Valuentum Exclusive Analysis for the Discerning Investor

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Jan 9, 2020

Yum! Brands Buys Habit Restaurants
Image Shown: An overview of Yum! Brands Inc’s operations. Image Source: Yum! Brands Inc - Investor Fact Sheet. On January 6, quick-service restaurant chain Yum! Brands (which owns the KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell brands) announced that it was acquiring fast causal burger joint Habit Restaurants for $14 per share in cash for a total cash consideration of $375 million. Habit Burger’s footprint includes ~265 restaurants in total across more than a dozen US states and China under its namesake brand, Habit Burger Grill, and please note roughly 90% of those locations are company-owned. Having the benefit of Yum! Brands global marketing and advertising wing will support future growth endeavors at the Habit Burger Grill brand. We still aren’t interested in shares of YUM here as the top end of our fair value range estimate sits at $106, or just a few dollars ahead of where YUM is trading at as of this writing.

Jan 4, 2020

Valuentum Exclusive Success Rates Trump Even the Best Quant Hedge Funds
Image: President of Investment Research Brian Nelson, CFA. A new book, “The Man Who Solved the Market,” hit bookshelves last year, and thus far it has been a hit. The text goes into the story of quant hedge fund Renaissance Technologies and its hedge fund, the Medallion Fund, which has put up mammoth returns since inception.

Dec 25, 2019

5 Things We Learned in 2019
Image: The Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. "The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it." -- George Orwell

Dec 4, 2019

Cracker Barrel Doing Well Despite Industry Headwinds
Image Source: 2019 Annual Shareholder Meeting, November 21. First-quarter fiscal 2020 results at Cracker Barrel were solid, but the fiscal year is still early, and the restaurant industry backdrop for traffic isn’t as strong as it once was. That said, we expect Cracker Barrel to keep raising menu prices to drive strong comparable store sales performance, which should help the firm achieve operating-margin guidance of 9% during the fiscal year, propelling copious free cash flow generation and supporting capital-return efforts. That said, we’ll be watching traffic performance and cost pressures closely in the coming quarters, but for now, our discounted cash-flow derived fair value estimate of $168 per share stands, reflecting about 17.5x the high end of the firm’s adjusted earnings per share target during fiscal 2020. Cracker Barrel’s Dividend Cushion ratio remains a very healthy 1.5x. Shares yield 3.4% at the time of this writing, and this excludes any special dividends that shareholders have grown accustomed to during the past five years.

Dec 2, 2019

McDonald’s Enters the Chicken Sandwich Wars
Image Shown: Shares of McDonald’s Corporation have pulled back over the past couple of months after an epic run during most of 2019, which we view as the market recognizing shares of MCD had gotten way ahead of themselves. McDonald’s is testing out a new crispy chicken sandwich offering in two US cities; Knoxville, Tennessee and Houston, Texas. This pilot project is expected to run through January 2020. While McDonald’s offers the ‘McChicken,’ its new chicken sandwich offering is far more substantial (the McChicken is to a chicken sandwich what the ‘McDouble’ is to a burger) and meant to compete with offerings from privately-held Chick-fil-A and Restaurant Brands' Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen. We still view shares of McDonald’s as overvalued as the top end of our fair value range estimate sits at $189 per share, and MCD trades at ~$195 per share as of this writing. Shares of McDonald’s yield 2.6% as of this writing, and while the company’s free cash flow profile is impressive, its large net debt load (~$31.7 billion as of the end of September 2019) weighs negatively on the strength of its dividend coverage.

Nov 20, 2019

Economic Commentary: Marks, Dalio, and the Discount Rate
Image Source: Mike Cohen. We sat down with the Valuentum team to discuss their latest thoughts on recent economic developments. To kick off the conversation, let’s start with the team’s views on the latest memo from Oaktree’s Howard Marks: Mysterious. For those that don’t know Howard, he is the Director and Co-Chairman of Oaktree, which managed about $122 billion in AUM, as of September 2019. The memo goes into depth on the reasons for negative interest rates, the impact of negative interest rates, and opines on whether the US will ever see negative interest rates. Then, we’ll go from there!

Oct 24, 2019

Our Reports on Stocks in the Restaurants - Fast Food & Coffee/Snacks Industry
The restaurant industry has benefited from a long-term trend toward eating out, but the space has become increasingly more competitive as new concepts are introduced and successful chains expand. Not only are there pricing pressures and trade-down threats, but rising costs for commodities and labor have pressured profits. Barriers to entry are low, and many constituents have a difficult time differentiating themselves. We tend to like larger chains that benefit from scale advantages and international expansion opportunities, though niche franchises can be appealing. We’re neutral on the structure of the group.

Oct 14, 2019

Economic Commentary: Robots, Value Trap, and Politics on the Markets
Valuentum sat down for the latest installment of its periodic economic commentary, and the team tackled a wide array of topics, from robots on Wall Street, to President of Investment Research Brian Nelson’s new book Value Trap, to political influence on the markets and boyond. Let’s set the stage with a prompt from a recent Bloomberg article, “The Master of Robots…Coming for Wall Street...

Oct 12, 2019

ICYMI: Interview with Valuentum's President Brian M. Nelson, CFA
Catch up with Valuentum's President Brian M. Nelson, CFA in a recent interview with dividend growth investor Arne Magnus Lorentzen Ulland of the blog stockles.

Oct 4, 2019

Economic Commentary: Apple $225+, Brokers Tumble, Auto Sales Look Tired
Image: Shares of TD Ameritrade Holdings have been punished as online trading commissions go to zero. "Though all signs point to increased volatility, we maintain our view that we’re well-positioned in the newsletter portfolios, and the ideas highlighted in the Exclusive publication consider the backdrop economic conditions we closely monitor." -- Brian Nelson, CFA