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Nelson: I Have Been Wrong About the Prospect of Near-Term Inflationary-Driven Earnings Tailwinds

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Transcript During the past several weeks, we’ve grown increasingly concerned about the health of consumer-tied entities across not only the consumer staples but also the consumer discretionary spaces. Many consumer staples entities, while raising prices, aren’t raising them fast enough to drive operating-income and bottom-line expansion, while many consumer-discretionary companies are facing higher freight and logistics costs and weaker performance in China, perhaps best revealed by Nike’s most recently-reported quarter, where inventory advanced 23% compared to the prior-year period. The tell-tale sign about the health of the consumer may be Amazon (AMZN) Prime Day, which is coming up on July 12-13, but based on many of the reports we’ve monitored this past earnings season, even if sales are strong on … Read more

Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bathwater

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Image: Erica Nicol Takeaways: Junk tech should continue to collapse, but the stylistic area of large cap growth and big cap tech should remain resilient. Moderately elevated levels of inflation coupled with interest rates hovering at all-time lows isn’t a terrible combination. In fact, it’s not bad at all. The markets are digesting the huge gains of the past few years so far in 2022, and the excesses in ARKK funds, crypto, SPACs, and meme stocks are being rid from the system. Our best ideas are “outperforming” the very benchmarks that are outperforming everyone else. The BIN portfolio is down 6.4% and the DGN portfolio is down 3.2% year to date. The SPY is down 7.8%, while the average investor … Read more

Our Report on the Banks & Money Centers Industry

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Image Source: Ethan Stock  Banks & Money Centers Industry Report – select the link below to download the pdf Summary We’ll talk about how banks make money, and the three most important costs of running a bank. The Great Financial Crisis revealed the tremendous risks of banking equities, and we’ll walk through these risks in depth. We will also cover how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted capital markets and the banking industry, and what to expect going forward. We’ll discuss how to conceptualize where we are in the banking cycle, and how that helps inform our valuation process for banks, which is different than traditional operating entities. The stress tests have helped many of the big banks from pursuing hazardous endeavors during … Read more

Hut 8 Mining Is an Interesting Play on Cryptocurrencies

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Image Source: Hut 8 Mining Corporation – November 2021 IR Presentation By Callum Turcan Hut 8 Mining Corporation (HUT) is headquartered in Toronto, Canada (in the province of Ontario), and “mines” digital assets from two operations in Alberta, Canada (in the city of Medicine Hat and town of Drumheller). The firm is in the process of developing a third mining operation in Ontario, Canada, at the small city of North Bay, having secured a long-term power purchase agreement with Validus Power Corp. Overview  Though Hut 8 Mining mines for both bitcoin (BITO) and ether, two of the most popular cryptocurrencies, when it mines for Ether it historically has preferred to get paid in bitcoin. Hut 8 Mining has built up … Read more

Hard Work and the Trust That Binds

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Image Source: Terry Johnson By Brian Nelson, CFA We’ll have our traditional Valuentum Weekly email coming out on Sunday, and I’m excited to say our team is putting the finishing touches on our technology industry update, so we’ll have a whole bunch of fresh reports for you to look at Sunday evening/Monday morning. It’s easy to forget how much we’ve been through the past two years. Often, we forget how helpful the warning that markets were going to crash was the weekend before they did on February 22, 2020, “Is a Stock Market Crash Coming? – Coronavirus Update and P/E Ratios,” how we thought dollar-cost-averaging made sense at the bottom in March 2020, and how we went “all-in” in April … Read more

Microsoft’s Dividend Is Rock Solid But Why?

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Image Shown: Valuentum’s Dividend Report on Microsoft. The Dividend Cushion Ratio Deconstruction reveals the numerator and denominator of the Dividend Cushion ratio for Microsoft. At the core, the larger the numerator, or the healthier a company’s balance sheet and future free cash flow generation, relative to the denominator, or a company’s cash dividend obligations, the more durable the dividend. In the context of the Dividend Cushion ratio, Microsoft’s numerator is larger than its denominator suggesting strong dividend coverage in the future. The Dividend Cushion Ratio Deconstruction image puts sources of free cash in the context of financial obligations next to expected cash dividend payments over the next 5 years on a side-by-side comparison. Because the Dividend Cushion ratio and many … Read more

Bank Earnings Solid During Second Quarter 2021

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Image Source: Bank of America Corporation – Second Quarter of 2021 IR Earnings Presentation In Alphabetical Order by Ticker: BAC, MS, JPM By Callum Turcan In this note, we cover three recent reports from the banking industry as earnings season gets underway. Ongoing coronavirus (‘COVID-19’) vaccine distribution efforts are enabling the domestic economy to reopen in earnest, and consumers are beginning to return to “pre-pandemic activities,” though the risk of variants remains. In our view, the outlook for the US economy is quite bright. The outlook for net interest margins (‘NIMs’) should improve alongside the domestic economy, though yields remain rather low as of this writing and lackluster NIMs weighed on the performance of the banking space at-large last quarter. … Read more

ICYMI — Video: Exclusive 2020 — Furthering the Financial Discipline

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ICYMI — Video: Exclusive 2020 — Furthering the Financial Discipline — — In this 40+ minute video jam-packed with must-watch content, Valuentum’s President Brian Nelson talks about the Theory of Universal Valuation and how his work is furthering the financial discipline. Learn the pitfalls of factor investing and modern portfolio theory and how the efficient markets hypothesis holds little substance in the wake of COVID-19. He’ll talk about which companies Valuentum likes and why, and which areas he’s avoiding. This and more in Valuentum’s 2020 Exclusive conference call.   Note: This video was originally published August 2, 2020.    To watch the video >>   The Theory of Universal Valuation —– Valuentum members have access to our 16-page stock reports, … Read more

Banks Holding Up Well, Some Feel Pain from Archegos Capital Collapse

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Image Shown: Bank of America Corporation has an optimistic view towards the ongoing US economic recovery. Image Source: Bank of America Corporation – First Quarter of 2021 IR Earnings Presentation By Callum Turcan Earnings season is now underway! In this article, we cover the performance of two large US banks and the problems facing one major European bank in light of losses stemming from Archegos Capital Management blowing up. Large reserve releases last quarter–due to the US economy holding up better than expected–during the coronavirus (‘COVID-19’) pandemic played an outsized role in bolstering the financial performance of key US banks after these institutions recorded large reserve builds in 2020. Net interest margins (‘NIM’) continue to face headwinds from the low … Read more

Fourth Quarter Bank Earnings Roundup: MS, GS, BAC, C, WFC, JPM

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Executive Summary: Though we’re generally cautious on banking business models due to the arbitrary nature of cash-flow generation within the banking system and the difficulty in valuing such entities on the basis of a free-cash-flow-to-the firm framework, we like Morgan Stanley–and its return on tangible equity of 17.7% during the fourth quarter of 2020 speaks to solid economic-value creation. Goldman’s annualized return on total equity (ROTE) was an impressive 22.5% during its fourth quarter, helping drive the full-year measure to 11.1% for 2020. Bank of America had been an idea in the Best Ideas Newsletter portfolio in the past, but we removed the company June 11, 2020. We continue to view the banking system more as utility-like serving as an extension … Read more