Portfolio Positions - Dollar Tree

Sideways action continued this week also. This sideways action can be very demoralizing for regular market watchers, as no one really knows what will happen next. But there is a famous phrase on the street, which says that "one should not short a dull market." Although this market is not dull on a day-to-day basis, it has been pretty dull over the last few months.

Good investors make money in these type of markets by selling stocks that have already rallied during this phase and re-distributing proceeds into positions which have not performed so well. In this way, they are better positioned to take advantage of potential rally.

A very good example in this regard is Amazon. Amazon declined throughout 2014 after topping around 400 in late 2013. While Amazon was declining, it was a good opportunity to accumulate. Since Amazon was in a bull market based on proprietary model, adding to long positions paid off big time in 2015 with Amazon rallying from 300 to 430 in just 4 months. Therefore, the gains would have been amplified, as one would have bought multiple shares at lower price.

The goal of the new model is to buy good businesses that actually sell tangible products or services. This would mean that investors are actually investing in good companies.

The most recent example in model portfolio is Dollar Tree stock. Dollar Tree rallied in the first two months of this year, but since then it has been declining. As a result, proprietary allocation model increased the exposure in Dollar Tree in May because it is in a bull market. Model will keep on changing the ratio based on analytic modeling, as long as the stock remains in a bull market.

If the stock is truly in a Bull market, it will rally sooner or later and thus, gains will be amplified. If not in bull market, portfolio will exit the stock position on proprietary triggers. We will see...


 

Lessons from Nasdaq and Beating the Market

Last week was a positive week for the overall market. Blue chips gained some but Nasdaq gained a lot. Nasdaq is now within few points of all time high, which was set in 2000.

Although Nasdaq (the darling of 90s) is now approaching all-time highs after 15 years, many of the companies that were making higher highs in early 2000 are no where to be found in today's market. If one had invested in selected few companies, he would still be at a much lower level.

The story of Nasdaq taking 15 years to reach its all-time highs, teaches us two important lessons:

1. Market can remain below a certain level for eons. Therefore, buy and hold might not be the best strategy
2. Individual stocks are extremely hard to manage because of their individual unique profiles, company cultures and other aspects

Being said that, now the question arises how can one then beat the market and should one hire a money managers, with ton of market experience, to beat the market. Lets tackle both of these questions one by one:

Firstly, over the long-term (~20 years) only 1-2% of the money managers beat the market. This means that the probability of selecting a winning manager is .02. In other words, if you have the choice of investing money with 100 money managers, only 2 will be able to beat the market over the long-run. Furthermore, all of them will take money management fees. So should one invest with money managers with such low odds of success?

This observation gives credence to Warren Buffet's concept that its better to invest in low cost ETFs that follow the market and at least perform better than majority of the money managers because you will be closely following market's performance. But this method does not answer the question of how to beat the market. Although it is a difficult question to answer, it is a very good question to ask!!

In order to beat the markets, one should buy good companies and ride them as long as they perform well. If they enter a bear market, one should start riding another well-performing company. Although this concept seems very simple, it is very difficult to implement. In order to effectively implement this concept one needs following 5 pieces of information:

1. Which companies to invest in?
2. Whether selected stock is in a bull or bear market?
3. How much to invest in each position? 
4. When to exit a certain position?
5. How to protect gains? 

As you know Understand, Survive and Thrive has been performing market analysis over the past several years with the goal to optimize portfolio returns using objective techniques and algorithms to take out emotions from trading. We have recently tried to incorporate above mentioned 5 pieces into our model for long-term investing.

 

Fed Decision & Gov't Shutdown: This Time Its Real (Part 2)

Part 1

This question suggests that either Fed does not think the economy is strong enough right now, which means there is some thing fundamentally wrong. Or they are anticipating a major shock in the near future. This leads us towards the upcoming budget discussion and possible government shut-down starting on October 1, 2013.

I think Federal Reserves' was looking ahead and they saw a real policy of a government shutdown in October, along with another long-drawn battle on debt-limit increase. That is why, they preemptive these political uncertainties by giving another doze of steroids to the market so that the impact of political stalemate does not ripple through the stock market, and consequently does not derail the nascent economic recovery.

As far as the political stalemate is concerned, this time it will be bad! On all previous occasions politicians started working on the debt-ceiling / government shutdown issues at least ~2 months in advance, with media shouting about this possibility ~3 months in advance. For example, in 2011 debt-ceiling was being discussed in the media in April/May time frame, months before the actual stock market decline in August.

But this time, it is different. Today, was the first time I saw something on the news about a potential government shut-down in a financial news outlet. This means that lawmakers are not taking this shut-down seriously with only 2 weeks left to the the shutdown. This will be followed by debt-ceiling debate, which needs to be settled in less than a month. And finally, since Republican lawmakers have been burnt by sequestration earlier this year, it is highly unlikely they will easily cooperate on this issue.

All of the above mentioned scenarios combined, suggest that there a lot of headwinds for the market in the near future. Under these circumstances, we will analyze the IPM model for trade timing  

Fed Decision & Gov't Shutdown: Logic Behind Fed's Decision (Part 1)

So everyone was surprised by what Fed did yesterday. In fact, it is one of the times after a long time that I have seen so many people caught off-guard. Since I was expecting the market to go up after the announcement of the taper, I was not surprised by the rally after the announcement. I was surprised by the announcement to not taper. And to be sure, this surprise was equally shared between financial news media and economists. Since the surprise decision is now out, the question remains about the context of this decision.

In real world economists, Federal Reserve's officials, treasury analysts and central bankers typically make policy decisions based on fundamental analysis of macro-economic indicators. These indicators tell them how to manage their policy to control inflation, foster job growth and spur economic activity. Therefore, it will be very insightful to analyze the implication of federal reserve's recent decision of "not to taper" from a fundamental & socio-economic perspective.

For one, since everyone was expecting a taper decision. "Not Taper" turned out to be a perfect contrarion trade.

On the other hand, from a fundamental perspective the consensus was that Fed will start tapering its bond buying program in September 2013. And the reason behind this assumption was the language used by Fed's officials over the recent meetings was getting Hawkish. In these meeting's Fed's officials had started becoming "Hawkish" about the fiscal policy i.e. they were getting concerned about the potential increase in the inflation rate due to extremely accommodating monetary policy.

Behind the shift in Fed's language towards stricter monetary policy was recent economic data which was hinting towards robust economic growth in the US economy, along with significant gains in the housing market and stock indices. However, this data was available to the general public all over the world, and the data did not get worse over the last month or so.

Therefore, the question is: "What did the Federal Reserves' see differently during the September's FOMC meeting, which forced them to keep the extraordinarily accommodative monetary policy intact?"

This article will continue in next part ...