Couch potato investing: better that betting on a horse race

In Financial Bull Riding I wrote that annual percentage returns is the wrong measure of investment performance. The better metric is absolute dollar return. Naive investors, and most financial journalists, assume the two will produce the same results, but they don't. 

Josh Peters, Director of Equity Income Strategy for Morningstar and the author of The Ultimate Dividend Playbook, calls chasing percentage returns a horse race: 

Almost all of Wall Street is geared around this idea of a horserace. That it’s all about trying to beat your benchmark, beat the S&P 500 — to do it every quarter regardless of whether that quarter is up or down. That’s not what most people are looking to do. That’s only how money managers evaluate each other, maybe. But that’s not necessarily what’s going to serve the actual financial requirements or financial needs of people who are out there. The biggest demand out there is for income and it’s not just because interest rates are low, it’s because baby-boomers are retiring and most of them don’t have those defined benefit pension plans to count on.

Fundamentalist investing scores big gains

Last week I wrote about fundamentalism and I want to carry on with that theme this week. I’m late to the party. Research Affiliates launched their fundamental indexes over ten years ago, but I only recently read The Fundamental Index: A Better Way to Invest by Robert Arnott, Jason Hsu and John West.

The authors promote index investing because of the evidence of the failure of most active managers to match the percentage returns of indexes such as the S&P 500. For most part time investors, indexes are the best choice. Even Warren Buffet enlisted an index fund to sustain his wife’s wealth after he moves on.

Poking the bear - what happens next to the market?

The S&P is down about 9% for the year and 10% from the highs last year as of this writing. By the time you read this, the index may be even lower. The bear has been hibernating for seven years and may be waking up. If so, he’ll be hungry for your nest egg. 

Technicians will be looking for the lows of last year for support as if nothing has changed. But a lot has changed. Profits for the fourth quarter of last year are expected to fall over 5%, according to data provider FactSet. And even if you leave out the disastrous energy sector, profits are expected to be flat.

China, Brazil, Europe, Japan are in worse shape. US manufacturing has been in a recession for months. Oil, gas and mining are in recessions. We are beginning to see the effects in the consumer sector as retail sales from the Christmas season sunk below those of last year.

This is a good time to look at where we are in the business cycle using insights from pages 105-107 in my book Financial Bull Riding:

S&P 500 Forecast

While profits in the energy sector cratered in the last quarter, a jump in retail profits of $28 billion in the fourth quarter from the previous year suggests that the S&P 500 will continue to rise. The forecast calls for an average of 2056 for the S&P 500 for Q2 and 2185 for Q3 this year.

In order for the quarterly averages to reach such heights, the index would have to set many new record highs. That could happen if more European and Japanese funds cross the oceans to invest in the US as they flee the destruction of their own currencies by their central banks. However, I’m skeptical. 

Another way to interpret the forecast is as a moving average. In technical analysis, moving averages of varying lengths guide investors timing their purchases and sales. The market crossing the moving average is a buy/sell signal, depending on the investor’s strategy. The graph above shows that the forecast sometimes leads and sometimes follows the market but when the two cross it indicates a turning point. The two lines have shaken hands recently, which could be our turning point for this market.

Earnings stumble

Despite what mainstream finance and economics teach, the stock market is rational. Two things drive it - profits and risk tolerance, or as they say in finance, the discount rate. Both have advanced the stock market from its lows at the bottom of the latest recession to recent record highs as profit rates and risk tolerance soared so that investors have been willing to pay more for the same profits.

As of the writing of this post, the S&P 500 is down about 3% from its record set on March 2. Some of the selling could have come from profit taking or covering shorts, but much of it is due to concerns about future earnings. Last week I showed that profit rates are at record highs and reasonable investors would assume such rates are unsustainable based on the history. And that seems to be the case as Seeking Alpha's Brian Gilmartin wrote:

Looking at the first half of 2015, analysts are now projecting year-over-year declines in both earnings and revenues for both Q1 and Q2 '15, compared to expectations for earnings and revenue growth for both quarters back on December 31 '14.

Taking the market's temperature

Based on the popularity on my blog of the post The Dao of Investing - It's time to sell, I'm guessing investors are looking for indexes to help them take the temperature of the market. So this week I will revisit an indicator I developed in my book Financial Bull Riding.  

The method for building the index was based on a technique developed by James Estey in his book Business Cycles published in 1950. Estey included a chart of business cycles from 1790 through 1949 in which he plotted economic activity similar to GDP. Armed with dates for business cycle peaks and troughs, he de-trended the data by calculating the average for the series between peaks, then between troughs, then averaging the two series to obtain an average for each business cycle. Then he subtracted monthly figures from the cycle averages. 

Q4 2014 Forecast

Here is my latest forecast of the S&P 500 quarterly averages. The market is quite a bit above what profits would justify, which means the PE ratio is expanding, or to put it another way, people are so desperate for earnings that they're willing to take higher risks. The market is above the forecast as it was in the late 1990's bubble.

Who is buying?

The Dow is back over 17,000 and the S&P 500 topped 2,000 again this week. Who is buying at these nose bleed levels? According to Jeffrey Kleintop of LPL Financial the buyers are individual investors and corporations buying back their own stock (Hat tip to Christopher Rowe, Director of Investor Education at The Oxford Club). 

Currently, there are six notable trends in buying and selling in the stock market. U.S. stocks are being purchased by corporations and individuals; however, foreigners, hedge funds, institutions and insiders are net sellers.

According to data from FactSet, S&P 500 companies bought back about $160 billion in stock in the first quarter of 2014, and are on pace for an amount this quarter that is close to the all-time high of $172 billion set in the third quarter of 2007. Corporations have been decreasing the amount of shares in the market for 10 straight quarters. Over the past year, this has amounted to about 3% of shares outstanding in the S&P 500. 

Why does this matter? Individual investors tend to pile into the market near the top so that they buy high and sell low. Individuals are a small part of the market, so they function mainly as an indicator that the end is near.

Corporate buying is a much larger segment, large enough to overwhelm institutional selling and cause the market to rise. Corporations are borrowing to purchase their own stocks and pump up returns. This deflates the price/earnings ratio by inflating the earnings per share. So while I'm not a big fan of PE ratios as a guide to investing, corporate buy-backs make the ratio even less worthwhile.

But the main problem with corporate buy-backs is that the corporations are borrowing to buy. That pumps up the price of the stocks, makes management look better and in some cases triggers options and bonuses for them.

Kleintop expects institutional selling to continue. So what happens when profits go south and corporations have trouble making the payments on the loans? It will take out the largest group of buyers in the market this year. Most will have to sell the stocks they bought for a loss. That will accelerate any decline in the stock market that follows a bad earnings reporting season.

Stock market forecast Q3 2014

Here is the latest forecast of the S&P 500 average for the fourth quarter this year. The market made a head fake lower last year so it may turn around again depending on how well profits for the first quarter of this year turn out. But from the looks of things we have probably hit the high for this year and maybe for the bull market. This is a good time to think about gold and silver or possibly emerging markets since they have fallen so low.

Markov Confirms ABCT

Greg Davies and Arnaud de Servigny offer a different take on diversification in their book Behavioral Investment Management: An Efficient Alternative to Modern Portfolio Theory. Chapter 6, “Representing Asset Return Dynamics in an Uncertain Environment was the most interesting chapter to me, and the one that adds confirmation to using the ABCT as a guide to timing the market. 

Modern portfolio theory tells investors to diversify their portfolios at least between two asset classes, stocks and bonds. A simplistic summary of the method is to use the statistical measure called standard deviation to assess the risks of asset classes and diversify according to risk. But in reality, advisers have found that a fixed ratio, say 70% stocks and 30% bonds, often works better without requiring as much work. 

S&P 500 Headed Up!

Here is the update to my forecast of the S&P500: