Feb

11

While most of you don't play racketball, I believe the hobo's history of racketball on site was very educational for those with kids who wish to play it or anyone who plays any racket sport. The torque and the backswings on the backhand and the bends in the pictures are most enlightening. One notes that there have been 4 champions who ruled the racketball world for about 5 years each, winning almost every tournament. I noted the same thing in squash, and tennis isn't too far away in that area also.

One wonders if a similar phenomenon relates to markets. e.g. is there one stock that can outclass all the others in performance for a certain number of years, like Hogan, Swan, and Kane. Eventually those champions receded due to age, competition, or injury. Is there a predictable turning point?

Alston Mabry writes: 

Obviously, AAPL is the current version of this. And looking at AAPL, one sees an example of a company that stumbles as it fails to effectively deploy the very capital it accumulates due to its success. 

A commenter writes: 

This is the measure of how good a CEO Jobs was. He may have been a great innovator and manager, but he may not have been that strong of a CEO. A good CEO assures succession, and it isn't clear that Jobs was successful in this regard. The same was true of RCA and David Sarnoff, By comparison, Alfred P. Sloan accomplished this task for GM, Adolph Ochs for the NY Times, Hershey with Hershey Foods, and the Mars family with the Mars candy business. That hasn't been the case with Apple, at least not yet. Any guesses on how long the Board waits until Cook is replaced?

David Lillienfeld writes: 

There will always be outliers.

There are also companies at the other tail with managements performing more for "enjoyment" (like me athletically–I suck at racketball but I very much enjoy playing it and when I've had access to a court, done so for 3+ hours a week). Are there stocks in which management is in it for fun rather than shareholder value "enhancement"? Sure. It isn't hard to identify underperforming companies.

As for a predictable turning point, there should to be tells in each industry, but that doesn't address your question about one sentinel stock. I don't think there is a sentinel today the way GM was in the 1950s and 1960s. (Some might argue that Johns-Manville was a better sentinel. Either way, there was a single stock.) You've got a globalized market and no one company occupies a dominant position in a sentinel industry (such as autos in the 1950s and 1960s). Of course, implicit in this uninformed comment is that a connection exists between stock performance and corporate performance.

Or have I misunderstood your question?

Alston Mabry writes: 

Just to do a little bit of counting, here are the 48 non-financial US-based cos with cash of $5B or more, with LT investments added in. The amounts are in billions of dollars, and the list is sorted by the Total column.

total cash: 729.4
total LT inv: 337.7
cash + LTinv: 1067.1

Ticker/TotalCash/LTinv/Total

AAPL   39.8  97.3  137.1
MSFT   68.1  9.8  77.9
GOOG   48.1  1.5  49.6
CSCO   45.0  3.7  48.7

XOM   13.1  35.1  48.2
CVX   21.6  26.5  48.1

GM   31.9  14.4  46.3
WLP   20.6  22.1  42.7
PFE   23.0  13.4  36.4
ORCL   33.7  0.0  33.7
QCOM   13.3  15.1  28.4
KO   18.1  10.2  28.2
IBM   11.1  15.8  26.9
F   24.1  2.7  26.8
AMGN   24.1  0.0  24.1
MRK   18.1  5.6  23.7
INTC   18.2  4.4  22.6
HPQ   11.3  10.6  21.9
JNJ   19.8  0.0  19.8
BA   13.6  5.2  18.8
CMCSA   10.3  6.0  16.3
DELL   11.3  4.3  15.5
UNH   11.4  2.6  14.1
NWSA   7.8  5.2  13.0
EBAY   9.4  3.0  12.5
LLY   6.9  5.2  12.1
ABT   11.5  0.4  11.9
AMZN   11.4  0.0  11.4

GLW   6.1  5.2  11.3
EMC   6.2  5.1  11.3

HUM   9.3  1.0  10.3
FB   9.6  0.0  9.6
UPS   9.0  0.3  9.3
WMT   8.6  0.0  8.6
SLB   6.3  1.7  8.0
DVN   7.5  0.0  7.5
S   6.3  1.1  7.5
PEP   5.7  1.6  7.3

PG   7.0  0.0  7.0
UAL   6.7  0.0  6.7

HON   5.3  1.3  6.5
DISH   6.4  0.1  6.5
RIG   6.0  0.0  6.0
ACN   5.7  0.0  5.7

COST   5.6  0.0  5.6
NTAP   5.6  0.0  5.6

DE   5.0  0.2  5.2

Richard Owen adds: 

This is a brilliant list with many lessons.

- 80/20 rule: $2tr of surplus cash is bandied about as the figure for US corporations. Here are 50 covering over half of that sum.

- The 1% have an internal dissonance. Here is their accumulated share of National Product, all stored up and failed to be reinvested. The 1% neither wish to reinvest their cash, to reduce their share of Product, nor to have GDP decline, nor to run deficits. This is in aggregate impossible.

- By giving you will receive. By being cowardly, you will realise your fear. Tim Cook is hoarding his cash out of fear. Nobody has EVER put that kind of cash to work successfully. Not even Warren Buffett could do it on his best day. If Apple attempts to do so, they will end up hanging themselves. David Einhorn is so on the point with his analysis. And for once an activist is helping make management's jobs more secure, not less. They just need to listen. Take some options, recap the stock, make yourself heroes. Don't think you can use that cash to buy another magic wand. You will end up buying a pup. The most recent example of what might happen to Tim Cook if he doesn't see the light is the CEO of Man Group. They totally feared that AHL would stop working. They grasped at their cash looking for any credible diversification. They bought GLG at totally the wrong multiple. And then it all fell apart. All totally well intended, all well thought through. But if they had just recapped the stock - "coulda been heroes". Get out of your own way.

Steve Ellison writes: 

A couple of theories:

The crossover point from innovator to mature company occurs when revenue from continuing product lines becomes large enough that it dwarfs revenue that could realistically be expected from starting up a new product line in a new niche, was the theory in the innovation class I took in business school. Let's say that a company might develop a completely new line of business. If it were successful, it would be doing very well to get to $1 billion per year of sales of the new line within 5 years. If the company already had $20 billion per year in revenue, management would probably devote more attention to nurturing and further developing the cash cows that bring in the $20 billion than to a risky venture that might, if all goes well, add 5% to existing revenue. One might test this proposition by setting an arbitrary sales per year threshold and checking stock price movements of companies after they move past this level.

Adoption of new technologies follows an S curve pattern, driven by a small number of early adopters followed by more cautious but herdlike technology managers at large businesses, was the theory advanced by Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm. One might test this theory by looking for companies whose sales growth decelerated to less than 20% of the maximum growth rate of the past 5 years.


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