Drugging the market

I'm waiting for my man
Here he comes, he's all dressed in black
Beat up shoes and a big straw hat
He's never early, he's always late
First thing you learn is you always gotta wait. ...


I'm waiting for my man
Baby don't you holler, darlin' don't you bawl and shout
I'm feeling good, you know I'm gonna work it on out
I'm feeling good, I'm feeling oh so fine
Until tomorrow, but that's just some other time
I'm waiting for my man.

-- Velvet Underground, "I'm Waiting for the Man"

We shook our head in disbelief last week as the market rallied on hot air -- specifically, a verbal formula from European Central Bank head Mario Draghi that the bank would "do whatever it takes" to save the euro. He might as well have said, "We will do whatever it takes to defy the law of gravity."

Not that we didn't take advantage of the farcical buy-up in the U.S. stock market. We sold the dreaded Nokia bought two postings earlier. The trade worked exactly as we'd hoped: scalped a few points, got our money back with some extra, and now have more cash to invest opportunistically.

But our own fortunes aside, it was not an encouraging sign. The markets now are a branch of politics, reacting to signs and portents like an ancient Roman augurs -- only instead of interpreting the flights of birds, they interpret politicians' flights of fancy.

Central banking bail bondsmen provide the tales that wag the dog. Or to vary the metaphor, the drugs that keep institutional investors on life support. Bailouts, or payday loans from central banks, are actually referred to in news stories as "injections" of capital, or an economic "fix."

The Telegraph is a sad kind of debased "conservative" paper, but it is more honest in reporting the real possibility of worldwide financial systemic collapse than any mainstream U.S. source. Just read these articles it published yesterday, albeit hidden behind the glare of the Olympics shuck-and-jive ceremonies:

World holds its breath as America's debt battle looms: After Britain's disappointing GDP figures, America announced on Friday that its growth is slowing. As debts soar, can the US haul the world's most important economy around? (Link) 

Spanish bail-out 'impossible', experts warn (Link)

Keywords: [European Central Bank] [Mario Draghi] [Nokia] [Euro]

Ghost Money's author does not claim to know what he's talking about. He is not an investment advisor. This site is for entertainment, if it can even manage that.

Yield of dreams

Was it only five years ago that millions of citizens happily dropped their cash into no-risk Treasurys and bank CDs that earned them respectable money? It is hard to remember now, following so much time at the Banktown Strutters Ball.

The abnormal normal era, having given us the Fed's SIRP (subatomic interest rate policy) until the economic recovery or the sun's death, whichever comes first, means there are no longer any safe + profitable interest plays. Many of those who formerly craved guaranteed investments still do -- except their flight to "safety" in Treasury paper is now guaranteed to lose money after inflation sinks its teeth into returns.

Ah, but others refuse to take no yield for an answer. In the new world disorder, some gravitate toward the AT&Ts and Johnson & Johnsons. We ourselves own a dust mote's worth of Southern Co. (SO), which keeps the lights on in Georgia and thereabouts.

Still others have a taste for raw meat. Ten-percent-plus yields. You can find them ... although they tend to be, by traditional standards, jolly strange contraptions.

In a SIRP world, anything that offers a licentious yield is bound to be tweaky. You'd better understand what you're getting into.

Jason Zweig, in the Wall Street Journal, has a cautionary tale about an entity called Cornerstone Advisors, which flogs three closed-end funds. (Tip of the stovepipe hat to Kid Dynamite.)

At Cornerstone, investors are receiving "distribution yields" of roughly 22% of net asset value, and the shares trade for much more than the value of their underlying assets. According to the WSJ Market Data Group, the Cornerstone funds are the three highest-yielding of the 657 closed-end funds in the U.S.

Twenty-two percent? Champagne for the house! Uh, wait.

Most of the yield at Cornerstone, however, doesn't come from its investments. In past years, it came from giving investors some of their original assets back. Now, it comes out of money the funds' investors have just added.

In each of the past five years, the Cornerstone Progressive Return fund distributed more than 10 times as much in dividends and other payouts as it earned in net investment income.

It sounds like the Cornerstone managers would be right at home in Congress.

Anyway, Cornerstone -- like the government -- has discovered that you can bribe people with their own money. It's legal, and as Kid Dynamite notes, Cornerstone spells it out for anyone who can squint.

Zweig concludes:

Investing has sunk to this: People are willing to pay a big premium for the privilege of getting their own money back, after fat fees, without interest—apparently because it gives them the illusion of earning a high yield.

Desperate people do desperate things. Investors who are starved for yield do desperately stupid things.

Does this mean that no high-yielding fund or stock can be trusted? Of course -- in the investing world nothing can be trusted implicitly. But an occasional siren's song may be listened to. Ghost Money has already written about Prospect Capital (PSEC). Another company that is much in favor these days is American Capital Agency Corporation (AGNC). 

Todd Johnson, who impresses us as a shrewd analyst of income-generating investments, sums up the case for AGNC here. Ghost Money likes that its last six dividends have been dividends, not return of capital.

The company's press releases say that AGNC "is a real estate investment trust that invests in agency pass-through securities and collateralized mortgage obligations" -- quick! The smelling salts! Slap slap, stay with us -- "for which the principal and interest payments are guaranteed by a U.S. Government agency or a U.S. Government-sponsored entity." There you go, backed by the United States government. What could be more rock-solid?

Ghost Money doesn't fully understand the business model, but it is leveraged and seems to be an artificial creature of the SIRP. We think it dissolves at the end of the interest rate night. That could be a while yet.

Full disclosure: Nothing to disclose. We do not own AGNC.

Keywords: [yield] [interest rates] [Cornerstone][Kid Dynamite] [Jason Zweig] [AGNC]

Ghost Money's author does not claim to know what he's talking about. He is not an investment advisor. This site is for entertainment, if it can even manage that.

Buying the world's most hated stock

Tossed some money this morning in a wastebasket labeled "Nokia" (NOK). A hundred shares @ $1.72. 

This is the sort of move The Experts tell you not to do, or your descendants will curse you down to the last generation. (But we have no kids, so we're safe.) The Experts keep a storehouse of words they dip into for situations like this. Value trap. Cheap for a reason. Spend a month researching it before you plunge.

Ghost Money says ish kabibble.

NOK has fallen hard, but it's not some poxy start-up in Baluchistan. It's a major international company. Nokia may never again be the King Kong of mobile phones, but it will find at least a niche where it will make money.

There are people who spend not just a month but all their days analyzing networks and smart phone operating systems and chips and 4G and no doubt soon 5G and 6G. Ghost Money can't imagine anything more boring. It would be losing our time. Whatever the state of play in smart phone technology at the moment, as revealed by the most painstaking study, it will be topsy-turvey in a few days.

Besides, if we can't afford to risk $172 we shouldn't be in the stock market at all. And there's no way the stock will go to zero -- in the worst scenario, another company will buy it for asset stripping.

Even with NOK in extremis, we haven't lost our eye for pricing. Yesterday the company blew out the doors -- reported a quarterly loss of only a dime a share, instead of the 11 cents or 12 cents the analysts expected. The predictable knees predictably jerked, and the stock was up 7-plus percent, if we recall, at one point. We didn't bite. We knew buyer's remorse would set in soon. As it turned out, today, when most of yesterday's gain washed out.

If it matters, NOK pays a dividend once a year. At least it has for two years running. Our guess is that if management wants to give Nokia the aura of a comeback, they will keep the dividend if they possibly can. The yield (assuming there continues to be any) is more than 12 percent.

Ghost Money says patience will be rewarded with NOK, but won't say how much patience, or how much reward.

Keywords: [NOK] [hated stocks] [smart phones]

Ghost Money's author does not claim to know what he's talking about. He is not an investment advisor. This site is for entertainment, if it can even manage that.

Don't average down. Don't play in traffic.

In one respect, every investor nowadays has it good: an almost infinite amount and variety of information and advice is available at the cost of a few finger taps. The internet is simply bursting with it.

Ghost Money finds a lot of it to be valuable, too, so long as one doesn't latch on to a financial guru and treat everything he says as revealed truth. But there is also to be found online quite a bit of piffle, of which Ghost Money is a representative example.

We generally approve of Seeking Alpha as having a fairly good signal-to-noise ratio. It's all written by outside contributors (mostly in the investment business), there's no obvious attempt to present a unified viewpoint -- you can sometimes read columns urging a "buy" and a "sell" of the same stock on the same day -- and the reader comments are often well informed and decently written, unlike those from the juveniles who spin out endless threads at Zero Hedge.

