Performance review March 2015 – Comment “Should an active investor give money to a money manager ?”

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Just a quick reminder: this will be the last monthly update, from now on I will switch to quarterly updates.

Performance

In March, the portfolio gained +2,1% against +3,6% for the Benchmark (Eurostoxx50 (25%), Eurostoxx small 200 (25%), DAX (30%),MDAX (20%)). Year to date, the score is +11,5% against +20,2% for the benchmark. Since inception, the portfolio is up 104,3% vs. 73,3%.

Major winners were TFF (+19,6%), Drager (+8,4%), Hornbach (+6,5%) and Thermador (+6,0%). Losers were Ashmore (-7,1%), Van Lanschot (-6,4%) and TGS (-4,3%).

Overall, performance was again behind the benchmark but with around (2,1/3,6)= 58% of the upside fully in line with the current allocation of the portfolio with regard to cash and beta of the investments.

Portfolio transactions

In line with my self-prescribed “slowness” I only made one position change this month: The full sale of my KAS Bank position in mid march. Within my existing positions, I added to my Romgaz stake following the good results.

Cash and “cash similar” positions are now at around 27%, a pretty high percentage but maybe not too bad going forward. So far of course, the conservative approach has cost me a lot of performance, but the year is not over yet. The current portfolio, as always can be found under the respective portfolio page.

Comment “Should an active investor give money to a money manager ?”

I am currently preparing my first investment into a fund actively managed by someone else. For me, as an active investor, this is quite unusual, so far I have only invested in ETFs in order to gain exposure to sectors or directly into stocks and bonds. The big question here is of course: Why should I pay management fees for someone doing the same stuff that I actually enjoy doing myself ? So for myself a tried to rationalize the decision a little bit and came up with 5 criteria which are important to me for trusting my hard-earned money with someone else:

1. The manager has to be trust worthy
2. The manager should have most of or even better all his money in the fund
3. the manager has a different skill set than oneself or just better skills or access to different assets
4. The manager should still be “hungry”
5. The fund manager is not only in for the money
6. The investment vehicle should be a “fair” structure

Interestingly, those criteria are not that different from investing into a stock, but let’s look at them one by one:

1. The manager has to be trust worthy

This sounds more easy than it is. In order to know if someone is trust worthy, you either know someone really well or there is a long track record of this person proving that she/he will always act what in German we would call “in Treu und Glauben” or in English as a true Fiduciary of one’s money. In a standard asset management organisation, this cannot be taken for granted. In many large asset management companies, the main target is not performance but management fees and not the performance of the money invested.

One of the worst cases would be investing into someone where you know that this guy is “bending the rules” somewhere and hoping that still everything would be ok with your money. With Bernie Madoff for instance, many people thought that he was making the nice and easy money in his “hedge fund” by scalping and front running his customers on the trading side of his business and thy were OK with it. Without accusing him in any way, Bill Ackman for me would be also a questionable character. Both, with Herbalife and Valeant he is “bending” the rules to his advantage, how do you know that he will never does the same within his investment vehicles ? I think this is clearly the area where one should never make the slightest compromise.

2. The manager should have most of or even better all his money in the fund

This is something which is especially important if there is a performance component in the fee structure. A performance fee is essentially an option and the value of any option increases with volatility. If a portfolio manager however has invested all his money in the fund, he will think twice about maximizing only the option value…..

3. the manager has a different skill set than oneself or just better skills or access to different assets and the investment process is transparent

Sounds pretty obvious but is still worth thinking about. If I invest in a value investing strategy, this only makes sense if I am sure that the manager does have skills that I don’t have. This could be either very deep research and a concentrated long-term portfolio or access to markets/assets which I don’t have as a private investor. in any case this requires that the manager is transparent on what he is doing at that an investor understands the investment process. Fundholder letters or even better “manuals” are a big plus here.

4. The manager should still be “hungry”

The typical story in investment management goes like this: Manager starts small fund, has great returns, nobody is interested at first. After 3-5 years of great returns, fund gets onto the radar screen of large investors and grows quickly. Performance drops as investment style cannot easily be scaled up and/or investment manager cares more for his Ferrari collection. In any case, I think it is more interesting to invest in the early phase than in the later phase despite a potentially higher fee percentage.

5. The fund manager is not only in for the money

That sounds strange at first, why should a money manager not be in for the money ? What I mean here is that there are a lot of people in the investment management business who see this as the fastest way to make a lot of money. In my experience, those people are generally not good money managers in the long-term. The really good ones are those who actually like what they are doing and do it because its their passion. Those guys will go the extra mile and read annual reports on week ends and in their vacation because they don’t consider it as work.

6. The investment vehicle should be a “fair” structure

As I am an individual investor I would for instance have a problem with a structure where I pay upfront commissions or custody fees that an institutional investor would not pay. Also, if I plan to invest long-term, I would not want to invest in a structure where other investors could hurt my returns by either putting in a lot of money on a daily basis or pulling their investments at any time. As a long-term investor, I would need to be sure that also the others are in for the long-term and no “hot money” can disturb the investment success.

It makes also a lot of sense to look at other investors in a fund vehicle. It is an advantage if other investors are known and reliable.

Those are the 6 criteria which are important for me for trusting my money to someone else. Of course this is no guarantee that the investment will perform well, but at least the risk to the downside is limited to a certain extent if all criteria are met.

More on the specific fund investment will come in a later post this month.

Investment Strategy update: The Discovery of Slowness

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The discovery of Slowness

The last book  I read was a German novel called “The Discovery of Slowness” (in the English Translation) from German writer Stan Nadolny.

The book is a ficticious story about a real person, the famous English explorer John Franklin.

In the book, John Franklin is an extraordinarily slow person who has a rough start into life as a kid. He always needs a lot of time to answer questions or react to things happening. During his life, this weakness turns into a strength. More than once, his slowliness and deliberate long thought process leads to a superior solution compared to the “first impulse”.

For instance once, after their ship goes under, he and his comrades find themselves themselves stranded on a flat corall bank. Whereas his fellow sailors start shouting for help etc., he directly starts to build a platform in order to survive the high tide and thereby saves all his comrades. When he was asked later why he did this he says “As I am so slow, I have to start early”. In another situation, a ship under his command gets in into a storm in the Arctic seas and is at risk to get destroyed by Icebergs. His men start to panic and want to get away. He takes his time and finally contra-intuitively stears the ship into the solid ice as this is the only safe place in a storm and they survive.

During his life, he turns his weakness into a strength by preparing himself extremely diligent for any unforseen problems. As it turns out, good preperation is almost always better than fast reaction time. He is calling this preparation a “system”. One of the core pillars of this system is to have an organization run by two person: One “fast” one for the daily work and a “slow” one for the really important decision.

