Showing posts with label Stocks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stocks. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 10, 2023

Paccar: Peak Demand For Trucks

 Paccar (PCAR) produced 185,900 trucks in 2022 and is on track for another record year in 2023. The company has experienced good revenue growth in 2021 and 2022. The company has experienced stellar gross and operating margins over the past few years. The company registered a 16% gross and 13% operating margin in 2022. The current fiscal year, 2023, may bring even more good news on the margin front. The company registered a 20% gross and 17% operating margin in its March 2023 quarter and maintained its 17% operating margin in June 2023. 

Unfortunately, the demand for trucks may have peaked, given high-interest rates, high inflation, and waning consumer demand. Some of the strength in the truck market was due to the stimulus and subsidies provided by the U.S. Federal Government that bolstered infrastructure spending and brought about a manufacturing renaissance in this country. Although the bills passed by Congress in 2022 have more spending left for a few more years, the weakening consumer and lack of demand in the real estate sector may counteract the spending by the Federal Government. Fiscal year 2023 may be as good as it gets for Paccar. The stock has performed well over the past year, and its dividend yield has fallen. Dividend income seekers may have to wait for a much higher dividend before buying the stock. Treasury rates have increased enough that bonds offer an attractive alternative for investors waiting for a higher yield. Due to these reasons, I rate it a hold.

Exceptional performance of Paccar.

Paccar has performed exceptionally well over the past year, gaining 50% (Exhibit 1). The stock has handily outperformed the S&P 500, which has returned 15% over the past year. Cummins (CMI) gained just 3% over the past year. Year-to-date, the stock has gained 33% compared to the 12% return of the S&P 500 Index (SP500). The Vanguard Industrials Index Fund ETF (VIS) has had a great year, with a return of 16% over the past year. The industrial sector has benefitted from the stimulus and subsidy spending by the U.S. Federal Government. Although more subsidy spending is left in the coming years under the bill authorized by Congress in 2022, a combination of high interest rates and a slowing global economy may cap any upside in this stock.

Exhibit 1: 

Performance of Paccar, S&P 500, and Cummins

Performance of Paccar, S&P 500, and Cummins (Seeking Alpha)

Fully valued

Although the stock, trading at a forward GAAP PE of 11.4x, looks undervalued compared to its five-year average of 14.4x, given the economic environment and the rate increase, this lower valuation may be deserved. The Vanguard Industrial Index ETF (VIS) may be overvalued, trading at a weighted average PE of 20x and a price/book ratio of 4x. The EV/EBITDA multiple may better assess the company’s valuation. The stock trades at a 10.2x forward EV/EBITDA multiple compared to the sector median of 10.7x. This indicates the stock may be fully valued. Cummins (CMI), a Paccar peer, looks undervalued, trading at a 7.8x forward EV/EBITDA multiple.

Dividends, buybacks, and debt.

Given the stock's performance over the past year, the yield has dropped to 1.2%. The Vanguard Industrials ETF offers a yield of 1.4%, and the Vanguard S&P 500 Index ETF yields 1.58%. The payout ratio is 12%, a rather conservative number. But, given the cyclical nature of the truck business, Paccar may be suitable to be cautious with its payout. A low payout may also free up cash for stock repurchases. The company paid $483 million in total dividend payments over the trailing twelve months. The company has grown its dividend annually at the pace of 7.5%, compared to 6.8% for the sector, over the past five years.

Paccar has spent $828 million in share buybacks over the past decade. But, the company has issued over $300 million in stock over the past decade, blunting the share buybacks' effects. The diluted share count is reduced from 532.8 million in 2013 to 524.1 million over the trailing twelve months, just 8.7 million. Using this share count reduction, the average price paid for the buybacks is $95 compared to its current price of $86.

