As you probably know, mutual funds have become extremely popular over the last 20 years. What was once just another obscure financial instrument is now a part of our daily lives. More than 80 million people, or one half of the households in America, invest in mutual funds. That means that, in the United States alone, trillions of dollars are invested in mutual funds.
In fact, to many people, investing means buying mutual funds. After all, it's common knowledge that investing in mutual funds is (or at least should be) better than simply letting your cash waste away in a savings account, but, for most people, that's where the understanding of funds ends. It doesn't help that mutual fund salespeople speak a strange language that is interspersed with jargon that many investors don't understand.
Originally, mutual funds were heralded as a way for the little guy to get a piece of the market. Instead of spending all your free time buried in the financial pages of the Wall Street Journal, all you had to do was buy a mutual fund and you'd be set on your way to financial freedom. As you might have guessed, it's not that easy. Mutual funds are an excellent idea in theory, but, in reality, they haven't always delivered. Not all mutual funds are created equal, and investing in mutuals isn't as easy as throwing your money at the first salesperson who solicits your business.
The Definition of mutual funds
A mutual fund is nothing more than a collection of stocks and/or bonds. You can think of a mutual fund as a company that brings together a group of people and invests their money in stocks, bonds, and other securities. Each investor owns shares, which represent a portion of the holdings of the fund.
You can make money from a mutual fund in three ways:
1) Income is earned from dividends on stocks and interest on bonds. A fund pays out nearly all of the income it receives over the year to fund owners in the form of a distribution.
2) If the fund sells securities that have increased in price, the fund has a capital gain. Most funds also pass on these gains to investors in a distribution.
3) If fund holdings increase in price but are not sold by the fund manager, the fund's shares increase in price. You can then sell your mutual fund shares for a profit.
Funds will also usually give you a choice either to receive a check for distributions or to reinvest the earnings and get more shares.
Advantages of Mutual Funds:
• Professional Management - The primary advantage of funds (at least theoretically) is the professional management of your money. Investors purchase funds because they do not have the time or the expertise to manage their own portfolios. A mutual fund is a relatively inexpensive way for a small investor to get a full-time manager to make and monitor investments.
• Diversification - By owning shares in a mutual fund instead of owning individual stocks or bonds, your risk is spread out. The idea behind diversification is to invest in a large number of assets so that a loss in any particular investment is minimized by gains in others. In other words, the more stocks and bonds you own, the less any one of them can hurt you (think about Enron). Large mutual funds typically own hundreds of different stocks in many different industries. It wouldn't be possible for an investor to build this kind of a portfolio with a small amount of money.
• Economies of Scale - Because a mutual fund buys and sells large amounts of securities at a time, its transaction costs are lower than what an individual would pay for securities transactions.
• Liquidity - Just like an individual stock, a mutual fund allows you to request that your shares be converted into cash at any time.
• Simplicity - Buying a mutual fund is easy! Pretty well any bank has its own line of mutual funds, and the minimum investment is small. Most companies also have automatic purchase plans whereby as little as $100 can be invested on a monthly basis.
Disadvantages of Mutual Funds:
• Professional Management - Did you notice how we qualified the advantage of professional management with the word "theoretically"? Many investors debate whether or not the so-called professionals are any better than you or I at picking stocks. Management is by no means infallible, and, even if the fund loses money, the manager still takes his/her cut. We'll talk about this in detail in a later section.
• Costs - Mutual funds don't exist solely to make your life easier - all funds are in it for a profit. The mutual fund industry is masterful at burying costs under layers of jargon. These costs are so complicated that in this tutorial we have devoted an entire section to the subject.
• Dilution - It's possible to have too much diversification. Because funds have small holdings in so many different companies, high returns from a few investments often don't make much difference on the overall return. Dilution is also the result of a successful fund getting too big. When money pours into funds that have had strong success, the manager often has trouble finding a good investment for all the new money.
• Taxes - When making decisions about your money, fund managers don't consider your personal tax situation. For example, when a fund manager sells a security, a capital-gains tax is triggered, which affects how profitable the individual is from the sale. It might have been more advantageous for the individual to defer the capital gains liability.
Showing posts with label investments. Show all posts
Showing posts with label investments. Show all posts
2009-03-29
2009-03-22
How to Spend Money In a Recession
It's important to save where you can, but it's just as critical to spend where you should.