Despite the book being a good read itself (kind of a Forest Gump story with a Victorian English setting), the more I read the more I had to think of investing and Warren Buffett in particular.

Compared to today’s financial technology (Twitter, High Frequency Trading etc.), Warren and Charlie look as slow as John Franklin in the book. They are so slow that they actually missed the whole first dot.com bubble and many other hypes. However, by creating Berkshire as a permanent investment vehicle and holding a big cash pile, they prepared themselves well for any kind of troubles.

Both have stressed themselves the advantages of being slow many times, either Charlie with his “sit on your ass investing” or Warren’s “Punch Card”. From the outside I would even say that they employ the “Franklin system” to a certain extent. Warren seems to be the fast guy and Chalrie is the one who makes the big changes, like steering Warren to “great” companies many years ago.

For many investors, including myself, this often sounds counter intuitive. Real time stock prices, twitter feeds, mobile phone trading etc. enable us to do everything real time, so why should we care what those old farts say ?

Well, one aspect of this a pretty tangible one: Capital gains tax. In Germany, as a private investor, you pay around 30% capital gains tax. For fun, I made a quick table with the following assumptions:

– Underlying annual return 12% p.a.
– investment horizon 30 years
– Capital gains tax 30%

The following table shows the total return over 30 years depending on how often the portfolio is being “turned over”. So 1 means: The portfolio is turned every year, 5 year means 6 turns within 30 years etc.. These are the results:

turnover/year Total gain AT p.a. AT in% of max
1 1024% 8,4% 35%
2 1735% 10,2% 60%
3 2061% 10,8% 71%
4 2284% 11,1% 79%
5 2363% 11,3% 82%
6 2444% 11,4% 84%
7 2529% 11,5% 87%
8 2616% 11,6% 90%
never 2896% 12,0% 100%

The results are logical but still striking: Over a thirty year period, if one turns the portfolio every year, the result is roughly 1/3 of a portfolio which remains constant over the 30 years. It is also interesting that the total result increase over-proportionally with every additional year of the average holding period. Already with a 4 year holding period one captures almost 80% of the total yield.

One remark: Please don’t confuse this withe an advice for dax driven investments. This is just to illustrate that slow portfolio turn-over has adnatages.

Secondly, and even more important, being slow in my opinion is the best defense against any kind of behavioural biases. The book was written well before Danial Kahneman’s famous book, but clearly shows that slow thinking leads to better decisions which is especially important in investing.

In the past, I have often reacted to quickly, which resulted either in selling too early or buying to quickly. Especially when prices move significantly within a short term, some behavioural biases like anchoring become very strong. Maturing as an investor in my opinion means among other things, to become slower.

However this is more easy said that done. A large part of the investment industry is hard wired to make investors trade as often as possible in order to generate fees. If you watch CNBC or read investment magazines, they always emphasize to buy or sell things now and not wait until it’s “too late”.

Consequences

As I have written in some of my comments, I am aiming to lengthen my holding periods anyway, but I still think I am too fast. For me, I have come up with 3 very concrete action items which should hopefully help me in becoming a lot slower:

1. I will limit my news feed to high quality sources. I will abandon high frequency stuff like Zero Hedge and Clusterstock

2. I will stop writing monthly performance comments and switch to quarterly

3. I will create my own “soft punchcard”: I will limit myself to either 1 new position or 1 complete sale of a position per month. Increasing or decreasing existing positions is still allowed.

A little explanation for point 3, as this is a real “hard restriction”: This means that at a maximum, I can “switch” 6 stocks a year into new ones. I have to sell one first in one month and buy the new one in the next. As I own on average 25 positions, this should translate over time to a holding period of at least 4 years, preferably more.

This will of course limit my choice to do for instance soem short term special situations, on the other hand I hope that this will further improve my investment decisions and focus better on the long term. I would love to have an brokerage account which would actually limit me on the number of trades I could do in a month.

Deeply discounted rights issues – Serco Plc (ISIN GB0007973794)

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Serco Plc, the British outsourcing company, used ro be a stock market favourite for a long time. Especially in the 2000s, Serco was able to increase its profit ~10 fold from 0,04 pence per share in 1999 to around 40 pence in 2012.

Then however, a little bit similar to Royal Imtech, problems and some scandals piled up and culminated in an accounting bloodbath for 2014. Serco showed a total loss of 2,09 pounds (!!) per share, eliminating pretty much all profits made from 1999.

After raising a smaller amount of capital last year, Serco announced a large 1:1 capital increase at a sharp discount in early March, the rights have been split of on March 31st. Serco wants to raise some 500 mn GBP with the majority being used to lower the outstanding debt (currently around 600-700 mn).

Looking at the stock chart, Serco shareholders have suffered a big loss, especially compared to competitor G4S which, despite relatively similar problems, has recovered well:

Normally, I would not look at a “turn around” case like Serco at all, but in this case it might be different. The difference is the new CEO, Ex Aggreko CEO Rupert Soames:

Soames surprised everyone in early 2014 when he left Aggreko after leading the company for 11 years and with great success. For anyone who has read an Aggreko annual report, one knows that Soames was not only a succesful CEO but also a very good communicator. I can highly recommend to read those reports as they are very interesting.

Before asking for shareholder money, he actually said that he will not take his guaranteed bonus for 2014 which I found was a very good gesture.

After enjoying the Aggreko reports I decided to look into the 2014 annual report and especially the “CEO Letter” from Soames to see what he has to say.

I was positively surprised by the openness how Serco’s problems were adressed, both from the Chairman and Soames himself. It is the classic tale of too much growth through acquisitions combined with a lack of integration and bad execution. Other than at Royal Imtech, it doesn’t involve outright accounting fraud.

One rarely gets to read such a good description of the problems of a company and the historic context (page 9 of a turnaround case. This is then followed by a clear change in strategy, namely to focus on Government services and get out of “private” contracts altogether. Overall the strategy section looked very well thought out and not unrealistic to me.

Further in the report, I found this interesting statement:

Historically, the key metrics used in forecasts were non-GAAP measures of Adjusted Revenue (adjusted to include Serco’s share of joint venture revenue) and Adjusted Operating Profit (adjusted to exclude Serco’s share of joint venture interest and tax as well as removing transaction-related costs and other material costs estimated by management that were considered to have been impacted by the UK Government reviews that followed the issues on the EM and PECS contracts). We believe that in the future the Group should report its results (and provide its future guidance) on metrics that are more closely aligned to statutory measures. Accordingly, our outlook for 2015 is now expressed in terms of Revenue and Trading Profit. The revenue measure is consistent with the IFRS definition, and therefore excludes Serco’s share of joint venture revenue. Trading Profit, which is otherwise consistent with the IFRS definition of operating profit,adjusts only to exclude amortisation and impairment of intangibles arising on acquisition, as well as exceptional items. Trading Profit is therefore lower han the previously defined Adjusted Operating Profit measure due to the inclusion of Serco’s share of joint venture interest and tax charges. We believe that reporting and forecasting using metrics that are consistent with IFRS will be simpler and more transparent, and therefore more helpful to investors.

