The Bond Dilemma

The craziness of markets over the last few months caused by the Coronavirus have been incredible. As in investor, I am trying to forecast where we go from here, and what are the best and worst possible outcomes. While the stock market and its disconnect from the economy seems to be getting most of the headlines, I think the bigger story is the bond market and where it goes from here.

As seen in the chart above, the 2 year treasury bond has dropped from near 3.00% in late 2018 to 0.13% in September of 2020. This, along with the government’s fiscal stimulus is probably most responsible for the stock market’s disconnect from the economy.

The stimulus here is unprecedented – dwarfing the financial crisis of 2009:

The stock market is fueled by stimulus, and seems to be signalling full speed ahead. Given the government intervention, it is nearly impossible to determine if the market is overvalued or undervalued, as the economy is a secondary factor to stimulus.

I also think the stock market is being fueled by Bond investors jumping ship. Risk averse bond investors not reinvesting bonds that mature at .14% – instead invest in Apple or Microsoft that has a growing yield and is ‘safe’. I understand the appeal of this strategy, but at these prices it seems like a lot or risk is being taken on out of desperation.

At any rate, one almost sure bet is that the bond market will be a loser. This bet does assume that the aversion to negative interest rates in the US will persist. Given that assumption, the best case for the investors in 2 year treasuries would be a no inflation or deflationary economy, with rates at or near zero. Given that assumption, the rate of return on bonds is still near zero.

The worst case scenario for bond investors is all this stimulus in the hands of consumers, combined with an economy waking from the COVID shutdown, leads to inflation. The only hope the government has of reducing the debt is to increase inflation, and so those in charge of the money press are incented to cause some inflation. The government has targeted and pretty much achieved a 2% inflation rate for the last few years. The Federal Reserve recently adjusted its inflation mandate to declare they may allow overshooting their 2% target rate – a further sign of inflation in the medium to long term. This does not bode well for a T-Bill yielding .14%.

So what to do with my bond portfolio. My asset allocation currently has a percentage in US Bonds, and if I am to reduce that allocation, where to I put it? Lots of options, but none that I really like:

Increase Allocation to the stock market. One option is to increase allocation to the stock market- maybe in the ‘bond proxy’ sectors. Options such as Utilities and Financials (JP Morgan is yielding over 3.6%%, and the government won’t let anything happen to that bank. Most local and regional ‘safe’ utilities yield in the 2-4 % range. Other options might be focusing on reasonable yielding low valuation stocks. Rocky Brands comes to mind with a near 2% yield and Price/Book around 1, P/E of 9, and a little growth. Many bond investors have already flocked to the market and these sectors, so it may be too late here to buy these possibly inflated assets. Definitely adding risk with this strategy.
Increase Allocation to Gold. I have an allocation in gold already, though I hate the idea of holding rocks in my portfolio. But the way the world if printing money, Gold has had a pretty good year and the money printing wont be stopping anytime soon. I have been experimenting with buying quality Gold miners, then selling covered calls in the +10% range which generates pretty good income. This is still an experimental strategy, but it seems to be doing no worse than just holding gold (via BAR) and gold mining stocks, and makes me feel better about holding this asset class.
Increase Allocation to TIPS (Treasury Inflation Protection Securities). An interesting play here – TIPS are pegged to the inflation rate – so if inflation does hit, your interest rate increases. If we have deflation, yields will turn negative (unless you buy IBonds via Treasury Direct – which have a floor of 0% rate – but there is a limit on annual purchases). Probably worth taking your chances with TIPS over fixed rate bonds, The Vanguard TIPS Mutual Fund is currently yielding over 2%, so that might be an interesting option, but its not going to make you rich. Its also moved up alot over the last few months, as other people have figured this out several months ago.
Increase Allocation to Real Estate/REITs. This is my least favorite diversification play. In volatile times, REITs move more like stocks than bonds, so its a huge risk increase to move from bonds to economy dependant real estate. There are certain areas of REITs that my be interesting for ‘safer’ diversification (i.e. farmland REITs), but historically they haven’t performed well. I also believe the fallout from COVID has yet to be reflected in the commercial REITS.

I am not alone facing these choices – most investors saving for retirement or in retirement are facing this dilemma. Right now I am leaning toward increasing my allocations to the stock market – but really emphasizing low P/E or low Price to Book stocks in defensive sectors that haven’t participated in this recent tech bubble run-up. Those stocks are out there, it just requires some digging.

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The Microsoft Surface Duo

I have been reading a lot of bad reviews about Microsoft’s new dual screen device called the Surface Duo. What I find most surprising is most the bad reviews center around the lack of purpose for a dual screen device. The Windows Blog provides a pretty good overview of the device.

It seems to me there would be demand for a dual screen device – no so much for single app use, but for business multitasking. It seems to me the logical use case is to have one side of the phone for apps consuming media, the other side for apps where your create media. So if I was to get one, I would likely keep my email and messaging app on one side, and my web browser and reading apps on the other. Other use cases Microsoft shows that essentially using the device as a doublewide screen are less compelling to me, as even a double wide screen is probably too small to do any real work. But for a productivity tool, I think this form factor will catch on.

Besides the consternation regarding how to use the device, the bad reviews have focused around the low specs on this device. On this point I agree – for a list price of $1,400, I would want a more high end device.

The low end specifications for such a high priced device will put this product at a disadvantage, and it may not succeed. But I don’t necessarily think Microsoft was planning on a huge success in this round. This is an experiment and I think they are looking to see what users and app developers do with this form factor. Again, at $1400 this device isn’t for me, but I give Microsoft credit for putting it out there.

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Rocky Brands Update

I just published a new article on Seeking Alpha covering Rocky Brands:

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4367000-rocky-brands-online-strategy-provides-profitability-through-pandemic

Rocky Brands is an interesting story – one would think they would be hit pretty hard during the pandemic. They were expected to lose $0.16 a share in Q2, instead they reported a $0.33 gain on unexpected demand.

An interesting conservative buy at these levels and in this environment.

Measuring Air Quality

In the past few months I have become more curious about the air quality of our house. I noticed as I get older I feel more congested in the winter, and lately our cat has been sneezing more – so I decided to throw technology at the question. In the winter here in the Pacific Northwest, we keep the windows closed most days in winters, and we don’t usually have all the rooms in our house fully heated. In winter months, when I am not heating my office it can dip down to the low 60’s, and with the wet weather we receive, I wonder if we have mildew or other organisms that like damp, cool environments.

So I decided to research air quality trackers, and came across this Awair Air Quality monitor.

See larger image

Awair Element Indoor Air Quality Monitor – AQM8002A (Kitchen)

List Price:

$149.00

New From:

$149.00 In Stock

I was able to buy it at just over $100, and while it was more than I wanted to spend, but I couldn’t pass up the connected home features this one offers. It comes with a nice app that gives you more than enough information about your home air quality. I set it up in my office where it sits on my desk and I can see the numbers go up and down. I have it set up to give me notifications on my phone when thresholds exceed certain levels. After watching it for several months, the only thing it gives me a low score is typically on is the temperature and humidity. If I don’t have the heat on in my office, the humidity can quickly rise to above 70% on rainy days, which isn’t great. So I have been using this monitor to manage the humidity without grossly heating an empty room.

This does detect chemicals in the air pretty well though. One weekend, I got an alert from my Awair that chemicals in the air were high. I was just sitting in my office, and the numbers were spiking out of nowhere. After thinking about all the stuff I had been doing that day, I realized what was probably causing the issue. Earlier in the day around 2pm, I had painted a closet door in the garage with latex paint, and after I was done I used a utility sink to wash out the brush I was using. I have done this for years, never thinking anything of it. Well it turns out, the furnace is in the same room as the sink, and when the heat kicked on, it must have picked up all the latex compounds that I washed in the sink.