When times are tough, most people think they should spend less and save as much as possible. That's good advice in many situations, but there are exceptions. Maybe we can call it spend money on the right time at the right place. Here are seven of them:
Home improvements: A recession is a great time to do work on your home. Materials will be discounted, since demand will be low. Labor is plentiful and cheap. And if the work increases the value of the house, spending extra money to get them done when times are tough makes financial sense.
Your health: Your health is always important, but it is even more crucial during dour economic times. You can't afford to miss work for an extended period without placing your job at risk. Preventive measures, even if they cost extra, are important. In addition, you need to quickly address ailments so they don't turn into something major later on.
Quality food: Food tends to be one of the few budget items that can be juggled to save money here and there. The problem is that people often choose to buy poorer quality food, which isn't as healthy. The food you eat will determine your energy level and resistance to colds and illnesses. Also, learn the tricks of the coupon trade so you can get quality food and save money at the same time.
Retirement: If you have the money, now's the time to buy stocks and other investments, especially if your timeline for needing the money is decades away. While people feel more secure when the stock market is rising, that's when equities are more expensive. Stocks today are less than half of what they were at their peak -- a bargain.
Products that save you money: More than ever, it makes sense to spend money on appliances and gadgets that will save you money in the long run. Price tags and labor are cheaper, and the extra efficiency will pay off in the long run.
Costs to relax: When the economy turns sour, it brings on stress. Stress is not only bad for your health, it can ruin relationships, cause a decline in job performance and affect decision-making when it comes to finances. The key is to know what reduces stress and figure out a way to keep or increase that activity in your budget. For example, a gym membership may seem like a luxury when there isn't enough money to go around, but exercise is a known stress reliever. Perhaps painting is your stress relief. Whatever the activity may be, don't scrimp.
Repairs and maintenance: Lengthen the life of what you have and avoid spending money on brand-new equipment. The amount you spend may be a fraction of the replacement cost.
Source from: thestreet.com
When times are tough, most people think they should spend less and save as much as possible. That's good advice in many situations, but there are exceptions. Maybe we can call it spend money on the right time at the right place. Here are seven of them:
Home improvements: A recession is a great time to do work on your home. Materials will be discounted, since demand will be low. Labor is plentiful and cheap. And if the work increases the value of the house, spending extra money to get them done when times are tough makes financial sense.
Your health: Your health is always important, but it is even more crucial during dour economic times. You can't afford to miss work for an extended period without placing your job at risk. Preventive measures, even if they cost extra, are important. In addition, you need to quickly address ailments so they don't turn into something major later on.
Quality food: Food tends to be one of the few budget items that can be juggled to save money here and there. The problem is that people often choose to buy poorer quality food, which isn't as healthy. The food you eat will determine your energy level and resistance to colds and illnesses. Also, learn the tricks of the coupon trade so you can get quality food and save money at the same time.
Retirement: If you have the money, now's the time to buy stocks and other investments, especially if your timeline for needing the money is decades away. While people feel more secure when the stock market is rising, that's when equities are more expensive. Stocks today are less than half of what they were at their peak -- a bargain.
Products that save you money: More than ever, it makes sense to spend money on appliances and gadgets that will save you money in the long run. Price tags and labor are cheaper, and the extra efficiency will pay off in the long run.
Costs to relax: When the economy turns sour, it brings on stress. Stress is not only bad for your health, it can ruin relationships, cause a decline in job performance and affect decision-making when it comes to finances. The key is to know what reduces stress and figure out a way to keep or increase that activity in your budget. For example, a gym membership may seem like a luxury when there isn't enough money to go around, but exercise is a known stress reliever. Perhaps painting is your stress relief. Whatever the activity may be, don't scrimp.
Repairs and maintenance: Lengthen the life of what you have and avoid spending money on brand-new equipment. The amount you spend may be a fraction of the replacement cost.
Source from: thestreet.com
2009-03-18
How to pick stocks: Value Investing
In the previous article understand-what-kind-of-stock-investors you are,we mentioned that there are roughly three kind of investors, value investor, growth investor and income investor. Now here is the detail for value investing.
Value investing is one of the best known stock-picking methods. In the 1930s, Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, finance professors at Columbia University, laid out what many consider to be the framework for value investing. The concept is actually very simple: find companies trading below their inherent worth.
