NGS Group
Jag har köpt en mindre position i NGS Group (2%) och hoppas kunna öka denna till 3-4% vid en större nedgång. Bolagets är lågt värderat och den underliggande verksamhet växer organiskt. NGS Groups senaste förvärv är intressant och minskar beroendet av vårdsektorn. Bolaget är litet och lönsamheten kan bli volatil framöver, trots stabiliteten i dagsläget. Faller marginalerna markant bör man se över investeringen.
Om jag skulle kunna hitta 30 stycken liknande bolag med samma värdering och tillväxt skulle jag få en god avkastning. Hur ett enskilt innehav utvecklas i denna hypotetiska portfölj är däremot omöjligt att säga.
Bill Gross fråga har nu blivit besvarad:
Euroland – “Whatever it takes”, “no limit”, what new catchphrases can Draghi come up with next time? (Bill Gross, 3 februari 2016)
(http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/15/another-ecb-bullet-markets-to-scour-draghi-speech.html)
Att det kommer kraftiga rekyler i en svag marknad är inget ovanligt. Efter större nedgångar krävs inte mycket för att folk skall börja köpa igen. Det är dock förvånande att de flesta större uppgångar sammanfaller med att någon centralbankir pratar.
Det finns många placerare som inte varit med om en rejäl björnmarknad. Dessa placerare har köpt på alla nedgångar de senaste 5 åren och tjänat pengar. För dessa placerare är det uppenbart att bara idioter säljer aktier och att buy and hold är vad som gäller.
Man kan förstås fråga sig om dessa placerare betraktat en börsgraf i ett längre perspektiv än 5 år?
Scenario: En placerare investerade allt sitt kapital under början av IT-manin.
Denna stackare har sett sitt innehav nå ursprungskostnaden 5 gånger under 16 år. Buy and hold fungerar bra i en sekulär bullmarknad, men fungerar sämre i en sekulär björnmarknad. Efter 16 åren har denna hypotetiska placerare fått en kursavkastning om 3%, plus en årlig direktavkastning. Att sätta in pengar på ett bankkonto hade sparat mycket emotionellt trauma och förmodligen gett en likartad avkastning. Nu har förstås Yngves bestämt sig för att begreppet ränta är föråldrat och därav finns inte samma möjlighet till alternativavkastning längre.
Att minska sin exponering mot börsen är inte alltid synonymt med idioti. Det finns faktiskt (tro det eller ej) tillfällen där det lönar sig att stå utanför börsen.
Jag misstänker att det finns många placerare som säljer i panik på nedgångar och sedan i panik köper tillbaka sina positioner "när det vänder". Dessa placerare är rädda för att "missa" uppgången och denna rädslan är intet annat än förklädd girighet.
"Fear of missing out, of course, is not fear at all but unbridled greed. The key is to hold your emotions in check with reason, something few are able to do. The markets are often a tease, falsely reinforcing one’s confidence as prices rise, and undermining it as they fall. Pundits often speak of the psychology of markets, but in investing it is one’s own psychology that can be most dangerous and tenuous." -- Seth Klarman year-end 2015 letter to investors.
Personligen uppdaterar jag mig kring börsen med en frekvens om 3-5 dagar. För mig är denna uppdateringsfrekvens lagom och jag tror många skulle ta mer rationella beslut om de sluta betrakta nyheterna varje dag. Ingen kan med säkerhet veta vad som komma skall och därför bör man ta ett beslut och sedan hålla fast vid det. Det är bättre att man är konsekvent än att man konstant byter åsikt.
Antalet nya Avanza kunder (årligen)
Intresset från småsparare framstår som omättligt. Nedanstående graf visar antalet nya Avanza kunder (årligen).
William White
Nedan följer lite intressanta tankar från William White. Först kommer en artikel från 2009 och sedan följer en artikel från 2016. Nedanstående tar tid att läsa, men är väl värt det. För mig är nedanstående utdrag obligatorisk läsning för alla normalbegåvade individer som vill skapa sig en realistisk syn kring centralbankirers kompetens. Jag visste tidigare att bankirerna var obegåvade, men jag trodde aldrig att deras inkompetens och oförmåga var så här exceptionell.
Inför finanskrisen jobbade William White för BIS (Bank for International Settlements), en samarbetsorganisation för världens centralbanker. BIS kontor finns i Basel och BIS publicerar regelbundet information som når de flesta av världens större centralbanker. Artikeln 2009 beskriver hur White kontinuerligt varnade centralbankirerna för den amerikanska fastighetsbubblan, subprimesektorn, "rating bolagen" och att det kunde ske en "credit crunch". Det kan vara värt att poängtera att William White uttryckte sig i en formell akademisk miljö och att sett ur det perspektivet uttryckte sig White starkt.
Det är välkänt att FED fick varningar från flera olika parter som borde ha fått centralbanken att ompröva sin världsbild, men vad BIS gjorde var att de i praktiken förutspådde finanskrisen och kontinuerligt informerade FED om riskerna. Det är helt enkelt häpnadsväckande att FED inte gjorde någonting.
Om man föredrar att läsa hela texterna finnes de här och här. Det kan vara värt att notera att William White uttryckte sina ås
(min fetstil)
2009
Since the economy went up in flames, the wiry retiree has been jetting around the globe like a paramedic for the world of high finance. He shows no signs of exhaustion, despite his rigorous schedule. In fact, White, with his gray head of hair, is literally beaming with energy, so much so that he seems to glow.
Perhaps it is because someone, finally, is listening to him.
While the economy was recovering from the demise of the dotcom sector and from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, cheap money was already on its way to triggering the next excess. This time it took place in the housing market, and this time it would be far more devastating.
Since the economy went up in flames, the wiry retiree has been jetting around the globe like a paramedic for the world of high finance. He shows no signs of exhaustion, despite his rigorous schedule. In fact, White, with his gray head of hair, is literally beaming with energy, so much so that he seems to glow.
Perhaps it is because someone, finally, is listening to him.
Listening to him, that is, and not to his rival of many years, the once-powerful former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank, Alan Greenspan. Greenspan, who was reverentially known as "The Maestro," was celebrated as the greatest central banker of all time -- until the US real estate bubble burst and the crash began.
Before then, no one in the world of central banks would have dared to openly criticize Greenspan's successful policy of cheap money. No one except White, that is.
'A Disorderly Unwinding of Current Excesses'
White recognized the brewing disaster. The analysis department at the BIS has a collection of data from every bank around the globe, considered the most impressive in the world. It enabled the economists working in this nerve center of high finance to look on, practically in real time, as a poisonous concoction began to brew in the international financial system.
White and his team of experts observed the real estate bubble developing in the United States. They criticized the increasingly impenetrable securitization business, vehemently pointed out the perils of risky loans and provided evidence of the lack of credibility of the rating agencies. In their view, the reason for the lack of restraint in the financial markets was that there was simply too much cheap money available on the market. To give all this money somewhere to go, investment bankers invented new financial products that were increasingly sophisticated, imaginative -- and hazardous.
As far back as 2003, White implored central bankers to rethink their strategies, noting that instability in the financial markets had triggered inflation, the "villain" in the global economy. "One hopes that it will not require a disorderly unwinding of current excesses to prove convincingly that we have indeed been on a dangerous path," White wrote in 2006.
(...)The question of who was right, Greenspan or White, didn't exactly lead to a power struggle in Basel. The forces were too unevenly distributed for that. On the one side was the admonishing chief economist, with his seemingly antiquated model that advocated the establishment of reserves, and on the other side was the glamorous central banker, under whose aegis the economy was booming -- the killjoy vs. the party animal.
The central bankers certainly discussed the competing models. But most of them were behind Greenspan, because his system was what they had studied at their elite universities. They refused to accept White's objections that the economy is not a science. There was no way of verifying his model, they said.
Besides, who was about to question success? Greenspan was their superstar, the inviolable master, a living legend. "Greenspan always demanded respect," White recalls, referring to the Maestro's appearances. Hardly anyone dared to contradict the oracular grand master.
And why should they have contradicted Greenspan? "When you are inside the bubble, everybody feels fine. Nobody wants to believe that it can burst," says White. "Nobody is asking the right questions."
(...)A few weeks later, the market demonstrated its destructive power once again, when Russia plunged into a financial crisis, bringing down the New York hedge fund Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) along with it. The New York Fed hurriedly convened a meeting of the heads of international banks, initiating a bailout that remains unprecedented to this day. The global economy was saved from a systemic crisis -- at a cost of $3.6 billion (€2.6 billion).
And what did Greenspan do? He lowered interest rates. Then the next bubble, the so-called New Economy, began to grow in Silicon Valley. It burst in the spring of 2000. What did Greenspan do? He lowered interest rates. This time the reduction was massive, with the benchmark rate dropping from 6 percent to 1 percent within three years. This, according to White, was the cardinal error. "After the 2001 crash, interest rates were lowered very aggressively and left too low for too long," he says.
