office work and potentially reshaping immigration policy needs.
  • The path to cracking the US market has fundamentally changed – companies no longer need traditional retail gatekeepers like Best Buy or Costco, just a product and Amazon advertising budget, as demonstrated by companies like Renpho.
  • Brand value remains crucial in an era of rapid technology commoditization – your observations of the 15 Oura ring competitors and the GoPro story demonstrate that without strong brand differentiation, even good products can’t command premium pricing in today’s market.

***

***

Full Article

I wrote this from Las Vegas, where my son Jonah and I were at CES (the Consumer Electronics Show). 

In investing and life, it’s very easy to get tunnel vision – doing what works and staying in your comfort zone. I wanted to attend CES to shake myself out of this pattern.

It’s hard to describe how massive this event is. It sprawls through five enormous pavilions at the Las Vegas Convention Center and takes up two floors of the Venetian Hotel. It is attended by over one hundred thousand people. 

Here are my initial, off-the-cuff, somewhat random thoughts from CES. 

Robotaxis There were several robotaxi companies here, in addition to Alphabet’s Waymo. Multiple robotaxis are going to hit the market over the next few years; it won’t be just Waymo. Most will start geofenced (they’ll work in specific areas), just like Waymo did. 

This is good news for Uber: The more fragmented the robotaxi market, the more players are in this market, the more valuable is Uber’s switchboard system (which will bring higher utilization to robotaxi operators). 

This will also hugely transform public transportation. Think about school buses – that market is primed for disruption since most buses follow the same route every day in a relatively small area.

Chinese EVs Chinese electric cars are awesome. This reminds me of what happened in Africa. Most of Africa skipped phone landlines completely and went straight to wireless phones. Similarly, Chinese automakers weren’t great at making regular gas-powered cars (everyone else had dominated that space), so they just leapfrogged straight to electric cars. And leapfrog they did – they’ll make even Tesla work hard. 

I can’t speak for their reliability, but their designs are fresh; and without labor unions mandating how many workers need to screw in a single lightbulb, they’re much cheaper than Western alternatives.

If they hit the US market without tariffs, they would decimate the incumbents – similar to what Japanese carmakers did in the early 80s to the Big Three.

Machines on Autopilot Autonomous and remote-controlled equipment is going to change construction, mining, and farming completely. Imagine excavators digging dirt on a project in the middle of nowhere, operated remotely from air-conditioned urban offices – maybe even by experienced operators brought out of retirement. 

Jobs that were physically demanding and that pulled workers away from their families are going to become regular nine-to-five office jobs. This means workers can have normal family lives and work longer – way past when they’d normally have to retire due to the physical demands of the job.

Or picture a colony of Caterpillar trucks working autonomously 24/7 at a mine site. The efficiency and safety gains would be huge. You’ll still need workers, but different workers, and fewer of them.

Think about agriculture. All those jobs that “Americans don’t want to do” will be done by tractors or other farm equipment going through strawberry fields, using AI to spray pesticides only where needed and collecting apples and oranges.

Here’s an economic observation with slight policy overtones: The nature of the job market will change. This is one of those turning points in history where our immigration policy should be forward-thinking, adjusted for the world where AI will be playing a larger role in it (that is inevitable), not just focused on the past and today’s needs.

***


***

Cracking the US Market China has a significant competitive advantage in manufacturing; it has a very robust ecosystem and well-oiled supply chain – nothing new here. Its labor is no longer the cheapest, but Chinese manufacturing is getting more automated. 

We talked to one of the chief designers of Renpho, a Hong Kong company that makes digital scales (among other gadgets) and is the number one seller of those scales on Amazon. They outsource all manufacturing to China, and the factory that manufactures their scales is completely automated. 

What’s also interesting is that in the past, to break into the US market, you had to have relationships with Best Buy and Costco. They were the gatekeepers and also the quality-control testers. Today, all you need is a product. You have direct access to the US consumer through Amazon – you just have to be willing to spend on Amazon advertising to promote your product.

Brand or Bust It’s incredible how fast technology gets commoditized. There are literally fifteen (!) companies selling Oura-like rings (sleep-tracking biometric devices worn as a ring; I’ve been wearing one for five years).

In technology, you need to keep moving all the time or you’ll be eaten by the competition (true in life in general), but you also need a strong brand. I couldn’t tell the difference between my Oura ring and the fifteen replicas, most of them sold at a fraction of Oura’s price. But I trust Oura, and that’s the power of the brand.

I remember researching GoPro stock after it got bombed out (down 80%). During our research, I found that GoPro was selling their cameras for $300-400, while Chinese-made, no-name replicas were sold on Amazon for $40. These replicas didn’t have GoPro’s brand, but they had tens of thousands of five-star (hard to fake) reviews on Amazon. GoPro may have been exceptional (loved by pros), and these no-name cameras were just okay, but they were 10 times cheaper.

I put GoPro stock into the “too hard” pile and moved on – thank God I did; after declining 80%, the stock fell another 80%.

This brings me back to the value of a brand. GoPro wasn’t worth 10x more to consumers than Chinese no-name alternatives. Can Oura command 10x pricing over its no-name competitors? I don’t know. That’s the beauty of investing – I don’t have to have an actionable opinion on everything. With time I have become very comfortable saying “I don’t know.” Investing is one of the few professions where you don’t have to have an answer for everything. “I don’t know” should be the default answer, unless you do know. Which isn’t that often.