The value investor looks for stocks with strong fundamentals - including earnings, dividends, book value, and cash flow - that are selling at a bargain price, given their quality. The value investor seeks companies that seem to be incorrectly valued (undervalued) by the market and therefore have the potential to increase in share price when the market corrects its error in valuation.
Value, Not Junk!
Before we get too far into the discussion of value investing, let's get one thing straight. Value investing doesn't mean just buying any stock that declines and therefore seems "cheap" in price. Value investors have to do their homework and be confident that they are picking a company that is cheap given its high quality.
It's important to distinguish the difference between a value company and a company that simply has a declining price. Say for the past year Company A has been trading at about $25 per share but suddenly drops to $10 per share. This does not automatically mean that the company is selling at a bargain. All we know is that the company is less expensive now than it was last year. The drop in price could be a result of the market responding to a fundamental problem in the company. To be a real bargain, this company must have fundamentals healthy enough to imply it is worth more than $10 - value investing always compares current share price to intrinsic value not to historic share prices.
Value Investing at Work
One of the greatest investors of all time, Warren Buffett, has proven that value investing can work: his value strategy took the stock of Berkshire Hathaway, his holding company, from $12 a share in 1967 to $70,900 in 2002. The company beat the S&P 500's performance by about 13.02% on average annually! Although Buffett does not strictly categorize himself as a value investor, many of his most successful investments were made on the basis of value investing principles.
Buying a Business, not a Stock
We should emphasize that the value investing mentality sees a stock as the vehicle by which a person becomes an owner of a company - to a value investor profits are made by investing in quality companies, not by trading. Because their method is about determining the worth of the underlying asset, value investors pay no mind to the external factors affecting a company, such as market volatility or day-to-day price fluctuations. These factors are not inherent to the company, and therefore are not seen to have any effect on the value of the business in the long run.
Contradictions
While the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) claims that prices are always reflecting all relevant information, and therefore are already showing the intrinsic worth of companies, value investing relies on a premise that opposes that theory. Value investors bank on the EMH being true only in some academic wonderland. They look for times of inefficiency, when the market assigns an incorrect price to a stock.
Value investors also disagree with the principle that high beta (also known as volatility, or standard deviation) necessarily translates into a risky investment. A company with an intrinsic value of $20 per share but is trading at $15 would be, as we know, an attractive investment to value investors. If the share price dropped to $10 per share, the company would experience an increase in beta, which conventionally represents an increase in risk. If, however, the value investor still maintained that the intrinsic value was $20 per share, s/he would see this declining price as an even better bargain. And the better the bargain, the lesser the risk. A high beta does not scare off value investors. As long as they are confident in their intrinsic valuation, an increase in downside volatility may be a good thing.
Screening for Value Stocks
Now that we have a solid understanding of what value investing is and what it is not, let's get into some of the qualities of value stocks.
Qualitative aspects of value stocks:
Where are value stocks found? - Everywhere. Value stocks can be found trading on the NYSE, Nasdaq, AMEX, over the counter, on the FTSE, Nikkei and so on.
a) In what industries are value stocks located? - Value stocks can be located in any industry, including energy, finance and even technology (contrary to popular belief).
b) In what industries are value stocks most often located? - Although value stocks can be located anywhere, they are often located in industries that have recently fallen on hard times, or are currently facing market overreaction to a piece of news affecting the industry in the short term. For example, the auto industry's cyclical nature allows for periods of undervaluation of companies such as Ford or GM.
Can value companies be those that have just reached new lows? - Definitely, although we must re-emphasize that the "cheapness" of a company is relative to intrinsic value. A company that has just hit a new 12-month low or is at half of a 12-month high may warrant further investigation.
Here is a breakdown of some of the numbers value investors use as rough guides for picking stocks. Keep in mind that these are guidelines, not hard-and-fast rules:
*Share price should be no more than two-thirds of intrinsic worth.
*Look at companies with P/E ratios at the lowest 10% of all equity securities.
*PEG should be less than one.
*Stock price should be no more than tangible book value.
*There should be no more debt than equity (i.e. D/E ratio < 1).
*Current assets should be two times current liabilities.
*Dividend yield should be at least two-thirds of the long-term AAA bond yield.
*Earnings growth should be at least 7% per annum compounded over the last 10 years.
The P/E and PEG Ratios
Contrary to popular belief, value investing is not simply about investing in low P/E stocks. It's just that stocks which are undervalued will often reflect this undervaluation through a low P/E ratio, which should simply provide a way to compare companies within the same industry. For example, if the average P/E of the technology consulting industry is 20, a company trading in that industry at 15 times earnings should sound some bells in the heads of value investors.
Another popular metric for valuing a company's intrinsic value is the PEG ratio, calculated as a stock's P/E ratio divided by its projected year-over-year earnings growth rate. In other words, the ratio measures how cheap the stock is while taking into account its earnings growth. If the company's PEG ratio is less than one, it is considered to be undervalued.
Narrowing It Down Even Further
One well-known and accepted method of picking value stocks is the net-net method. This method states that if a company is trading at two-thirds of its current assets, no other gauge of worth is necessary. The reasoning behind this is simple: if a company is trading at this level, the buyer is essentially getting all the permanent assets of the company (including property, equipment, etc) and the company's intangible assets (mainly goodwill, in most cases) for free! Unfortunately, companies trading this low are few and far between.
The Margin of Safety
A discussion of value investing would not be complete without mentioning the use of a margin of safety, a technique which is simple yet very effective. Consider a real-life example of a margin of safety. Say you're planning a pyrotechnics show, which will include flames and explosions. You have concluded with a high degree of certainty that it's perfectly safe to stand 100 feet from the center of the explosions. But to be absolutely sure no one gets hurt, you implement a margin of safety by setting up barriers 125 feet from the explosions.
This use of a margin of safety works similarly in value investing. It's simply the practice of leaving room for error in your calculations of intrinsic value. A value investor may be fairly confident that a company has an intrinsic value of $30 per share. But in case his or her calculations are a little too optimistic, he or she creates a margin of safety/error by using the $26 per share in their scenario analysis. The investor may find that at $15 the company is still an attractive investment, or he or she may find that at $24, the company is not attractive enough. If the stock's intrinsic value is lower than the investor estimated, the margin of safety would help prevent this investor from paying too much for the stock.
Conclusion
Value investing is not as sexy as some other styles of investing; it relies on a strict screening process. But just remember, there's nothing boring about outperforming the S&P by 13% over a 40-year span!
Value investing is one of the best known stock-picking methods. In the 1930s, Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, finance professors at Columbia University, laid out what many consider to be the framework for value investing. The concept is actually very simple: find companies trading below their inherent worth.
The value investor looks for stocks with strong fundamentals - including earnings, dividends, book value, and cash flow - that are selling at a bargain price, given their quality. The value investor seeks companies that seem to be incorrectly valued (undervalued) by the market and therefore have the potential to increase in share price when the market corrects its error in valuation.
Value, Not Junk!
Before we get too far into the discussion of value investing, let's get one thing straight. Value investing doesn't mean just buying any stock that declines and therefore seems "cheap" in price. Value investors have to do their homework and be confident that they are picking a company that is cheap given its high quality.
It's important to distinguish the difference between a value company and a company that simply has a declining price. Say for the past year Company A has been trading at about $25 per share but suddenly drops to $10 per share. This does not automatically mean that the company is selling at a bargain. All we know is that the company is less expensive now than it was last year. The drop in price could be a result of the market responding to a fundamental problem in the company. To be a real bargain, this company must have fundamentals healthy enough to imply it is worth more than $10 - value investing always compares current share price to intrinsic value not to historic share prices.
Value Investing at Work
One of the greatest investors of all time, Warren Buffett, has proven that value investing can work: his value strategy took the stock of Berkshire Hathaway, his holding company, from $12 a share in 1967 to $70,900 in 2002. The company beat the S&P 500's performance by about 13.02% on average annually! Although Buffett does not strictly categorize himself as a value investor, many of his most successful investments were made on the basis of value investing principles.
Buying a Business, not a Stock
We should emphasize that the value investing mentality sees a stock as the vehicle by which a person becomes an owner of a company - to a value investor profits are made by investing in quality companies, not by trading. Because their method is about determining the worth of the underlying asset, value investors pay no mind to the external factors affecting a company, such as market volatility or day-to-day price fluctuations. These factors are not inherent to the company, and therefore are not seen to have any effect on the value of the business in the long run.
Contradictions
While the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) claims that prices are always reflecting all relevant information, and therefore are already showing the intrinsic worth of companies, value investing relies on a premise that opposes that theory. Value investors bank on the EMH being true only in some academic wonderland. They look for times of inefficiency, when the market assigns an incorrect price to a stock.