The company generated $5.4 billion in EBITDA during the trailing twelve months. Paccar generated $3.5 billion in operating cash and $2.37 billion in free cash flow. This free cash flow number is derived by deducting the company’s capital expenditures from its operating cash. These numbers are good, but investors should remember that 2022 was one of the strongest years for truck demand globally, and 2023 is shaping to be another good year. I am concerned these good times, and any demand reduction could dent its cash flows. Also, the company generates a lot of revenue from its financing division. If the economy slows further and demand wanes, it could increase bad loans and decrease the demand for new loans, as the U.S. Treasury rates have increased to their highest levels in over a decade.

Paccar has performed exceptionally well over the past decade, returning 237% on a total return basis compared to the 210% return of the S&P 500 Index. But, weakening consumers coupled with high rates may put a substantial dent in demand across the various sectors of the economy. The stock’s performance has been impressive, and the industrial sector has been strong over the past year. Most of this strength may be attributed to the various bills passed by the U.S. Congress that have billions of dollars in outlays for renewable energy, electric vehicles, infrastructure modernization, and efforts to re-shore manufacturing and build semiconductor plants. Investors should be concerned that most of the demand across the industrial sector and Paccar is driven not by consumer organic demand but by the government's industrial policy. Paccar’s strength may not last, and it may be best for investors to wait for a much lower entry point.

Saturday, June 17, 2023

The Industrials Sector is on a Tear

 The Vanguard Industrials Index ETF (VIS) touched a 52-week high of $202.86 on Friday, June 16 (Exhibit 1).  

Exhibit 1:

Vanguard Industrial Index ETF (VIS) 5-Day Performance
Source: Seeking Alpha


The top performer in this ETF was Vertiv Holdings, returning 133% over the past year (as of June 16, 2023). The company describes itself as follows:

"Vertiv is a global leader in the design, manufacturing and servicing of critical digital infrastructure for data centers, communication networks, and commercial and industrial environments. Our customers operate in some of the world's most critical and growing industries, including cloud services, financial services, healthcare, transportation, manufacturing, energy, education, government, social media, and retail." (Source: SEC.GOV)

This renewed interest in data centers is not surprising, given the popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) and the investments in new applications powered by AI. 

In the Q1 2023 Earnings call, Vertiv's management said the following about AI:

"We are distinctly seeing the first signs of the AI investment cycle in our pipelines and orders. Vertiv is uniquely positioned to win here, given our market leadership and deep domain expertise in areas like thermal management and controls, which are vital to support the complexity of future AI infrastructures." (Source: Seeking Alpha)

"Let me go back to the investments in AI. You may have heard it as generally characterized as the next infrastructure arms race, Vertiv benefits from this race and is an agnostic partner of choice to the risk participants. The acceleration in investment in AI will turn into a net infrastructure capacity demand acceleration, and this starts to be visible in our pipeline. AI applications’ demand and net capacity increase in the industry, higher power density, a gradual migration to an air and liquid hybrid cooling environment and a transition to liquid-ready facility designed." (Source: Seeking Alpha)

 Here's the list of the top 10 performers in the Vanguard Industrials Index ETF over the past year (Exhibit 2).  

Exhibit 2:

Top 10 Performers in the Vanguard Industrials Index ETF
Source: Barchart.com, Data Provided by IEX Cloud

 
Here's the list of the bottom 10 worst performers in the Industrials ETF over the past year (Exhibit 3):

Exhibit 3:

Bottom 10 Worst Performers in the Vanguard Industrials Index ETF
Source: Barchart.com, Data Provided by IEX Cloud


Saturday, December 10, 2022

Monthly Return Analysis of Conagra Brands

Conagra Brands owns many iconic brands in the food business (Exhibit 1). The company is categorized as a consumer staple. 

Exhibit 1:


 

Here's the histogram of monthly returns of Conagra Brands between June 2019 and November 2022 (Exhibit 2). Please click on the image to see an enlarged version.  

Exhibit 2:

Conagra Brands Histogram of Monthly Returns (Source: Data Provided by IEX Cloud, Author Calculations using Excel)

The average monthly returns of Conagra Brands (Exhibit 3) are very similar to that of the Vanguard S&P 500 Index ETF (Exhibit 4).