Global Tech Showdown Korean companies are really dominating screen technology. LG and several other Korean companies showed off transparent, glass-like LCD screens at CES. Imagine sitting in your self-driving car, and your windows are both regular see-through glass and LCD screens at the same time. Our lives are slowly becoming what we used to see in sci-fi movies, and these screens are definitely a leap in that direction.

CES is a truly global show, with technology on display that spans every aspect of our future. There were a lot of companies from Asia (especially China). In certain pavilions focused on consumer or business hardware, China completely dominated the exhibits. There were quite a few large American companies and many American startups, mostly focused on software (though all their hardware was manufactured in Asia). America still dominates in software.

A few, mainly Chinese, companies were showcasing their humanoid robots. One robot was slowly but accurately moving and stacking boxes in a defined area. Others were roaming more freely and were good at avoiding objects. At this point, these robots have the IQ of a smart dog, an average cat (now cat lovers will love me), or Siri. I bet in a few years this will have changed.

I was only mildly surprised by how few European companies were at the show. It’s a very broad generalization, but Europe seems to be running on fumes of past glory. Western Europe has become a pro at regulation and mastered the redistribution of wealth (activities that don’t help innovation or economic growth), and not much else. Yes, there are exceptions, but that’s the point – they are exceptions. If Europe doesn’t change course, eventually it will run out of fumes.

The beauty of learning is that you don’t always know everything you’ve learned at the moment of learning. Often, you’re just depositing data points that will crystallize into insights at a much later date. I don’t know if CES will become an every-year tradition or something I do sporadically, but it’s definitely fertile ground for learning.

COMMENTS APPRECIATED

Like, Refer and Subscribe

***

***

Filed under: "Ask-an-Advisor", Alternative Investments, Experts Invited, Funding Basics, Glossary Terms, Investing, Op-Editorials, Portfolio Management | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Why the Survival and Dominance of Car Manufacturers is Far from Certain

Posted on April 21, 2024 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

A SPECIAL REPORT

(In case you missed it)

***

#12: Vitaliy Katsenelson, Value Investor (invest like Buffett, stocks ...

By Vitaliy Katsenelson CFA

***

I am going to share with you excerpts from a research paper I wrote in 2018 about Tesla and electrical vehicles (EVs), which I have turned into a small book for reader convenience (it is available for free, here). I want to share these essays with you today because we are at a pivotal moment for traditional carmakers, and these essays, which I have not updated, present an important thinking framework about the industry.

It is easier to convince shareholders and the board of directors to invest money into new factories when the demand for EVs is growing, even if you are losing money per vehicle. At least there is hope that once you get to scale and perfect new technology, the losses will turn into profits.

However, when the demand for electrical vehicles stutters and your inventory of EVs starts piling up – which is exactly what is happening right now – investing in EVs becomes very difficult (I wrote about it here).

Retreating to what you know, what has worked for almost a century, what doesn’t generate huge losses with every vehicle sold, and what your current workforce is trained for, and comfortable producing, seems like a natural decision. The decisions traditional carmakers will make over the next year or two will be very important for what their future looks like a decade or two from now.
Why the Survival and Dominance of Car Manufacturers is Far from Certain

CITE: https://www.r2library.com/Resource

COMMENTS APPRECIATED

Thank You

***

***

Filed under: "Advisors Only", "Ask-an-Advisor", Experts Invited, Interviews, Investing, Op-Editorials | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Whatever Happened to the Invisible Hand of Capitalism?

Posted on May 6, 2023 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

The Invisible Hand of Capitalism?

vitaly

By Vitaliy Katsenelson CFA

Just as the well-meaning economist of the Soviet Union didn’t know the correct price of sugar, nor do the good-intentioned economists of our global central banks know where interest rates should be.

***

246_1

***

Assessment

Even more important, they can’t predict the consequences of their actions.

Here’s why?

http://contrarianedge.com/2016/03/16/whatever-happened-to-the-invisible-hand-of-capitalism/

Conclusion

Your thoughts and comments on this ME-P are appreciated. Feel free to review our top-left column, and top-right sidebar materials, links, URLs and related websites, too. Then, subscribe to the ME-P. It is fast, free and secure.

Speaker: If you need a moderator or speaker for an upcoming event, Dr. David E. Marcinko; MBA – Publisher-in-Chief of the Medical Executive-Post – is available for seminar or speaking engagements. Contact: MarcinkoAdvisors@msn.com

OUR OTHER PRINT BOOKS AND RELATED INFORMATION SOURCES:

Comprehensive Financial Planning Strategies for Doctors and Advisors: Best Practices from Leading Consultants and Certified Medical Planners™

***

Filed under: Health Economics, Investing | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

A DENTIST ASKS: How to Invest When There’s Nowhere to Hide?

Posted on September 29, 2022 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

***

By Vitaliy Katsenelson CFA

***

How to Invest When There’s Nowhere to Hide
I was having lunch with a close friend of mine. He mentioned that he had accumulated a significant sum of money and did not know what to do with it. It was sitting in bonds, and inflation was eating its purchasing power at a very rapid rate.

He is a dentist and had originally thought about expanding his business, but a shortage of labor and surging wages turned expanding into a risky and low-return investment. He complained that the stock market was extremely expensive. I agreed.*

***

CITE: https://www.r2library.com/Resource/Title/082610254

COMMENTS APPRECIATED.

Subscribe to the Medical Executive-Post.

