Depending on your perspective on certain “excited” areas of the market and “extremes” in the political spectrum, we are currently engaged in a real-time exercise regarding what catalysts bring an end to these phenomena. Are the catalysts to end those historical moments different? By day, I have to think about the former; by night, I ponder the latter. And we know the role that social media plays in both of these realms. It’s worth recalling that for one of the past extreme moments, the reign of terror led by Joseph McCarthy, the social media of the day played a key …
Author: Daniel Peris
Tulips & T$sl@s. Two charts. Just saying….
Defining risk in a high dividend-paying portfolio. It’s not what most people think.
As the manager of a high dividend-paying portfolio, I necessarily take dividend risk. The yields in the portfolio are, as you might expect, much higher than the market’s miserly 1.6%. Individual securities in the portfolio have had, can have, and will have yields that can be in the high single digit range, and even sometimes low double-digit range. Very high yields in a low yielding market is admittedly a sign of dividend risk, but not an assurance of it. And that’s what the goal of the enterprise is: to take an appropriate amount of dividend risk in order to maximize …
At the intersection of the Random Book Project & lockdown: War & Peace.
#6: Leo Tolstoy, War & Peace, in two volumes. (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1984, originally published in 1865). Marked 3 rubles, 70 kopeeks, but with a Beriozka sticker indicating 5.55. Exchange rate at the time was $1.26 per 1.00 ruble so the set cost $7.00 How did I get it? Bought it when I spent a semester in Moscow my junior year in 1984. Others went to London or Florence. For reasons that still elude me, I went to the Soviet Union. Who does that? Why? While the book is timeless, my copy of it is not. The mass produced, acid-paper Soviet …
Putting S&P 500 Index “dividend growth” in context….
For those of you keeping score, the S&P 500 Index managed to eke out in 2020 a small increase in the index dividend, 0.07%, over 2019. $58.24 went to $58.28. That’s pretty impressive given the economic circumstances and the reality that dividend-focused products had a tough time in 2020 actually collecting their dividends. The economic downturn affected the Old-Economy dividend payers more than the New-Economy work-from-home companies. So bully for the S&P 500 Index. But it is important to put that achievement in context. Growing the dividend off such a low base isn’t really much of an achevement. The S&P …
The dividend chorus is getting louder. Will it make a difference?
Blackrock is jumping on the dividend bandwagon. According to a recent Bloomberg article, Blackrock is calling for strong dividend payers to benefit in 2021 from the paucity of income generated in the bond market. Their argument is more in regard to fixed income securities than it is versus other equities, but they are still highlighting the attractiveness of higher-dividend paying equities in a yield-starved market. Blackrock joins a lengthening list of market participants and commentators making the same call. Will it make a difference? Interest rates have been low and declining for years without a major rotation into dividend stocks …
“Dividends will have their day again,” says the WSJ. So will business investors.
Happy to have this Dividends will have their day again call out from the Wall Street Journal, but it is worth filling out the story a bit. Distributable profits are the most natural, logical way of generating return for minority shareholders in an on-going, for-profit enterprise. If that enterprise happens to be publicly traded they are called dividends. It is a form of business ownership. Successful businesses that do not distribute their excess cashflow to company owners can be owned as stocks, and stocks only. Their only cash return comes from going into the market place and selling a stake–hopefully at a …
Floating above history….
Nearly forty years after encountering The Education of Henry Adams in a college classroom, I was recently treated to a summary as to why the work was and remains so fascinating. Dan Chiasson’s New Yorker review reminds readers of how Adams floated over history as much as he lived in it and wrote about it. Adam’s wonder at the new technology at the turn of the 20th century is as fresh today as when it was written over a century ago.
NBN Interview with Paul Donovan: Profit & Prejudice
Prejudice is bad for business. That’s the long and short of it. Paul Donovan amply documents this in his recent work of Shiller narrative economics, Profit and Prejudice: The Luddites of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Routledge, 2020). With that out in the open, shouldn’t prejudice in business cease? Well, that’s a tall order. Not every business person is a profit maximizing Fisherian with an MBA from the University of Chicago. Pointing out to prejudiced business people that they are leaving money on the table is, on its own, unlikely to put an end to their discriminatory practices. Culture matters, as …
Markets are everywhere, even where they are strictly forbidden….
Markets are everywhere, including where they strictly forbidden. This excellent research by Jim Heinzen on the Soviet second economy just came out in Slavic Review. The full article is behind a paywall but should be accessible via universities and libraries. Link is here. Below is the abstract from the Slavic Review site. Soviet Entrepreneurs in the Late Socialist Shadow Economy: The Case of the Kyrgyz Affair James Heinzen Supported by new archival material, this article delves deeply into one landmark criminal case to explore key aspects of the social, economic, and cultural history of illegal production and markets in the …
December’s real-time test of market efficiency.
We have this month both a test of and an immediate HBS case study in market efficiency. A highly innovative electronic vehicle company is about to enter the major market index. Is that a problem for the many investors in the index funds and ETFs based on the S&P 500 Index, or are things as they should be in an efficient market? Market efficiency is presumed to be greatest in large-cap, liquid, well-researched companies. The EV company clears all three thresholds easily, with a market cap of over a half trillion (!) dollars, plenty of trading volume, and 36 separate …
What if we counted differently……
Saijel Kishan’s recent Bloomberg article, provocatively titled, How Wrong was Milton Friedman is intriguing on many levels. It summarizes the work of George Serafeim, an HBS professor who wants to change how we measure company success and failure. Specifically, he wants to reward and punish companies on the income statement based on ESG impacts. That is, he proposes to put a dollar value on diversity or lack thereof, on polluting or not, etc. And then have those companies report profit and loss after consideration of their social impact. It’s an ambitious plan, and some would say just a natural extension …
Dividend tax rates….
A collar tug, indeed, but dividend investors have survived a wide variety of tax climates. Main issue is not the rate increase itself, but the differential between div and cap gains rates. Better when they are similar…. harder when they are not. Wall Street Journal opinion piece: The Dividend Tax Canary – WSJ
NBN Interview with Vadim Shneyder: Russia’s Capitalist Realism
Vadim Shneyder’s new book, Russia’s Capitalist Realism: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov (Northwestern, 2020) examines how the literary tradition that produced the great works of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Anton Chekhov responded to the dangers and possibilities posed by Russia’s industrial revolution. During Russia’s first tumultuous transition to capitalism, social problems became issues of literary form for writers trying to make sense of economic change. The new environments created by industry, such as giant factories and mills, demanded some kind of response from writers but defied all existing forms of language. Prepare yourself for an innovative perspective on Anna Karenina, The Idiot and other 19th-century …
At the intersection of the Random Book Project and our current predicament.
#5: Guido de Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961, reprint of OUP original from 1927). No price. How did I get it: Been carrying it around with me since graduate school. Why: Rereading this classic account of “the experiment” in classical liberalism, to remind me how we got here, and how easy it is/would be to foul it up, and end “the experiment.” De Ruggiero’s work was published as a rebuff to the fascism which had taken over Italy at the time. Relevant conclusion: classical liberalism cannot be assumed. It has to be worked at by each …
GM’s Alfred Sloane on dividends (1935).
Alfred Sloane was the legendary, long-time leader of General Motors. In 1935, he shared his views on GM’s dividend policy in the New York Times. The point is that the company that dominated an industry for over a half century felt completely comfortable paying robust dividends while investing in its business. Any answer from the Fab 15? (Google, Amazon, FB, etc) Pdf of the column in the attachment, courtesy of the NYT. Sloan 1935
The “non-cash” charge and the business investor.
An investment philosophy that considers stock market investing as simply another form of business investment will necessarily focus on the basics of business investing, such as cashflows. That is often at ends with how the stock market works. Case in point is the infamous “non-cash” charge…… Wall Street brokerages and too many investors are delighted to ignore non-cash charges because, well, they are non-cash. It’s worth reminding investors what every business owner knows: that those non-cash impairments more often than not started out as cash outflows, usually for acquisitions. A non-cash impairment of goodwill or asset write down is the …
NBN Interview with Jonathan Schneer: The Lockhart Plot
History in the making can be messy. As a tale told years later by historians, it is usually a clean narrative, with a beginning, a middle, and a mostly logical and foreordained end. Much of that messiness gets lost. Not in Jonathan Schneer’s new book, The Lockhart Plot: Love Betrayal, Assassination and Counter-Revolution in Lenin’s Russia (Oxford UP, 2020). Schneer’s recounts the story of a young British diplomat, Bruce Lockhart, sent to Soviet Russia soon after the October Revolution in 1917. Initially seeking some sort of accommodation with the Bolsheviks, Lockhart ends up plotting to overthrow the regime. The plot–set for …
NBN Interview with JC de Swaan: Seeking Virtue in Finance
JC de Swaan does not shy from a challenge. In his new book, Seeking Virtue in Finance: Contributing to Society in a Conflicted Industry (Cambridge University Press, 2020), de Swaan, argues that it is possible to work in finance and not fall prey to the worst ethical ills of a profit maximizing industry. A lecturer at Princeton and partner in at Wall Street hedge fund, de Swaan spent years chronicling examples of virtuous behavior in finance. He distills his research into four “pillars” of ethical behavior for financial professionals. They include 1. Customers first, 2. Social wealth creation 3. Humanistic leadership and 4. Engaged …
Are vanishing dividends a good idea? Hardly.
Exercising business ownership through the stock market is hard enough. The pressure to be a stock speculator is overwhelming. And it just got a little harder. A Bloomberg Opinion column from October 20, entitled, “Those Vanishing Stock Dividends Should Stay That Way,” took up the case of a junk rated (BB), highly cyclical mining company that cancelled its miniscule dividend in March of this year. The piece trumpeted that the stock’s share price rallied sharply off the bottom of the market that month. The author wrote that “shareholders appeared to send the message that they would prefer [the company] put …
A thoughtful dissent from the ruling investing orthodoxy…..
Aswath Damodaran’s recent Musing on Markets blogpost (from Sept 21) offers a thoughtful dissent from the ruling orthodoxy on ESG investing. He highlights how the current “hype” (his word) leaves critical analytical questions “unanswered or answered sloppily.” For example, he asks, “Do companies perform better because they are socially conscious (good) companies, or do companies that are doing well find it easier to do good?” If the latter, “researchers will find that ESG and performance move together, but it is not ESG that is causing good performance, but good performance which is allowing companies to be socially good.” He points …
NBN Finance Interview with Tom Levenson: Money for Nothing
Modern finance isn’t really all that modern. Three centuries ago, Great Britain’s need for money to fight its wars, the appearance of joint stock companies, and the emerging quantification of all aspects of life converged to create new notions and forms of money and investments. And then there was a spectacular bubble in 1720. The South Sea stock rose and fell quickly, but the financing structures remained and last to this day in evolved form. In his new book Money for Nothing: The Scientists, Fraudsters, and Corrupt Politicians Who Reinvented Money, Panicked a Nation, and Made the World Rich (Random House, …
NBN Interview with Gene Ludwig: The Vanishing American Dream
Gene Ludwig cares. The former banker, government regulator, and serial entrepreneur cares deeply about the hollowing out of the American middle class over the past several decades, not least of all in his hometown of York, PA. So he gathered the country’s best and brightest in 2019 for a conference at Yale Law School to come up with specific policy proposals that can reverse that process. The details of what has happened make for difficult but necessary reading. In The Vanishing American Dream: A Frank Look at the Economic Realities Facing Middle- and Lower-Income Americans, (Disruption Books) the policy proposals to rebuild …
The 2020 election in historical context.
Heading into our presidential election, it is worth reminding the electorate how unusual our circumstances are. I am not referring to the country’s extreme political division and dysfunction, but instead to our framework of classical liberalism where individuals matter so much in a system of governance that they are actually asked to vote on the leadership of the country. From a historical perspective, that is an extremely rare approach to the management of complex societies. But to many of us, it does not seem abnormal at all. In fact, our system of representative democracy within a legal and financial system …
Same problem–global warming–but very different answers.
Is there a consensus on the best response to global warming? Not even close. Left and right both bring their own tools, math, and, most notably, agendas–climate related and non-climate related–to their policy prescriptions. From the economic right, Bjorn Lomborg offers economic growth to increase adaptation to a warming planet, as well as market-based innovation to mitigate carbon generation. From the left, Robert Pollin (and his co-author Noam Chomsky) put forth an Eco-Socialist New Green Deal. Listen to the NBN interview with the former here, and with the latter here.
NBN Interview with Robert Pollin: Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal
Economist Robert Pollin has teamed up with Noam Chomsky to produce a manifesto for the New Green Deal in Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (Verso). Their plan attempts to keep the planet from heating up too much while simultaneously redressing the economic wrongs that they blame substantially on unfettered capitalism. Not everyone will agree that eco-socialism is the answer to global warming, but all participants in the debate will want to understand the wide range of policy proposals that are being brought to the table. Listen to the NBN interview here.
The FT on the current challenges of investing for dividends.
Quoted in the FT’s Big Read today, on the current challenges of being a dividend investor/manager. Lots of individuals/retirees directly affected when dividends under pressure due to business interruption or shifting market preferences. https://www.ft.com/content/2719966c-b228-4300-bdc0-dcbe2f7050fd
NBN Interview with Joshua Greenberg: Bank Notes and Shinplasters
What is money? Really, what is money? It turns out that the answer is not so simple. During the course of the 20th century, most of us have gotten used to the notion of a single medium of exchange based on Federal Reserve notes which we call dollars. They look the same, feel the same, and have the same use everywhere in the country. We are so comfortable with that medium of exchange that we are now increasingly doing away with the paper and accepting a digital version of said money. The convenience of having a single and stable currency …
NBN Interview with James Pearce: The weaponization of history in Russia.
History matters in Russia. It really matters, so much so that the state has a “historical policy” to help legitimize itself and support its policy agenda. In The Use of History in Putin’s Russia (Vernon Press, 2020), James C. Pearce examines how the past is perceived in contemporary Russia and analyses the ways in which the Russian state uses history to create a broad social consensus and forge a national identity. Listen to the NBN interview here.
NBN Interview with Bjorn Lomborg: The economics of climate policy.
Should climate change policy be subject to a cost-benefit analysis leading to a variety of policy choices? Or is it so critical that the only “proper” path is immediate and extreme carbon reduction, regardless of the costs and the impact of those measures on the welfare of the population? Bjorn Lomborg’s new and controversial work, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet (Basic Books, 2020) leans strongly in the direction of the former. Conducting that analysis, he comes to some shocking conclusions, notably that the “optimal” mix of global warming and …