Member Articles

Don’t Follow the Social Media Likes: The Divine “Comment(y)”

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Image Source: Pilottage “Personally, it was a miserable experience for me to see things that others couldn’t.” – Nelson on Valuentum’s call preceding Kinder Morgan’s dividend cut. By Brian Nelson, CFA — A foreshadowing, a rare comment remembering Valuentum’s successful warning on Seadrill when we made our call on Kinder Morgan, June 2015. This was one of the more difficult articles for me to write. I don’t know why exactly, but the words just aren’t coming out right. Pardon me. It sounds trite, almost to the point of blasphemy, to call “The Divine Comedy” a self-help book, but that’s how Dante himself saw it. In a letter to his patron, Can Grande della Scala, the poet said that the goal … Read more

Have Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Shares Finally Found Support?

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Image Source: kennijima By Alexander J. Poulos and Brian Nelson, CFA The pharmaceutical industry remains an area of innovation with numerous life-altering therapies brought forth to treat the many afflictions that plague us. The industry lifeblood remains the tenuous path of research and study. There is not a foolproof way to predict how a compound will respond until full clinical trials are completed and analyzed, and even successful commercialization cannot be guaranteed should a drug be approved, regardless of the time and costs invested. A later stage clinical failure, for example, could devastate a smaller company, with its equity never to recover. That’s in part why we tend to prefer larger, more diversified, entities within the pharma/biotech arena as the … Read more

SEC Approves Financial Weapon of Mass Destruction and More Earnings Reports

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Let’s talk about quadruple-leveraged ETFs, Apple’s and Altria’s earnings reports, Coach’s fundamental improvement, Gilead’s fall from grace, IBM’s ongoing deterioration and more. By Brian Nelson, CFA Well, it is what it is as they say. In our ETF research and analysis, we consistently warn readers about the long-term price erosion dynamics of ultra-leveraged ETFs (of the double and triple variety), vehicles that we have emphasized are for “day traders,” not long-term investors. Believe it or not, however — we received news May 3 that the SEC approved a request to now list quadruple-leveraged ETFs, what we describe to be “financial weapons of mass destruction.” Yikes. You read that correctly–quadruple-leveraged exchange traded funds, ones that mimic the movement of the index … Read more

Volatility Spikes, Oh Cisco, the Mighty US Dollar, and More

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Image Source: CBOE Let’s talk about recent market events May 17. There’s a lot going on. By Brian Nelson, CFA It looks like volatility is back in a big way, with “all 29 volatility indexes at the CBOE ris(ing) today,” one more-than-doubling, the CBOE Short-Term Volatility Index (VXST). The ridiculously-named “fear gauge” or “fear index” or the CBOE Volatility Index, the VIX (VIX) leapt nearly 50%. On May 17, we effectively bought volatility intraday by adding put options to the newsletter portfolios, both on the S&P 500 SPDR (SPY) and Netflix, a company whose valuation we think remains ridiculous. We may continue to add put options on entities whose equity prices we believe have become too stretched, positions that may … Read more

Top-Weighted Visa Leaps to Mid-$160s, More Earnings Reports

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Top-Weighted Visa Leaps to Mid-$160s, More Reports Image: Visa (V) has been the top-weighted idea in the Best Ideas Newsletter for as long as we can remember. In December 2017, when we migrated to weighting ranges for ideas in the newsletter portfolio, the company’s “weight” was 8.6%. The image above shows its performance relative to the S&P 500 (SPY) since then. Source (pdf). — In alphabetical order by ticker symbol: GOOG, LLY, GE, GM, IR, LL, MA, MCD, MRK, PFE, TXRH, WDC — Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL): Shares of Alphabet, the parent of Google, reported first-quarter performance April 29 that may have revealed weakness in the revenue story at the search giant. The miss was rather large on the top line during the quarter, but … Read more

Vodafone’s Dividend Cut, Alibaba’s Resilience, More Reports

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Vodafone’s Dividend Cut, Alibaba’s Resilience, More Reports In alphabetical order by company name: A, BABA, PLCE, GES, M, NSANY, RL, TLRY, VOD — Good morning, — Still buying stocks immediately as they fall and on the way down? There may be no logical basis for doing so. Here’s an excerpt from Value Trap: Theory of Universal Valuation.  — Image: Excerpt from Value Trap, page 241 — Order your copy here.  — The market must eventually agree with you for your idea to work out, so why not wait until the stock starts to move higher first. Waiting a few weeks or a few months/quarters to see if the stock eventually settles and technical/momentum indicators start to improve is vital in helping … Read more

Where Are the Safe Havens?

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“We believe that staying diversified as in holding a broad swath of ideas as in either the Best Ideas Newsletter portfolio or Dividend Growth Newsletter portfolio as the equity portion of one’s allocation makes a lot of sense in any environment…High yield dividend investing may become more and more popular in coming years as rates across the globe approach 0%, and the amount of negative-yielding debt proliferates.” — Brian Nelson, CFA By The Valuentum Team The Federal Reserve is weighing all its options as it assesses how to balance global economic weakness and strong performance in the US, pressure from the White House to aggressively cut rates, and a 30-year yield that puts the federal funds rate at the highest … Read more

Analyzing Chevron and Important Updates in the Global Energy Industry

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Image Source: Chevron Corporation – November 2019 IR Presentation Summary In this note, let’s cover the current state of raw energy resource prices in North America and around the world. We’ll analyze Chevron’s 2020 capital investment and exploration budget, in particular, and the global energy industry at-large. Shares of CVX appear generously valued as of this writing given the numerous headwinds facing the energy industry going forward. By Callum Turcan The world of oil and gas equities has been battling with persistently low raw energy resource prices for some time now. Back in the middle of 2014, a barrel of light sweet crude delivered to Cushing, Oklahoma (home of the West Texas Intermediate, or WTI, benchmark), would fetch over $100. Now … Read more