But even Seeking Alpha carries articles from time to time that make you wonder how they got published. A website, unlike a print publication, doesn't have a fixed amount of space that must be filled, and there is no shortage of contributors at Seeking Alpha.

Here's one example from the other day. It's from a certain Dr. Kris, who has 64,819 followers -- must be quite the queue -- and, according to her bionote: "Combining her love of cooking with the stock market, she's devised recipes for investment success designed to please the palate of most investors. Dr. Kris currently manages a private equity long/short portfolio and writes of her current research projects that appear on her website, StockMarketCookBook.com." 

Dr. Kris tells us that "averaging down is a bad investment."

The concept of "averaging down" is straightforward. Say you buy a hundred shares of a stock at $100. It goes down to $90 and you buy more a hundred more. Your average cost per share has now been lowered to $95. Repeating this action as the stock falls will lower your average cost per share even more. Sounds good, right?

It depends. If you're investing in the stock-that is, you're viewing this as a trade and not a long-term investment-then averaging down is a strategy that runs counter to your goal of making a profit. Traders use buy and sell indicators to determine when to enter and exit positions. Should a stock fall enough to trigger a stop-loss, they exit the position and take a small loss at the most. Stock traders either don't care or don't know enough about the company's fundamentals to determine whether or not the drop in price is due to a temporary lack of buyers or whether it's reflecting a more serious problem that they don't know about or hasn't yet surfaced.

Ghost Money does not believe in stop-losses, at least near the buy point. The market is neither efficient nor rational, and short-term movements are random. Unless the stock goes down on important fundamental news, stop-losses are simply reacting to randomness. That is not a good "recipe" for trading, in our opinion.

Dr. Kris adds, "The situation may be different, though, if you're investing in the company itself. If, after doing your homework, you are convinced that the company is a good value and you are planning on holding the stock for a long time, then averaging down may work to your advantage. The operative word here is 'may.' Even if you're convinced that management is on the right track and the fundamentals are solid, I still have a bias against this approach for a couple of good reasons."

We won't discuss her reasons in detail -- what they amount to is that you risk falling in love with a stock and you can be fooled by crooks running a company. Both are worries, all right, but apply to any stock investment; they have nothing in particular to do with averaging down.

Dr. Kris's argument isn't wrong, just meaningless. Even if you buy a name for a trade, let's say purely on the basis of technical analysis, whether to stay, go, or average down is a decision to be made on the same basis that you bought it -- not because averaging down is bad.

As for "investing in the company," well, you should have researched it thoroughly before you bought it, not if it dips afterward. Except in the (rare) case of a substantial change to the company's fundamentals -- a downgrade from a brokerage firm is not one of those, in our view -- why not help yourself to another serving if the price goes down, if you can afford to and want to commit more money?

This situation was presented to us just the other day. We took 30 shares of United Technologies (UTX) @ $73.30 and thought it was a reasonable move. The next day it (along with the market) got whacked. Dr. Kris would presumably have urged us to have put a stop in place, perhaps around 72, which would have meant UTX being hauled away with the trash. Instead we bought 30 more, for the same reasons we  bought it the previous day, except this time @ 71 (the amount of the limit order we put in).

At this moment, UTX is switching owners @ 73.34. Because of the averaging down, there is a gain of 1.28 percent, net of trading costs.

Dr. Kris's insight actually seems to boil down to: averaging down is good if you've got a winner and bad if you've got a howling dog. Or, as Will Rogers said, "You should only buy stocks that go up. If it won't go up, don't buy it."

Keywords: [Seeking Alpha] [averaging down] [stop-loss] [UTX]

Ghost Money's author does not claim to know what he's talking about. He is not an investment advisor. This site is for entertainment, if it can even manage that.

The conceptual railroad

Let's say your credit card debt is around $16 billion. You've maxed out 822 cards, but another 35 have been approved. One of your hobbies is toy railroads. Why not borrow another $4.5 billion and get started on building the Dreamrailer?

That would be due north of loony if you were you. But if you were the state of California, it would be dandy.