This is something whcih I haven’t seen before that actually a company is going back from “adjusted” reporting to statutory which I find is very positive.

Another good part can be found later in the statement from the CFO (by the way another Aggreko veteran) regarding the implementation of ROIC:

A new measure of pre-tax return on invested capital (ROIC) has been introduced in 2014 to measure how efficiently the Group uses its capital in terms of the return it generates from its assets. Pre-tax ROIC is calculated as Trading Profit divided by the Invested Capital balance. Invested Capital represents the assets and liabilities considered to be deployed in delivering the trading performance of the business.

I always like to see return on capital as an important measurement for businesses and implementing this is clearly a great step forward.

Another interesting fact from the Renumeration report: Both new board members have significantly lower salaries than the old, outgoing board members. Soames has a 800 k base salary, Cockburn 500 k. both pretty reasonable numbers.

However the big problem for me is that I know next to nothing about the business of Government outsourcing. So for me it is at this time very difficult to assess how attractive the stock is and how long it will take to recover.

The current management is clearly a good one but I am not sure if the underlying business is a good one as well. Especially those long-term contracts do seem to contain significant risks. Page 50 and following pages in the report provides  a very good view in great on what can go wrong with long dated contracts. In many cases, Serco was locked into fix price contracts and costs went against them without having a chance to do anything about it.

On the other hand, the 1,5 bn write-off for sure is conservative and one could/should expect that it contains some “reserves” which might be released in coming years.

Deeply discounted rights issues in general

Another word of caution here: A couple of discounted rights issues I looked at in the past were actually not very good investments.

Severfield was a good one with around +50% outperformance against the Footsie since the rights issue in March 2013. KPN even outperformed the Dutch Index by ~+62% in the two years and Unicredit even more than 70%.

On the other hand, Monte di Pasci underperformed by -70% against the index since their rights issue  and Royal Imtech by -45%. EMAK finally performed more or less in line with the index over time after the capital increase.

So overall, the score of outperformers to underperformers would be 3,5:2,5. With Royal Imtech it was pretty easy to see that it would be difficult, as there was a significant accounting fraud involved. BMPS also looked like a big problem as the rights issue was to small and another one is in the making.

So the question is clearly: Is Serco more like Severfield/KPN or Royal Imtech ? For the time being I would rather look at Serco more positively, mostly due to management.

Not surprisingly, analysts hate Serco. the company has one of the lowest consensus ratings within the Stoxx 600. This alone is not a reason to buy, but at least might explain a potential under valuation. A final note: Soames might not be a bad choice for running a Government outsourcing company. His ancestry should ensure some viable contacts at government level:

Rupert Soames can just remember his grandfather, Sir Winston Churchill. His earliest memories are of playing cowboys and Indians with Britain’s wartime prime minister – and of not being allowed to attend his state funeral. He was six at the time and furious: “Watching it on TV was a very poor substitute,” he once said.

His family has long been part of the political establishment: his father Christopher was the last governor of southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, who served in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet and was also a European commissioner, while his brother Nicholas is a current Tory MP.

Summary:

Overall, the Serco case does look interesting. A brilliant management team is trying to turn around a troubled Government contractor with a transparent and plausible strategy. On the other hand, the business is a difficult one or at least I do not have a lot of knowledge about this sector so I need to digg more into it.

So for the time being, I will watch this from the sidelines and maybe try to learn more about this sector in general.

Lloyds Banking Group (ISIN GB0008706128) – A potential interesting special situation within UK Banking (part 1) ?

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Quick “Management summary”:

Within the large UK banking peers, only Lloyds banking Group offers a “pure play” Uk opportunity. There are a lot of negatives around UK banking in general and Lloyds specifically, but overall nothing which would “kill” the investment at this stage. Potentially, the current selling of the UK government and the visible turn around could present an attractive entry point for a turn around situation with kind of “catalyst” if Government at some point is finished and profit increases ex fines.

Following my Aldermore post a few days ago, I decided to have a closer look into the listed UK banks as the UK market looks structurally more interesting than most European ones. Overall valuations are pretty moderate. This is a table based on the most recent financial year:

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Name P/B P/TB Leverage NIM Pers. Exp P/E
HSBC HOLDINGS PLC 0,88 1,03 13,17 2,08% 33,25% 12,5
BARCLAYS PLC 0,77 0,90 22,03 0,00% 43,52% #N/A N/A
ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND GROUP 0,71 0,82 17,46 1,83% 38,00% 101,2
STANDARD CHARTERED PLC 0,90 1,01 15,53 2,15% 37,02% 16,5
LLOYDS BANKING GROUP PLC 1,19 1,30 17,13 1,33% 28,40% 51,7

Looking at the list of banks, lets look quickly at the different players.

1. HSBC

HSBC is by far the biggest player with the clear target to be one of the biggest players globaly, offering all services from investment banking to private banking, etc. Their UK business is a rather small part of the company, the biggest part of the business comes from Asia. Historically, HSBC has always been trading at least at 2x book value. The company has been involved in many scandals, the problems of the Swiss subsidiary and the secret bank account of the CEO are only the latest example. Overall, HSBC is much more a play on Asia than anything else.

2. Barclays

Barclay’s is in its core an investment bank with some retail businesses attached. They took over large parts of Lehman following the financial crisis. Barclay’s has significant revenues from card processing and African operations. As with HSBC, UK retail is not their main focus.

3. Royal Bank of Scotland

The creation of “Fred the Shred”, had to be bailed out by the British Government in 2008. The Government still owns more than 60%. Among others, RBS is obliged to dispose US subsidiary Citizen’s which I own as a “special situation”. RBS is (still) a full service bank, including investment banking and wealth management. RBS is still in the middle of restructurings, for instance just a few days ago they announced to drastically shrink Non-UK investment banking.

4. Standard Chartered

Although Standard Charteres is UK listed, it basically does not do any business in the UK. It is an international commercial bank active mostly in Asia and Africa. The CEO has been recently replaced and the share price has recovered. Historically, as HSBC, Standard Chartered used to trade at much higher mutiples.

5. Lloyds Banking Group

After the disastrous HBOS acquisition in 2008, Lloyds had to be bailed out by the British government. the Government still owns 23% and is in the process of selling down. As part of the reorganization, Lloyd’s IPOed TSB and scaled back the international business. Lloyd’s is an almost “pure play” UK bank with the largest share in UK business of all the players. After the spin-off of TSB, they still have on average ~20% market share which to my knowledge is pretty unique for a private bank in a Western country.

So LLoyd’s in principle is the only interesting “play” to invest into UK banking. But is it worth the effort to dig deeper ?

As always, the first step is: Try to kill the investment case

This is the list I came up with after reading the 2014 annual report plus some “well known facts” about banks:

1. Lloyds had to pay massive fines, among others for misselling PPI insurance, Libor fixing etc and there is more to come
2. The UK Government still owns ~23% and is selling
3. Uk banking is very unpopular in the public’s mind which is bad for business
4. UK bank levy has been extended
5. 3 officers get 21 mn in 2014 despite tiny profit, bonus for”underlying profit”
6. huge pension plan (funded, derisked)
7. UK housing is overheated
8. In the next financial crisis, all banks will crash again
9. Valuation is high compared to “peers”
10. They only pay a tiny dividend
11. Risk of UK election outcome and UK exit
12. The banking business model is dead

1. Fines/PPI

This is a quote form the annual report:

PPI
The Group increased the provision for expected PPI costs by a further £700 million in the fourth quarter. This brings the amount provided in 2014 to £2,200 million (2013: £3,050 million), and the total amount provided to £12,025 million. Total costs incurred in the fourth quarter were £700 million and as at 31 December 2014, £2,549 million or 21 per cent of the total provision, remained unutilised.

So they do have still a 2 bn GBP provision for additional claims. Overall, the PPI episode was clearly a major issue for them. But on the other hand, there is some reason to believe that we have seen the peak. I am no expert in this, but if the provision would be enough, we could see rapidly increasing earnings over the next 1-3 years. Reading through the annual report, it looks like that they should not expect any US fines and also most FX/Libor related fines should be closed. But there clearly remains a risk.

2. Government stake / selling

In December, the UK Government decided to “dribble” the stocks into the market and against a one time big sale. A few days ago they released that they had sold 1% down. This constant selling is of course not good for the shareprice. The “break even” for the Government seems to be 73,6 pence, so one could expect that they are constantly in the market for the time being. This is clearly bad for traders but not necessarily for long term investors.

Looking at the chart, it seems that there is a “lid on the price” at around 80 pence since more than a year:

Forced sellers or in this case sellers who don’t want to maximise their long term return are often moving prices into “non-effecient” areas. As we value investors know, price is not equal value. So the classic “share overhang we have here might be a reason to actually look deeper into the value of the stock as there is a good chance that without those sales, the share price could be higher.

3. Bad reputation

Banking in general and UK banks in particular are maybe one of the most hated companies at the moment. As I have written, many small players try to take advantage of this like Aldermore, Handelsbanken or Virgin Money. Plus, the UK banks lose most law suits as judges mostly side with the plaintifs. The question clearly is if this will hurt the big players all over and long term or if there will be winners and losers for the big players. My personal opinion is that LLoyds as a focused UK player is in a better position to turn around the image than for instance RBS, HSBC or Barclays who have other problems to solve. I will look at this later but in my opinion the main victims will be the “weaker” players, not Lloyds Bank.

Bad reputation on the other side can be interesting for an investor. When no one wants to touch a stock, it is usually more likely a value investment than if everyone is talking on cocktail parties on how great a company does.

4. UK Bank levy

As a direct result of the bad reputation, the UK government had introduced a bank tax (“levy”) as a percentage point of the full balance sheet after the financial crisis. Currently it is ~0,21% for the whole balance sheet amount, a very significant expense especially for banks which have a lot of non-Uk business (Standard Chartered, HSBC). There is clearly a risk that a socialist UK Government will keep or even increase the tax. On the other hand, corporate taxes in the uk went down a lot which kind of off sets this issue compared to non-UK peers.

5. Large bonuses 2014

Especially the CEO, Antonio Horta-Osorio made around 11 mn GBP in 2014 which caused some uproar in the UK press. However most of that was a result of a 3 year plan which vested this year. On the other hand, he turned down a bonus of 2 mn in 2012 and received most of his bonus in stocks which he pledged not to sell until the government is out. As management plays a big role at banks, I will need to look deeper into the CEO at a later stage. Comapring older annual rpeorts, they have dropped their initial target from 2012 to earn 12-15% ROE in the long term.

6. Large pension plan

To be honest, Lloyd’s pension plan is not only huge but GIGANTIC. The current DBO liability is 38 bn GBP not much less than the total core equity position. The bad news: The discount rate the use with 3,67% is pretty high, on the other hand, they have derisked the plan early. of the 38 bn assets, only 5 bn are equity. Additionally, they seemed to have actively closed a large part of the interest rate risk in 2014. This is the statement from the annual report:

The asset‑liability matching strategy currently mitigates approximately 89 per cent (2013: 54 per cent) of the interest rate volatility and 94 per cent (2013: 71 per cent) of the inflation rate volatility of the liabilities.

This was very fortunate or clever timing and might have spared them a couple of billions over the last few months. For pension plans, this is clearly best in class with regard to ALM. Nevertheless a big pension plan like this will eat up a lot of capital and risk bearing capacity for the company and is clearly a big negative factor.

7. UK housing is overheated

I am not an expert in UK housing, but my assumption is that they are better prepared than last time.

8. In the next financial crisis, all banks will crash again

As I have mentioned before, I do think the banking sector overall is much more stable than in 2007. the next crisis will come from somewhere else and the major victims will be other players.

9. Valuation is high compared to “peers”

Yes, at first sight it looks expensive, but in my opinion, Lloyds is already 1-2 years ahead compared for instance with RBS. The have cleaned up the organization and the portfolio

10. They only pay a tiny dividend

Compared to the 6% of HSBC, Lloyd’s tiny dividend looks ridiculous. However this could change quickly and Lloyds could become interesting for dividend investors.

11. Risk of UK election outcome and UK exit

Valid concern, however I tend to ignore such macro stuff. Rather I think it could be an additional explanation for a low valuation.

12. The banking business model is dead

Nope, I do think the “traditional” banking model is here to stay, at least for the banks who do it right.

Summary:

Overall, I would not “kill” the Llyods investment case at this stage. The biggest issue for me is the gargantuan pension plan. Although it seems to be well-managed, it is still HUGE. In a next step, I will need to come up with a valuation or some idea about potential returns for Lloyds and have a closelook at management.

As a side remark: I do see that someone like Handelsbanken could capture market share, especially from guys like RBS or Barclays. A funny side note: Handelsbanken doesn’t even appear as competitor for Lloyds in their 2014 strategy update

Some links

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The founder of Singapore has died at age 91. Great article from the Telegraph on his life and achievements.

MUST READ: Howard Marks on liquidity

A new investing blog called jnvestor with some pretty good write ups. Keep it up mate !!!

A very good post about market timing and “cash addiction”

Notes from the Daily Journal 2015 meeting with great quotes from Charlie Munger

Amazon with a direct attack on all cloud storage competitors

Finally, the Brooklyn Investor nicely wraps up the HeinzKraft case

Short cuts: Koc Holding, NN Group, Romgaz

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Koc Holding

Koc releaed 2014 earnings already beginning of March. Looking at the presentation (there is no English annual report yet), one can see that despite the troubles, Koc showed a remarkably solid result with overall net income up 1% against 2013, although operating profit was down -6%.

I read the earnings conference call transcript as well. The major story was that Turkey was struggling in the first 6-9 months but following the oil price decline, things seem to have improved in the last 3 months or so. This confirms the general assumption that Turkey as a large oil importer should benefit from lower oil prices.

Management made a point that the largest subsidiary, oil refiner Tupras is expected to increase earnings significantly in 2015 as a 3 bn USD investment program will be finished and the refinery then will run on full capacity. Although Tupras had losses on inventory, Koc stresses that margins are independent of oil prices.

Koc clearly has suffered as well from their USD denominated debt, but other than many EM companies, they do have a “natural” hedge because of their large, foreign currency denominated earnings stream.

Almost exactly 6 months ago, I reduced my Koc stake by 2/3 as I was worried about Turkey in general and my bad experience with Sistema in Russia. Looking back, I have to admit that this might have been a typical “fast thinking” mistake. I actually do think that Koc is  a very good long-term investment if one believes in the Turkish economy. I am therefore inclined to increase the position again to around 2,5% of the portfolio, as I think that Koc with a P/E of ~10-11 is still good value, considering both, the quality of the company as well as the potential growth opportunity. The long-term downside in my opinion is relatively limited.

NN Group

NN Group had issued their annual report some days ago. Overall, earnings etc were unspectacular. However there was on extremely interesting sentence right in the beginning:

NN Group’s Solvency II capital ratio, calculated as the ratio of Own Funds (OF) to the Solvency
Capital Requirement (SCR) based on our current interpretation of the Standard Formula, is estimated to be in a range around 200% as at 31 December 2014. NN Group is considering to apply for the usage of a Partial Internal Model. The Solvency II capital ratio remains subject
to significant uncertainties, including the final specifications of the Solvency II regulations and the regulatory approval process.

This is remarkable in 2 ways. First, the Solvency II standard formula is relatively onerous so having 200% in the standard formulae is a good sign. Secondly, many competitors actually do not comment at all on their Solvency II ratios. Aegon for instance or more recently Talanx didn’t even give an indication. Swiss Life, which is not subject to Solvency II but the Swiss Solvency test (SST) also declined to give numbers.

One can of course interpret this in many ways but in my opinion, not communicating estimated SII ratios is much more a sign of weakness than anything else.

There is also a recent presentation to be found on NN website which clearly shows that their ALM matching in their big life Dutch company looks Ok. Plus they made a 200 mn EUR share repurchase (from ING) in February. Not a bad idea when the stock is valued at 0,43 times book. Overall, I am quite happy with NN despite the big fundamental headwinds for the industry. This is a stock I will invest more into when there is weakness in the stock price.

Romgaz

Romgaz issued preliminary numbers for 2014 as well. In my interpretation, they are incredibly good. Net income increased by +44%  to 3,72 RON, resulting in a P/E of ~9 even before taking into account net cash. Even better, the dividend will increase to 3,15 RON or roughly 9,5% yield at current prices.

As mentioned, Romgaz is pretty independent from market prizes for the time being as they are just starting to adjust to (higher) market prices.

In any other market, this should have had at least some impact on the share price, but for now the market seems to have ignored it completely. For fun, I ran a quick correlation analysis for Romgaz since the IPO. Romgaz has a pretty low correlation to the Romanian stock index with a value of around 0,45. It is however even less correlated to any European index. For the Stoxx 600 it is around 0,21. Interestingly for the Euro Stoxx Oil and Gas it is even lower at around 0,17.  As I do like uncorrelated investments a lot, this is a big plus for me.

Deutsch Bank started to cover Romgaz some days ago with a buy rating, although in my opinion with a pretty strange way of calculating the cost of capital.

Anyway, as a consequence of the great results, I increased my Romgaz position by around two percentage points to 4,2% of the portfolio at around 7,70 EUR per share.

UK Banking – A look at IPO Aldermore Plc (ISIN GB00BQQMCJ47)

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Within my Handelsbanken mini series (part 1, part 2, part 3), I have identified their UK business as one of the potential value drivers. So it was a luck and coincidence that a few days ago, Aldermore PLc, a “start-up” UK Bank went public.

Aldermore itself was founded only in 2009 by a then out-of-job former Barclay’s Banker called Philip Monks. They tried to go public already last year but had to pull the IPO in October.

As I have mentioned a couple of times, an IPO prospectus is always a good opportunity to learn about business models in general and about competitors and the specific sector as well.

There are some interesting parts from the prospectus on the UK banking market:

A high number of mergers and acquisitions in the sector has resulted in sector consolidation (Lloyds’acquisition of HBOS being the largest as well as a number of smaller building society takeovers such as Santander’s acquisition of Alliance & Leicester and Nationwide’s acquisitions of Cheshire, Derbyshire and Dunfermline Building Societies). This has resulted in the UK banking sector becoming one of the most concentrated and least competitive in Europe according to a Treasury Select Committee report published in 2011.

The report concluded that the top five UK banks controlled 75 per cent. of total gross new lending in total mortgages, 85 per cent. of the personal current account market and 62 per cent. of the savings account market.

For a potential shareholder in a UK banking business stock, “most concentrated and least competitive” sound not that bad as it implies some pricing power.

Handelsbanken is mentioned as one of the few foreign players:

Although there are exceptions (e.g. Handelsbanken), more generally, foreign banks have exited or reduced their presence in the UK market. For example, ING exited their mortgages and savings business and stopped writing new business in Asset Finance towards the end of 2012 and the UK business banking subsidiaries of Irish banks have restricted lending.
Furthermore, UK banks have been forced to carry out major cost-cutting exercises, including centralising credit selection functions; in some cases, ring-fencing retail operations; and spending significant amounts to improve the performance and security of their IT platforms.
UK banks have also been significantly impacted by legacy issues arising from, for example, the mis-selling of PPI and swaps and from legacy and underinvested infrastructure. Since 2011, the total bill for litigation,fines and customer redress has been £28.5 billion, equivalent to two-thirds of the cumulative profits of the top five banks over this period
 Customer dissatisfaction in the UK banking sector has also risen. One effect of this, as discussed in a recent Oliver Wyman report, is an increased propensity of customers to review and switch banking provider

Similar to my argument for Handelsbanken, UK customers seem to be fed up with UK banks and are open for new entrants like Handelsbanken and Aldermore.

As a result of these factors, there have been a number of new entrants to the UK banking market. They have adopted a variety of models targeting different credit segments (i.e. retail, SME, corporate) and adopted different distribution models (i.e. branches, intermediary, direct). These include retail-focused branch-based banks such as Metro Bank and Virgin Money and required disposals under State Aid such as Williams & Glyn (currently part of RBS) and TSB (majority owned by Lloyds Banking Group). In addition, these are specialist lenders such as Close Brothers, Shawbrook, Bibby and Paragon, challenging the share of the UK banking market controlled by the incumbents in targeted lending segments.

Aldermore however has a complete different set up than Handelsbanken. They don’t run any branches:

Aldermore does not have a traditional branch network and as such does not have the significant costs associated with running such a branch network.

Instead they run Online/Broker/intermediary based business model, claim to avoid unnecessary costs for branches.

The Directors believe that Aldermore’s branch-free distribution model is better suited to the digital era,with the regional offices representing the physical footprint that Aldermore requires to service its SME customers. The absence of a large, under-utilised branch network enables Aldermore to distribute products and service customers more cost effectively

Interestingly, their actual cost income ratio 2014 is  60% vs. 53% at Handelsbanken. This might have to do with size (Handelbanken is 2-3 times bigger). So it is clearly not a “no brainer” to run an online bank only.

What I didn’t like about Aldermore:

– Intermediary model is not that easy. They don’t have direct client contact, clients are “owned” by brokers
– How do they cope in a downturn test if work outs are necessary and they don’t have client contact ?
– large potential bonuses for management
– targets for management are only EPS and Share price

They do state an explicit ROE ambition:

The Directors are targeting a return on equity of approximately 20 per cent. by the end of the financial year ending 31 December 2016.

Targeting is great, but having it included in compensation would be even better.

Could Aldermore be the same story like Admiral 10-15 years ago ?

I think that Aldermore differs in a very important way from Admiraml: It is not structured at as capital-light model, Aldermore keeps the risk on its balance sheet and will at some point in time need additional capital if they grow like this, which then will dilute shareholders.

Additionally, they are not active in the comparison space. I do think that in the long run will bite into their profitability as the comparison siteswill be able to charge them significant comissions for referals. In the insurance space, referral fees in many cases are already as expensive as sales commissions for agents.

A good reminder that not every new and online based financial company is “the next Admiral” is for instance Vardia, the Norwegian direct insurance newcomer. After explosive growth, out of the blue they had to announce a recapitalization recently. The stock price of course got hammered.

Summary:

Aldermore is clearly riding the wave of disgruntled UK bank clients, but I would not invest there. I don’t see a real competitive advantage,at least not for now.
Valuation wise, the company trades at around 2,5x book value and 15 times earnings which is OK but not cheap. The biggest risk in my opinion is that with their aggressive growth, the might attract a lot of bad risks. Their long-term underwriting abilities will be tested in the next down turn for sure. Anyway, the Aldermore IPO clearly shows that there is room for smaller players in the UK and that there is a good chance for Handelsbanken to grow for quite some time.

Additionally i would argue that the UK banking sector still looks attractive compared to other countries. In Germany for instance retail and commercial banking is dominated by Government backed banks (Sparkassen) which have a built-in advantage of extremely low funding cost. The local UK market in comparison looks much better, especially as interest rates are still positive…..

Some links

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Activist fund Marcato’s presentation on BNY Mellon including a good insight into the business model of custodian banks (h/t market folly)

Alpha Vulture blog with a valuation update of FFP Holding (Peugeot)

Must read: Sequoia Funds 2014 letter (h/t market folly)

“Appraisal Arbitrage” – An easy way to make money for sophisticated investors? (I don’t think this works technically in Europe/Germany).

A very inspring TED talk from Ricardo Semmler, previous CEO and owner of Brazilian SEMCO on how to run a company without (almost any) rules.

Some signs that the start-up boom might be peaking for this cycle. Another, much surer sign is when the CEO of a struggling coal based German utility goes to Silicon Valley for an inspirational vacation trip.

Short cuts: AS Creation, Fortum, KAS Bank annual report

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AS Creation

As Creation is a stock I owned in the past. Last November I had quickly updated the case and written the following:

In any case, I don’t think AS Creation is interesting at the current level of 30 EUR. At a 2014 P/E of 15-20 (before any extra write-offs on Russia) there seems to be quite some turn around fantasy being priced in.

Just a few days ago, AS Creation came out with an anouncement. There will be no dividend and the loss for the year 2014 is 9,3 mn EUR, at the upper end of the communicated range. In parallel, the CFO left the company. The loss seems triggered by a 10 mn EUR FX loss and a 5 mn EUR fine in France. They did not give further details but one can assume that the German business wasn’t that great either.

In any case a good reminder that despite cheap fundamentals, not every “value stock” is good value.

Fortum

Fortum is also a stock which I owned in the past. I sold them in autumn 2012 because I was not really convinced by the idea anymore.

Looking at the chart, we can see that Fortum has done OK since then, especially compared to like German utilities like RWE, which looked a lot cheaper back then:

Again a reminder that cheap doesn’t mean good. The even more interesting aspect is that a few days ago, Fortum finalised the sale of the Swedish power distribution grid to a consortium of pension plans and insurers for 4.4 bn EUR.

According to Reuters, the multiples were quite “Juicy” for the seller:

The deal values the network at around 16.6 times earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA), the same as for Fortum’s Finnish grid sale in 2013.

16,6 times EBITDA for a business which is quite comparable to my portfolio stock Electrica is an interesting price point. Clearly, you need to take some kind of discount for a recently privatized Romanian company, but I think it clearly shows what kind of prices especially pension and insurance companies are ready to pay. This makes me feel even better about the prospects of Electrica than before.

KAS Bank annual report

When I looked first at KAS Bank 2 and a half years ago, i was drawn in mostly by a very low valuation and the solid business model with a good “mean reversion” potential. that’s what I wrote back then:

Summary:

KAS Bank for me looks like a very interesting opportunity within the banking sector due to the following reasons:

+ attractive specialist business model (custodian)
+ cheap valuation even based on current “bottom of the cycle” earnings
+ valuation depressed because of overall hostility against banks
+ low or no analyst coverage
+ reversion to the mean speculation a lot less risky than with normal banks as virtually no risk of dilution (even Basel III standards are met by a wide margin)
+ potential upside ~100% over the next 3-5 years plus dividends+ low correlation / beta good portfolio diversifier

The upside has realized much quicker than i thought. As of now, including dividends, the stock return +75%. So good analysis, great return ? Well not really. Actually, if I am honest, this was mostly luck as I made a big mistake or omission when i analyzed the stock: I did not look at the pension liability. And this despite the fact that I have written and warned quite often about pensions.

In Kas Bank’s case I have ignored that because the plan was funded. That was a mistake and I will show you why.

Looking into the 2014 annual report of KAS Bank, we can see that they made a nice 24 mn EUR profit this year, which includes the one time effect of the canceled German JV. However, total equity DEcreased from 213 to 194 mn EUR. As the 2014 dividend is around 10 mn EUR, the question is clearly: Where did the other 35 mn EUR equity go ?

The solution to this question can be found on page 52, in the Comprehensive Income statement: KAS Bank lost 52,6 mn EUR pre tax) because of the increase in its pension liability. 2014 has been a brutal year for pensions. The discount rate has been reduced significantly. In 2013 I didn’t pay attention, but KAS Bank used 3,9% which was on the very high-end of permitted rates for EUR. In 2014 they had to slash this to 2,2% (page 80). It gets even crazier if we look at the gross numbers on page 81. The gross DBO increase 105 mn EUR from 182 mn to 287 mn. Luckily, some of that increase could be countered by asset increases. From an overfunding of 40 mn EUR, the plan went to break even. What really surprised me is the duration of the plan with around 22 years. The problem for me is the following: Despite the current funded status, there is a significant amount of risk in the plan. The gross size of the plan is 1,5 times the equity of KAS Bank. The run a significant equity allocation (85 mn EUR or ~ 45% of KAS Banks Equity). So in a scenario with a stock market crash with continuing low-interest rates, KAS Bank would pretty quickly be forced to do a capital increase.

Additionally, the current environment is clearly not helping KAS Bank in its core business. A custody bank is always deposit rich which is a problem now. Another second level problem is mentioned on page 18:

Treasury income, mainly securities lending, decreased by 20% to EUR 11.4 million (2013: EUR 14.3 million). The lower income from securities lending was primarily due to a market wide liquidity surplus which decreased
the prices for securities lending services.

This decrease happened even before the ECB started pumping liquidity into the markets.

So overall, I have been very lucky so far. I didn’t take into account the pension liability in my first analysis and fundamentals got worse for the business itself. Nevertheless I made good money because i bought cheap enough. Optically, the stock still looks priced oK at P/B 1, trailing P/E of 7 and 5,6% dividend yield, but fundamentally, especially looking at ultra low interest rates for quite some time, KAS Bank is in my view now at fair value.

However, I didn’t want to stretch my luck too far and therefore I sold the whole position at around 11,50 EUR per share.

Handelsbanken (part 3) – where is the upside & valuation

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As this turned out to be again a pretty long post, a quick “management summary” in the beginning:

1. I do think that Handelsbanken’s UK business represents a significant opportunity for long-term growth
2. Additionally, I think that well run banks are a good opportunity as banks are in general disliked and overall risks in banking have been greatly reduced
3. However, at current valuation levels, Handelsbanken is too expensive. I would be a buyer at around 350 SEK per share or ~-15% below current prices

After trying to “kill” the Handelsbanken investment case last week, now in my third post I will look at the potential upside.

From my side, there are 2 potential “catalysts” which COULD imply future upside, which are:

1. Significant growth potential in UK and Netherlands
2. (Relative) revaluation of the banking sector in the medium term

1. Significant growth potential in UK and Netherlands

If you read the Handelsbanken annual reports over the last few years, it is not exactly a secret that they have great success in the UK. This is a table I compiled from the annual reports which shows the development of the UK branches:

Branches Operating profit Total OP UK/total
2009 62 177 13727 1.29%
2010 83 417 14770 2.82%
2011 104 639 16563 3.86%
2012 133 1006 17108 5.88%
2013 161 1173 18088 6.48%
2014 178 1652 19212 8.60%

Since the end of the financial crisis in 200, Handelsbanken managed to increase operating profit in the UK 10 times and the UK business reached almost 9% of total operating profits in 2014.

Despite a higher cost/income ratio in the UK (~55%) vs the home market in Sweden (~33%), profitability as measured by ROE is already at the same level. Opening bank branches is clearly a cost factor, so one should expect cost income ratios to even go down in the UK over time.

Gross margins in the UK are clearly higher than in Sweden. In my opinion, this has two possible explanations: First, overall interest rates are higher in the UK which makes it easier to charge more. Secondly, most of the competitors (Barclay’s, HSBC, Lloyd’s, TSB) have large legacy portfolios and need to earn margins on new business.

The big question is: can Handelsbanken continue to grow and how big could this become ? One clear driver of the growth is that UK customers are fed up with their local banks. Most of them needed bail outs (RBS, Lloyds, TSB), damaged their reputation by aggressively selling questionable products and/or tax evasion etc. (HSBC’s Gulliver with his Swiss bank account as a last example).

Handelsbanken’s market share in UK so far is tiny. I tried to collect some numbers. In this 2011 report for instance, Handelsbanken didn’t even show up. This is how market shares for instance looked for personal account:

Normally, as in many industries, size does have advantages also in retail banking. Advertising for instance are expenses which scale well. In the UK however banks with large market shares face strong headwinds as outlined in this article. Interestingly, Lloyd’s with its leading market share has a cost-income-ratio of currently around 67% and this number has improved a lot over the last year. So it’s quite interesting to see that the “dwarf” Handelsbanken is already much more efficient than the big guys.

Overall, without having examined the UK market in more detail, I do think there is room for Handelsbanken to expand and reinvest capital at attractive rates for some time.

Personally, I like the organic growth of Handelsbanken a lot. In general I find that especially in the early stages, organic growth is often undervalued. Stock investors prefer often fast growth via acquisitions. You can book a lot of accounting special effects etc. and increase EPS per share much quicker. As we have seen often however, the risk of M&A deals is a lot higher and more often than not, those deals backfire and sometimes even sink the acquirer.

In the UK for instance, recently spun-off TSB has already been approached by Spanish Bank Sabadell for a potential take over a few days ago. This is of course a quick way to add a lot of branches but also a much more risky one.

Netherlands:

Netherlands for Handelsbanken is a comparable small market. with currently 20 branches (up from 18 in 2013), the business grew by ~17%. In principle, I think the situation could be similar to the UK. a lot of the dutch banks have big legacy issues and need to earn margins. However at the moment I would look at the Netherlands as an option and not as something to actually take into account when valuing Handelsbanken.

2. (Relative) revaluation of the banking sector in the medium term

I have quickly touched this topic in the two other posts already. Banks are generally considered as “bad investments” by most participants in the stock market. This is clearly justified if we look back the last 10 years or even longer. Whereas a company like Nestle is considered a safe and promising investment at a P/E of around 23, banks are considered a pure gamble even when the trade at fractions of those multiples.

For me, this is both, a lesson in how to look at historical data and a potentially big structural investment opportunity. Let me explain why.

The main arguments against banks is that they are highly leveraged and too risky. The risk is both individual and systemic (Lehman scenario). In my opinion, the systemic risk component has been greatly reduced by what happened since the financial crisis. A lot of mechanisms have been created to prevent a second event like the run that happened in 2008/2009. For me the most important are:

– collateralization of derivatives
– bank resolution systems both national (e.g. SOFFIN) and on international level
– clear commitment and mandates of central banks
– significant increase in capital requirements internationally

For current shareholders of large legacy banks, this is not very funny at the moment. Whereas most non-banks pay dividends and buy back shares like crazy, banks have to raise capital and postpone dividends in order to shore up their capital. And clearly, in many of the mega-banks, there is plenty of toxic waste on the balance sheet to justify low valuations.

On the other hand, this creates in my opinion great opportunities for players like Handelsbanken which have little toxic waste on their balance sheet and are run efficiently. The systemic risk for those players has become a lot smaller as a potential bankruptcy of one of the old mega-banks will most likely have only little effects on other banks in the future.

The individual risk of a classic and disciplined lending bank in my opinion is relatively limited if it is run by the right people. I do not think that a conservatively run bank is riskier than any other business. I know this is a somehow controversial standpoint but to me, a standard banking business model looks a lot less complex than for instance a multi national branded consumer goods company. For me this kind of blind distrust in the banking business model creates a very interesting opportunity.

Yes, banking in general will be much more dull in the future, but als a lot safer.

The second issue I want to touch quickly is the issue of historical data. Yes, historically, banks look like terrible investments because many of them have been wiped out in the financial crisis. I cannot prove it statistically, but I think banks are also the reason why suddenly low P/E and low P/B strategies seemed to have stopped working. The now favored metric by many “data miners”, the EV has the advantage that it automatically filters out any financial company. But looking into the rear view mirror is not always the best way to make investment decisions. If you would have been a stock investor after WW II, you might not have ever invested into German or Japanese shares because they have been wiped out. But a World War luckily does not happen every 5-10 years and neither does a full-blown financial crisis.

I think that there is a good chance that due to the pressure of capital markets, in the future, returns for banks could be relatively a lot better than they have in the past, assuming that the basic banking model is here to stay. The market will squeeze banks so much that those who remain will earn good ROEs again at some point in the future. And good banks will earn very good ROEs.

Valuation exercise

There are many ways to evaluate companies. I prefer simple ones. For banks, I consider ROE and P/B as the most important factors which drive long-term returns, so a valuation model should focus on those metrics.

To have a starting point, I make the following assumptions:

– ROE will improve to 15% over 5 years (from currently 12,4%) and will stay there (15 year average is 16,5%)
– P/B will remain constant at 2,1 (15 year average is 1,7)
– Divdend payout will be 25% and handelsbanken will be able to reinvest at the above assumed ROEs

The following table translates this into a simple IRR calculation:

Current Price book 2,1                    
ROE 15%                    
                       
ROI 7,1%                    
                       
                       
                       
    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Book Value 200 218,8 240,1 264,4 292,1 323,9 360,4 400,9 446,0 496,2 552,0
ROE 12,5% 13% 13,50% 14% 14,50% 15% 15% 15% 15% 15% 15%
EPS 25 28,44 32,41 37,01 42,36 48,59 54,05 60,13 66,90 74,43 82,80
Implicit P/E 16,8 16,2 15,6 15,0 14,5 14,0 14,0 14,0 14,0 14,0 14,0
Retention ratio 75% 0,75 0,75 0,75 0,75 0,75 0,75 0,75 0,75 0,75 0,75 0,75
Dividend   7,1 8,1 9,3 10,6 12,1 13,5 15,0 16,7 18,6 20,7
Target Price   459,4 504,2 555,2 613,5 680,2 756,8 841,9 936,6 1.042,0 1.159,2
                       
NPV CFs -409 7,1 8,1 9,3 10,6 12,1 13,5 15,0 16,7 18,6 1.179,9
                       
IRR 12,9%                  

Under those assumptions, Handelsbanken would be trading at 1.160 in 10 years time and returning me 12,9% p.a.

Now comes the interesting part: If I would want to see my 15% p.a. which I normally require, I would need to change assumptions. First I could move the purchase price down from 409 SEK. In my model, I could pay 342 SEks per share and get my 15% annual return. I could also increase my P/B multiple to 2,6 to get my 15% or I could increase the ROE to 21% after year 6 to get 15%. To be honest, both, the multiple expansion and the ROE increase seem much to aggressive to me.

So the question clearly is: Is 12,9% potential return enough or should I insist on 15% ? With the 10 year government rate in Sweden at 1%, the 12,9% would indicate a potential equity premium of 11,9% which is far more than one would normally expect from the market. On the other hand, no one knows what long-term interest rates will be in 10 years time, so betting fully on today’s low rates is also not the best solution.

This return is also driven by the assumption that Handelsbanken can continue to reinvest 75% of their profits at attractive ROEs. In Handelsbanken’s case, I don’t think that this is unrealistic. However if they could for instance only reinvest 60% and pay out the rest in dividends, then the expected return would drop to 10,7% p.a.

Anyway, for now, I would not feel comfortable investing at the current stock price level.

Summary:

At the end of this mini-series, it has become relatively clear to me that Svenska Handelsbanken is really a great company, a true “Outsider” in regard to its business model and culture. Additionally, I do think that they have good growth opportunities in UK, which allows them to reinvest capital for some time to come attractive ROE’s.

In general, I believe than well run banks are one of the few potential bargains left in the market as investors hate them and do not see the greatly improved fundamentals of the financial “plumbing”.

Nevertheless, I do think that Handelsbanken does not fulfill my return requirements as the current price seems to have priced in some of this growth already. Unfortunately i was very slow in discovering Handelsbanken., as I could have bought them at an attractive only a few months ago. Nevertheless, I will keep them as my prime candidate on my watch list. I would love to add this “Outsider company” to my long-term value portfolio.

But again, patience is important. another positive aspect of this exercise is that I know now much better than before what I am looking for when I analyze a bank.

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