White was losing his patience. Was there no other option than to regularly allow the economy to collapse? Didn't the policy of operating without a safety net border on stupidity? And wasn't it written, in both the Bible and the Koran, that it was important to provide for seven years of famine during seven good years?
(...)This time, White didn't just want to discuss his views behind closed doors. This time, he decided to seek a broader audience. His destination was Jackson Hole in Wyoming, a kind of Mecca for financial experts. It was August 2003.
"This is an opportunity we can't afford to miss," BIS economist Claudio Borio told his boss, White, as he wrote himself a few last-minute notes in his room at the Jackson Lake Lodge in preparation for his speech to the symposium.
Greenspan was in the audience when Borio and White presented their theories -- theories that had absolutely nothing in common with the powerful Fed chairman's worldview, or that of most of his colleagues.
"This is an opportunity we can't afford to miss," BIS economist Claudio Borio told his boss, White, as he wrote himself a few last-minute notes in his room at the Jackson Lake Lodge in preparation for his speech to the symposium.
Greenspan was in the audience when Borio and White presented their theories -- theories that had absolutely nothing in common with the powerful Fed chairman's worldview, or that of most of his colleagues.
White and Borio described the dramatic changes that had taken place since deregulation of the financial markets in the 1980s. Price stability was no longer the problem, they argued, but rather the development of imbalances in the financial markets, which were increasingly causing earthquake-like tremors. "It is as if one villain had gradually left the stage only to be replaced by another," White and Borio wrote in the paper they presented at Jackson Hole. As it turned out, it was a villain with the ability to unleash devastatingly destructive forces.
It was created by what the two BIS economists called the "inherently procyclical" nature of the financial system. What they meant is that perceptions of value and risk develop in parallel. People suffer from a blindness to future dangers that is intrinsic to the system. The better the economy is doing, the higher the ratings issued by the rating agencies, the laxer the guidelines for approving credit, the easier it becomes to borrow money and the greater the willingness to assume risk.
A bubble develops. When it bursts, the results can be devastating. "In extreme cases, broader financial crises can arise and exacerbate the downturn further," White wrote in his analysis. The consequences, according to White, are high costs to the real economy: unemployment, a credit crunch and bankruptcies.
All it takes to predict such imbalances, White argued, is to monitor "excessive credit expansion and asset price increases," and to take corrective action early on, even without a pending threat of inflation.
This task, the authors concluded, must be performed by monetary policy, among other things. The central banks, according to White and Borio, could limit credit expansion and thus avoid adverse effects on the global economy.
The Jackson Hole paper was an assault on everything Greenspan had preached and, as everyone knew, he was not fond of being contradicted. Other members of the audience glanced surreptitiously at the Maestro to gauge his reaction. Greenspan remained impassive, his face expressionless behind his large spectacles, as he listened to White. Later, during a more relaxed get-together, he refused to even look at White.
White suspected he had failed to convince his audience.
"You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink," he says.
'All We Could Do Was to Present our Expertise'
Now that the US prime rate is bobbing up and down between zero and 0.25 percent, and the Fed is pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into the market, White's words at the 2003 conference have undoubtedly come back to haunt many a central banker.
In that speech, White had prophesied that if the "worst scenario materializes, central banks may need to push policy rates to zero and resort to less conventional measures, whose efficacy is less certain."
He warned that the money supply could dry up. Markets, he wrote, "can freeze under stress, as liquidity evaporates." He also identified -- a full four years before the bursting of the real estate bubble -- the disturbing developments in the US real estate market as a consequence of lax monetary policy.
"Further stimulus has not come free of charge and has raised questions about the sustainability of the recovery," he warned. From today's perspective, White's predictions are almost frightening in their accuracy.
But when push came to shove, he was unable to overturn the prevailing ideology. "We were staff," he says. "All we could do was to present our expertise. It was not within our power how it was used."
Despite the disappointment at Jackson Hole, White didn't give up on supplying data, facts and analyses. Perhaps, he reasoned, this constant flow of information could help to break through mental barriers.
(...)In the 2004 BIS annual report, White was unusually frank in criticizing the Fed's lax monetary policy. Although Greenspan sat on the bank's board of directors at the time, the board never sought to influence the analyses of its experts. But neither did it take them seriously.
In January 2005, the BIS's Committee on the Global Financial System sounded the alarm once again, noting that the risks associated with structured financial products were not being "fully appreciated by market participants." Extreme market events, the experts argued, could "have unanticipated systemic consequences."
They also cautioned against putting too much faith in the rating agencies, which suffered from a fatal flaw. Because the rating agencies were being paid by the companies they rated, the committee argued, there was a risk that they might rate some companies too highly and be reluctant to lower the ratings of others that should have been downgraded.
These comments show that the central bankers knew exactly what was going on, a full two-and-a-half years before the big bang. All the ingredients of the looming disaster had been neatly laid out on the table in front of them: defective rating agencies, loans repackaged to the point of being unrecognizable, dubious practices of American mortgage lenders, the risks of low-interest policies. But no action was taken. Meanwhile, the Fed continued to raise interest rates in nothing more than tiny increments.
(...)The Fed chairman was not even impressed by a letter the Mortgage Insurance Companies of America (MICA), a trade association of US mortgage providers, sent to the Fed on Sept. 23, 2005. In the letter, MICA warned that it was "very concerned" about some of the risky lending practices being applied in the US real estate market. The experts even speculated that the Fed might be operating on the basis of incorrect data. Despite a sharp increase in mortgages being approved for low-income borrowers, most banks were reporting to the Fed that they had not lowered their lending standards. According to a study MICA cited entitled "This Powder Keg Is Going to Blow," there was no secondary market for these "nuclear mortgages."
Three days later, Greenspan addressed the annual meeting of the American Bankers Association in Palm Desert, California, via satellite. He conceded that there had been "local excesses" in real estate prices, but assured his audience that "the vast majority of homeowners have a sizable equity cushion with which to absorb a potential decline in house prices."
The Maestro had spoken -- and the party could continue.
The Maestro had spoken -- and the party could continue.
William White and his Basel team were dumbstruck. The central bankers were simply ignoring their warnings. Didn't they understand what they were being told? Or was it that they simply didn't want to understand?
In the March 2006 BIS quarterly report, the Basel analysts described, once again, the grave risks of the subprime market. "Foreign investment in these securities has soared," they wrote. They also cautioned that there were "signs that the US housing market is cooling" and warned that investors "may be exposed to losses in excess of what they had anticipated."
(...)It was a waste of time and effort. Roger Ferguson, the then-deputy Fed chairman, ironically started to refer to the BIS's Cassandra-like chief economist as "Merry Sunshine."
(...)Ben Bernanke, who succeeded Greenspan as Fed chief in early 2006, was especially deaf to White's warnings. When he presented his biannual report on the state of the economy to the US Congress on July 19, 2006, he made no mention whatsoever of the subprime risk.
A few months later, in December, the BIS reported that the index for securitized US subprime mortgages had fallen sharply in the fourth quarter of the year. A loss of confidence began to take shape.
The first casualties began surfacing a few weeks later. On Feb. 8, 2007, HSBC, the world's third-largest bank at the time, issued the first profit warning in its history. On April 2, the US mortgage lender New Century Financial filed for bankruptcy.
Bernanke remained unimpressed. "The troubles in the subprime sector seem unlikely to seriously spill over to the broader economy or the financial system," he said. It was June 5, 2007.
A few months later, in December, the BIS reported that the index for securitized US subprime mortgages had fallen sharply in the fourth quarter of the year. A loss of confidence began to take shape.
The first casualties began surfacing a few weeks later. On Feb. 8, 2007, HSBC, the world's third-largest bank at the time, issued the first profit warning in its history. On April 2, the US mortgage lender New Century Financial filed for bankruptcy.
Bernanke remained unimpressed. "The troubles in the subprime sector seem unlikely to seriously spill over to the broader economy or the financial system," he said. It was June 5, 2007.
But even if Bernanke had listened, it would have been too late by then. On June 22, the US investment bank Bear Stearns announced that it needed $3 billion (€2.1 billion) to bail out two of its hedge funds, which had suffered heavy losses during the course of the US real estate crisis. In Germany, entire banks were soon seeking government bailout funds. Banks increasingly lost trust in one another, and the money markets gradually dried up.
It was the beginning of the end. "When the crisis started, I asked myself: Is this the big one?" White recalls. "The answer was: Yes, this is the big one."
(...) Did White express himself unclearly? No, it was more that he represented a system that only questioned the prevailing view. "Ultimately, an economic model can only be defeated by an opposing model," says BIS Chief Economist Stephen Cecchetti, White's successor. "Unfortunately, we don't have a generally recognized model yet. Perhaps this partly explains why our warnings were less effective than would have been desirable."
2016:
