Apple’s drop shows price of popularity
Commentary: To find your prince, you need to kiss a frog
new
Jan. 25, 2013, 11:40 a.m. EST
By Mark Hulbert, MarketWatch
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (MarketWatch) — What investment lesson are you drawing
from Apple’s breathtaking plunge over the last couple of months?
The one I think is most important is a contrarian one: To find your prince, you need to be willing to kiss a frog.
For years now, this contrarian lesson was dismissed by Apple
AAPL
-2.09%
investors, who racked up huge gains by ignoring contrarian analysis and
instead investing in the most popular, coolest and best-performing
company in sight.
However, now that the stock is down nearly 40% since its peak of last
September — including a more than 12% drop in Thursday’s trading alone —
perhaps they will be more open to considering the contrarian wisdom of
investing in out-of-favor companies.
The stocks of such companies may be less exciting, but over the long
term they usually provide a superior — and certainly less volatile —
return.
Just consider a spectacular bet that Robert Arnott, chairman and founder
of Research Affiliates, made in the summer of 2010. To set the context
of his bet, Apple that summer surpassed Microsoft
MSFT
+0.97%
to take the No. 2 spot in the market-cap rankings — and was fast closing in on ExxonMobil
XOM
+0.08%
as the largest publicly traded company in the world.
As contrarian investors know, sometimes you need to kiss a frog to find your prince.
BP
BP
-0.01%
, in contrast, was on life support as it struggled to cope with the
disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Its stock price had plunged
to its lowest in over a decade. Survival was by no means assured.
Like the good contrarian he is, however, Arnott was willing to “kiss the
frog”: He publicly bet that BP would outperform Apple over the longer
term.
That was a gutsy bet indeed. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the
vitriolic comments my column received for merely reporting Arnott’s
bet.
Read August 2010 column in Barron’s by Mark Hulbert: Is Apple’s market value too big for comfort?
To be sure, Arnott’s bet only recently became a winner. But he is today
enjoying the last laugh: Since BP’s low in the summer of 2010, it has
produced a cumulative real return of 77%, in contrast to 71% for Apple.
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This isn’t the only time Arnott has kissed a frog. Another came a year
after his BP-over-AAPL bet: In August 2011 he predicted that Bank of
America
BAC
+0.78%
would outperform Apple over the long term.
At that time, it was hard to imagine Bank of America’s reputation being
more awful. It represented all that was dysfunctuional about bank and
mortgage-company behavior that led to the credit crunch and liquidity
crisis of 2008.
Even today it is paying the price for its bad deeds: Its latest
quarterly earnings, released last week, were hugely depressed by
billions in charges related to the settlement of various legal disputes
arising out of the subprime-mortgage fiasco.
Read full report on BAC earnings.
Is Apple a value investor's dream?
With Apple's share price nearing 52-week lows, growth-minded investors are selling to value investors, who are drawn to the stock's valuation and potential for a dividend hike.
Yet on this BAC-over AAPL bet, Arnott is even further in the black than
he is with his BP bet: Since my August 2011 column reporting it, Bank of
America stock has produced an 18-month real return of 60%, versus 25%
for Apple.
To be sure, contrarian bets like Arnott’s don’t always work out this nicely. But, more often than not, they do.
We know this because of the superior long-term performance of benchmarks
like Arnott’s so-called fundamental indices, which almost always end up
underweighting the stocks with the largest market caps.
Consider the FTSE RAFI All-Caps US 1000 index, which weights stocks
according to a number of fundamental criteria rather than market cap. In
the summer of 2010, for example, when Arnott made his BP-over-AAPL bet,
Apple was the 27th largest company in that index. It would have been
the second-largest company in the index if its weight had been based on
market cap.
Since the inception of the FTSE RAFI All-Caps US 1000 index in November
2005, its alternate weighting scheme has added 1.44 percentage points
per year to its return. That’s a lot of alpha to trace to changing each
stock’s weight in the index.
Keep that in mind the next time you’re tempted to invest in the latest fad on Wall Street.
What frog might a contrarian be kissing right now?
In an email earlier this week, Chris Brightman, head of investment
management at Research Affiliates, suggested betting on Wal-Mart
WMT
-0.66%
over Amazon
AMZN
+1.80%
. The latter company may not have the same pizzazz that Apple did in its
heyday, but it still represents the allure and promise of the high-tech
sector — especially in contrast to Wal-Mart.
Amazon’s stock is up over 50% over the last year, triple Wal-Mart’s stock gain of just 17%.
Brightman’s contrarian-based reasoning: “Today, Amazon has a market
capitalization of $124 billion, more than half of Wal-Mart’s $233
billion market cap. Yet Wal-Mart is more than five times the size of
Amazon measured by sales, cash flow, dividends, and book value. Wal-Mart
has free cash flow ... of $11 billion per year to distribute to its
shareholders — which is paid as $5 billion in dividends and $6 billion
as share buybacks — providing a nearly 5% annual yield.”
“Amazon [in contrast] has only $2 billion of free cash flow and pays
nothing back to its shareholders. Amazon’s sales and cash flow will need
to more than quintuple relative to Wal-Mart to match Wal-Mart’s ability
to pay its shareholders. Anything less, and Wal-Mart is the better
investment.”
Mark Hulbert is the founder of Hulbert Financial
Digest in Annandale, Va. He has been tracking the advice of more than
160 financial newsletters since 1980. Follow him on Twitter
@MktwHulbert.
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