Diversions: Wild is the wind

Just had a fabulously productive day at work (meaning I got a long way towards some money-making ideas).

And for that I am happy enough for now.

So I am indulging in diversions:

Tesco - request for comments

The number of problem long investments in my portfolio doubled overnight - from one to two. (We have some small problem longs and some large longs with more minor problems - and some problem shorts but only two largish positions that are doing poorly.)

The treacherous two are the (much discussed) Bank of America long and the (less discussed) Tesco. Bank of America is a bank - therefore highly levered - and therefore total disasters can't ever be discounted. But Tesco is a grocer with a seemingly impregnable position in the UK and some positions elsewhere that may or may not be fine. It is hard to see how you compete with Tesco in its core business - and hence it is pretty hard to see how they get into real trouble. They have debt (driven by the demands of investors during the last cycle to "sweat the balance sheet" but the debt should not be problematic and the repayments are fairly rapid.)

I thought Tesco was my "safe" long. The relatively safety made the position bigger!

Oops.

On Tesco, I was sceptical of their expansion into the United States. Grocers (indeed retailers in general) have a poor record of crossing borders - there are plenty of cultural differences.

More to the point it is fairly easy to open up in competition in the US - there are vacant big-boxes everywhere and soon to be more - but it is very hard to open up in competition in the built-up cities of the UK. The UK is thus naturally a good business (hard to compete with) and the US less so. [Contra: I guess that is why they open in the US - because they can get sites...]

But when I revealed the position one of my regular correspondents (and obviously smarter than me) admonished me. He thought the American positions would be fine but the UK was going to be problematic - he thought margin declines could be nasty. And that is how it looks right now - the US has very good sales growth - the UK rapidly falling sales growth (a very bad second derivative) and declining margins to boot.

Margins may be the end of this story - but maybe there is something else. After all the competing retailers did well over Christmas - the problems look Tesco specific.

So here is a request for comments. When I was last in the UK (both recent trips) I did not step out of the international city of London. Oxford Street is visibly doing quite well. But the UK is not. My friends with businesses over the UK describe the city as a cocoon in which you can comfortably shop and see no problems with the world. Go to business parks in Edinburgh once built for grand financial institutions and it looks different.

So here is a request - and it is a request for my (relatively few) UK readers outside London. What is going on at Tesco and Sainsbury in places like Leeds or any other major regional city in the UK? Is there a reason why the problems appear Tesco specific? Is Tesco deliberately going down market (they appear to be in recent promotional videos).

My hopeful request to readers is for someone to conduct an "apple freshness test" in a regional city. For this test you buy an apple from each of the local grocers on the same day and leave them on the shelf to see the order in which they rot to the point you would not eat them. Twelve days is generally pretty good - it means the supply chain is fast and efficient. Eight days less so. The grocer that loses the apple freshness test eventually loses the reputation for fresh food and will (inevitably) lose margins and profits. This is something that happens imperceptibly - but women (and they are mostly women in this case) are very good subjective judges of where to shop.

The "apple freshness test" is the core here. The company says that at the "heart" of what they need to do is fresh foods. Fresh foods is only partly about what happens in the store. To be fresh they need to deal with the chain.

Hoping for help from my readers.



John

It is a small (meaning worthless) consolation that the two stocks on which I am suffering are the ones Warren Buffett has been buying. I am losing money in good company - but they are losses just the same. (Unlike him though I have some winning short-sales...)

The forthcoming irrelevance of the Australian consumer electronics retailers

This is a post aimed squarely at my hedge fund manager readers who regularly ask me what to short in Australia. The most obvious target (in my view) is retailers - and as a taster I start with the big-box consumer electronics retailers.

Australia still has two electronics chains doing big-box consumer electronics. These are JB HiFi which is well run, has a modern format, a short history and not much balance sheet and Harvey Norman which is a little more old fashioned (like Circuit City in the 1990s it still sells fridges on prime real estate) but has a better balance sheet (reflecting its once glorious history). Harvey Norman also has a franchise model - it does not own all of its stores.

In the US the debate is whether the country can support one or zero highly profitable big box chains. Best Buy - the bears argue - is the showroom for Amazon. In Australia as I said we still have two chains - its as if Circuit City were still around. Moreover because Harvey Norman has a balance sheet it can survive quite a long time and Gerry Harvey is prone to say it is the competitor that will go out of business. But Harvey Norman really is losing share to JB Hi Fi and ultimately both will lose share to the internet.

Gerry Harvey sounds somewhat desperate these days - firstly arguing that internet shopping is a con (nobody makes any money in it) and then arguing that there should be additional taxes on it. Then he sets up an internet company in Ireland.  It looks really bad except that because of the above-mentioned balance sheet he can stay around for a while and he might even be able to liquidate and be left with something valuable at the end. (I still believe liquidating a large retailer is scary-hard.)

The JB HiFi model

JB HiFi spends a lot of money to look cheap. Have a look at their website - it is almost a parody of old-style discounting pamphlets. The stores have false plywood floors to make them look like a discounting house. They have young staff wearing casual clothes and signs that are carefully printed on a computer so that they look hand-drawn. The shop is deliberately cluttered giving it a feeling of being (very) crowded. They don't do products that are not hip. There are no fridges, blenders, toasters but lots of pads, laptops, large screen TVs and computer games. The Apple products are given prime place not because selling them is profitable but because it makes the store look cool.

And for a long time JB HiFi really were cheap. The website flashes the slogan "cheapest prices - always". This was a company with the virtuous cycle of looking cheap and being cheap, selling fast, having high turnover and low inventory costs (important in electronics where obsolescence is quick) and just looking like a happening place. It was also a hot stock.

But it does not ring true any more. They are not the "cheapest prices always" - far from it. They match prices on large items where people price check and they will match prices if you really push them (trade practices law in Australia makes it hard to advertise the cheapest price if you don't have it) but I am noticing that on "convenience items" such as cables and SD cards they are pricing aggressively high. They spend money to look cheap but they aren't any more. It is the advertising tag-line of a decaying business.

They missed earnings expectations a while ago - the stock is having a rough time. But it is still fairly richly valued (do comparisons of price to sales if you want). The immediate question is how far further will it go and will Gerry Harvey keep throwing his good balance sheet at staying in the game and give them pricing pressure. Gerry Harvey it seems wants to be the survivor.

My Christmas Observation

I purchased a camcorder at Christmas and forgot to buy an SD card. These produce a lot of data so a big (ie 32gb) card was required.

Here is the only such card at the JB Hi Fi in the major shopping mall in Bondi Junction.

You see that price right: $299. It is the 45 mb/s version.

Here is the same product via an Amazon partner store at $128.

Gerry Harvey doesn't do better. Here is a 32 gb card at the Harvey Norman in the same shopping centre.

 The product is a Sandisk "ultra" at $190. Amazon will sell you an identical product for $39.

I am trying to work out the dynamics of this with regard to the stock. My best model is the decline of Radio Shack which did this before them. Radio Shack had a business model built on squeezing very fat margins out of customers that needed something now. They had 2400 stores over America so they were close enough to anyone who needed them pronto.

And proximity was useful. Remember the days you absolutely needed that Firewire cable and were prepared to drive to the local Radio Shack (or Dick Smith in Australia) and pay $10-20 for something that would cost 50c to purchase in China? As the Onion observed we do not need so many cables any more and Radio Shack has become irrelevant. These days it survives by selling mobile phone contracts.

Well as my little SD card survey demonstrates the big-box electronics stores here have become Radioshack - albeit with a bigger footprint and the pretence of "lowest prices". But Radioshack didn't blow up - it just sort of drifted away. The stock was $70 in 2000 - the peak year in which everyone was connecting their computers to the net and needed all those cables. It is $9 now.

That I think is the future here too. The two stores won't deal either one a death-blow. Gerry Harvey will continue to lose share to JB Hi Fi (who look cheaper and cooler) but he and his company are rich and they can bleed for a very long time. JB Hi Fi will continue to charge "convenience prices" to the customers hiding behind their faux-cheap facade.

And we will wake up in a decade and realize these companies are just not important - or for that matter even relevant.



John

Disclosure: no position in the funds. For various tax reasons we have elected to have no Australian positions.

