Valuentum Exclusive Analysis for the Discerning Investor

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Dec 29, 2021

Best Idea Alphabet Growing Global Cloud Presence
Image Shown: Alphabet Inc Class C shares, a top-weighted idea in our Best Ideas Newsletter portfolio, are up ~65% over the past year. Alphabet has historically focused primarily on growing its digital advertising revenues since the company was founded under the Google name back in 1998. More recently, the technology giant has begun seriously seeking to broaden its revenue base, and we like what we see on this front. We include Alphabet Class C shares as an idea in the Best Ideas Newsletter portfolio given its immense capital appreciation upside potential as a net cash-rich, free cash flow generating powerhouse.

Aug 14, 2020

Our Thoughts on Chevron Buying Noble Energy
Image Shown: An overview of Chevron Corporation’s all-stock acquisition of Noble Energy Inc that was announced in July 2020. Image Source: Chevron Corporation – July 2020 Noble Energy Acquisition Presentation. On July 20, Chevron Corp announced it was acquiring Noble Energy through a $5.0 billion all-stock transaction, or $13.0 billion when factoring in net debt and the book value of non-controlling interests. Shareholders of Noble Energy will receive approximately 0.12 share of Chevron for each share of Noble Energy. At the time the deal was announced, shareholders of NBL were receiving a ~12% premium based on the ten-day average closing stock prices. Chevron intends to issue ~58 million shares to cover the deal, keeping in mind the firm had approximately 1.85 billion shares outstanding on a weighted-average diluted basis as of the second quarter of 2020. The deal is expected to close during the fourth quarter of this year and is forecasted to generate $0.3 billion in annualized run-rate cost synergies one year after closing.

Jun 16, 2020

Exxon Mobil Puts on a Brave Face
Image Source: Exxon Mobil Corporation – November 2019 Guyana IR Presentation. Near-term oil prices and most importantly, the oil price futures curve, have improved materially since just a couple of months ago when it looked like the sky was falling. For the first time ever, WTI turned negative in April 2020 for physical deliveries due May 2020 of light sweet oil to Cushing, Oklahoma, as storage options were limited (and arguably, many speculators had jumped into the market not fully aware of the risks they were taking on). Exxon Mobil Corp has seen its share price recover considerably since the drop, though we caution that management’s commitment to the dividend will prove a hard task if things do not improve materially in the short-term. As of this writing, near-term futures for WTI and its international counterpart Brent are trading near $40 per barrel. In the face of COVID-19, low raw energy resource prices (Exxon Mobil’s upstream operations form its largest single business segment), and subdued demand for refined petroleum and petrochemical products (from gasoline to plastics) have significantly weakened Exxon Mobil’s cash flow profile. The ongoing coronavirus (‘COVID-19’) pandemic has shaken energy markets to their core in ways we have not seen ever before. Shares of XOM yield ~7.4% as of this writing. We give Exxon Mobil a Dividend Cushion ratio at 0.2, though its Dividend Safety rating is “GOOD” given the company’s ability to tap capital markets, especially debt markets as the oil giant carries high quality “A-rated” investment grade credit ratings. There is a limit to how much debt Exxon Mobil can take on to cover its dividend obligations, however, which we will cover in greater detail in this article.

Apr 13, 2020

Historic Oil Deal Reached
Image Source: Chevron Corporation - March 2020 Security Analyst Meeting Presentation. Over the Easter holiday weekend, members from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (‘OPEC’), non-OPEC members that are part of the OPEC+ group (countries that in the recent past have joined forces with OPEC to curtail global oil supplies in a formal manner), and non-OPEC members outside of the OPEC+ group such as Brazil, Canada, and the United States came to an agreement to cut their collective oil output by north of 10 million barrels per day. Global oil and other raw energy resource prices have been simply demolished year-to-date due to a combination of demand destruction from the ongoing coronavirus (‘COVID-19’) pandemic and the emergence of a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia. Please note that oil demand destruction due to the “cocooning” of households (and the related drop off in refined petroleum product demand from automobiles, airplanes, etc.) may be as high as 35 million barrels per day according to some analysts, an enormous figure that’s resulting in major stockpile buildups all over the world. Other analysts don’t necessarily see the level of demand destruction as that high (projections are being updated constantly); however, they are still calling for a drop off in demand that’s in the ten(s) of millions of oil barrels per day range (at least in the short-term, depending on how long the pandemic lasts). Even if this agreement is effectively implemented, that won’t result in oil prices (and other raw energy resource prices) returning to pre-COVID-19 levels in the short/medium-term, in our view, but will make emerging from this pandemic an easier task given that global oil storage capacity is nearing its limit. As of this writing on April 13, oil prices are trading up modestly but are still down by well over 50% year-to-date.

Mar 20, 2020

Stress in the Oil & Gas Industry Grows as Major Energy Exporters Hunker Down
Image Shown: WTI is down almost 61% over the past year as raw energy resources prices were decimated by the news that OPEC and non-OPEC members couldn’t reach another production curtailment deal in early-March 2020. Upstream capital expenditures are coming down aggressively in the US shale patch and elsewhere, and just as importantly, even the bigger firms are throwing in the towel and scaling back their ambitions. Exxon Mobil has recently pledged to make material cuts to its capital expenditure budget, while Chevron is considering such a move, as are others. It will take a lot more than that to stabilize raw energy resources pricing given the demand destruction caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, with many households in major demand regions (namely the US and Europe) now “cocooning” in their homes to wait out the crisis. That’s on top of an expected surge in oil supplies from OPEC and non-OPEC nations, with an eye towards Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Russia. We caution our members to not catch a falling knife here.

Mar 15, 2020

Fed Cuts 100 Basis Points, Launches More QE
“Now, stocks and other assets are being sold, some indiscriminately. It is truly becoming a stock pickers market as opposed to a quant-led and index-led market. It takes a different kind of bravery to buy on massive down days and one must have conviction in their research that the company will not go away if massive downside scenarios do in fact emerge.” – Matthew Warren. In this piece, we cover our assessment of what the global markets might be facing in a bull-case, base-case, and bear-case scenario. Our base case is a substantial recession in the US and a financial crisis of some unknown magnitude.

Mar 9, 2020

Oil Markets Get Decimated
Image Shown: Oil prices have been decimated year-to-date. The outlook for independent upstream names has become dire. In an industry that’s generated little to no free cash flow since 2010, and instead has relied heavily on capital markets to stay afloat; for all the hype surrounding surging US production of raw energy resources there hasn’t been much shareholder value creation to show for it. Consumers and certain US states have been big winners, sure, but equity holders and now potentially credit holders have largely taken it on the chin. We will continue following the space for our members going forward, and please note there’s a very good reason we removed the Energy Select Sector SPDR ETF from our newsletter portfolios back in August 2019 (link here), the outlook for the energy space (particularly oil & gas) was lackluster at the time and has since become dire.

Mar 3, 2020

Covering Oil Markets Ahead of the Upcoming OPEC/OPEC+ Meetings
Image Source: Exxon Mobil Corporation – 2019 IR Presentation. On March 5, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (‘OPEC’) is holding an “extraordinary” meeting in Vienna, Austria, which will be followed up by a ministerial meeting between OPEC and non-OPEC members the next day. The group had already agreed to cut oil supplies by an additional 0.5 million barrels of per day (‘bpd’) back in December 2019 through an agreement that would last through March 2020 (that was on top of an existing deal to keep 1.2 million bpd off of the market which runs through the end of March 2020 as well). As part of that deal, Saudi Arabia offered to “voluntarily” reduce supplies by an additional 0.4 million bpd; however, that hasn’t been enough to prop up oil prices (even though ~1.7-2.1 million bpd of oil supplies are effectively removing removed from the market at 100% compliance). As of this writing, the internationally-oriented May 2020 Brent contracts are trading near $52 per barrel, down from the high $60s level seen at the end of 2019. The US-oriented WTI contracts haven’t fared any better, and April 2020 deliveries are trading near $47 per barrel as of this writing.

Sep 19, 2019

FedEx Bemoans Trade Wars and Issues Weak Guidance, Shares Get Crushed
Image Source: FedEx Corp -- IR Presentation. Global logistics and shipping giant FedEx Corp reported first-quarter earnings for its fiscal 2020 (ended August 31) on September 17 that underwhelmed, sending shares sharply lower (down almost 13%) on September 18. As a capital intensive business operating in a cyclical industry, FedEx is stuck in a bind. Either pursue its drive for greater efficiency, greater scale, and (in theory) greater profits in the future while acknowledging that significant headwinds in the short- to medium-term will pressure free cash flows at a time of significant capital investment, or attempt to scale back which hollows out the core of management’s capital allocation strategy. Please note FedEx’s future aircraft purchase commitments make cutting capital expenditures by a meaningful amount a significantly harder task, reducing its financial flexibility. Management has opted to push forward into the fray. We are remaining firmly away from FedEx at this time.

Sep 16, 2019

Saudi Arabia Attacked, Oil Prices Shoot Higher
Disaster struck this weekend when several drones took out the Abqaiq oil processing facility and the massive onshore Khurais oil field in Saudi Arabia on Saturday, with WTI and Brent both surging on the news once trading resumed at the start of the week. We will be monitoring this situation very closely going forward. The pace at which Saudi Arabia can bring capacity back online will have an outsize impact on global oil markets going forward, as the world no longer has any spare capacity to turn to during times like these (when supply is severely curtailed). Geopolitical tensions are clearly growing and that could spill over into a war directly between Saudi Arabia and Iran, but for now there’s no signs of troops mobilizing for such an endeavor.