After a long holding period,  I finally dropped Starbucks out of the VFS Invest portflolio.  Even though  I had to take a capital gain,  I decided to remove it because of two reasons.  One, given its recent drop on earnings concerns, my momentum model flagged it as under-perform.   Two, my thesis for holding Starbucks is crumbling.  My main reasons for holding Starbucks was strong management in Howard Schultz, and a good China play.  Well, with Schultz leaving, that strikes one reason, as well as introduces another negative I watch.  My gut has told me over the years that when a CEO leaves, the stock under-performs for awhile. This may be because the CEO always likes to leave on a high note.  Alternatively, this could be because of the turmoil a change in leadership at the top can cause subsequent quarters to underachieve, because of writeoff’s or change in direction of new management.

The second concern is China.  I still think China is a huge opportunity for Starbucks long term.  Short term,  I have a concern about China’s economic performance overall.  Given the tariffs and slowing growth in China, I think its conceivable that the long predicted China crash could happen in the next several months, and I would think Starbucks could get hit by this.

Finally, a third concern is revenue growth is already slowing significantly.  Same store comp revenue is now hovering around 2%, and even factoring in revenue from new stores, growth is slowing significantly:

So for now, I am on the sidelines with Starbucks.  I just don’t like the risk/reward.  I hate selling after a big drop, but I also hate holding a stock because I hope it will go back up.  I will watch and wait on the China story, as well as give the new management a couple quarters to prove to me that the leadership is still high quality.

I was poking thru the annual report for Constellation Brands (STZ) and came across an interesting tidbit.  Constellation Brands is primarily a beer and wine company.  Popular beer brands it owns are Corona, Modelo, and Pacifico, as well as some craft brews.  It owns some major wine and spirits brands too, such as Kim Crawford, Robert Mondavi, SVEDKA Vodka and others.  It is a big company with a market cap of 42 billion and net income of 2.31 billion in 2017.

As  I was reading thru the report trying to figure out if I wanted to add it to my watch list, I came across this in the recent acquisitions section:

This was a pretty understated note, but it seems like they are dipping their toes in the water to see it if make sense to be in the cannabis business.  As an investor, it seems to me that if you want to place a bet that the cannabis business will be a great investment in the coming years, this may be an interesting way to play it.  There are numerous cannabis growing and marketing stocks out there, but they seem pretty risky, and more hype than revenue.

A couple more interesting comments in the annual report on this investment:

We have also recently invested in a Canadian company that manufactures and supplies medicinal cannabis. While we will not develop, distribute, manufacture or sell cannabis products in the U.S., or anywhere else in the world, unless it is legally permissible to do so at all governmental levels in the particular jurisdiction, this investment could affect consumer perception of our existing brands and our reputation with various constituencies.

It looks to me like they have not yet fully embraced this new market, at least publicly, and they want to make sure this market doesn’t tarnish their other brands.  Also (emphasis mine),

In November 2017, we acquired (i)  a 9.9% investment in Ontario, Canada-based Canopy Growth Corporation, a public company and leading provider of medicinal cannabis products (the “Canopy Investment”), and (ii)  warrants which give us the option to purchase an additional ownership interest in Canopy Growth Corporation (the “Canopy Warrants”) for C$245.0 million , or $191.3 million . The Canopy Warrants expire in May 2020 . For the year ended February 28, 2018 , we recognized an unrealized gain of $464.3 million from the changes in fair value of the Canopy Investment and the Canopy Warrants, which is included in income from unconsolidated investments.

I couldn’t find how much they paid for this investment, but in four months they made 464 million on this investment.  So their initial foray into this market is pretty successful, even if they don’t market cannabis themselves.

So if you are a believer that cannabis will have a place in the worlds leisure culture next to alcohol, Constellation Brands may be an interesting investment.  While clearly not a pure play in cannabis, they have the distribution and marketing infrastructure in place to really build the market.

One of my favorite terms used in investing history is ‘Irrational Exuberance’, a term Former Fed chair Alan Greenspan used in a speech on December 5th 1996.  At the time, everybody was bullish, and the stock market was on a tear as shown by the S&P 500 chart below:

The full quote by Greenspan was:

Clearly, sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks and other earning assets. We can see that in the inverse relationship exhibited by price/earnings ratios and the rate of inflation in the past. But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?

— “The Challenge of Central Banking in a Democratic Society”, 12/5/1996

Looking at the above chart, its easy to see why there was a concern that irrational exuberance was fueling a bubble.  But remember, we had four more years of ‘irrational exuberance’ and rising asset prices, ending with the crazy dot com bubble of of 2000 – 2001.