From Zero Hedge:

California's budget deficit may be $16 billion (up from $9 billion in January), the state's cities may be keeling over and filing for bankruptcy left and right (Stockton and Mammoth Lakes), and overall container traffic at the Port of Long Beach may have dropped 7.2% in May compared to last year, but at least California is about to get its own monorail. Well, maybe not monorail, but certainly a high speed line between Los Angeles and San Francisco for the low, low price of at least $4.5 billion in debt to start (and much, much more to actually end). The winners: Keynesians and labor groups. The losers: anyone who has ever taken math for idiots. 

You see, the rail line won't be built because California needs a train from Los Angeles de Mexico to San Francisco de Gay Pride. It's the idea of it -- a hypothetical railroad. A concept that will attract money.

From USA Today: "California lawmakers approved billions of dollars Friday in construction financing for the initial segment of what would be the nation's first dedicated high-speed rail line connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco. The state Senate voted 21-16 on a party-line vote after intense lobbying by Gov. Jerry Brown, Democratic leaders and labor groups." And while nobody really expects the train to actually be built, here is the real reason for passing the legislation: "The bill authorizes the state to begin selling $4.5 billion in voter-approved bonds that includes $2.6 billion to build an initial 130-mile (210-kilometer) stretch of the high-speed rail line in the Central Valley. That will allow the state to collect another $3.2 billion in federal funding that could have been rescinded if lawmakers failed to act Friday." 

In summary, just passing the bill, gives California a $3.2 billion federal bailout while the actual use of funds may or may not ever appear (or money is on the latter). If still confused think Greece and Germany, because Federal tax collections were just used to give California a very fungible cash injection. Where the money ends up now is anyone's guess.

Here we see the 1930s New Deal's leaf-raking schemes raised to the nth power. Instead of the government providing jobs via a "conservation corps" and painting post office murals, the federal behemoth will borrow money so California can borrow money to create jobs in connection with a superfluous train route.

Maybe some of the jobs created will involve clearing and grading the right of way; possibly there will be a few jobs laying track, in case the project actually gets that far. But you can bet a double-eagle that the overwhelming majority of the jobs will go to the bureaucratic superstructure. You can't create a 500-mile bullet train (or pea shooter train) without legions of planners, lawyers, study commissions, public relations crew, and support staff.

What better example could there be of why our "real" economy is in the intensive care unit while banksters and hedge fund managers rake in all the chips? Leave to one side for the moment that everyone is using debt -- play money. The bigger problem still is that capital is not invested in projects that, at least potentially, could create wealth. It goes to whatever will act as a magnet for bailouts and new loans. 

We've reached the ludicrous stage where not only inadvertent failures get rescue money ultimately derived from taxpayers and foreign-held bonds, but we're intentionally designing failed enterprises from the ground up. Everybody knows the LA-SF railroad is pointless in real-world terms, that it will end up swallowing money, not creating it.

Who cares? All that matters is that some federal agency with a mandate to support "clean" transportation and "green" jobs will shovel money to California -- a true shovel-ready project, this -- and the Golden State's politicians can put off the day of reckoning long enough to extend their terms of office.

[Link: Zero Hedge]  

Keywords: [California] [high-speed railroad] [job creation]

Ghost Money's author does not claim to know what he's talking about. He is not an investment advisor. This site is for entertainment, if it can even manage that.

Exploiting Washington, D.C. real estate for profit?

After all this time (a two-week history of publication) you may be getting a notion that Ghost Money is keen on stocks that pay you to own them. Capital gains are unpredictable -- they're a "story." Ghost Money is skeptical of "story" stocks that pay no dividends.

But what about another kind of "capital" gains -- investing in America's version of Lhasa, Paris, Beijing, and the Emerald City all rolled into one? We refer, of course, to Washington, D.C., the seat of the Empire that can now, courtesy of decades of power aggregation and five Supreme Dictators, "tax" you into bending the knee? 

Namely, Washington real estate. As the prosperous center of a wasting (in more than one sense) nation, D.C. is where it's at. Lobbyists, lawyers, and other free-spending life forms congregate there to warm their hands at the federal hearth. They aren't making any more Washingtons (thank goodness). Siting an office in the region comes with a pricey Pigs at the Trough supplement.

Now that limited and representative government is but a poignant memory, we might as well pass an Affordable Financial Self-Care Act and rake off a bit of the Washington Property Boom profits, what?

I know of only one REIT specifically geared to the Washington area market: Washington Real Estate Investment Trust (WRIT). I've followed this company for years, formerly had a few shares, went to their annual meeting, and even lived in one of the buildings they own (on Connecticut Avenue in D.C.).

Sounds like a way you can print money like the Fed, doesn't it? But hold your horses.

This isn't an awful REIT. It seems to be managed conservatively. The dividend (about 6 percent) is steady-Eddie; it didn't even get shaved in the crash of 2008. Property turnover is low -- they've owned most of their buildings for years. Long-term debt to equity is high, but about average for REITS. Beta is in line with the market, so it's not a roller-coaster ride.

Something is wrong with WRIT, though. I sensed it when I held their shares and nothing since has caused me to change my mind. (I mean "wrong" in business sense; there is no reason to question their integrity.)

WRIT's stock price has its ups and downs, like any company, but over time just seems stuck. Their earnings have underperformed estimates in the past few quarters; earnings were negative in last year's fourth quarter. 

Ghost Money doesn't profess to have any special insight about what the trouble is with WRIT. We suspect it may have something to do with the disparate assortment of properties it carries: office buildings, shopping centers, medical offices, and residential units. Such diversification provides a cushion against downward shocks in any segment, but it may be a handful to manage.

You can buy WRIT with reasonable confidence that you'll continue to get the yield you're paying for. But for a capital gain on top of that, I'd wait till the stock is near the lower end of its trading range.

Keywords: [WRIT] [real estate] [Washington]

Ghost Money's author does not claim to know what he's talking about. He is not an investment advisor. This site is for entertainment, if it can even manage that.

Congress can now make you do anything

Karl Denninger merchandises outrage by the metric ton. Sometimes Ghost Money doesn't grasp what he's on about; sometimes we just can't be worked up about all the world's corruption.

Many good responses to the Supreme Soviet Court's ruling on Obamacare have appeared, to the point where we felt there was nothing to add. Denninger lays it on thick, but we are not ready to say he's exaggerating. Karl, over to you:

So we have three Presidential candidates, none of which will do a damn thing to fix what's wrong with health care.  All three are promoting a path that will bankrupt the States, bankrupt the Federal Government, bankrupt you or all three.

All three are promoting mathematical impossibilities.  All three are protecting monopolistic behavior and refusing to address specific laws that were passed to protect that behavior and special government-granted privilege; without those protections that monopolistic behavior would immediately collapse. 

And worse, none of them has proposed a damn thing to deal with what the Supreme Court just did, which is grant a permanent ability to the Federal Government to compel any behavior by linking it to a tax.  Some examples of where this can (and might in the near future!) go include:

• You make cars.  You're told to sell a car to anyone who makes under $25,000 a year for $5,000.  This is of course under your cost of production.  If you refuse, every car you make is subject to a $5,000 tax.  This is now Constitutional, as of this last week.
• You would like to have three kids.  The government decides that you may have only two.  If you have get pregnant with a third and refuse to have an abortion you must pay $10,000 a year in additional tax forever.  This is now Constitutional, as of last week.
• You may have all the abortions you want, but each costs $10,000 in tax.  This is Constitutional, as of last week.
• You must eat Broccoli and submit receipts with your 1040 proving you bought 1lb of Broccoli per person in your household per week.  If you do not, you must pay $5,000 in additional tax.  This is Constitutional, as of last week.
• If you are more than 10lbs overweight you must pay $2,000 of additional tax for every 10lbs overweight you are, with no cap.  This is Constitutional, as of last week.

You probably think I'm kidding on this.  I'm not.  This is what the Roberts Court held.  There is literally nothing that Congress cannot mandate that you do, or not do, under penalty of paying a tax.  All that was unconstitutional before the ruling now is explicitly constitutional if the only "compulsion" to do (or not do) a given thing is that you will be taxed if you refuse.  The court promised to review "reasonableness" of any such taxes in the future, but note that at the same time the court ignored two other problems with the Health Care law, making a lie of their claim of "future reasonableness" tests right up front:

• Direct taxes are unconstitutional without being apportioned.  This is clearly a direct tax and it is not apportioned.  It is therefore unconstitutional, but the USSC simply ignored this. (The 16th Amendment was required to make income taxes constitutional for this reason.)
• The Anti-Injunction Act prohibits suing the government over a tax until you have actually paid it.  This means that if the PPACA "penalty" is a tax then the entire lawsuit that went to the USSC is moot as it's not yet "ripe" (since nobody has yet paid the tax.)  If they were going to find that this was a tax they were thus bound to dismiss the entire complaint as unripe.  They ignored that too.

In short the USSC has become no more legitimate than the North Korean government and is unworthy of your respect.

[Link: Karl Denninger]

A booby-trapped world for investors?

I've subtitled this blog "Investment in a World Gone Mad." While that madness is by no means confined to the investing environment, it's what we have to contend with if we're to get through crises to the left of us, crises to the right of us, crises in front of us.

Paul Farrell has an interesting take on what we're up against. He's the only commentator at MarketWatch I read regularly. Well, usually. Mmmm, fairly often. He's a big picture man. Determinedly pessimistic -- unfortunately, I'm afraid his pessimism is well founded.

"Capitalism is committing suicide and destroying America too," Farrell says. He cites 10 "bubbles" he thinks we will soon be able to add to the dotcom bubble and the housing bubble. For instance:

2. Government Bubble isolates Washington from real America

When will this bubble explode? In a Time feature the “Bubble on the Potomac,” Andrew Ferguson warns, America’s massive debt has created “new affluence flooding the nation’s capital” making Washington society “a world apart from the country it governs,” adding that “this insularity has consequences for the rest of the country.”

The average American may be struggling, but government is “for sale,” in this center of the trillion-dollar government-contracting business, where the federal budget is sold off to the highest bidders. Lobbying is the city’s “biggest business,” with more than 20 lobbyists for every elected official, all publicly advertising the huge benefits they generate, often hundreds of times over an “investment” in their lobbying fees. 

[Link: MarketWatch]

This is bang on. I live in the Washington area and it's like the world of Louis XIV: a power center and world of courtiers. I suppose I am a beneficiary -- although unconnected with the government, I have a job, which I probably wouldn't if I lived somewhere else.

The Washington elite do inhabit their own bubble, where the issue is how the spoils are to be divided. In reality, the drill bit has long since failed to bring up pay dirt -- America is a dry well. Add tax on top of tax, and it's not enough if the tax base is declining. 

Doesn't matter to our Mandarins. They pray to two gods: Borrowing and Money Printing. As long as their gods don't fail them, their reign is secure.

But their gods are deceivers. Even if the U.S. is in the "least bad" shape of any major Western country and for the present seems like a safe harbor, sooner or later no one will lend to Madhouse, Inc. And printing more and more currency backed only by the promises of a government operating on the sailor-on-shore-leave principle will eventuate in a currency collapse.

Then the bubble will burst and no mistake. Washington's silky set will taste the bitterness of life in the rest of the nation they have sold out.

Keywords: [MarketWatch] [Paul Farrell] [Washington]

Ghost Money's author does not claim to know what he's talking about. He is not an investment advisor. This site is for entertainment, if it can even manage that.

I'll like Prospect Capital until I don't

Prospect Capital (PSEC) is a payday loan company for other companies -- "a private equity firm specializing in late venture, middle market, mature, mezzanine finance, buyouts, recapitalizations, growth capital, development, and bridge transactions." 

I know what some of those things are. Bridge transactions -- I paid tolls for crossing several bridges while driving on my mini-vacation this weekend. Seems like a lucrative business. Of course, someone has to sell you a bridge. Ghost Money was told confidentially that the Brooklyn Bridge can be had for the right price.

An acquaintance who is familiar with PSEC says that its loan recipients are mostly unpromising businesses that can't get financing any other way. He says the PSEC management is shrewd about separating the sheep from the goats, though, and he owns the stock.

Current annualized dividend is in the 10 percent neighborhood, and it's paid monthly. Seeing the dividend drop into your brokerage account once a month is a good (temporary) headache cure.

PSEC's balancing act can work only as long as the country can stave off a worse recession than the one we're still in. If we hit the wall, lots of PSEC's loan clients will go bankrupt. Right now PSEC is working, but I'd keep an eye on the exit.

Keywords: [PSEC] [private equity] [dividend investing]

Ghost Money's author does not claim to know what he's talking about. He is not an investment advisor. This site is for entertainment, if it can even manage that.