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RHS – A Defensive ETF Rises

Summary Are these the worst of times? A worried market plays defense. Defensive sectors related to the consumer have risen to the top, such as the RHS ETF. Even though U.S. GDP data have picked up, until earnings improve, defensive sectors will have their day. Introduction When large institutions circle the wagons, they buy consumer staples, because we must spend on food, household cleaning products, over-the-counter medicines and feed that nicotine habit even in the worst of times. The Guggenheim S&P Equal Weight Consumer Staples ETF (NYSEARCA: RHS ) has risen to the top of our rankings of Guggenheim funds (see Figure 1). What does this mean? (click to enlarge) Figure 1: Strongest Guggenheim ETFs (data courtesy ETFmeter.com ) The RHS ETF Holdings. The Guggenheim RHS ETF has 37 stocks, with “equal” weights. The typical weight is around 2.7%, though some are as high as 3.05 percent. Approximately 37% represent Food Products, 21% represent Beverages, 19% represent Food and Staples Retailing, 10% represent Household Products and 8% represent tobacco. The top five best trending stocks in RHS are Mondelez International (NASDAQ: MDLZ ), Brown-Forman (NYSE: BF.B ), CVS Caremark (NYSE: CVS ), Kimberly Clark (NYSE: KMB ) and Monster Beverage (NASDAQ: MNST ). About half of the stocks are rising strongly. The five weakest stocks, and therefore, stocks representing best “value” are Keurig Green Mountain (NASDAQ: GMCR ), Mead Johnson (NYSE: MJN ), WalMart (NYSE: WMT ), Sysco (NYSE: SYY ) and Whole Foods Markets (NASDAQ: WFM ). Consumer Staples: The Strongest Sector within S&P 500 We analyze the major sub-sectors within the S&P 500 index over the medium-term, and find that Consumer related sectors are at the top of the trend strength, with materials and energy at the bottom. The latter have suffered due to a stronger dollar and weakness in China. Figure 2: A summary of medium-term trend analysis of S&P 500 sectors (data courtesy etfmeter.com ). S&P 500 Earnings Forecasts Come Down and Valuations Rise In their analysis of the latest reported Q2 earnings by S&P 500 companies (see Reference 1 below), Zacks reports overwhelmingly, companies have been “guiding down” on Q3 and Q4 earnings for 2015. They estimate that the guidance is for -4% year-over-year earnings decline for Q3 earnings, and a -0.8% decline in Q4 year-over-year earnings growth. This could explain the rise in defensive stocks. In other earnings news, FactSet.com report (see Reference 2 below) that the 12-month forward P/E ratio for the S&P 500 index is 16.7 per their estimates, above the 5-year and 10-year averages. Both data services expect growth to resume in 2016. However, for the rest of the year, valuations are richer than long-term trends, and earnings are expected to be lower, year-over-year. Putting the two together, the defensive posture by large investors seems justified. U.S. Economic Activity has picked up U.S. GDP data have been revised substantially in the latest releases complicating the interpretation of trends (see Reference 3 below). However, the Chicago Fed NAI shows the economy gaining strength (see Figure 3 and Reference 4 below). (click to enlarge) Figure 3: The Chicago Fed National Activity index recast in an investor-friendly format shows the economy bouncing back in Q2. The data are supportive of higher equity prices over the long-term (data courtesy ETFmeter.com ). Looking Ahead The rise in Consumer Defensive sectors reflects the uncertainty about future earnings in 2015. The economy has begun to pick up, but there is always a lag before the improvement shows up in earnings. The recent weakness in China, coupled with the knock-on effects from the Greek rebellion in Europe and a strengthening dollar (in anticipation of an interest rate hike in the U.S.) have lowered earnings guidance. Till the two opposing forces are of roughly equal strength, perhaps into 2016, consumer related stocks are likely to maintain their recent strength. References Sheraz Mian of Zacks: ” Q2 Earnings Season: All Around Weakness – Earnings Trends ” FactSet Earnings Insight ( July 24, 2015 ) Steve Liesman: ” U.S. Government revised earlier GDPs to fix anomalies in reporting ” Tushar Chande, ” SPY, QQQ, IWM: Full Trend Analysis of Major Market ETFs ” Disclosure: I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours. (More…) I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it. I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

Everyone Should Consider These Crisis-Immune Stocks