Exhibit 3: 

(Source: Data Provided by IEX Cloud, Data Calculations Using Excel)

Exhibit 4:

(Source: Data Provided by IEX Cloud, Data Calculations Using Excel)

The monthly returns of Conagra Brands and the Vanguard S&P 500 Index ETF have a mild positive correlation of 0.27 (Exhibit 5)

Exhibit 5:  


A 12-month rolling correlation of the monthly returns yielded a very high positive correlation of 0.8 between April 2020 and March 2021 (Exhibit 6).

Exhibit 6:

(Source: Data Provided by IEX Cloud, Correlation Calculations Using RStudio)

A 12-month rolling correlation of the monthly returns yielded the highest negative correlation of 0.37 between July 2021 and June 2022 (Exhibit 7).

Exhibit 7:

(Source: Data Provided by IEX Cloud, Correlation Calculations Using RStudio)

A linear regression model estimates Conagra's Beta at 0.34, which is not statistically significant at the 95% confidence interval. The p-value is 0.083, suggesting that the correlation is not statistically significant.

Here's the output of the linear model:

Call:
lm(formula = CAG_Monthly_Return ~ VOO_Monthly_Return, data = VOOandCAG)

Residuals:
      Min        1Q    Median        3Q       Max 
-0.168638  -0.044057  -0.004737   0.045175  0.170379 

Coefficients:
                   Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)  
(Intercept)        0.007141   0.011079   0.645   0.5229  
VOO_Monthly_Return 0.342593   0.192981   1.775   0.0835 .
---
Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 0.07047 on 40 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared:  0.07303, Adjusted R-squared:  0.04986 
F-statistic: 3.152 on 1 and 40 DF,  p-value: 0.08346

The adjusted R-squared is 0.049, meaning that just 4.9% of Conagra's monthly returns can be explained by the monthly returns of the Vanguard S&P 500 Index ETF.    


  








Tuesday, November 22, 2022

Volatility of Monthly Returns of Newell Brands Compared to the Vanguard S&P 500 Index ETF

The monthly returns of Newell Brands and the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF have a positive correlation of 0.44, as calculated using the Pearson method. The data used in this study is range from June 2019 to October 2022 (41 months of data). 

Newell Brands is a company that owns some very famous brands across multiple consumer and commercial product lines. 

Exhibit: The Brands Owned by Newell Brands

(Source: Newell Brands)

      

Here's the R command and the output from R-Studio

> # Calculate the Monthly Return Correlation between Newell Brands 

> # and Vanguard S&P 500 Index using the Pearson method 

> cor(VOOandNWL['NWL_Monthly_Return'], VOOandNWL['VOO_Monthly_Return'], method = c("person"))

                        VOO_Monthly_Return

NWL_Monthly_Return          0.4434957 

Here's the plot of the S&P 500 and the Newell Brands' monthly returns:

Exhibit: S&P 500 Index Monthly Returns VS. Newell Brands Monthly Returns

                       S&P 500 Index Monthly Returns against Newell Brands' Returns
                          (Source: Data Provided by IEX Cloud, Correlation and Graph on RStudio)

When the correlation is calculated for the months when the S&P 500 Index had positive returns, the correlation drops to 0.28. 

> # Calculate the Monthly Return Correlation between Newell Brands 

> # and Vanguard S&P 500 Index using the Pearson method

> # for only those months when the Vanguard S&P 500 Index ETF 

> # had positive returns.

> cor(VOOandNWLPositiveReturns['NWL_Monthly_Return'], VOOandNWLPositiveReturns['VOO_Monthly_Return'], method = c("person"))

                        VOO_Monthly_Return

NWL_Monthly_Return           0.284022

Here's the plot of the S&P 500 Index against Newell Brands' monthly returns for months when the S&P 500 index had a positive return. 