THANK YOU

***

INVESTING: https://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Financial-Planning-Strategies-Advisors/dp/1482240289/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1418580820&sr=8-1&keywords=david+marcinko

***

Filed under: "Advisors Only", "Ask-an-Advisor", "Doctors Only", Career Development, Experts Invited, Health Economics, Investing, Videos | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a comment »

COVID, Inflation and Value Investing

Posted on June 10, 2022 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

Millennial Investing

***

By Vitaliy Katsenelson, CFA

***

***

COVID, Inflation, and Value Investing: Millennial Investing
I was recently interviewed by Millennial Investors podcast. They sent me questions ahead of time that they wanted to ask me “on the air”. I found some of the questions very interesting and wanted to explore deeper. Thus, I ended up writing answers to them (I think through writing). You can listen to the podcast here. 

By the way, I often get asked how I find time to write. Do I even do investment research? Considering how much content I’ve been spewing out lately, I can understand these questions. In short – I write two hours a day, early in the morning (usually from 5–7am), every single day. I don’t have time-draining hobbies like golf. I rarely watch sports. I have a great team at IMA, and I delegate a lot. I spend the bulk of my day on research because I love doing it. 

This is not the first time I was asked these questions. If you’d like to adapt some of my daily hacks in your life, read this essay.

How has Covid-19 changed the game of value investing?

Value investing has not changed. Its fundamental principles, which I describe in “The Six Commandments of Value Investing,” (one-click sign up here to receive it in your inbox) have not changed one iota. The principles are alive and well. What has changed is the environment – the economy. 

I learned this from my father and Stoic philosophers: You want to break up complex problems into smaller parts and study each part individually. That way you can engage in more-nuanced thinking. 

Let’s start with what has not changed. Our desire for in-person human interaction has not changed. At the beginning of the pandemic, we (including yours truly) were concerned about that. We were questioning whether we were going to ever be able to shake hands and hug again. However, the pandemic has not changed millions of years of human evolution – we still crave human warmth and personal interaction. We need to keep this in mind as we think about the post-pandemic world. 

What we learned in 2021 is that coronavirus mutations make predicting the end of the pandemic an impossible exercise. From today’s perch it is safe to assume that Covid-19 will become endemic, and we’ll learn how to live with it. I am optimistic on science. 

Let’s take travel, for example. Our leisure travel is not going to change much – we are explorers at heart, and as we discovered during the pandemic, we crave a change in scenery. However, I can see business travel resetting to a lower base post-pandemic, as some business trips get resolved by simple Zoom calls. Business travel is about 12% of total airline tickets, but those revenues come with much higher profit margins for airlines. 

Work from home. I am still struggling with this one. The norms of the 20th-century workplace have been shaken up by the pandemic. Add the availability of new digital tools and I don’t need to be a Nostradamus to see that the office environment will be different. 

By how much? 

The work from home genie is out of the bottle. It will be difficult to squeeze it back in. My theory right now is that customer support, on-the-phone types of jobs may disproportionately get decentralized. The whole idea of a call center is idiotic – you push a lot of people into a large warehouse-like office space, where they sit six feet apart from each other and spend eight hours a day on the phone talking to customers without really interacting with each other. Current technology allows all this work to be done remotely.

On another hand, I can see that if you have a company where creative ideas are sparked by people bumping into each other in hallways, then work from home is less ideal. But again, I don’t think about it in binary terms, but more like it’s a spectrum. Even for my company. Before the pandemic, half of our folks worked outside of the IMA main office in Denver. Most of our future hires will be local, as I believe it is important for our culture. However, we provide a certain number of days a year of remote work as a benefit to our in-office employees. 

From an investment perspective, we are making nuanced bets on global travel normalizing. We don’t own airlines – never liked those businesses, never will. Most of their profitability comes from travel miles – they became mostly flying banks. 

Office buildings I also put into a too-difficult-to-call pile. There was already plenty overcapacity in office real estate before the pandemic, and office buildings were priced for perfection. The pandemic did not make them more valuable. Maybe some of that overcapacity will get resolved through conversion of office buildings into apartments. By the way, this is the beauty of having a portfolio of 20–30 stocks: I don’t need to own anything I am not absolutely head over heels in love with.

What is the importance of developing a process to challenge your own beliefs?

My favorite quote from Seneca is “Time discovers truth.” My goal is to discover the truth before time does. I try to divorce our stock ownership from our feelings. 

Let me give you this example. If you watch chess grandmasters study their past games, they look for mistakes they have made, moves they should have made, so in the future they won’t make the same mistake twice. I have also noticed they say “white” and “black,” not “I” and “the opponent.” This little trick removes them from the game so that they can look for the best move for each side. They say “This is the best move for white”; “This is the best move for black.”

You hear over and over again from people like Warren Buffett and other value investors that we should buy great companies at reasonable prices, and I’d like to dig deeper on that idea and its two key parts, great companies and reasonable prices. Could you tell us what it takes for a company to qualify as a “great” company?

This question touches on Buffett’s transformation away from Ben Graham’s “statistical” approach, i.e., buying crappy companies that look numerically cheap at a significant discount to their fair value, to buying companies that have a significant competitive advantage, a high return on capital, and a growth runway for their earnings. 

The first type of companies often will not be high-quality businesses and will most likely not be growing earnings much. Let’s say the company is earning $1. Its earnings power will not change much in the future – it is a $5 stock trading at 5 times earnings. If its fair value is $10, trading at 10 times earnings, And if this reversion to fair value happens in one year, you’ll make 100%. If it takes 5 years then your return will be 20% a year (I am ignoring compounding here). So time is not on your side. If it takes 10 years to close the fair value gap, your return halves. Therefore you need a bigger discount to compensate for that. Maybe, instead of buying that stock at a 50% discount, you need to buy a company that is not growing at a 70% discount, at $3 instead of $5. This was pre-Charlie Munger, “Ben Graham Buffett.” 

Then Charlie showed him there was value in growth. If you find a company that has a moat around its business, has a high return on capital, and can grow earnings for a long time, its statistical value may not stare you in the face. But time is on your side, and there is a lot of value in this growth. If a company earns $1 today and you are highly confident it will earn $2 in five years, then over five years, if it trades at 10 times earnings, a no-growth company may be a superior investment if the valuation gap closes in less than 5 years, while one with growing earnings is a superior investment past year 5. 

Both stocks fall into the value investing framework of buying businesses at a discount to their fair value, looking for a margin of safety. With the second one, though, you have to look into the future and discount it back. With the first one, because the lack of growth in the future is not much different from the present, you don’t have to look far.

There is a place for both types of stocks in the portfolio – there are quality companies that can still grow and there are companies whose growth days are behind them. In our process we equalize them by always looking four to five years out. 

What qualifies as a “reasonable price”? 

We are looking for a discount to fair value where fair value always lies four to five years out. In our discounted cash flow models, we look a decade out. Our required rate of return and discount to fair value will vary by a company’s quality. There are more things that can go wrong with lower-quality companies than with the better ones. High-quality companies are more future-proof and thus require lower discount rates. We are incredibly process-driven. We have a matrix by which we rate all companies on their quality and guestimate their fair value five years out, and this is how we arrive at the price we want to pay today. 

Why do you believe that buying great companies sometimes isn’t a great investing strategy?

Because that is first-level thinking, which only looks at what stares you in the face – things that are obvious even to untrained eyes and thus to everyone. First-level thinking ignores second-order effects. If everyone knows a company is great, then its stock price gets bid up and the great company stops being a great investment. With second-level thinking you need to ask an additional question, which in this case is, what is the expected return? Being a great company is not enough; it has to be undervalued to be a good stock. 

We are looking for great companies that are temporarily (key word) misunderstood and thus the market has fallen out of love with them. Over the last decade, when interest rates only declined, first-level thinking was rewarded. It almost did not matter how much you paid for a stock. If it was a great company, its valuations got more and more inflated. 

You’re a big advocate of having a balanced investment approach that is able to weather all storms. What investments have you found that you expect will be able to hold their buying power if inflation persists through 2022 and 2023?


There are many different ways to answer this question. In fact, every time I give an answer to this question I arrive at a new answer. You want to own companies that have fixed costs. You want assets that have a very long life. I am thinking about pipeline companies, for instance. They require little upkeep expense, and their contracts allow for CPI increases (no decreases); thus higher inflation will add to their revenue while their costs will mostly remain the same. 

We own tobacco companies, too. I lived in Russia in the early ’90s when inflation was raging. I smoked. I was young and had little money. I remember one day I discovered that cigarette prices had doubled. I had sticker shock for about a day. I gave up going to movies but somehow scraped up the money for cigarettes. 

Whatever answer I give you here will be incomplete. It’s a complex problem, and so each stock requires individual analysis. In all honesty, you have to approach it on a case-by-case basis. 

With higher inflation, you’d expect bond yields to rise, since bond investors will demand a higher return to keep pace with inflation. However, CPI inflation is currently over 6%, and the 10-year Treasury is sitting at 1.5%. Why haven’t we seen Treasury yields rise more, and what does it mean for investors if a spread this wide persists?

I am guessing here. My best guess is that so far investors have bought into the Fed’s rhetoric that inflation is transitory due to the economy’s rough reopening and supply chain problems. I wrote a long article on this topic. To sum up, part of the inflation is transitory but not all of it. 

I am somewhat puzzled by the labor market today. I’ve read a few dozen very logical explanations for the labor shortage, from early retirement of baby boomers to the pandemic triggering a search for the meaning of life and thus people quitting dead jobs and all becoming Uber drivers or starting their own businesses. Labor is the largest expense on the corporate income statement, and if it continues to be scarce then inflation will persist. 

I read that employees are now demanding to work from home because they don’t want to commute. The labor shortages are shifting the balance of power to employees for the first time in decades. This will backfire in the long run, as employers will be looking at how to replace employees with capital, in other words, with automation. If you run a fast-food restaurant and your labor costs are up 20–30% or you simply cannot hire anyone, you’ll be looking for a burger flipping machine. 

If we continue to run enormous fiscal deficits, then the US dollar will crack. The pandemic has accelerated a lot of trends that were in place. We were on our way to losing our reserve currency status. Let me clarify: That is going to be a very slow, very incremental process. It will be slow because currency pricing is not an absolute but a relative endeavor, and the alternatives out there are not great. But two decades ago the US dollar was a no-brainer decision and today it is not. So we’ll see countries slowly diversifying away from it. A weaker US dollar means higher, non transitory inflation. 

You wrote The Little Book of Sideways Markets, in which you point out that history shows that a sideways market typically occurs after a secular bull market. With the role that the Federal Reserve plays in the financial markets, do you still anticipate that valuations will normalize in the coming years?

