As mentioned previously, Poems offer a good screener that is pretty sufficient for our purposes as value investors looking for good stock ideas. Today, we look at Australia, one of the most attractive and yet under-rated markets globally. Australia is the world's 18th largest economy by PPP at c.USD1.8trn which is roughly 6x larger than Singapore's. It took the record for the longest stretch of uninterrupted GDP growth in the developed world (26 years from 1991 to 2017) driven by good policies, growth of its natural resource producers and its strong financial sector. It is also a fertile hunting ground for good value and growth compounders even if we just look at large caps above USD10bn.
I have almost always used the same criteria for screening (partly due to the limitation of the screen) and the above shows what is being used for today's Australia screen. The criteria are simply ROE at 10%, ROA at 5% and operating margins (OPM) at 10% and we generated a pretty interesting screen. I have not used traditional valuations such as PER and PBR because it will cut out interesting names such as CSL, Cochlear and Resmed etc.
Valuation has evolved over the last 20 years and the way to value growth stocks might be to use Price to sales or PEG because traditional metric like PER and PBR does not work for the super growth companies we have seen like Tesla, Amazon. We also have a few of those in Australia shown on this first section. Aristocrat is one of the largest gaming machines maker and has compounded well over the last 20 years. Australia also has some of the most interesting healthcare names in the world. Cochlear is the company that invented ear implants and cure deafness. If Helen Keller was born in this era in Australia, she would be able to listen and speak. Then she may not become Helen Keller, but that's besides the point. Cochlear has the ability to ensure that no babies will be deaf since its founding, unfortunately government policies and restriction continue to inhibit this reality even though we already have the technology.
The second section has James Hardie, a homebuilder that has compounded double digits for decades and Resmed, another world class healthcare company that cures sleep apnea. But what is worth highlighting today would be Woodside Petroleum. This is one of the pure LNG listed companies that has gone from strength to strength. With today's energy prices soaring, Woodside will continue to benefit. It should have been bought out by big majors but somehow it never happened. Now that is has grown to become a USD 60bn company, it might be too big to swallow, but we never know. Energy security will be ever more important. So glad I kept my global energy names all these years.
As usual, here's the past lists:
2020 Dividend List2019 Dividend List
2018 Dividend List - Part 4
2018 Dividend List - Part 3
2018 Dividend List - Part 2
2018 Dividend List - Part 1
2017 Oct Dividend List - Part 2
2017 Oct Dividend List - Part 1
Huat Ah!
