Moody's Fined

Moody's Investors Services, the well-known bond rating agency, was fined $16.5 million for failing to ensure the accuracy of its statistical models. The SEC accused the company of failures on more than 650 mortgage backed securities. Moody's assigned ratings on several bonds that were inconsistent with ratings for similar bonds and did not establish a rigorous control process for bond data entry, resulting in incorrect data entry. This resulted in bonds being given incorrect ratings.

Lower Taxes, NPV, and Company Value

A major benefit of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 is that it reduces taxes paid, which increases operating cash flow. Increased cash flow can increase the NPV of a project, even turning a negative NPV to a positive NPV, and increase the overall value of a company. Since the value of a project or the value of a company are both based on the present value of future cash flows, this result is fairly obvious. As a recent article points out, what is less obvious is that the reduced tax rate will also increase the required return on a project or a company. Since the cost of debt that is important for either valuation is the aftertax cost of debt, a reduced tax rate actually makes the cost of capital higher, all else the same. So, in discounting higher future cash flows with a higher cost of capital, the present value will not increase as much as you might think at first glance.

A Blockchain Bubble?

Many would argue that the rapid rise of internet stocks in the late 1990s was a bubble and blockchain company stocks may be following a similar path as internet stocks. Long Island Ice Tea Corp., which sells nonalcoholic beverages and lost $11.9 million on sales of $3.9 million in the first 9 months of 2017, saw its stock price jump as much as 289 percent when it rebranded itself as Long Blockchain. The company stated that it would seek out partners that develop blockchains. Long Blockchain has no agreements with any other company to partner on blockchain technology nor is there any assurance that one will be found. While Long Blockchain may eventually find a partner, we would advise you to be careful of FOMO (fear of missing out) investing.

Chipotle's Vanishing Options

In 2015, Chipotle stock hit its peak price of about $758 per share, and executives owned stock options worth millions. Since then, the stock has plunged more 60 percent and executives have lost millions. For example, CEO Steve Ells lost $37.5 million worth of stock options, CFO Jack Hartung lost $34.8 million, and CMO Mark Crumpacker lost $10.7 million. In total, the four top executives at Chipotle, including former co-CEO Montgomery Moran, lost $225 million during the stock price plunge. These options were all granted before 2014 as Chipotle stopped issuing stock appreciation rights after shareholders criticized them as being too large and not linked to performance.

The Stock Market Is A Home Run

Many people are familiar with the Super Bowl indicator: If an old AFL team wins the Super Bowl, the stock market will be down for the year and if an old NFL team wins the Super Bowl, the stock market will increase during the year. A new sports-related stock market indicator is the home run/strikeout total for Major League Baseball. As total home runs and strikeouts increase, the stock market increases and as the total home run runs and strikeouts decrease, the stock market decreases. Unfortunately, the researcher who discovered this relationship argues the connection is reversed, so the change in the stock market predicts the home run/strikeout total. Guess we won’t be able to use this as a predictor of stock returns.

Debt and Taxes

A proposal to reduce the U.S. corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent also includes a provision to limit the tax deductibility of interest expense. Corporations have responded in a dramatic fashion to this proposal by repurchasing $178.5 billion worth of bonds through early October of this year. In contrast, companies repurchased only $87.3 billion of bonds for the same period last year. Of course the potential increase in interest rates could also be driving debt repurchases as companies look to lock in low coupon rates. For example, Wal-Mart issued $6 billion in new bonds to help finance an $8.5 billion repurchase. Both causes have driven debt repurchases to astounding levels.

P&G Shareholders Reject Peltz

Activist investor Nelson Peltz has apparently lost his bid for a seat on the Proctor & Gamble board. Peltz had sought to gain one seat on the 11 person board. At a market cap of $232 billion, the proxy fight was the largest in history, with the sides spending more than $100 million on mailings, phone calls, and advertisements. Peltz is expected to contend the results as the final outcome was within one percent. A major explanation for the win by P&G is believed to be the large number of individual stockholders in P&G stock.