Summary After six years of rising share prices in the United States, I start to feel a little uncomfortable with current valuations. In this article I try to find out which companies and industries are likely to do well when the going gets tough in financial markets.. I calculated the share returns of American S&P 500 companies and European Stoxx 600 companies and industries during the financial crisis in 2008. I intend to increase the weights of stocks in my portfolio that are active in defensive sectors like consumer staples, health care, utility and energy. Readers can look for their own crash-resistant company in a spreadsheet list that is provided at the end of the article. My dilemma is simple. Professor’s Jeremy Siegel’s plea that stocks are the best asset class to own in the long run is very convincing (please read his brilliant books Stocks in the long run and The Future for Investors ). However, at the current valuations I strongly believe long run future returns will be low single digit at best for the S&P 500 as a whole, see this previous article of me. The simple answer to this dilemma is that I should look for the right stocks. I argued in earlier articles that I like to invest in companies that have their earnings protected by a wide moat such Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT ), Nestlé ( OTCPK:NSRGY ) and Unilever (NYS: UN ). In my view these companies will be able to generate handsome returns despite above average valuations, because they can invest every dollar they retain out of profits in a very lucrative way. In previous articles, I reasoned that investors should ignore short term price fluctuations if they are convinced the earnings power – that is the possibility to reinvest retained earnings in a lucrative way – has not changed. As long as the sustainable competitive advantage of the company – or what super investor Warren Buffett calls a moat – is unaltered, there is absolutely no reason to sell your shares. This point of view makes perfect sense in theory. In practice when shares plummet day after day and everybody thinks the end of civilization is near, it is extremely difficult to assess the long term earnings power of a company. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to find companies that are great investments and tend to do well when things get tough in financial markets. Forget useless math If have read dozens of (academic) papers and books on the concept of risk. The trouble is that most of the metrics used in finance – think volatility, beta, Value at Risk, etc – are close to useless in the real world because they explicitly or implicitly assume share returns are distributed according to a so called normal distribution (almost all the returns are close to the average). In the real world investors are faced with outliers, or returns that are light years away from the average. Although the academic world tries to construct models that try to deal with outliers, the approach I use to capture risk of individual shares in this article is extremely simple (the way I prefer things to be). I calculated the returns of stocks in particular sectors and individual stocks in the United States and Europe from top to bottom during the credit crisis. To be honest, the saying ‘financial markets have no memory’ seems applicable to me. I was a little shocked by the returns that were spitted out by my Bloomberg terminal doing the analysis. In the credit crisis the S&P 500 and Stoxx 600 – the 600 biggest European companies by market capitalization – lost 55.2 percent and 58.2 percent respectively of their value from top to bottom during this period. Stomach this! Stocks lost more than half of their value during the credit crisis Index Top Bottom Total Return S&P 500 index 10-9-2007 9-3-2009 -55.2% Stoxx 600 1-6-2007 9-3-2009 -58.2% Source: Bloomberg. Nowhere to hide I suspect that most readers are familiar with the story about the statistician who drowned in a lake with an average depth of six inches. Averages can be dangerous as the distribution around the average can be wide. Therefore, I grouped the companies in industry segments to see how each segment reacted during the crisis. I use the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICs, you can find which industry group belongs to which sector on this wiki page). Which American industry did best and worst during the credit crisis? Returns of S&P 500 Companies Returns of Stoxx 600 companies Sector # Mean Rec. return Sector # Mean Rec. return Consumer staples 33 -33,1% 49,4% Energy 23 -32,7% 48,5% Health care 50 -39,1% 64,3% Health care 36 -33,9% 51,4% Utility 29 -40,9% 69,3% Telecom services 19 -35,2% 54,3% Energy 37 -49,2% 96,8% Consumer staples 44 -36,8% 58,3% Materials 26 -50,5% 101,9% Utility 25 -38,8% 63,3% Information technology 62 -51,2% 105,1% Materials 48 -50,3% 101,1% Consumer discretionary 77 -53,6% 115,4% Information technology 27 -52,3% 109,7% S&P 500 -55,2% 123,3% Industrials 111 -54,7% 120,6% Industrials 60 -55,8% 126,0% Stoxx 600 -58,2% 139,0% Telecom services 6 -56,3% 129,0% Consumer discretionary 81 -60,1% 150,7% Financials 86 -68,1% 213,4% Financials 121 -64,6% 182,1% Source: Bloomberg. Return represents total shareholder return, including dividends. # represents the number of companies within each sector. Recovery return is the return necessary to recover your initial investment. Given the nature of the last big crisis I suspect few readers will be surprised by the worst performing sector: financials. Financial companies lost a staggering 68.1 percent in the U.S. and 64.6 percent in Europe of their market value from top to bottom. Note that in some cases the investors had to deal with the worst thing that could happen to a value investor: a permanent loss of capital. For example Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and both Bear Stearns (JP Morgan) and Wachovia (Wells Fargo) were absorbed by other investment banks. It is good news for investors that the top performing sectors are also fairly similar on both sides of the ocean. The sector consumer staples (mainly food, beverages, tobacco and personal products), Health care (equipment, pharmaceuticals and biotech), Utility and Energy are all represented in the top five in both the U.S. and Europe. The average returns of these sectors are all above the average of the market. Do not get me wrong: the performance was still horrible. This was the scary thing of the credit crisis: every share and asset class – even gold! – collapsed due to the a complete loss of faith in the financial system. But – and this is in my opinion very important – even in the credit crisis it still mattered a lot if the value of your portfolio dropped by 33 percent (fully invested in consumer staples), 55 percent (invested in the index) or 68 percent (fully invested in financials). Let’s do the math. If the value of a portfolio drops by 33 percent an investors needs a return of about 50 percent to get back to where he or she started. But if you lost 55 percent or 68 percent of value an investor needs a return of respectively 123 percent (factor 2.5) and 213 percent (factor 4.3!) to recover you initial investment value. You find the ‘recovery returns’ of each individual sector in the table above. As a side note I like to inform you that I also examined the returns of each industry in the aftermath of the burst of the internet bubble in 2000 in both the U.S. and Europe. In that period the same defensive sectors outperformed the market (most of these sectors even realized positive returns as the loss in market capitalizations was concentrated in internet companies). A quest for cheap crash proof stocks After a 6 year period in which markets have treated us well – again leading to expensive stocks – it makes sense to me to increase the weights in my portfolio to stocks that tend to do well in downturns. Therefore, I am looking for stocks that are active in the consumer staples, health care, utility and energy sector. However, although I favor the simple over the complex, there is always the risk of taking too many shortcuts. An investor always runs the risk that stocks that were resilient in 2007 will prove to be horrible investments during the next crash. The thing I do to deal with this problem is to look at valuations. As a value investor, I believe the price you pay determines the return of a financial asset. This implies an investor can pay too much, even for the most defensive stock. My method to find crash proof shares is fairly straightforward. In this spreadsheet you find the names of the shares of the S&P and Stoxx companies, its sector and return during the credit crisis (source: Bloomberg). Moreover, I added the P/E-ratio in 2007 (pre-crisis) and the current P/E of every share. In my quest for resilient stocks I look for shares in defensive sectors that have P/E-ratios that are similar, preferably lower, than before the crisis. In the last step an investor should investigate if there is a reason for the low valuation. The investors should for instance examine if the nature of the business have changed permanently in the past 6 years due to divestitures or