Lessons Learnt from 4 Biggest Losses - Part 2

This is a continuation of the previous post lessons learnt from my 4 Biggest Losses. To recap they are: 

1. Overseas Education, negative c.30%, operator of one of the largest international schools in Singapore. Student enrollment and revenue fell continuously for almost 10 years. It was exacerbated by the pandemic but even if the world normalizes, it is unclear if the stock will rebound. Management are owners and exemplified small cap risks.

2. SIA Engineering, negative c.20%, aircraft maintenance arm of our national carrier. I overpaid for this and am now suffering. It is unclear if I can breakeven. Oversizing the position also caused outsized absolute losses. This is the ultimate reminder for me not to overpay and to size my bets well.

3. Under Armor, negative c.70%, this was a stock that got into the portfolio because of a structured product went wrong. I sold puts and it got exercised. After holding the stock, it continued to drop and was hit by the pandemic. While there is a chance it can go up 100% or more from here (the 40x gap between Under Armor's and Nike's market cap seemed too big), I am not betting on it. This is another lesson about valuation - never overpay!

4. Cinema related small cap name, negative c.80%, this is a Chinese cinema technology provider that was badly hit by the pandemic. It is also another small cap name which comes with it small cap risks, like Overseas Education. The lesson is therefore not to invest in too many small caps and/or if we must, demand a much higher valuation discount.

In a nutshell, the lessons learnt here are: sizing, small cap risk, understanding unknown risks and over-valuation. I have discussed about sizing and hence we shall touch upon the rest today.

Small cap: I would refer to stocks trading at lower than USD2bn market cap and this was the case with #1 and #4 above. Small caps are usually run by owners, less experienced management teams and the business revenue also tend to be more volatile and as such deserves lower valuations. But we tend to forget that and ascribe just a 10-20% valuation discount to a similar business which is much bigger. 

Courtesy of CME Group

Looking at the four names, we can also argue whether Under Armor (market cap USD3.9bn) truly has an investment case. It is small cap looking through the eyes of Nike (market cap USD147bn) and Adidas (market cap USD28bn). One is much better off buying Nike or Adidas. Why bother with the third smallish player? The chart above says it all - it shows returns between large cap and small cap are not really different yet small cap investors take on a lot more risks. As such, the lesson here is that perhaps we should just avoid small caps. 

Understanding the risks: This brings us to the second lesson. We think we have uncovered everything. We have done our homework well. But it is actually very difficult, especially with small caps and inherently volatile industries. I think there are no good advice (to myself and readers) here, it takes years of experience to understand some of these industries and I urge everyone to always have robust discussions with other smart thinkers. 

The case-in-point here is the cinema technology provider that I bought which has gone down 80%. We all go to cinemas and we think we know the industry well. But with Netflix and streaming disrupting the industry, let alone all the faster changes in China, the writings were on the wall that risks are mounting. When the pandemic hits such small cap names, it was game over. 

It was a similar story with SIA Engineering. I thought I got the investment thesis right. There will be a lot more middle income tourists in the world, Changi will build T4 and T5 and SIA Engineering will benefit. I discussed with smart friends and even though they said it is not water-tight, I refused to listen. Lo-and-behold the pandemic came and turned everything upside down. Looking back, the airline industry is just inherently volatile and it doesn't pay to put too much money into one name and let alone related names (yes, I have other related names!).

Over-paying: There are multiple mistakes with SIA Engineering. Not only did I read the industry wrongly, I overpaid for it at more than 20x PER at the time of buying. I did the same with the cinema name (25-30x PER), believing in the growth story. I also overpaid for Under Armor at more than 30x PER. So much so for proclaiming to be a value investor. But this is also portfolio-manager-wanting-action error. 