           Exhibit: S&P 500 Index Monthly Positive Returns VS. Newell Brands Monthly Returns

S&P 500 Index Monthly Returns (Positive Months) against Newell Brands' Returns
                          (Source: Data Provided by IEX Cloud, Correlation and Graph on RStudio)

The linear regression of the monthly returns of the S&P 500 index and Newell Brands is used to estimate the average change in the monthly return of Newell Brands for a 1% change in the S&P 500 index. The coefficient of the independent variable (VOO_Monthly_Return) is the beta of Newell Brands.  In this case Newell Brands has a beta of 0.79. For every 1% monthly change in the S&P 500 index, Newell Brands is estimated to change by 0.79%. Yahoo Finance has calculated a beta of 0.84 for Newell Brands.      

> # Conduct the Linear Regression of the Monthly Returns Between $VOO and $NWL

> lmVOONWL = lm(NWL_Monthly_Return~VOO_Monthly_Return, data = VOOandNWL)

> # Present the summary of the results from the linear regression

> summary(lmVOONWL)

Call:

lm(formula = NWL_Monthly_Return ~ VOO_Monthly_Return, data = VOOandNWL)

Residuals:

     Min       1Q     Median       3Q      Max 

  -0.14372  -0.06818 -0.01767    0.06086  0.19915 

Coefficients:

                      Estimate   Std. Error   t value  Pr(>|t|)   

(Intercept)          -0.001988   0.014756     -0.135   0.89352   

VOO_Monthly_Return    0.793454   0.256769      3.090   0.00368 **

---

Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 0.09306 on 39 degrees of freedom

Multiple R-squared:  0.1967, Adjusted R-squared:  0.1761 

F-statistic: 9.549 on 1 and 39 DF,  p-value: 0.003681

 




Saturday, February 26, 2022

Welch Two Sample t-test of Daily Price Returns of J.M. Smucker and Mondelez

J.M. Smucker and Mondelez are consumer staples companies with similar financial performance. Both companies compete in similar product categories, especially when it relates to snacks. But, Mondelez has a vast international operation, while J. M. Smucker is more focused on the U.S. with very little So, I wanted to see if the mean daily returns are the same between the two stocks.

First, I downloaded the daily price return data for the past six months for both J.M. Smucker (SJM) and Mondelez (MDLZ) from IEX Cloud

I did a correlation between the daily price returns of the two companies using R:

> cor(SJM_6Month_ClosingPrice_Daily_Return_Data$changePercent, MDLZ_6Month_ClosingPrice_Daily_Return_Data$changePercent) 

[1] 0.5815403

The correlation in the daily returns between the two companies was 0.58 for the past six months. It is a positive correlation, but I would not consider this as a strong correlation in returns between the two companies. I would consider it a strong correlation if it was at or above 0.70. This came as a surprise given that both the companies are in the consumer staples sector and that sector has performed very well since December 2021. 

Next, I wanted to calculate the p-value for the Welch two-sample t-test between means of the daily returns.  The null hypothesis is that the difference in mean daily returns between J.M. Smucker and Mondelez is zero. The alternate hypothesis is that the difference is not zero. The p-value is 0.9035, which means the null hypothesis can be resoundingly rejected. The t-test command in R and the result set is presented below. The J. M. Smucker had a mean daily return of 0.0893% and Mondelez had a daily return of 0.0717%. There is a 1.7 basis points difference in returns with J. M. Smucker having a slightly larger daily return than Mondelez.       

> t.test(SJM_6Month_ClosingPrice_Daily_Return_Data$changePercent,         MDLZ_6Month_ClosingPrice_Daily_Return_Data$changePercent)

Welch Two Sample t-test

data:  SJM_6Month_ClosingPrice_Daily_Return_Data$changePercent and MDLZ_6Month_ClosingPrice_Daily_Return_Data$changePercent

t = 0.1214, df = 239.4, p-value = 0.9035

alternative hypothesis: true difference in means is not equal to 0

95 percent confidence interval:

 -0.002682718  0.003035099

sample estimates:

   mean of x    mean of y 

0.0008936508 0.0007174603 

Finally, here's the scatter plot of daily price change of J.M. Smucker (SJM) and Mondelez (MDLZ).