Looking at the S&P 500 chart since then shows an interesting story:

Two ways to look at this.  If you got out of the market at the point of ‘irrational exuberance’, you would of missed out on almost a double of the market in 3 years.  However, you could of gotten back 13 years later in the spring of 2009, when the market was at its 2008 lows.

I bring this up today, because many investors feel we are again at a point of irrational exuberance.  2017 was the first year in history where the S&P 500 was up every month of the year.  So I tend to agree we are again irrationally bullish.  But just because the market may be crazily priced, it still may go up to even more irrational heights, and it may take years for the market to recognize it.  However, it is also a reasonable bet that in the next 5 years there will be a point where the market will be cheaper than it is today.  Remember, we are currently in the 2nd longest economic expansion in American history, and with the yield curve flattening, it looks like the party may be coming to an end – if you look at it rationally.

When I saw this Jeff Bezos interview, it occurred to me that I have never really watched or read an interview with him.  Gates, Buffett, even Paul Allen you hear from more than the founder of Amazon.com.  It was interesting to hear his perspectives on Amazon, his driving principles, his background, and he comes across as a thoughtful guy.  I also liked the interviewer here – I thought he asked some great questions and really hit a wide variety of issues.

Its a long video, but if want to get the perspective of the richest man in the world, watch the video below.  If you prefer, you can view the transcript here,  but I think the video provides a full insight.

Over the holidays I was talking investments with family members, and the question came up as to whether I thought the RSI Indicator was of any use or not.  To be honest, I responded I had never looked at it, so I couldn’t offer an opinion.  Since then, I have been casually watching it, and I am now of the belief there may be something to it.

In case you are not familiar with the Relative Strength Index (RSI) technical indicator, it essentially tracks short term momentum.  This page provides a great overview of how it is calculated and its history.  In summary, it flashes a sell signal when a dramatic increase has happened over 14 days, or a buy signal when a dramatic decrease happens over 14 days.  The theory being that after 14 days of buying or selling, the inventory of people who would buy or sell is pretty much exhausted.

So in late January, I noticed a bunch of stocks where the RSI was flashing sell.  In particular, the S&P ETF (SPY):

S&P 500 (SPY)

Notice after the big run-up the RSI was over 70 (SELL!)  and subsequently the market corrected.  It then switched to a buy (RSI under 30) at the bottom.  Note however that it kept going up after initially hitting the over 70 mark, so if you sold then it likely wouldn’t have worked.

Amazon was the one that caught my eye.  This was my first test case, as I was looking to reduce my exposure to Amazon anyway, I figured with the RSI over 70, that was a reasonable time to unload some shares.

Amazon (AMZN)

This didn’t work real well, since it dropped less than most stocks in early February, and it quickly recovered the loss later in February.

The current one I am watching is Zillow:

Zillow Group (ZG)

 Looks like it is following the classic pattern, and now the price is starting to break down.  My working theory is that the strategy is to underweight a stock that has been over 70 RSI for 4 days.  And consider overweighting a stock when it hits 30 RSI.  Of all the charts I have looked at, that appears to be the formula based on the patterns.

My next step is to start tracking RSI and backtest a number of different formulas to see if there is a pattern here.  And if there is, I will plug it into my stock technical model.

The above charts were provided by stockcharts.com.  Try running some of your favorite symbols thru there and see if you find a pattern.  I still am resisting technical analysis, it seems a little voodoo that this is all driven by emotion.  But if I can nail down a pattern with this indicator, I might finally give in to the dark side of investing.

For years I have used Googles portfolio viewer to track stocks in my portfolios.  It was fast, had plenty of fundamental and technical data, and allowed easy tracking of news related to the portfolios.  Unfortunately, in the middle of November, Google deprecated their portfolio feature, leaving me to wander around for a better portfolio viewer.

I will miss the old Google interface:

Well organized and to the point.  I thought that with all the portfolio managers around, I shouldn’t have problems finding a new one.  My requirements were pretty simple.  Ability to track multiple portfolios, show daily price changes at a glance, and allow you to add stocks to a portfolio in bulk – i.e paste a string of symbols in to add stocks.  So I looked far and wide at all the various offerings, paid and free, and it took me a long time to settle on one that I liked.  The one I settled on?  The folks at Seeking Alpha seem to have created the best one I could find:

It meets all my requirements, has a clean interface with access to lots of stock financial information.  It doesn’t have the technical tools that Google Finance had, but I can do without that most of the time, and can probably find another source of that information when I need it.  One issue I have noticed is in the morning right after the market opens, it appears to be pretty sluggish.  My guess is a lot of people are finding this tool, and they are experience higher traffic now that Google has dropped out.

I would have been willing to pay for a full featured portfolio tracker, but I couldn’t find one that met my needs.  Maybe its time for some startup to really take advantage of the opening left by Google Finance’s changes.