Swing you bum! - Courtesy of MyTrade PH

Sometimes, we are compelled do to things even when there is nothing that we should do. From 2016-2020, the market was overvalued and as such most stocks are over-valued. I thought I was getting bargains for getting these high growth names at 25-30x PER. After all, Amazon and Tesla did so well trading at even higher valuations right? Well, unfortunately, I didn't have those but had these! The related lesson is that not all sexy stocks are the same. So perhaps it was best to avoid high valuations, esp after triangulation, they are still high. Again it's easier said than done. The inner voice is constantly shouting "Swing you bum!"

To sum up this last lesson:

1. When everything is expensive, it pays to do nothing.

2. Don't think your growth stock is Tesla.

3. Do not overpay. 

Huat ah!

Lessons Learnt from 4 Biggest Losses - Part I

Most people brag about their investment wins. It is just human nature. We need to show we are better, so we get status, pride and get to lead and enjoy the benefits that get accrued to leadership in tribes. In prehistoric times, alpha males who can hunt, have muscles, can fight well tend to get the best food, the best shelter and the women and produce more offsprings and win the natural selection competition. 

As such, bragging is biological.

Alpha male primate can even get cookies!

Today, it is about money. You can be bald and fat but if you are a billionaire, then prestige and goodies and some women will come your way. So we brag about investment wins to showcase that. We buy cars, watches, houses and NFTs to display wealth. It is imperative, biologically and socially.  But what is truly and fundamentally beneficial is to learn from our losses. That is how we get better as investors. That is what this post and the next is about. 

As I look at my portfolio, there are now four big loss-making positions which I felt compelled to write about. The losses amount almost to six digits and you can imagine how it pains to write about them. But I believe there are many lessons learnt and I hope readers can really takeaway some of these so as not to repeat them. But trust me, it will be easier said than done! Here are the losers in no particular order:

1. Overseas Education, negative c.30%, I have blogged about this stock.

2. SIA Engineering, negative c.20%, pandemic victim, I have also briefly blogged about this.

3. Under Armor, negative c.70%, hit by overvaluation and the pandemic.

4. Cinema related small cap name, negative c.80%, looks like I will never recover my capital.

As I looked at the four painful names, I see similar mistakes and recurring lessons. While all four names were somewhat impacted by Covid-19, it was not just the pandemic. It was overpaying i.e. valuations, it was ignoring small cap risks and not understanding all the issues and most importantly, it was not getting the sizing right. Actually, sizing is so crucial so let's talk about that in more detail. 

What I got from Google wrt to sizing

For me, the sizing mistake relates to all four names but it had the biggest absolute damage in the first two. As such, despite the percentage loss was only 20-30%, the outsized impact on the absolute damage was big and this is the nutshell lesson about sizing:

We must size the bet such that we can still sleep if we lose 80% of the amount invested. We must also think in terms of percentage of the portfolio. In most professionally run portfolios, there are hard limits like 10% for one position but for personal accounts, we may want to size it lower depending on our own psychological construct and the amount of absolute loss we can bear.

Let's use so numbers to illustrate the above. First we must determine how much we can afford to lose in one position. I will arbitrary put that as S$40,000 which is close to half of Singapore's median household income. (Imagine when you need to tell your better half that you lost half a year's income on one stock. This should be good pyschological threshold ;) Looking at my actual losses, since a position can go down 80%, that means the maximum bet on one stock should be c.S$50,000. Of course that also depends on your portfolio. If this is more than 10% of your portfolio, then perhaps it should be smaller. 

There is also a minimum size for a position which relates to transaction costs. When I first started, round trip (buying and selling) transaction cost can cost minimally $100 which means that any position should be c.S$10,000 otherwise it doesn't make sense as it costs 1-2% every time you do some buying and selling. Well, the world has changed and transaction costs can go to zero with some brokers, but still, sometimes it's not and it pays to know what is the optimal minimal size for you.

Going back to my mistakes, if I sized the bets correctly, I could have reduce my absolute losses by half and the pain will also be halved and I would not have to endure the wrath of my better half! When you can size correctly, losses cannot hurt your portfolio and your family peace and you can sleep better at night. There is a lot more to talk about sizing which perhaps deserve its own post but let's stop here for today and we shall discuss in the next post:

1. Valuations 

2. Small cap issues

3. Unknown risks

There are two rules in investing. First rule: don't lose money. Second rule: don't forget the first rule.

Huat Ah!

Health and Wellness: A Secular Trend

Happy New Year and Welcome 2017!

As a semi follow-up to the previous post, let's expand on the health and wellness theme that was discussed. There are two key factors to health and wellness: diet and sports. Ideas for diet would be about nutrition. Stocks could be Nestle, GNC (the supplement company) or maybe Danone. But in this post we focus on the second factor: sports. Or more specifically, sportswear including sports shoes.

To illustrate an important point about sports related industries, the following two charts on bicycles tells a good tale. As we know, cycling has become really big globally with major bike events and more and more enthusiasts joining this sport. It's enjoyable while giving our bodies good workouts but most importantly it's another way to show status. The bike, which can cost five figures, the attire, the tours, all adds to the glam surrounding cycling. It has all the right ingredients and is perhaps the good showcase for most health and wellness stock ideas.

The charts below depict the trends on Taiwanese bicycle exports. Yes, Taiwanese bikes are now the best in the world. The top chart shows unit prices in dollars and the bottom shows the total export value. As we can see, average unit prices had gone from $100 to almost $500 and in value terms, the industry grew 3x in the span of 15 years. Sports cycling as with jogging or other competitive sports is an industry where manufacturers have a lot of pricing power. This is a result of good marketing, constant innovation, as well as consumer mentality in paying up for performance and value. It's good business.

Prices only go up in sports!

Sportswear and shoes is a similar secular growth sub-industry having being shaped by the two giants, Nike and Adidas, over the decades to be oligopolistic and hence all the more capable of maintaining and raising prices by providing innovation and value add to the consumers. Consumers are willing to pay because they see tangible benefits. Well, actually there's both tangible and intangible benefits. For tangible benefits, running and basketball shoes would be the most obvious examples. Almost everyone would pay up for a better pair of shoes given that poor quality ones simply dis-integrate after a few uses. Bad shoes result in pain or sometimes even injuries. So who wouldn't pay up for Air Jordan or Adidas Ultra Boost for marathons? Well, as for intangible benefits, as teenagers and twenty-somethings, shoes and sportswear became bragging rights. Air Jordan was just a must-have for all basketballers! Right?

To further prove the point, the following chart shows the long term share price of Nike stretching back to 1981 (Adidas chart looks the same as well). We can see how this phenomenal firm had just compounded value over time and should continue to do so. In fact, the no.s are too small to be read from the chart. So let's put them in words here. In 1981, adjusted for splits, the stock was trading in the cents, like 10 cents. In 2000, after the dotcom bust, it was a few dollars, like $4. Today, Nike is trading at $51 with a market cap of USD 86bn! In other words, putting $1,000 in Nike in 1981 would be worth $510,000 today! Nike, as a stock idea, is simply a no-brainer. Just buy when the stock falls. At 4% FCF yield today, it's not too bad, but if we want a bit more margin of safety, maybe we should target closer to 5% FCF yield i.e. enter closer to $42. If it ever gets there, we should just close our eyes and buy this winner.

Nike long term share price

What is more interesting might be another up and coming competitor - Under Armour or UA in short. Under Armour has taken the world by storm in the last few years as an alternative to the two giants. People like its logo, the cool apparel designs and its new challenger status. Especially for the millennials, Nike and Adidas were what my parents wore, I wear Under Armour. Then their parents also started wearing UA. The firm's revenue went from USD 100m in 2003 to close to USD 5bn today. A 50x increase though still 1/6 of Nike's whopping USD 33bn annual sales. It did all the right things, going into the different verticals like basketball, running, cross-training and trying on golf and soccer. It seeks endorsements from athletes and celebrities and now boasts a cool list from Stephen Curry to Andy Murray to Dwayne Johnson a.k.a The Rock. Essentially following the playbook that Nike and Adidas had written in the 1980s and the 1990s. 

What's more, it had also appealed to the girls with feminine designs, taking on Lululemon Athletica and winning. Lululemon is less than half of Under Armour in sales and seemed more about sexiness than sports. UA did not start with a niche like yoga and hence had a broader base and the financial power to expand rapidly across regions and categories. Not to mention that getting sponsors need money, a lot of money. Especially when UA likes to get a whole slew of femme fatale sportswomen and fashion models. 

Under Armour femme fatale spokespersons

In fact the reason why it dropped so much and gotten interesting it's bcos it spent too much money and the markets got worried. Share price collapsed from a high of $45 earlier last year to $25 today. This is yet another example of unpredictability. If analysts were asked to guess early in 2016, who could have known that the all powerful Under Armour would fall 40%?

Well in order to take on the two giants (Nike and Adidas), UA went on a crazy capex spree, spending over $800m in the last three years. Not just on new stores but also on R&D and more endorsements. Again, take a good look at the top female athletes and models in the world above that UA found to help further boost its popularity with women, something that Nike and Adidas had not been as strong. Its stable of female spokepersons include Lindsey Vonn, Gisele Bundchen and Kelley O'Hara, all eye candies, definitely didn't come cheap. That's the game. Pay up and pay more so that the competition just falls off! UA is just taking the Nike, Adidas sponsorship game to another level.

Lindsey Vonn, the beautiful skiier, is especially motivational given her trial and tribulations with injuries and sacrifices. She started training at 7 and debut in the Winter Olympics at 17 in 2002 with high hopes but did not win any medals as with Olympic debut since it's more just for experience. In 2006, she crashed during practice and was heli-evacuated but came back after just two days to compete, finishing 8th. She won a Olympic Spirit Award for her grit. In 2010, She finally got her first Olympic medal, deservedly a gold, after 18 long years. Our Joseph Schooling suddenly seemed so fortunate yah? Under Armour's commercial pitch was just about making it into awesome story-telling. Here's her poster from UA: I will not be underestimated. Damn, so cool!

Lindsey Vonn, world champion skiier

  

Under Armour's own story is also quite inspiring. It was founded in 1996 by its current CEO who was an American football player himself. He noticed how synthetic fiber was superior as he wore them while playing. At 23, he started his business selling sports apparel made from synthetic fiber in the trunk of his car. He first targeted performance apparel for American footballers in schools, then branched out to baseball and finally mass consumers. Today, UA makes shoes, caps, socks as well as performance apparel for athletes and laypeople from youth to professionals. 47% of its customers are female and over 36% are college graduates who like to spend and can and will spend a lot to look good and feel good.

That's Under Armour. If it continues to grow, the stock shouldn't be at $25. It's market cap is currently a mere USD 12bn vs Nike at USD 86bn. Given that the industry would continue to grow and UA should grow faster, we can expect UA to be more like half of Nike at some point in the future (say five years). Okay at least 1/3 perhaps. Regardless whether it's 1/3 or 1/2, this would mean that UA market cap should be closer to at least 33% of Nike's i.e. at c.USD 28bn  (more than 100% upside) and that's assuming Nike stops growing which won't happen. So UA would be worth even more. 

Some might argue that's too optimistic. Let's use a different lens.

Looking at its own FCF, UA had not achieved stability as yet given its huge capex needs. In good years, it managed USD 100-200m of FCF but in others, it burned cash. However if its growth materializes, revenue should hit 10bn (slightly less than 1/3 of Nike's), NP should hit 600-800m and FCF should then stabilize at a tad lower at 500-700m, which means that we are getting c.5% FCF yield at today's market cap. Again, it's not unreasonable valuations.  

Well, having said all that, a thorough analysis of UA is warranted to make the numbers more concrete. And the risk that UA falters like the rest of the tier two sports brands remains real. Some tier two brands remain tier two forever because they simply cannot compete with Nike and Adidas. In US, we have New Balance, Sketchers, in Japan we have Asics and Mizuno and China... Remember China and all its hype about Li Ning and Anda? It's definitely safer to bet with Nike or Adidas. UA is more about higher risk higher return! There would be a limit to its downside though because if UA gets too cheap, someone would just buy it out.

This author doesn't own UA yet. 

2016 in Review: Most Unpredictable Year Ever!

2016 has to go down in history as the worst year for forecasters ever. Who would have predicted that the China market would collapse 25% in the first month of the calendar year, after dropping 40% in 2015, then only to rebound by year end? And the Bank of Japan reducing interest rates into negative territory, pulling 20-30% of the global bond market into negative yields. And commodities! Oil from $100 skyfalling to $30 and then back to $60, bringing the rest of the resource stuff - iron ore, copper, coal up, up and away!

Then Duterte, a maverick who became President of Philippines amongst high hopes, saw his country becoming the worst performing ASEAN stock market of the year. Then Brexit happened. But then again maybe it's not possible after all due to technicalities. Or it might take a full 10 years to fully exit. Then a King died, and a Cuban dictator whose reign lasted 10 US Presidents also died. Then a best selling phone became a grenade. And the other best selling phone can't use conventional earphones to listen to music. This was the company that transformed music listening with the iPod. Then Donald Trump won, and Renzi lost, and then India decided that its notes would not be legal tender anymore - a move that caused widespread panic among small businesses and rural folks. Gosh!

Oppa Gangnam Style!

Even in the last two weeks of the year, unpredictable bad news can't seem to stop. A refugee decided to bulldoze people in a truck in Germany, the European country that had accepted the most number of refugees in Europe. This event itself might cause the downfall of the most powerful woman in the world, maybe bring about the breakup of Europe? So would it be Brexit first or Breakup first? Elsewhere a Russian ambassador got assassinated while his President enjoys onsen in Japan with his Japanese pet dog. The same President, in the presence of his gracious hosts, then tells the host country straight in the face he won't return the islands his country confiscated controversially during WWII. WTF?!?

Perhaps the only good thing that came out of the year was that a small country no more than a little red dot on the world map managed to clinch its first ever Olympic gold medal as a butterfly against the world's fastest swimmers, who all got silver. Well, this was predicted by some in the swimming inner circles (the gold though, not the three silvers). Yeah! One prediction gotten right.

It goes back to an old point made here - prediction is futile. The future is a set of probabilities. There are a few outcomes and one would become real. The point of investing, is not to predict but to achieve a good expected return. This means, know all the possible outcomes. If A becomes real, what happens. If B becomes real, what happens. Bet such that the expected return will be okay. Say if A comes true, we are neutral. If B comes true, we make a ton of money. If C comes true, we lost 20%. So it's worth a bet. It also means, reading and knowing a lot and making many, many investment decisions over our lifetimes such that in the end, our average expected return will be good enough.

For most people who are new to the game, they like to ask about the future. What would happen? Is USD going to strengthen or weaken? Is STI going to hit 3,000 or not? Then talking heads come in and fill the gap. These amateurs then love it! But the truth is, nobody knows! Who could have predicted Brexit will happen, Trump will win, China will crash and rebound, oil will crash and rebound, commodities will rally big time and the best performing Asian market in 2016 is Thailand - after their King died? 

 Thailand: 2016 best performing Asian market in rollercoaster fashion

Hence it's not about predicting, it's about preparing well. This means reading widely, discussing with like-minded friends, understanding dynamics, then looking for opportunities where expected returns might be very good. One highlighted idea last month was Vietnam (or rather Vietnam property). If the high probability future that the country becomes another Asian Tiger (like Korea, Taiwan, HK, Singapore and needless to say, China) materializes, we have huge, huge upside (like 5x). If it doesn't we lose some money (maybe 30%) in the worst case scenario. That's very good expected return.

To digress a bit, one other big trend that is beyond prediction worth mentioning is the health and wellness trend in our lifetimes. As the global population ages, more and more people think about health and wellness and are willing to spend a lot more to maintain their health. This is a huge positive trend that spans across various sectors including supplements, retail, healthcare, apparel and even IT. Fitbit is a multi-billion company and was worth USD 6bn at its peak! Alas it was overhyped and now collapsed to a smaller USD 1.6bn market cap, but still big.

The two most important aspects of health are actually just diet and sports which doesn't really cost a lot of money but our current consumerism mentality makes sure that we spend as much as possible and be as glam as possible while pursuing our pink of health! Think of the huge supplement and sports apparel industries. Today, running is not putting on our sneakers and just do it, it is about wearing nice Under Amour shirts and 2XU compression pants, equipped with Fibit, mobile phone straps, great shoes and finally posting the run on Facebook! It's a whole new ball game!

But, diet is really the more vital aspect. This author would highly recommend reading this book titled the The Enzyme Factor by Dr Shinya Hiromi. It is compact, easy to read and comes with pure simple logical diet tips that should just be followed by everyone. As a surgeon for 40 years, Dr Shinya crystallized a simple fact: cutting out cancerous body parts did not cure cancer. The "cure" is good diet, good lifestyle. Just to share one tip out of the many in the book: eat a lot more fruits and eat less meat.

The Enzyme Factor

According to this doctor, fruits are created by Mother Nature to be eaten. Hence it contains all the best nutrients and enzymes for living creatures to be absorbed into their bodies. A diet filled with variety of fruits like tomatoes, apples, oranges, bananas, avocados supplemented with other vegetables and small amount of meat would be very healthy and his patients who followed his diet never get cancer relapses. Fruits are also easily digested and hence doesn't burden our digestive systems while meat, esp red meat is very hard to digest and a lifetime of eating meat ultimately causes cancer and/or illnesses. If we look at the structure of our teeth, we have only 4 out of 32 adult teeth that are suitable for eating meat. That's our incisors. Hence our meat to all food ratio is determined by evolution, it should be just 1/8 of our diet. Literally, food for thought huh?

Back to prediction and preparation, a good life is also about preparing well. We cannot predict markets but doctors/nutritionists can surely predict how people fall sick and eventually succumb to what kind of terminal illnesses just by looking at their diet and lifestyle. Stressful lifestyle with lots of tobacco eventually leads to cancer. Alcohol leads to liver problems. Meat lovers get heart diseases or colon cancer. Maintain a lifetime healthy diet, exercise and live stress-free. That's the best preparation against cancer and other big diseases.

It's all about preparing well for a good second half, to use soccer parlance. Yes, we are all more or less hitting half-time, and the score is 0-0! Okay maybe 2-0 for some. Time to strategize! As humans, we tend not to think too far ahead, usually thinking a few years ahead would be considered a feat. No one thinks more than 10 years ahead. When we are in our twenties, all we can think about was money, fun, glam. It never crossed my mind that I would be a father in a few years, have an ass full of debt from the home mortgage and how should I prepare for it. Now that I think back, it's really a miracle that things worked out without much preparation.

To sign off, let's talk about 2017. Remember it's not prediction but preparation. It's not easy but let's try. In my view, 2017 could see the rise in animal spirits given the very bad 2016. Investment appetite especially with the US economy recovering could pull parts of the world up. Although China and Europe should remain tough with the bad debt issues still haunting the financial sectors. So what's the preparation needed? Maybe look to deploy a bit into secular sectors, like health and fitness. Meanwhile in Singapore, 2017 could be the year the property oversupply hits a peak after which the no. of new condos would drop. Hence it might mean it's the bottom for the property market. It's could be the last chance to buy Singapore property before it becomes way too expensive. So, be prepared!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!