acquisitions. Investors should also try to assess whether the markets for its end products have structurally changed due to disruptive entry of new competitors (although I believe one can find value in oil today, some investors believe this could be the case with oil stocks). I additionally cannot stress enough the importance of a strong balance sheet. In the aftermath of the credit crisis, I have seen billions of shareholder value getting destroyed by overleveraged companies that faced a decline in cash flows and had to raise capital at very unattractive terms for existing shareholders to survive. Wal-Mart as an example It is beyond the scope of this article to examine individual stocks in great detail. For now I only want to have a close look at the best performing sector in the U.S. during the credit crisis: consumer staples. The best performing stock in this sector is retail giant Wal-mart. To me it is absolutely amazing this stock gained 7 percent in the worst investment climate ever. In this long read article, I extensively argue that Wal-Mart is an attractive investment at the current valuation. After my analysis of today, I decided to increase my position in the company. I not only expect attractive long run returns of Wal-mart, I also expect the stock will be resilient in an unfortunate scenario where markets start turning against us. Thanks for reading, and I hope you find some great stocks yourself by scrolling down the list — please let me know which. Editor’s Note: This article discusses one or more securities that do not trade on a major U.S. exchange. Please be aware of the risks associated with these stocks. Disclosure: I am/we are long WMT. (More…) I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

11 Stocks Plus Cash Saw $24,000 Grow To Over $1 Million

Summary Start in 1985 with a $2,000 investment in cash. Make one $2,000 investment at the end of the year from 1986 through 1996. Investments are assumed to be made in an IRA to shelter from taxes. The first $2,000 was invested in cash to pay for commissions and other fees. The average investor can save a tidy sum for retirement. It takes some luck, perseverance, and a buy and hold approach. The portfolio constructed would generate $22,400 in dividends for 2015. The portfolio was constructed by entering stock symbols into a spreadsheet in random order. The model assumed a $2,000 a year investment from 1985 through 1996 or 12 years. The first – year investment of $2,000 was invested in cash to account for commissions and other fees. The results are not actual results, but hypothetical results. Dividends that would have been earned on investments have been ignored or assumed to have been invested in stocks that blew up and went to zero ($0.00). The results generated most likely are influenced by a survivor basis. Nevertheless, the exercise proved useful. Data was obtained from company websites and or Yahoo Finance. The performance results are handicapped by not accounting for dividends paid since purchase nor assuming they are reinvested. The portfolio results presented are conservative to consider a worst case rather than an unrealistic best case. This is part one. The second part will cover the years 1998 through 2014. The model portfolio is shown below. (click to enlarge) Chart of the stock performance since inclusion into the model portfolio is shown below. Kellogg (NYSE: K ) K data by YCharts Archer Daniels Midland (NYSE: ADM ) ADM data by YCharts Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX ) SBUX data by YCharts The Home Depot (NYSE: HD ) HD data by YCharts Exxon Mobil (NYSE: XOM ) XOM data by YCharts Stryker (NYSE: SYK ) SYK data by YCharts Caterpillar (NYSE: CAT ) CAT data by YCharts Charles Schwab (NYSE: SCHW ) SCHW data by YCharts JPMorgan (NYSE: JPM ) JPM data by YCharts Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT ) WMT data by YCharts Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT ) MSFT data by YCharts Bottom line: With a little luck and experience, it is possible for a modest investment to grow into a nice nest egg. What do you think? Disclosure: The author is long ADM, SYK, SCHW, JPM, MSFT. (More…) The author wrote this article themselves, and it expresses their own opinions. The author is not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). The author has no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article. Are you Bullish or Bearish on ? Bullish Bearish Neutral Results for ( ) Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Submit & View Results Skip to results » Share this article with a colleague