Note that from the above data the number spike corresponds to a heat increase around 4:30pm – when the furnace kicked on. Amazingly just washing paintbrushes was enough to hit an unhealthy level in the house. Since then, the numbers have gone back down to normal and have not spiked since. I have some more painting to do – so I will test this out again just to prove my theory.

I tried moving the Awair to the Kitchen, and it seems pretty accurate detecting smoke from cooking too. Pretty much anytime when cooking, the particulate numbers will elevate, and turning on the kitchen fan does affect the numbers. Interesting the quickest way to get the numbers down is to open doors and windows, which almost immediately flushes the air.

For just over $100, this Awair appliance is interesting, although once you measure your air for a period of time, it doesn’t give you much actionable info. And I am not sure it answers my question about the mildew or mold in the air, but it does tell me I have no major problems. For now though, my indoor air quality is for the most part excellent and so I can rest (and breath) easy.

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The Framework Nightmare of the 2010’s

If historians ever write about software development in the 2010’s, the main discussion point will have to be the mess caused by JavaScript and competing JavaScript frameworks. The chart from Google trends shows how each year a different JavaScript framework was the ‘best framework to use’:

The reason this happened is they are all inferior. A JavaScript framework itself is a tool to try to cover up the deficiencies of JavaScript, a language that had developers grasping for a tool that would help. With frameworks came helper packages to help deploy frameworks, leading to a huge conglomeration of various packages needed to write front end software to run in a web browser.

The legacy of this mess will be with us for years. React is currently the winning framework (if you use Google search trends as a guide), and so new applications will more likely be written in React than the other frameworks. Thus, the pool of experienced developers with these older frameworks will shrink, making it more difficult to maintain these applications written just a few years ago. And no developer will want to put Vue or AngularJS on their resume when React is what is in demand at the moment, further weakening support for the older frameworks.

Granted many developers who know one framework know others, but the pressure will be one to translate, or rewrite an application from one framework to another. And that effort is expensive. Given that the business rules have likely changed since the original app was written in the mid 2010’s – it’s likely a new app in the current framework will be written from scratch. The good news I guess is since these apps only had a useful life of say 5 years, they will be easier to rewrite – but it won’t make the business person paying the bill feel any better.

Here is where I bring up Blazor – my favorite development tool of the day. While everybody is still writing apps using React – I think Blazor will be the ultimate winner. Its a much simpler, elegant, and efficient front end than any JavaScript framework can build. Remember – JavaScript frameworks are built on JavaScript, an un-typed, interpreted language. Blazor is a binary in WebAssembly using C#, allowing full stack developers to work in the same language from the front end to the server.

It’s still early days for Blazor, as the chart above shows. But I am confident that Blazor will be the winner, and I am currently writing all new apps using Blazor. Unfortunately for the business world, I expect in a few years I will be fielding lots of requests to rewrite very young React applications in Blazor.

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Modern Monetary Theory

I have been thinking a lot lately about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) – the economic principle that the US has defacto adopted as part of the COVID-19 stimulus package. One could argue that we had adopted it prior to COVID, but the record money printing that the US did in early 2020 cements our place in the MMT camp.

Wikipedia has a good summary of the principles of MMT. This table of the main tenents is the most enlightening. A government that has the power to issue its own currency:

Can pay for goods, services, and financial assets without a need to collect money in the form of taxes or debt issuance in advance of such purchases;
Cannot be forced to default on debt denominated in its own currency;
Is only limited in its money creation and purchases by inflation, which accelerates once the real resources (labour, capital and natural resources) of the economy are utilized at full employment;
Can control demand-pull inflation^[6] by taxation and bond issuance, which remove excess money from circulation (although the political will to do so may not always exist);
Does not need to compete with the private sector for scarce savings by issuing bonds.

So if I understand this right – as long as there is no inflation, the government can print as much money as it wants. Deficits truly don’t matter. I can see why this is so attractive to governments around the world.

A few issues I have with this. It’s pretty clear that as the government has run up huge budget deficits in the last 10 years – the money has gone into the stock market – not the economy. So the only inflation that has occurred is in financial assets, which I assume is excluded from the traditional measure of inflation. Now maybe that is because of the way the government has been distributing all this excess cash. If over the last 10 years the focus had been to to get the money to the public rather than work through the banking system, maybe these excess dollars would be showing up in the economy as inflation.

The other issue I have with this (as does the author of these points apparently) is item #4. The assumption is that when inflation does arrive, the government will raise taxes to slow the economy. I find that uh.. very unlikely – as there will be no political will to do so, especially when workers are seeing their paychecks erode during inflationary periods. Unless of course the taxes are raised on financial assets and investments – and we know there is no political will to do that. We can even look so far as the latest CBO Budget estimate to see there is no projection to deal with budget deficits through 2030:

Perhaps the assumption is there will be no inflation for the next 10 years – in that case – the good times are here.

Nobody knows how this will ultimately play out. if no inflation does occur in the next few decades, I will have to admit the Modern monetary theorists were probably right. If we do start to see inflation, and see rising interest rates increase the debt service in our annual budget, I will be interested to see if the Modern Monetary Theorists stick to the plan when it becomes politically difficult.

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Adams Resources Update

I just published another new article on Seeking Alpha:

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4351149-adams-resources-energy-bet-on-oil-and-management

Adams Resources and Energy is a company I have followed for awhile, and decided to do a deep dive into seeing where this company is going. Right now I am neutral on the stock, but if new management can show commitment to improving margins, it might be a nice ‘safe’ place to invest. Its tied to oil prices, so if you think oil is going to zero (or below) – probably not for you.

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Apple Moving Into A/R V/R

I dont follow Apple all that closely, but I was interested to see that they are moving into the Augment / Virtual reality (A/R V/R) space with an upcoming product. This article shows schematics for upcoming A/R glasses which makes sense for Apple. From the article:

Apple is rumored to have a secret research unit comprising hundreds of employees working on AR and VR, exploring ways the emerging technologies could be used in future Apple products. VR/AR hiring has ramped up and Apple has acquired multiple AR/VR companies as it furthers its work in the AR/VR space.

This makes sense, as this would be the next logical extension to the Apple Watch. It looks like they are headed in two directions – Apple Glass which would provide an easy way to get notifications – kind of a heads up display for everyday use.

According to the rumors Apple appears to be working on a V/R headset also. This has been rumored for some time, but there are more specifics to the rumors:

Along with augmented reality smart glasses of some kind, rumors have suggested that Apple is working on an incredibly powerful AR/VR headset that’s not quite like anything else on the market. It is said to feature an 8K display for each eye that would be untethered from either a computer or a smartphone, and it would work with both virtual and augmented reality applications:

Along with augmented reality smart glasses of some kind, rumors have suggested that Apple is working on an incredibly powerful AR/VR headset that’s not quite like anything else on the market. It is said to feature an 8K display for each eye that would be untethered from either a computer or a smartphone, and it would work with both virtual and augmented reality applications.Rather than relying on a connection to a smartphone or a computer, the headset would connect to a “dedicated box” using a high-speed short-range wireless technology called 60GHz WiGig. The box would be powered by a custom 5-nanometer Apple processor that’s “more powerful than anything currently available.” At the current time, the box apparently resembles a PC tower, but it “won’t be an actual Mac computer.”

For years I have been skeptical of Apples ability to innovate – every year all they innovate is a bigger iPhone or bigger iPad at a bigger price. However, I have to give them credit for getting the Apple Watch to gain market share. Now the real innovation that I am intrigued by is their recent purchase of a company called NextVR. This company ” specializes in recording live events like concerts and sports matches to be experienced in VR “. So Apple might be just the consumer company to finally bring VR to the masses, if they can take the worlds media consumption to a whole new level from streaming TV shows to streaming VR shows.

So keep your eye on Apple – while these are only rumors, it seems a logical next step for the company.

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Townsquare Media May Be A Bargain

I just published a new article on Seeking Alpha:

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4342698-townsquare-media-appears-to-be-oversold

When I started this article, my thesis was that the drop in the stock price was justified. But after breaking down the business and looking at the expected revenue contribution of the various segments, I changed my mind.

I am not too wild about any stock in this environment, but I may sell some other stock to raise cash and take a flyer on Townsquare Media.

Microsoft: Back In The Portfolio

Microsoft stock has been one of the few stocks I have tracked consistently over the last 30 years. In 1990 I finally decided to buy Microsoft stock, even though the P/E on the stock was through the roof. Previously I had always looked for stocks that appear cheap on a valuation basis, but I felt Microsoft was going to be a winner and it was always overpriced. It turned out to be one of my best investments ever, splitting 7 times from 1991 through 2003.

Unfortunately, I fell in love with the stock and held it throughout the 2000’s when it did very little. The technology world was changing, and the Ballmer administration (in my opinion) lost touch with developers and made some really bad decisions. I finally drained my position in 2010 as I saw no ideas coming out of Microsoft that could justify me owning the position.

After Ballmer left and new CEO Satya Nadella came in, in 2015 I bought a small position since I new Nadella had been the head of the Microsoft Azure Cloud business, where I had seen good and creative decisions. I exited that position in 2016 with a small profit, when I became concerned that the cloud business could not make up for the loss of Windows revenue as the price of Windows goes closer to zero every year. The other concern I had (which I think is still somewhat valid) – is that the cloud business is a commodity business, and all the other cloud providers have alternate sources of revenue. For instance, Amazon and Google could treat the cloud business as a loss leader, really cut the price of cloud, and could survive on its other businesses. Microsoft is disadvantaged in that respect as the Windows revenue is dropping.

But this month, I decided to get back into Microsoft stock. After giving much it much thought I decided that even though it is expensive (much like when I first bought it) I think it has upside potential. Below are the reasons for finally getting back in:

Coronavirus (relative) winner: Long term I think it will gain market share as the S&P 500 companies are forced to retool their workforce for remote work. I think big old companies like that are most likely to default to Microsoft – they likely have Microsoft applications in house, and it would seem to be a comfortable choice. Most companies when they move to the cloud take a ‘lift and shift’ strategy – where they just move applications to the cloud, then retool the applications to run more efficiently and cheaper. During the lift phase of this process, this typically costs more than in-house processing with the promise is long term cost reduction. Microsoft should see profits jump on this shift.
Microsoft Teams vs Zoom: In 2000’s style Microsoft execution, Microsoft inexplicably lost the business video conference war with Zoom. Everybody is using Zoom – when Skype has been around for years. However, I am thinking (hoping?) Microsoft Teams is being improved and has videoconferencing, and should be a better choice for enterprises than Zoom. Maybe this is a Blockbuster vs Netflix analogy – in which case I will be wrong, but I think Microsoft Teams has a decent chance of taking major market share in remote worker productivity.
Augmented Reality(AR) / Virtual Reality(VR): I am beginning to think maybe the enterprise is where AR/VR will take hold and find the ‘sticky’ application that makes it a must have. Maybe with the rise of telecommunication, AR will be the next level on that. Microsoft has done a lot of work on the hololens and if they this technology firmed up and with a good product team, this could be a real growth driver.
Blazor: I have done previous blog posts on Blazor, and the more I work with the more amazed I am with it. It is such a well thought out platform, and I think it will take huge market share from the current in-vogue frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue. It is so easy to get started with , and all the messy Javascript transpiling and packages go away. From a developers point of view its a thing of beauty. Its no coincidence that the development tools work seamlessly with Azure, so as enterprises develop using Blazor and the Microsoft Visual Studio tools, this will make it easier to go with Azure.

So Microsoft is back in the portfolio. In this coronavirus stock market, I am taking the time to improve my portfolio. I sold some other technology stocks to add Microsoft – rather than commit new money to this stock market. I hope I am not too late on this purchase, but it feels comfortable to be back in the Microsoft fold.