Human nature is prone to self-harm in financial bubbles

Twenty-four years ago, I was studying to become a financial analyst while working at a stock brokerage. Equity markets and animal spirits were soaring; the Nasdaq doubled in 1999 alone. Nortel was Canada’s pride and joy, accounting for over a third of Canada’s TSX stock index. In September 2000, Nortel was trading at C$124 a share; two years later, it was trading at 47 cents. And that was just one of many such examples.

In the stock brokerage, we were not taught how to value assets; investment firm training tends to focus on creating and selling investment products, not worrying about their risk-reward prospects. As a financial analyst, I learned about discounted cash flows and how to calculate a company’s present value and compare that with the market price of its shares and debt.

It was then that I noticed a problem. Almost all the most historically informative valuation calculations produced fundamental value numbers miles below the market prices in 2000, and they made no mathematical sense.

When I pointed this out to those around me, including the certified financial analysts (CFAs and MBAs) who worked on the ‘advisory’ team at the head office, they told me that those measurements were old school and irrelevant in a ‘new economy’ that was being transformed by the internet and technology. It was a forceful argument when confidently delivered by those decades older than me, but I wasn’t convinced. Why study to be a financial analyst if fundamental measurements no longer mattered?

Case in point: a company’s book value is theoretically the amount of money it would pay its shareholders if it were liquidated and paid off all its liabilities. In the spring of 2000, the average S&P 500 company traded 5 times its book value (shown below since 1946, courtesy of The Daily Shot).

The long-standing historical rule of thumb was that a price of 1x book value was reasonable, and a price to book of less than one has traditionally signalled a bargain. Five times? That was just unprecedented. Nowhere in the CFA textbooks did it even contemplate such extreme market pricing.

Price to book was just one metric—price to sales, price to earnings, market cap to Gross Domestic Product, dividend yield, equity risk premium, and on and on—and they were all at illogical levels. Few people knew, and even fewer cared.

It turns out it wasn’t a permanently high new world. As the masses went all in and then some, the bubble finally burst into a three-year drubbing that saw tech stocks tumble 80% and ‘conservative’ dividend-paying shares halve. It then took many years of holding and hoping to grow back losses.

Today, we are back at 2000-era valuation levels for the third time in the last century (market cap to corporate gross value-added multiple shown below since 1929). Once more, conventional wisdom is asserting that valuations no longer matter. I recall a similar sentiment in 2007, and I remain less convinced today than ever. As John Hussman points out in the Financial Times this week, in the last century, valu­ations have seemed least reli­able pre­cisely when they were most extreme and prescient, see Forgotten history reveals new eras but same bubbles:

The only way valu­ations could reach the heights of 1929, 2000 and today was for the mar­ket to advance tri­umphantly through every lesser extreme. Yet peaks such as today’s speak volumes about future returns. A secur­ity is noth­ing but a claim on a future set of cash flows that will be delivered to investors over time.

Regard­less of short-term out­comes, the higher the price investors pay for a given set of future cash flows, the lower the long-term return they can expect. A reli­able valu­ation meas­ure is simply short­hand for such an ana­lysis.

Sim­ilar to its pre­de­cessors, this spec­u­lat­ive epis­ode has been accom­pan­ied by exuber­ant sen­ti­ment about innov­a­tion­led growth, per­petual expan­sion in profits and a tend­ency among investors to root expect­a­tions about eco­nomic and invest­ment pro­spects in optim­ism.

As The Busi­ness Week observed in 1929: “This illu­sion is summed up in the phrase ‘the new era’. The phrase itself is not new. Every period of spec­u­la­tion redis­cov­ers it.”

The latest new era is only part of an endless cycle. Extremes such as the present have been extraordinarily rare in history, and provide investors with the opportunity to examine their exposure and tolerance for risk. At such moments, it may be helpful to exchange extraordinary optimism for a calculator.

Human nature is prone to self-harm in financial bubbles. In 2000, the baby boomers were 35 to 54 years old and primarily still working. Today, they have the highest stock market exposure ever and are aged 60 to 78. Financial recovery time will not be their friend. Fear of capital losses should trump fear of missing out on fleeting gains.

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Florida’s ‘condo cliff’

I regularly hear about people thinking of selling their Florida real estate due to escalating costs. An aged population increasingly feels the same way, and the weak loonie is a final catalyst for many Canadians. Who will be willing to buy from all those looking to sell?

After the deadly Florida condominium collapse in Surfside back in 2021, state lawmakers required condos that are at least 30 years old to do inspections, make repairs and gather reserve funds for future repairs. CNBC’s Diana Olick joins ‘Squawk Box’ to discuss the impending ‘condo cliff’ in Florida. Here is a direct video link.

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Market snakes follow ladders

Canada’s Venture Composite Index (a basket of economically sensitive micro-cap companies, 44% weighted in materials, 30% information technology, 15.74% in energy, 3.5% health care, 2.48% financials, 1.85% industrials, .58% communication services, and .32% consumer discretionary) appears to concur with former BoC head Stephen Poloz’s recessionary assessment.

When the real economy expands, rising demand for commodities and commodity-centric companies should reflect that. We saw this from 2009 through 2011 and briefly from 2020 into 2021.

Today (as shown below since 2000, courtesy of my partner Cory Venable), the Venture Composite Index is priced 41% below its 2021 top, 81% below its May 2007 cycle top, and 20% below its November 2008 “great recession” bottom.

Meanwhile, the large-cap TSX composite stock index (33% in financial shares) rebounded sharply in the past year to reach 17% above where it topped 33 months ago in March 2022 (below since 1980).

It’s important to note that there has never been a recession during which the Canadian stock market did not give back years of prior appreciation. Ladders take you up before snakes take you down. We see this above. In 1980-1982, the TSX dropped -45%, 1990-1993 (-24%), 2000-2003 (-50%, even though Canada technically avoided joining the US in a recession that cycle), 2008-2009 (-50%), and 2020 (-37%).

Apart from the highly irregular COVID drop and rapid 11-month bounce back, the shortest recovery time was 4 years to 1984 to recoup the 1980-82 losses. It took 8 years to 1995 to recover from the 1987 market drop, even though no recession unfolded.

In the 2008 bear market, the TSX dropped back to the price level it had first reached 11 years earlier, in 1998. It took 6 years for the market to recoup its 2008 high by 2014, and it remained range-bound until December 2018, for a decade of flat pricing.

Even that proved fleeting; the TSX gave back 20 years of gains as it tumbled back to the 2000 cycle high in March 2020 (see above). Amid unprecedented monetary and fiscal stimulus following 2008, it still took 12 years for the price index of Canada’s most valued companies to hold above the 2008 cycle peak by May 2020.

The 14% sell-off from March 2022 to last October returned the TSX to the same level as April 2021. At that point, it had managed a 24% gain over more than 15 years and underperformed T-bills with much greater risk and volatility.

The masses have once more been convinced that stocks are the only place to put our savings, but facts do not support that view. People are not pensions. Timing and our finite lifelines are everything. Since 1901, the stock market has spent 76% of the time declining in value or recovering from losses and just 24% of the time making new highs (Ned Davis Research).  Fear of losing money should trump fear of missing out on fleeting gains.

Starting valuations are definitive of returns in the longer run, and the higher they are, the harder prices fall. Today, equity risk-reward prospects have rarely been less attractive. This much is true. But history and human behaviour assure us that this shall pass and good things come to those who can carefully manage their emotions and capital over time.

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