In the meantime, I am very pleased with the tool Seeking Alpha has provided.  Check it out if you are looking for a new portfolio tracker.

Note to Readers:  This article was not sponsored in any way by Seeking Alpha.  I have written articles and been compensated by Seeking Alpha for those articles, but this is a personal blog post initiated by me and unrelated to my relationship with Seeking Alpha.

I just posted an analysis of Rocky Brands (RCKY) on Seeking Alpha.  Check it out here:

Rocky Brands: The Margin Story Is Better Than The Revenue Story

An interesting company that has been able to increase margins while sales are shrinking.  Will be interesting to see how this plays out.

After years of ignoring all those requests for free airline miles for signing up for a new credit card, I finally decided it did not make economic sense to ignore the offers.  American Express has really sweetened their offers, likely because since they lost all their Costco members, they are seriously looking for cardholders.

Thinking about it, I decided to break it down to a bet.   American Express (Amex) offered my 60,000 miles for signing up for a card.  If you assume a mile is worth roughly a penny, that’s $600.   So why is American Express so willing to part with $600?  Lets assume the actual cost to the airline is around $300.  I have no idea what the margin is on airline tickets, so lets just use 50% for this example,  If I buy a ticket using miles and the seat would of been empty anyway – it costs the airline very little.  But lets just assume the airline dings American express for $300 for driving traffic to this airline.

So, Amex thinks they get at least $300 of benefit by giving me a card.  I normally wouldn’t get an American Express card, as not everybody takes American Express – for good reason.  If I were a merchant, I wouldn’t take American Express, since they typically charge upwards of 1% more to the merchant than Visa or MasterCard.  So with apologies to merchants everywhere, if I spend their required $3000 on the Amex card, they are getting $90 in credit card fees from me.  Also, after the first year, they charge $90 for the card.  So if I keep the card for over a year, and spend roughly $7000 on the card, lets assume they break even.

Amex of course hits the jackpot if I carry a balance on the card or am late on a payment, so that’s the real gamble here.  They don’t know that I have very few firm rules in life – but one of them is to not carry a balance on a credit card – that is fiscal suicide.  They card around 25% annual interest on balances, in an environment where we get 1% on our savings.  Gee – even bankers can make money with that kind of spread.

So I took them up on my gamble, picked up the miles, and just purchased an airline ticket using the miles and saved $600 on the price of the ticket.

So so far – so good.  I have a process in place to manage the process, and track when my annual fees are due.  I also need to take a look at what opening these new accounts does to my credit, as that would be a hidden cost here if that is impacted.  I would not recommend everybody do this – it takes work to track all this, and in some sense you are playing with a fiscal bomb if it backfires on you.  So be aware this is not a free offer in the economic sense.

So who wins this bet?  I am going to say both me and Amex.  I currently plan to keep using the card for this year, and getting my miles balance back up to where I can get another ticket.  Amex gives me 1 mile for every $1 spent, which is roughly what my other cards give me for general purchases.  So I will use this as my primary card, until the year is up, then likely cancel if they try to charge me an annual fee.  So if I hit the $10,000 on that card this year, they essentially break even.

So as much as I was hoping to take advantage of stupid bankers.. it turns out they might end up benefiting them also.  I guess I will have to be satisfied with just shrinking their margins.

Of late I have been doing a lot of analysis around stock market sectors.  In the past I hadn’t really paid too much attention to sector weighting, but during all the technical analysis I have been doing has let me to believe there probably is something to trying to allocate holdings by sector.   I recently completed building my sector analysis model (see it here), and am test driving it to see if it can lead to enhanced returns in my portfolio.

During my deep dive into this subject, I ran across this page on the Fidelity website that did a pretty decent job of giving basic sector weighting advice.   They use a business cycle approach to sector weighting, and they had this interesting chart showing how different sectors do during different parts of the business cycle:

Fidelity’s opinion is that we are in the mid to late phase of the business sector, and that seems reasonable to me.  So using the chart above should give you an idea as to what sectors to start thinking about over-weighting or under-weighting.

One thing I realized when I started looking at my holdings by sector that I was way overweighted in the Technology and Consumer discretionary sectors.  This is because I typically ‘buy what I know’, products or services that I use.      I don’t think there is anything wrong in buying what you know, but this analysis has helped me keep better disciplined as to managing portfolio risk.

So its been an interesting dive into thinking about sectors, whether or not its meaningful or not only time will tell. I will be watching the market with a focus on sectors, and will see if this can be a tool to enhance portfolio performance.

I have followed the stock for eMagin for years, and finally gave up on it for good a couple years ago. But my technical indicator shows a possible upside move in the offing.

Check out the full story on an article I wrote on Seeking Alpha: