As i mentioned in my previous post, (G8 Educaiton/Sirtex update) i believe the US economy is on a good road to recovery and that 10 years from now i believe the economy will be in a much better state now. For example, i believe the GDP per capita to be relatively higher than it is now. Contrastingly, i also said that i believe Australia's future is bright but I'm somewhat cautious in making this statement (it comes down to how you define "bright".) I'll give you one of my reasons: if you look at the most recent reporting season, earnings grew at around 6-7%. This is fine, but the growth has come from cost-cutting and the firms have distributed the funds back to shareholders in the form of dividends. So, i question how such companies will grow with strength in the future.
I believe the search for yield is somewhat misinterpreted by market participants, especially retirees who tend to rely on such income. I don't think they have considered that a 6% dividend yield now is great, but its the growth in the dividend that matters. If the company is growing it's dividends at a low level, inflation will destroy you. Especially if inflation is growing faster than the dividend yield itself! Telstra is a good example of this. If you bought into Telstra in 2007 because of the dividends you would have received 28 cents per share. Fast forward to 2013 and whats the dividend per share? 28 cents. Factor in inflation at, say 2.5% per year (middle of the RBA target band) over the same time, your real loss is about 16% (due to the erosion of purchasing power brought about by inflation.) I could go on for a while but we'll leave it there for now. I hope it's sparked some different things to look at if you're using the traditional "dividend yield story" which as you can see, if you dig a bit deeper, is flawed. I've held capital appreciation constant here which of course isn't realistic but it makes the point clear. Of course this doesn't apply to every company.
Another probelem faced by the Australian economy is the depressing terms of trade (mainly due to the multifaceted problems faced by our miners) this will subtract from our national income. Tie this in with where our companies are going to grow, it becomes more apparent we may have some issues. All of these problems among others are the sorts of things running through my head when i made my initial statement.
So what can we do about it? I don't think I'm in a position to give my two cents for these sorts of issues as they extend slightly beyond my level. But what i will say is what I'm doing. I'm buying part-ownership in good businesses. Some of which (especially Sirtex) deriving most of their income from overseas. If you believe the $A is overvalued this might benefit you over your investment horizon. That's one way, another might be to avoid companies that are dependent on interest rates being low. Seth Klarman has been reported to give back ( or will be giving back) about $4 billion to shareholders. One of the reasons is because he believes the fairy tale of free money (this is more prominent in America than Australia as the Fed Funds rate is basically zero and has been for a while now) will have to come to and end soon and some companies aren't positioned well to deal with inclinations in interest rates. As you can probably see, these reasons among others all come back to finding good businesses. But how you define "good" is subjective and is difference for everyone.
Going back to Australia's future, i believe it maybe wise to allocate a certain portion (maybe around 20%) of my invest-able funds to the American stock market. The appropriate method for me will be a low cost ETF (Vanguard or Blackrock probably.) I will continue my focus on Australia, but some money in an international market whether it be certain Emerging Market economies such as China or India or even buying a tiny piece of corporate America will be ideal for investors. Due to my lack of experience i won't be engaging with Emerging Markets just yet (if at all.) As a note, i won't be doing bottom-up stock picking in global equity markets (hence the ETFs.)
No comments:
Post a Comment