Today, Larry Berman CFA, CMT, CTA and Stephen Groff commented about whether WBA-Q, AUTO-LN, QSR-T, LIT-N, FIE-T, HNU-T, APHA-T are stocks to buy or sell.
He prefers to play the broad space rather than figure out who wins the race. He prefers the HMMJ-T ETF. We are close to a market high so he thinks the market risk is high. The next broader market correction will pull this one back. He would keep your powder dry. In a 10% allocation to speculation he would put 1% in Marijuana. Maybe 3 or 4 if you are really speculative. He would prefer speculating more in AI.
Educational Segment. The Canadian Dollar. It has been on a roller coaster ride this year. The 2 year spread between US and Canadian is the highest correlation to the Canadian dollar. Our bonds usually yield more than the US. But back in 2015 that changed. Short term this is a negative factor. In the futures market, speculators in the Canadian dollar shorted this year but now are net long. That potentially has some downside for the dollar.
[Three Guests] Market. [Groff] The 16k number is a nice physiological number but does not affect what he does. He is bottom up. There are parts of the market that are fully valued. And parts that aren’t. [Rohinton] The risk reward is not in your favour in banks today. He does not think this is the day for this opportunity. He prefers US banks and others outside of banks such as the payment sector. [McNamee]. He does not think there is a bubble in the FANG stocks. He has owned names within that group and still likes names like Google. CSCO is not a name he has invested in. He looks at other value players like MSFT-Q that are into new technology transitions such as ‘Cloud First’. [Groff] There are pockets of real estate that are fully valued.
How do you evaluate an opportunity? Looking at Tech stocks: The customer has to like the product. The company should be continually gaining market share over the years. Then they can continuously grow. [Rohinton] A finance stock has to give you comfort over the downside. You have to look through the balance sheet to understand the risks. Then he looks at the upside. [Groff] Avoiding losses is important, especially when markets are hitting new highs and there is complacency.
He likes it long term and would own more if it was cheaper. They are having to reinvest and it is hurting margins. He does not know short term and it is reasonably fully valued, but he likes the business long term. They are good at doing M&A and taking costs out. They are a royalty model so they care about growth in absolute units.
They have grown 50% a year. Last year they had an execution issue and dropped their guidance. He found they were growing too aggressively and it was irritating customers. People didn’t understand this was the problem. Over the last two quarters they have been beating expectations. They are at 20% free cash flow growth now. (Analysts’ target: $165.00).
Market. New highs but the TSX has been lagging world markets for a considerable time. We are heavily weighted in banks and energy. The banks bounced back and we had some GDP growth. Curbing the growth in housing is going to be a huge problem. Oil will stay at $50 for 5 years so there is not a lot of optimism for growth. It looks like in the US we are going to get a vote on the tax bill in mid-January. This will not solve any of the problems the US economy has. AMZN-Q is destructive. The stock has been the best stock for the last 15 years (38% over the last 15 years). They lost almost a billion dollars in their core retail operation. They are only great at disrupting so where is this going to go. As a value investor he does not get the story.