Smart Dividend Investing: Beyond Yield
In a zero interest rate world, where liquidity and a newfound (recently rediscovered?) religion that credit defaults will be few and far between, assets with yield have been steadily bid up. The result: just as short-term savings accounts offer almost nothing in the way of interest, risk assets have seen spreads (the difference between their yield and a risk-free proxy) squeezed, so that they look much less attractive.
If you’re a bond manager, the trade-off between yield and safety is fairly apparent; moving up in one requires sacrificing some of the other. But equity investors, for some reason, often overlook that the “free lunch” to be had in dividend investing isn’t as great as it might appear, which is why having a good dividend stock screen is so important to narrow down candidates. Once a starting point is established, here are a few more analytical steps to take:
-Funding the dividend
The dividend culture that exists among investors encourages some management teams to (wrongly) believe that they need to pay a dividend in order to gain some perception of stability or conservatism. But a dividend, like water, is only as good as the source it comes from. Borrowing extra money to continue paying distributions to shareholders is something easily detected by looking at a firm’s Statement of Cash Flows, and a look at the Income Statement can tell if the dividend is an extremely high percentage of earnings. Either situation says that the firm likely is not profitable enough at present to be paying a dividend, which leads us to…
-Distributing excess capital
Some mature firms (many consumer staples come to mind) have limited expansion opportunities but are highly profitable; it makes sense for these companies to distribute such “excess capital” to investors if it would otherwise result in a large cash build-up on the balance sheet. It doesn’t make sense for companies to pay a dividend while simultaneously undergoing an aggressive expansion or trying to maintain certain standards of financial conservativism. Banks are a classic example of the latter; Citigroup (C) and Bank of America (BAC) each paid about $10 billion annually in dividends during the “good times” leading up to the crash. That money, of course, would have been extraordinarily valuable if it were retained. Looking at whether a company is actually giving investors back capital that it can’t make good use of, as opposed to simply increasing leverage (the effective side-effect of dividends), requires more analysis, which should culminate in…
-Estimating a sustainable yield
I’ve seen many people mistake a short-term anomalous yield for a supposedly-good dividend investment. Always check to see if the payout and yield are correct, or if they’re being skewed by a short-term event such as a special payout or variable profits. Common sense reigns here; if something is advertised as having a 15% yield, that should raise eyebrows, since most companies don’t have either the cash flow generating power (#1) or excess capital (#2) to consistently pay out that much.
Dubai, Risk Assets, and the Liquidity Illusion Redux
Is there a way to make money, on the long or short side, from the quasi-sovereign debt issues in Dubai? Because the situation has already broken and isn’t generally accessible to individual investors, there’s a more worthwhile path to consider than trying to short a bank with UAE exposure (which tends to be relatively small in concentration for global banks) – and that’s understanding the signals being sent.
In general, it’s a sharp reminder that credit risk is real, especially unconventional investments in emerging markets. That should give pause to the risk asset rally that has dominated discussion for the majority of 2009, an event that has clouded the perceptions of what safe haven assets are. What bounced on the news? The U.S. dollar (UUP). What “safe haven” sold off? Gold (GLD). I understand the appeal of gold, but am skeptical of its ability to be a true store of value in times of crisis. The “hard sell” many goldbugs, and TV advertisements, give on the usefulness of the metal should be another red flag; good assets are bought and not sold.
The bullet-point story isn’t always accurate – consider liquidity, which is the de facto explanation for the surge in asset prices this year. The last time we heard about an overabundance of liquidity was 2007, when the private equity bubble topped out; one year later we had a liquidity crisis. Liquidity disappears in times of market stress, and the source or cause of stress is not predictable. In other words, liquidity does not create a sustainable rally, it’s a short-term technical factor… and although it might be a significant driver of trading, it is imprudent to rely on liquidity to continue driving prices higher, just as it would be to expect a marginal company to always have access to financing.
The Dubai story, at its heart, is one of uneconomical activity. We are guilty of our fair share of that in America, but Dubai’s existence was predicated on the ability to defy nature through aggressive debt-financed building, and it seems the costs have not been fully considered. I’m not sure what value lies in Dubai, because it has higher structural costs than other locations because of its geography and environment, but combining poor economics with a lack of respect for shareholder rights is a recipe for disaster – understand what you own, and make sure your ownership rights are secure.