January 17, 2014
- Blowing cool air on economic “froth”
- Three reasons the editor of our most exclusive service is proceeding with “extreme caution”
- The refrigerator that spammed your inbox
- The “Internet of Things”… and the real cybersecurity threat close to home
- A bullish indicator for gold… a craptastic form of protest… Obama sinks IBM and Cisco… and more!
“Sure, anyone can figure out what the S&P is trading at,” says our Thompson Clark. “It’s up. A lot. But what are some other indicators of possible ‘froth’ in the economy?”
Mr. Clark joined us last year. He’s been an enigmatic figure from the start. If he isn’t traveling somewhere to check out a company in person, his head is buried deep in the company’s books.
On the other hand, that’s what we hired him to do — perform exhaustive research for one of our most expensive and exclusive services, with a strict membership cap of 1,000 people. Most of what he writes is for their eyes only. But with 2014 now 2½ weeks old, he did venture to offer a few hidden clues about what the new year will bring.
So what about that “froth” thing, Thompson?
“One way to answer this question is by looking at recent business acquisitions,” he says. “It’s not so much the price paid for the business. What really matters is what the buyer is getting for his money.
“Acquisitions are often priced as a multiple of earnings or cash flow. They are often funded through debt. Are buyers paying higher multiples for businesses? Is the amount of debt as a percentage of the acquisition cost going up?”
Know the answers and you know how high a level of risk tolerance is out there. “Higher multiples paid for earnings and higher multiples tolerated for debt display investors’ increased tolerance for risk. These purchase prices are often backed up by rosy, and rarely achieved, earnings projections.”
“How about junk bond issuance in the past two years?” says Mr. Clark, sniffing out another indicator of froth.
Junk bonds are all about taking on higher risk in exchange for a higher coupon payment; last year, companies issued $361 billion in junk bonds — the highest figure in a data set that began in 1995.
“These bonds are rated junk for a reason,” says Thompson. “The likelihood of repayment of principal, along with interest, is not a sure thing. Such a higher rate of issuance shows a higher tolerance for risk from investors. That strategy works until it doesn’t. Be careful.”
And then there’s the mean-reversion thing.
“No asset class simply continues moving above or below its average level forever,” Mr. Clark reminds us. “Eventually, it will move back toward its average. This could mean it moves up or down.”
The tendency has been at times dramatic in the last three-five years… but it’s easily forgotten after the S&P jumped 29% in a calendar year. “I anticipate this concept to continue to ring true for 2014 and beyond.”
The undervalued plays he recommends to his small circle of readers should benefit from this tendency. The broad market? Uh, not so much.
“I will continue to proceed with extreme caution,” Thompson wrote his readers at the start of the year. “We’re at very high levels, across many markets and asset classes. A concept I will continue to emphasize in future recommendations is having a significant margin of safety.”
[Ed. Note: If you like the way Thompson thinks, we must caution you: His recommendations are not for everyone. They can be thinly traded. You might get whipsawed in the short term and get scared into selling at the worst possible time. A cast-iron stomach isn’t a prerequisite for following Thompson’s recommendations… but it doesn’t hurt.
That said, if you think you might have what it takes, we still have 159 available slots before we hit our 1,000-member cap. You can make a decision with confidence after you watch this.]
Another mixed bag for U.S. stocks this morning: Today, it’s the blue chips with the most strength. The Dow is up slightly as we write, to 16,453, while small caps represented by the Russell 2000 are down fractionally, to 1,171.
The market’s “meh” performance this week can be traced to “meh” earnings. Earnings suddenly seem to matter again. “UPS dropped 1.7% as it projected earnings that trailed estimates,” reads a Bloomberg summary. “Intel Corp. fell 4.3% as its revenue forecast raised concern the personal computer market is struggling to grow. General Electric lost 2.9% as margins at its manufacturing units fell short of guidance.”
Yuck. But Morgan Stanley and American Express? They’re looking sharp. Feast for the money shufflers, famine in the real economy…
Gold jumped in London about an hour or so before the Comex open in New York this morning. Lo and behold, the Midas metal is about to reclaim the $1,250 mantle it lost on Tuesday.
“Almost unnoticed, open interest in gold futures has taken off spectacularly,” writes GoldMoney’s Alasdair Macleod, “increasing by over 35,000 contracts since the beginning of the month, which is shown in the following chart.
“As a general rule of thumb,” he explains, “an increase in open interest on a rising gold price is bullish, indicating the bulls are back in charge.”
Silver, meanwhile, is up more than 1%, to $20.33 — putting a shine on one of Steve Sarnoff’s Options Hotline recommendations — already up 49% in 10 days.
The greenback sits at a two-month high this morning, measured by the dollar index — which registers 81.1 as we write.
“A short-term bear market rally for the dollar,” is how EverBank’s Chuck Butler describes it — bucking the mainstream consensus. “I just don’t see the ‘sea change’ on the debt front that would kick this short-term rally into a multiyear trend. If you notice what all the pundits and economists are saying these days, it centers around ‘2014 will be the year of the dollar.’
“They don’t say anything about what happens past 2014. And think about this for a minute. Didn’t we see 2005, 2008 and 2011 as ‘years of the dollar,’ and then nothing? Yes, we did.”