Value investors also disagree with the principle that high beta (also known as volatility, or standard deviation) necessarily translates into a risky investment. A company with an intrinsic value of $20 per share but is trading at $15 would be, as we know, an attractive investment to value investors. If the share price dropped to $10 per share, the company would experience an increase in beta, which conventionally represents an increase in risk. If, however, the value investor still maintained that the intrinsic value was $20 per share, s/he would see this declining price as an even better bargain. And the better the bargain, the lesser the risk. A high beta does not scare off value investors. As long as they are confident in their intrinsic valuation, an increase in downside volatility may be a good thing.
Screening for Value Stocks
Now that we have a solid understanding of what value investing is and what it is not, let's get into some of the qualities of value stocks.
Qualitative aspects of value stocks:
Where are value stocks found? - Everywhere. Value stocks can be found trading on the NYSE, Nasdaq, AMEX, over the counter, on the FTSE, Nikkei and so on.
a) In what industries are value stocks located? - Value stocks can be located in any industry, including energy, finance and even technology (contrary to popular belief).
b) In what industries are value stocks most often located? - Although value stocks can be located anywhere, they are often located in industries that have recently fallen on hard times, or are currently facing market overreaction to a piece of news affecting the industry in the short term. For example, the auto industry's cyclical nature allows for periods of undervaluation of companies such as Ford or GM.
Can value companies be those that have just reached new lows? - Definitely, although we must re-emphasize that the "cheapness" of a company is relative to intrinsic value. A company that has just hit a new 12-month low or is at half of a 12-month high may warrant further investigation.
Here is a breakdown of some of the numbers value investors use as rough guides for picking stocks. Keep in mind that these are guidelines, not hard-and-fast rules:
*Share price should be no more than two-thirds of intrinsic worth.
*Look at companies with P/E ratios at the lowest 10% of all equity securities.
*PEG should be less than one.
*Stock price should be no more than tangible book value.
*There should be no more debt than equity (i.e. D/E ratio < 1).
*Current assets should be two times current liabilities.
*Dividend yield should be at least two-thirds of the long-term AAA bond yield.
*Earnings growth should be at least 7% per annum compounded over the last 10 years.
The P/E and PEG Ratios
Contrary to popular belief, value investing is not simply about investing in low P/E stocks. It's just that stocks which are undervalued will often reflect this undervaluation through a low P/E ratio, which should simply provide a way to compare companies within the same industry. For example, if the average P/E of the technology consulting industry is 20, a company trading in that industry at 15 times earnings should sound some bells in the heads of value investors.
Another popular metric for valuing a company's intrinsic value is the PEG ratio, calculated as a stock's P/E ratio divided by its projected year-over-year earnings growth rate. In other words, the ratio measures how cheap the stock is while taking into account its earnings growth. If the company's PEG ratio is less than one, it is considered to be undervalued.
Narrowing It Down Even Further
One well-known and accepted method of picking value stocks is the net-net method. This method states that if a company is trading at two-thirds of its current assets, no other gauge of worth is necessary. The reasoning behind this is simple: if a company is trading at this level, the buyer is essentially getting all the permanent assets of the company (including property, equipment, etc) and the company's intangible assets (mainly goodwill, in most cases) for free! Unfortunately, companies trading this low are few and far between.
The Margin of Safety
A discussion of value investing would not be complete without mentioning the use of a margin of safety, a technique which is simple yet very effective. Consider a real-life example of a margin of safety. Say you're planning a pyrotechnics show, which will include flames and explosions. You have concluded with a high degree of certainty that it's perfectly safe to stand 100 feet from the center of the explosions. But to be absolutely sure no one gets hurt, you implement a margin of safety by setting up barriers 125 feet from the explosions.
This use of a margin of safety works similarly in value investing. It's simply the practice of leaving room for error in your calculations of intrinsic value. A value investor may be fairly confident that a company has an intrinsic value of $30 per share. But in case his or her calculations are a little too optimistic, he or she creates a margin of safety/error by using the $26 per share in their scenario analysis. The investor may find that at $15 the company is still an attractive investment, or he or she may find that at $24, the company is not attractive enough. If the stock's intrinsic value is lower than the investor estimated, the margin of safety would help prevent this investor from paying too much for the stock.
Conclusion
Value investing is not as sexy as some other styles of investing; it relies on a strict screening process. But just remember, there's nothing boring about outperforming the S&P by 13% over a 40-year span!
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