(Data Source: IEXCloud.io, Plot Created using RStudio)

  

Wednesday, December 1, 2021

Can Salesforce (CRM) continue growing to justify its valuation?

Salesforce (CRM) grew at a breakneck speed over the past two decades. The is hoping that the growth will continue in this decade.

The company's free cash flow yield is very similar to that of Microsoft (MSFT) and Adobe (ADBE). Salesforce's free cash flow yield has been consistently around the 2% level over the past decade. Microsoft and Adobe have seen their market capitalization and earnings multiple expand over the years causing their free cash flow yield to drop. I might have to look into their number more closely. 

Exhibit: Free Cash Flow Yield
(Source: Seeking Alpha)

Salesforce is lagging behind Microsoft (MSFT) and Adobe (ADBE) on return on equity. Both those companies have more than 8x more return on equity than Salesforce.  

  Exhibit: Return on Equity

(Source: Seeking Alpha)

Microsoft and Adobe have 6x and 8x more return on invested capital (ROIC) compared to Salesforce. 

Exhibit: Return on Invested Capital 

(Source: Seeking Alpha)


Salesforce's EBITDA margin is much lower than that of Microsoft and Adobe.  

Exhibit: EBITDA Margin
(Source: Seeking Alpha)

Salesforce's EV to EBITDA multiple is higher than that of Microsoft and Adobe.  

                               Exhibit: EV to EBITDA Multiple for Salesforce, Microsoft, and Adobe.  

                                        
   (Source: Seeking Alpha)                                         

Salesforce's year-over-year quarterly revenue growth (See Exhibit: Year-over-Year Revenue Growth) has converged with Microsoft and Adobe.  

    Exhibit: Year-over-Year Revenue Growth

(Source: Seeking Alpha)

Salesforce's price to earnings growth ratio (See Exhibit: Salesforce, Microsoft, and Adobe PEG Ratio) was attractive during the past decade compared to Microsoft and Adobe. If the company's growth can continue, that would justify its higher valuation multiple compared to Microsoft and Adobe. Salesforce's revenue is already in the high $20 billion, so for it to grow at a 20% rate would take some work.  

                                        Exhibit: Salesforce, Microsoft, and Adobe PEG Ratio

(Source: Seeking Alpha)





Tuesday, August 10, 2021

MongoDB: Number of $100,000 or greater ARR Customers

Here's how MongoDB (NASDAQ: MDB) defines Annualized Recurring Revenue (ARR):

"We define ARR as the subscription revenue we would contractually expect to receive from customers over the following 12 months assuming no increases or reductions in their subscriptions."

Number of  $100,000 ARR Customers each year:
  • 2016: 164
  • 2017: 246
  • 2018: 354
  • 2019: 557
  • 2020: 751
  • 2021: 975
42.8% Compound Annual Growth Rate in $100K or greater ARR customers.  
(Source: MongoDB.com)

The company also closely monitors ARR expansion rate and here's is what they have to say how that:

"We also examine the rate at which our customers increase their spend with us, which we call net ARR expansion rate. We calculate net ARR expansion rate by dividing the ARR at the close of a given period (the “measurement period”), from customers who were also customers at the close of the same period in the prior year (the “base period”), by the ARR from all customers at the close of the base period, including those who churned or reduced their subscriptions. For Direct Sales Customers included in the base period, measurement period or both such periods that were self-serve customers in any such period, we also include annualized MRR from those customers in the calculation of the net ARR expansion rate. Our net ARR expansion rate has consistently been over 120%."

The ARR expansion rate is another critical metric for software subscription companies. It shows whether the customer is willing to buy more of the product and/or expand its use within the company.  
Sources:

Paccar: Peak Demand For Trucks

 Paccar ( PCAR ) produced 185,900 trucks in 2022 and is on track for another record year in 2023. The company has experienced good revenue ...