And now the downside of “smart” appliances — smarter hackers who can seize your refrigerator for their deeds.
The cybersecurity firm Proofpoint is out with a report describing an unprecedented hack between Dec. 23-Jan. 6 — encompassing “more than 750,000 malicious email communications coming from more than 100,000 everyday consumer gadgets such as home-networking routers, connected multimedia centers, televisions and at least one refrigerator that had been compromised and used as a platform to launch attacks.”
Yep, one of those Internet-connected refrigerators that can send you an email when it realizes your milk is nearing its expiration date.
“It’s long been known that smart devices are among the most insecure computers on the Internet,” says an account from Quartz, “but it appears that hackers are finally taking advantage of the fact that everything from our toasters to our light bulbs will soon be Internet connected — and ripe for compromising.”
The “in” term for these devices, by the way, is “the Internet of Things.”
Proofpoint, of course, is peddling a solution. How feasible that solution might be is open to question. “These embedded computers are riddled with vulnerabilities,” security expert Bruce Schneier writes at Wired, “and there’s no good way to patch them.”
Besides, the threat posed by a smart toothbrush pales in comparison to the routers and modems that handle all the Internet traffic entering and leaving our homes. “Routers and modems pose a particular problem,” Schneier writes, “because they’re (1) between users and the Internet, so turning them off is increasingly not an option; (2) more powerful and more general in function than other embedded devices; (3) the one 24/7 computing device in the house, and are a natural place for lots of new features.”
“If we don’t solve this soon,” Schneier writes, “we’re in for a security disaster as hackers figure out that it’s easier to hack routers than computers.”
Schneier suggests the burden of “solving this” will fall on your ISP. “Whether they’re to blame or not, the ISPs are the ones who get the service calls for crashes. They often have to send users new hardware because it’s the only way to update a router or modem, and that can easily cost a year’s worth of profit from that customer.”
But who will develop the technical fixes your ISP will use? That task will likely fall to the sort of tiny cybersecurity players our Byron King tracks. Many of them get “seed money” from the Pentagon to develop security solutions that can make shareholders billions down the line. To learn who’s set to get the lion’s share of this seed money, check out Byron’s exclusive research at this link.
“Out with Hollande and the entire political class,” read the message on the side of the man’s truck… before he deposited tons of horse manure in front of the Bourbon Palace, home to France’s lower house of parliament.
That’s a whole lot of protest…
News accounts of the incident are uniformly skimpy. All we know with certainty is the man was arrested before he could dump his entire load. So to speak.
We’re left to speculate about what moved the man to these measures. If he’s indicting “the entire political class,” we suspect it has little to do with the French president’s dalliance with an actress 18 years his junior.
Nor do we know what charge the man faces. Had he delivered this bit of performance art on Capitol Hill, we have little doubt he’d face some kind of terrorism charge — assuming he wouldn’t meet the fate of the poor woman who made a wrong turn last fall and got blown away by Capitol police with her 1-year-old daughter in the car…
“Your predictions months ago in 2013, are coming true,” writes a reader. We never tire of such flattery around here.
“Let’s have more,” he asks, “on the feds’/NSA’s methods to undermine encryption and eavesdrop on people’s spending habits and finances, and the recent Target and Neiman Marcus security breaches. And how criminals would soon figure it out as well.
“I’m waiting for a Wal-Mart or Kohl’s to go down next.”
The 5: “At least six U.S. merchants suffering Target-style attacks,” says a CNBC alert that literally flashed across one of our screens as we wrap up today’s episode. More to come.
Meanwhile, the president just finished his long-awaited speech about “reforming” the NSA. The reforms amount to cosmetic solutions intended to make the mooing masses believe the feds care about their privacy after all and they can go back to their fantasy football picks before the conference championships on Sunday.
“Mr. Obama made no mention,” says a New York Times account, “of two of the recommendations from a panel that looked into surveillance that are of most pressing concern to Silicon Valley and the business community: that the N.S.A. ‘not in any way subvert, undermine, weaken or make vulnerable’ commercial software, and that it move away from exploiting flaws in software to conduct cyberattacks or surveillance.”
Hmmm… We stuck our necks out late last year and said he’d close the NSA’s “back doors” that have purposely degraded encryption standards across the Web.
But the Times speaks of “a deep divide in the administration.” That is, there are hardcore spooks who want your data at all costs and don’t much care that American tech firms are losing their competitive edge. “From Germany to China,” says the Gray Lady, “there is talk of boycotting some American hardware and cloud services that are viewed as compromised.” More than just talk; IBM and Cisco’s sales to the Asia-Pacific region have cratered $1.7 billion year over year since the Snowden leaks began.
No, you don’t have to like it. But you also don’t have to be helpless. Our exclusive guide to help you muddy the digital footprints you leave behind for the feds is still available.
Have a good weekend,
Dave Gonigam
The 5 Min. Forecast
P.S. We’re back tomorrow with our usual 5 Things You Need to Know wrap-up — in case you got busy this week and missed an episode or two.
On Monday, U.S. markets are closed for the Martin Luther King holiday. The weekday edition of The 5 returns on Tuesday.