I say yes, in part because declining interest rates have pushed all assets into stratospheric valuations. Rising bond yields and valuations pushed heavenward are incompatible. Yes, I expect valuations to do what they’ve done every time in history: to mean revert. In big part this will depend on interest rates, but if rates stay low because the economy stutters, then valuations will decline – this is what happened in Japan following their early-1990s bubble. Interest rates went to zero or negative, but valuations declined. 

The stock market today is very much driven by the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy. Is there a point at which they are able to take the gas off the pedal and allow markets to normalize?

I am really puzzled by this. We simply cannot afford higher interest rates. Going into the pandemic our debt-to-GDP was increasing steadily despite the growing economy. In fact, you could argue that most of our growth has come from the accumulation of debt (the wonders of being the world’s reserve currency). Our debt has roughly equaled our GDP, and all of our economic growth in some years equaled the growth in government debt.

During the pandemic we added 40% to our debt in less than two years. We have higher debt-to-GDP than we had during WWII. After the war we reduced our debt. Also, we were a different economy then – we were rebuilding both the US and Europe. As a society we had a high tolerance for pain. 

Just like debt increases stimulate growth, deleveraging reduces growth. Also, I don’t think politicians or the public care about high debt levels. So far debt has only brought prosperity. However, higher interest rates would blow a huge hole in government budgets. If the 10-year Treasury rises a few percentage points, interest rates will increase by the amount we spend on national defense. One thing I am certain about is that our defense spending will not decline, so higher interest rates will lead to money printing and thus inflation. 

I am also puzzled by the impact of higher interest rates on the housing market. Housing will simply become unaffordable if interest rates go up a few percentage points. Loan-to-income requirements will price a huge number of people out of the market, and housing prices will have to decline. This Higher rates will also reduce the number of transactions in the real estate market, because people will be locked into their 2.5% mortgages, and if they sell they’d have to get 4-5-6% mortgages. There are a lot of second-order effects that we are not seeing today that will be obvious in hindsight. Housing prices drive demand in adjacent sectors such as home improvement. And think of the impact of higher rates on any large purchase, for example a car. 

We’re seeing the continuing rise of China has a big player in the global economy, and I know you like to invest internationally. As a value investor, how do you think about China’s rise as a global powerhouse and how it might affect the financial markets?

During the Cold War there were two gravitational centers, and as a country you had to choose one – you were either with the Soviets or with the West. Something similar will likely transpire here, too. I have to be careful using the Cold War analogy, because the Cold War was driven by ideology – it was communism vs. capitalism. Now the tension is driven by economic competition and our unwillingness to pass the mantle of global leader to another country. 

We are drawing red lines in technology. Data is becoming the new oil. China is using data to control people, and we want to make sure they don’t have control over our data. Therefore, the West wants to make sure that our technology is China-free. The US, Europe, and India will likely be pursuing a path where Chinese technology and Chinese intellectual property are largely disallowed. We have already seen this happening with Huawei being banned from the US and Western Europe. Other countries, including Russia, will have to make a choice. Russia will go with China.

Also, we are concerned that most chip production is centered in Taiwan, which at some point may be grabbed by China. The technological ecosystem would then have to undergo a significant transformation. This has already started to happen as we begin to bring chip production back to the US and Europe. 

The pandemic made us realize that globalization had made us reliant on the kindness of strangers, and we found we could not even get facemasks or ventilators. 

Globalization was deflationary; deglobalization will be inflationary.

This increased tension between countries has led to your investing in the defense industry. Could you tell us how you think about this industry? 

Despite the rise of international tensions, the global defense industry has been one of sectors that still had reasonable (sometimes unreasonably good) valuations. We have invested in half a dozen US and European defense companies. The US defense budget is unlikely to decline in the near future. There is a common misperception that Republicans love defense and Democrats hate it. Those may be party taglines, but history shows that defense spending has been driven by macro factors – it did not matter who was the occupant of the White House. 

There are a lot of things to like about defense businesses. They are an extension of the US or European governments. Most of them are friendly monopolies or duopolies. They have strong balance sheets, good returns on capital, and predictable and growing (maybe even accelerating) demand. They are noncyclical. They have inflation escalators built into their contracts. I don’t have to worry about technological disruptions. They are also a good macro hedge.

We added to our European defense stocks recently for several reasons. Europe has underinvested in defense, relying on the US Yet we have shown time and again that we may not be as dependable as we once were. 

***

COMMENTS APPRECIATED

Thank You

Subscribe to the Medical Executive-Post

***

***

Filed under: Experts Invited, Investing | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Whatever Happened to the Invisible Hand of Capitalism?

Posted on June 3, 2022 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

Join Our Mailing List

The Invisible Hand of Capitalism?

vitaly

By Vitaliy Katsenelson CFA

Just as the well-meaning economist of the Soviet Union didn’t know the correct price of sugar, nor do the good-intentioned economists of our global central banks know where interest rates should be.

***

246_1

***

Assessment

Even more important, they can’t predict the consequences of their actions.

Here’s why?

http://contrarianedge.com/2016/03/16/whatever-happened-to-the-invisible-hand-of-capitalism/

Conclusion

Your thoughts and comments on this ME-P are appreciated. Feel free to review our top-left column, and top-right sidebar materials, links, URLs and related websites, too. Then, subscribe to the ME-P. It is fast, free and secure.

Speaker: If you need a moderator or speaker for an upcoming event, Dr. David E. Marcinko; MBA – Publisher-in-Chief of the Medical Executive-Post – is available for seminar or speaking engagements. Contact: MarcinkoAdvisors@msn.com

OUR OTHER PRINT BOOKS AND RELATED INFORMATION SOURCES:

Comprehensive Financial Planning Strategies for Doctors and Advisors: Best Practices from Leading Consultants and Certified Medical Planners™

***

Filed under: Health Economics, Investing | Tagged: , , , | 3 Comments »

#2: The Six Commandments of Value Investing

Posted on March 7, 2022 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

2. Long-term time horizon (both analytical and expectation to hold) 

EDITOR’S NOTE: Although it has been some time since speaking live with busy colleague Vitaliy Katsenelson CFA, I review his internet material frequently and appreciate this ME-P series contribution. I encourage all ME-P readers to do the same and consider his value investing insights carefully.

By Vitaliy Katsenelson, CFA

***

***

The Six Commandments
of Value Investing
***
2. Long-term time horizon (both analytical and expectation to hold) 
A long-term time horizon is extremely important for value investors for several reasons: 
First, it is impossible predict how a stock will be priced in the short run. Short-term stock behavior is random, and thus its forecasting (at least using tools available to investors) cannot be turned into a repeatable process. 

Second, having a longer time horizon than Wall Street is a very important competitive advantage. The Street’s time horizon is very short – measured in months, maybe quarters, but rarely in years. 

Money flows into mutual funds and hedge funds are driven by recent performance, so Wall Street is obsessed with the short term. This creates time arbitrage. Stocks get punished because their immediate future may look unattractive, but if you look at them as businesses, that short-term performance is just a pimple on your long-term timeline. 

So, how do we embed a long-term time horizon into our process?

First, we always look at earnings and cash flows at least three (often five) years out. This forces us to look at the company’s normalized earnings power and ignores the short term. All our models focus on what the company will be worth based on its earnings power in three to five years. Then we discount (bring that future value forward to today at an 18%-40% discount rate, depending on the company’s quality) to see what we want to pay for this company today. 
Looking at the business at least three to five years out has a very important side effect: It adds “growth” to the portfolio from earnings and dividends. Stock returns come from three sources: price-to-earnings (P/E) expansion, earnings growth, and dividends. 

P/E expansion is finite – it’s a one-time shot in the arm. Let’s say a stock’s P/E goes from an undervalued 12 to a fairly valued 15 – a 25% return. If this company doesn’t grow earnings and/or pay dividends, that 25% will be our total return. The risk of owning this type of “one-shot” stock is that without earnings growth or dividends, time is not on your side – you don’t get paid to wait.

If your time horizon is three years, that 25% return gets truncated to an annual return of only 8% a year. But if this company, in addition to trading at a depressed P/E, pays a 3% dividend and grows earnings 7% a year, that is an additional, repeatable 10% return a year. This elongation of the time horizon embeds growth in our portfolio and also forces us to demand a much higher discount for stocks that don’t pay dividends and don’t grow their earnings. 

***

COMMENTS ARE APPRECIATED

Thank You

Subscribe to the Medical Executive-Post

***

****

Filed under: Events-Planner, Investing | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a comment »

USA v. CHINA: What a [Physician] Investor Should Do?

Posted on May 10, 2021 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

A PODCAST PRESENTATION ON THE C.C.P.

Vitaliy N. Katsenelson, CFA - YouTube

By Vitaliy Katsenelson, CFA

EDITOR’S NOTE: Over the last six months, my value investing management colleague Vitaliy Katsenelson has skewed his IMA’s portfolios more towards defense companies.

–Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA CMP®

WHY THE SHIFT?

The world appears less safe today than at any time since the Berlin Wall came down. Fast-forward two decades from then to now, and we find a drastically different world.

For example, China’s large Long March 5b rocket has fallen to Earth mostly as expected, much to the chagrin of critics. And some suggest the country is gearing up for “World War III” after Congress passed a multi-billion dollar defense Bill on Friday which President Donald Trump had previously vetoed.

LINK: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/us-military-worried-china-could-start-world-war-iii-180807

And so, in this podcast, Vitaliy explains his thoughts on the US, China, and the role defense companies play in his client portfolios.

PODCAST LINK: You can watch / hear / read his article online here: https://contrarianedge.com/us-and-china-in-the-foothills-of-cold-war/

title-img

ASSESSMENT: Your thoughts are appreciated.

THANK YOU

***

Filed under: Experts Invited, Investing, Videos | Tagged: , , , , | 3 Comments »

Why Amazon will NOT kill this business!

Posted on August 7, 2017 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

Why Amazon Will Not Kill This Business

By Vitaliy Katsenelson CFA

Conclusion

Your thoughts and comments on this ME-P are appreciated. Feel free to review our top-left column, and top-right sidebar materials, links, urls and related websites, too. Then, subscribe to the ME-P. It is fast, free and secure.

Speaker: If you need a moderator or speaker for an upcoming event, Dr. David E. Marcinko; MBA – Publisher-in-Chief of the Medical Executive-Post – is available for seminar or speaking engagements. Contact: MarcinkoAdvisors@msn.com

OUR OTHER PRINT BOOKS AND RELATED INFORMATION SOURCES:

Risk Management, Liability Insurance, and Asset Protection Strategies for Doctors and Advisors: Best Practices from Leading Consultants and Certified Medical Planners™8Comprehensive Financial Planning Strategies for Doctors and Advisors: Best Practices from Leading Consultants and Certified Medical Planners™

***

Filed under: Investing | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

Finding high-quality companies; TODAY?

Posted on June 20, 2017 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

At attractive valuations

By Vitaliy Katsenelson, CFA

We are having a hard time finding high-quality companies at attractive valuations.

For us, this is not an academic frustration. We are constantly looking for new stocks by running stock screens, endlessly reading (blogs, research, magazines, newspapers), looking at holdings of investors we respect, talking to our large network of professional investors, attending conferences, scouring through ideas published on value investor networks, and finally, looking with frustration at our large (and growing) watch list of companies we’d like to buy at a significant margin of safety. The median stock on our watch list has to decline by about 35-40% to be an attractive buy.

But – maybe we’re too subjective

Instead of just asking you to take our word for it, in this letter we’ll show you a few charts that not only demonstrate our point but also show the magnitude of the stock market’s overvaluation and, more importantly, put it into historical context. 

***

 

 Finding High-Quality Companies Today

*** 

Conclusion

Your thoughts and comments on this ME-P are appreciated. Feel free to review our top-left column, and top-right sidebar materials, links, URLs and related websites, too. Then, subscribe to the ME-P. It is fast, free and secure.

Speaker: If you need a moderator or speaker for an upcoming event, Dr. David E. Marcinko; MBA – Publisher-in-Chief of the Medical Executive-Post – is available for seminar or speaking engagements. Contact: MarcinkoAdvisors@msn.com

OUR OTHER PRINT BOOKS AND RELATED INFORMATION SOURCES:

Comprehensive Financial Planning Strategies for Doctors and Advisors: Best Practices from Leading Consultants and Certified Medical Planners™

***

Filed under: Experts Invited, Investing | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

Ben Bernanke: Buy One Suit, Get Three Free

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

Join Our Mailing List

Linear thinking is dangerous

vitaly[By Vitaliy Katsenelson, CFA]

Linear thinking is dangerous. It is the easiest form of reasoning, lying on the path of least resistance. The simpler the path, the more readily people will march along it. Linear arguments are easy to make, as they require the least amount of evidence — past data points with a straight line drawn through them.However, the larger the crowd that follows the wrong line of reasoning, the more people pile in, and the greater the consequences if they are proved wrong.

A lot of things in nature, and thus in investing, are not linear. A past trend may or may not persist into the future. Events don’t happen in a vacuum; they are observed, studied and capitalized on — which in the case of investing may preclude a company’s future from resembling its past. As I write this, I think of successful companies whose achievements attracted competition, which then marginalized them.

Some things are inherently nonlinear, their behavior reminiscent of a pendulum’s: The further they swing in one direction, the harder they’ll go in the opposite direction. It is very dangerous to default to linearity with such nonlinear phenomena, as the more confident we become in the swing (the more linearity we observe), the closer we are to the pendulum’s reversing course.

Price-earnings ratios often follow a pendulum behavior. If you look at high-quality dividend-paying stocks — the Coca-Colas and Procter & Gambles of the world — they are now changing hands at more than 20 times earnings. Their recent performance has driven linear thinkers to pile into them, expecting more of the same in the future. Don’t! These stocks were beneficiaries of a swing in the P/E pendulum as it went from low to average and then to above-average levels.

Pattern recognition is an important contributor to success in investing. Mark Twain once said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. If you can identify a rhyme (that is, see a pattern) relating to the current situation, then you can develop a framework to analyze and forecast it. But what if the current situation is very different — if it doesn’t rhyme with anything in the past? This is where the ability to draw parallels becomes helpful. It allows you to overlay rhymes (patterns) from other companies, industries or even fields. Building analogous frameworks is a cure for linear thinking; it helps us see nonlinearity and facilitates the creation of nonlinear mental models.

Then there is pseudolinearity: things that seem to be linear but are forced into linearity by extrinsic factors. This was a subtopic of my presentation at the Valuex Vail investing conference in June. I drew a parallel between two entities that suddenly looked analogous: Jos. A. Bank Clothiers, a Hampstead, Maryland–based retailer of men’s apparel, and the Federal Reserve.

***

rote

***

Jos. A. Bank

Jos. A. Bank has always been a very promotional retailer. It would jack up prices, then run sales for consumers happy to be deceived — a typical American retail tale. But sometime in 2008, Jos. A. Bank went promotional on steroids. You could not watch CNBC for an hour without seeing one of its ads. The company started out by encouraging you to buy one suit and get one free. Then you got two free suits. Finally, it started giving away Android phones with suit purchases. For a while this past March, Jos. A. Bank offered consumers the opportunity to buy one suit and get three free.

There are several problems with the strategy: It does not emphasize the quality of the suits or the company’s great service, and the ads aren’t helping to build a brand but are intended just to pimp sales at Jos. A. Bank, as if it were a grocery store with USDA choice beef on sale.

This brings us to the latest quarter. Jos. A. Bank’s same-store sales dropped 8 percent, but what really piqued my interest was this explanation by its CEO, R. Neal Black, during its earnings call in June: “Since 2008, at the beginning of the financial crisis and the recession, the overall sales picture has been one of volatility, and strong promotional activity has been consistently and effectively driving our sales increases. This strategy was designed with 18 to 24 months of effectiveness in mind, and we stuck with it for more than 60 months since — as the economy remained weak. Now the strategy has become less effective.”

What Jos. A. Bank has really been doing since the financial crisis is running its own version of quantitative easing. The company had a temporary strategy that was supposed to get people into its stores during the recession — much like the Fed’s original QE, which was designed to provide liquidity in a time of crisis — but the recovery that ensued was not to Jos. A. Bank’s liking. So just as the Fed implemented QE2, and then QE3 when the economy did not improve to its satisfaction, the retailer followed with more QE.