Sears Holdings liquidation sale

We have been short Sears Holdings, publicly, albeit in small quantity. Being summer in Australia I did not even look at the market for the last couple of days - but got into work for some congratulatory emails as Sears stock is off very hard on an announcement of truly awful sales, the closure of 100 to 120 stores and $1.6 to $2.4 billion of non-cash charges. (More about the charges later on.)

I look pretty smart putting a Sears short on in November - and kudos is gratefully accepted but undeserved. I was short Sears at my old firm when the Eddie Lambert controlled K-Mart took them out for considerably more than they were worth. It was not the only time that happened to me - but multiple stabs don't dull the pain. I would gladly swap kudos for a refund of my then clients' money.*

The premise for owning Sears was property liquidation. The company owned many of its sites - sometimes on book at low historic values reflecting the company's long and once glorious history. Eddie Lambert and his merry-men were going to extract that value through selective store closures and super-profitable liquidation. Sears was an awful retailer (there was little doubt about that) but it was - they thought - a good property play.

My view: owning Sears as a property play is a demonstration of the arrogance and breathtaking naivete of much that passes on Wall Street. Sears Holdings has over 300 thousand employees. I don't know how you successfully liquidate a business integrated with that many lives. I don't know of anyone who has ever successfully liquidated a business with that many employees.** I am not sure it can be done and it certainly can't be done by someone with my skill-set (highly analytical, ability to spy value or value traps but no people management skill and not much tact).

The idea that Sears was going to be managed/liquidated by a bunch of hedge fund guys (people like me) well - that was comical.

Just to stress the point for my fund manager friends who read accounts and have my skills (but like me are often disconnected from the businesses they invest in) I will state the obvious. The employees are living breathing people and as you pull the business apart the way you treat those people and how they think about you (and behave towards you) are critical to any value you extract in liquidation. Someone has to look these people in the eye and tell them they don't have a job. And someone has to pick-and-choose which people to fire and which to retain. And they have to do this without destroying much of the value extracted along the way. They have to liquidate the firm in such a way that the value accrues to the liquidators and not to the people who are being screwed.

I don't care what you think of the morality of that. The reality of that is that it was always going to be hard - possibly very hard.***

We are about to find out how hard. Sears is going to close 100 to 120 stores (it is vague about the number) and fire many employees. But they have not worked out which employees or even which stores. Not to sound ghoulish - but my guess is that this is going to be considerably harder than the "Sears spokesman" makes it sound. And if they can't do 120 stores without trouble then the original Sears liquidation premise was insane. This is a case of Wall Street fantasy meeting reality: eventually reality wins.

The charges and reality

The large (non-cash!) charges deserve mention. This is from the Sears release:

[We Sears] expect that we will record in the fourth quarter a non-cash charge related to a valuation allowance on certain deferred tax assets of $1.6 to $1.8 billion

You know what that means. It means that you should not expect to earn that profit in the future. It is the admission from the Eddie Lambert controlled Sears that the fantasy is over.

The reality is unchanged: when you think of the 1950s you think of Sears. Sears was (in Main Street reality) irrelevant a decade ago. The Wall Street fantasy took a little longer to end.


John



*(A note about Schadenfreude.) The take-over of the old Sears by the Eddie Lambert controlled K-Mart was the second worst day of my career. The worst day was when Fred Goodwin's Royal Bank of Scotland purchased Charter One Financial. When I started the blog one of the main goals was to spell out just how atrocious Sir Fred Goodwin (the then CEO of Royal Bank of Scotland) was. The fourth post on this blog was the beginning of my "Sir Fred Goodwin death watch". I enjoyed watching him and his bank come apart. But I should not have enjoyed it. Schadenfreude is not an attractive personality characteristic and the collapse of RBS has caused real pain to a lot of innocent parties. And a Schadenfreudegasm - well that just strikes me as unreasonably indulgent. After all my clients lost money - and I should and would but cannot swap any pleasure I had for a refund of their losses.

This time though I am just accepting the Schadenfreude. My client are making money and I have no reason to feel guilty about that. Moreover I don't have to fire those employees. Unlike Royal Bank of Scotland (which Sir Fred destroyed) Sears employees were doomed anyway.

**. It is worth mentioning the GM example. GM was salvaged through bankruptcy with a couple of hundred thousand employees. But those employees were particularly trapped, the shareholders were wiped out and the Government contributed considerable money. That is what a "successful" transition for a business with that many employees looks like.

***. (Politics, employees and realism). I am a bleeding heart left-winger and naturally feel a little paternalistic to the employees being fired. However you don't need to be a bleeding heart lefty to agree with my analysis. A realist will tell that when you have 300 thousand employees your relation to them is going to be critical in running your business. Employees are "stakeholders" even if your only (moral) criteria is "shareholder value". Realism over politics is a better basis for investment.

Future Joseph Jett traders get a Christmas card from Mario Draghi

Well the Euro fix is in. Whether it works - that is another question. But the fix is this: European banks can borrow unlimited amounts for three years to buy Euro government debt. The debt often yields 5 percent. The money costs 1 percent.

The Government debt has - at least for the moment - a very low (mostly zero) risk weighting for capital adequacy purposes so the return on regulatory equity is more than adequate.

Now of all the things you want to be - top of the list these days has got to be a trader at a dumb bank paid a percentage of income earned at bonus time. Massive return on equity. Unlimited funds to employ. Christmas. Indeed a lifetime of silly-seasons all at once courtesy Super Mario.

Of course your bank is not just going to sign over the 20 million check. You are going to have to bamboozle them for that. After all, the European Government Bond carry trade patently risks capital and the risk management department should charge you mega-bucks for that capital. Indeed the risk management department probably should do more than that and stop you.

At Goldman Sachs (where they are quite tight) the risk management department would stop it dead. Contra: at MF Global certain senior Goldies employees demonstrated how Goldies traders without Goldies risk management behave.

But even at MF Global the risk management department knew what was going on.

So dear traders seeking large bonuses: how do you complicate it beyond the feeble minds of your local back-office? You can do complex things with government bonds - strips, interest rate swaps and all sorts of high-fallutin maths that comes from them.

You might not believe me: remember Joseph Jett who misstated profits and risks at Kidder Peabody (then part of General Electric, now buried in UBS). He reported enormous profits and took home an $8.2 million bonus. Jett operated entirely in Government bonds and their derivatives.

So what are you waiting for? The complexity of the stuff you can trade - all dependent on the above ECB provided carry - is enormous. And surely you are smart enough to run rings around the kids in the risk management department.

Wall Street has proven that complexity and cheap money are the road to riches. Now, dear European traders, is your time.

Hop to it boys. You got a Christmas card to collect.


John

Peculiar goings on at Blogger

This post is a short apology. Somehow yesterday a post I part-wrote in September - left in draft and never finished - got circulated to my email list by blogger/feedburner. It had spelling mistakes in it (it was a draft) but nobody picked up that the email was dated several months ago. People did email me about the spelling mistakes.

It mentioned solar panel prices. They are much lower now.

Sorry for the inconvenience and the incorrectly dated and priced objects.

John

PS. About half the posts I write wind up never being sent - all sorts of reasons. I guess I got to be careful with the old ones.

J

Solar panel prices continue to fall

Guidance from Trina and other solar manufacturers was for a wholesale price to be above $1 per watt.

So I got this email from my local supplier today suggesting retail prices far below that:

Dear Client:

Just a quick note that Powerark Solar is promoting a Christmas sale on BLD solar panels, the brochure and specs are attached.

BLD panel pricelist:

190w: 95cents for 1 pallet (58pcs), 93cents for 2 pallets (116pcs)

250w (60cells): 99cent for 1 pallet (40pcs).

We are also supplying Alex Solar panel, and various brands of inverter including Ever-Solar, SMA, Afore (double MPP Trackers), JFY and APS Micro-Inverter, please feel free to contact us if interested.

Best Regards,

 

Will Li

 

Powerark Solar Pty Ltd

Add: 26 James Street, Lidcombe, NSW 2141

Tel: 1300 887 ***; (02) 9460 ***

Fax :(02) 9437 ***

Website: www.powerarksolar.com.au

Mob: 0422266***

Email: wil@pow***.com