It is understandable why Jos. A. Bank’s management did what it did. The company was being responsible to its employees — it didn’t want to close stores or have layoffs — and it had to report quarterly to shareholders. The focus shifted from building a long-term sustainable franchise to using short-term measures to grow earnings the next quarter and the quarter after that.

There are many lessons that one can draw from the parallels between Jos. A. Bank’s behavior and the Fed’s handling of our economy. First, it is very hard to challenge someone who has a linear argument. Let’s say that a year ago you talked to Jos. A. Bank’s management and raised the question of the sustainability of their advertising strategy. They’d have pointed to four years of success, and they’d have been right, at least up to that moment. They would have had four years of data points and a bulletproof linear argument, and you would have had your common sense and little else.

***

suit-869380__180

***

Ben Bernanke

Right now Ben Bernanke looks like a genius. He can show you all the data points in the recovery, but so could Jos. A. Bank, and this leads us to a second lesson: Pain is postponable, but it is cumulative. During Jos. A. Bank’s quarterly call, its CEO also said: “The decline in traffic is because existing customers are returning slightly less frequently. . . . It makes sense when you consider the saturating effect of our intense promotional activity over the past several years.”

With every sale Jos. A. Bank stole its future purchases, because when you buy one suit and get three for free, you may not need to buy another one for a while.But there is also a snowball effect that you cannot ignore: Every ad chipped away at the company’s brand. Now when you show someone that you wear a Jos. A. Bank suit, they don’t think about its quality, just that you have two or three more suits in your closet.

There is a cost to our recovery — a bloated Federal Reserve balance sheet and our addiction to low interest rates. Of course, we spread that addiction globally.

According to Hugh Hendry, founding partner and CIO of London-based hedge fund firm Eclectica Asset Management, rising U.S. bond yields have driven global yields higher. “In Brazil for instance, the biggest emerging debt market, no company has been able to raise debt abroad since mid-May as borrowing costs soared to a four-year high in June, at 7.1 percent,” he wrote in a recent investment letter.

The Fed is betting on George Soros’ theory of reflexivity, in which people’s biases and actions can change the economy: Instead of the wagon being towed by the horse, the wagon, in expectation that it will be towed by the horse, starts moving on its own, thereby motivating the horse to start towing the wagon.Lower interest rates drive people to riskier assets, and as asset values go up, people feel confident and spend money, and the economy grows. But this policy puts us on very shaky ground, because reflexivity cuts both ways: If asset prices start to decline, confidence declines — and so will the economy. Now there are a lot more savers owning riskier assets than they otherwise would have, and their wealth is at risk of getting wiped out.

The third lesson from the parallels between the Fed and Jos. A. Bank: We are in the midst of a game of musical chairs, and when the music stops, no one wants to be left standing around holding risky assets. Everyone is focused on the Fed’s tapering, and they are right to do so. Just as we saw with Jos. A. Bank, economic promotions cannot go on forever. With every sale the company had to increase the ante, giving away more and more to get people to come into its stores. The Fed may continue to buy Treasuries and mortgage securities, but the purchases will be less and less effective. And the music may stop on its own, without the Fed doing anything about it.

Last, pseudolinearity eventually leads to high uncertainty and thus lower valuations. Put yourself in the shoes of an investor analyzing Jos. A. Bank today. Before buying the stock, you’d have to answer the following questions: What is the company’s earnings power? How much did its promotional strategy damage the brand? And how much in future sales did that strategy steal?

Assessment

In the wake of Jos. A. Bank’s own five-year, nonstop version of QE, it is difficult to answer these questions with confidence. The company’s earnings power is uncertain, and investors will be willing to pay less for a dollar of uncertain earnings, thus resulting in a lower P/E. At some point, when U.S. economic activity weakens, investors will have to answer similar questions about the U.S. and global economies. And as they look for answers, they’ll be putting a lower P/E on U.S. stocks.

ABOUT

Vitaliy N. Katsenelson CFA is Chief Investment Officer at Investment Management Associates in Denver, Colo. He is the author of Active Value Investing (Wiley 2007) and The Little Book of Sideways Markets (Wiley, 2010).  His books were translated into eight languages.  Forbes Magazine called him “The new Benjamin Graham”.  

Conclusion

Your thoughts and comments on this ME-P are appreciated. Feel free to review our top-left column, and top-right sidebar materials, links, URLs and related websites, too. Then, subscribe to the ME-P. It is fast, free and secure.

Speaker: If you need a moderator or speaker for an upcoming event, Dr. David E. Marcinko; MBA – Publisher-in-Chief of the Medical Executive-Post – is available for seminar or speaking engagements. Contact: MarcinkoAdvisors@msn.com

OUR OTHER PRINT BOOKS AND RELATED INFORMATION SOURCES:

***

[WHERE LEARNING IS A plus+™]

Career Development, Products and Services

“The informed voice of a new generation of fiduciary advisors for healthcare”

CMP logo

http://www.CertifiedMedicalPlanner.org 

 Our New Text – “Take a Peek Inside“ – Now Available

Comprehensive Financial Planning Strategies for Doctors and Advisors: Best Practices from Leading Consultants and Certified Medical Planners(TM)

                              logos

“BY DOCTORS – FOR DOCTORS – PEER REVIEWED – FIDUCIARY FOCUSED”

***

Filed under: Alternative Investments, Investing, Op-Editorials | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »