Search Results for: swedroe

I’ve written a little bit in the past about including small-value stocks to your investment portfolio. “Small” means companies with a relatively smaller market cap (total market value) – definitions vary from being the bottom 10% by capitalization or being worth less than $1 billion. “Value” stocks are those that tend to trade at a lower price relative to others when measured against markers like earnings, dividend yield, sales, or book value.

This NYTimes article on the portfolio of investment advisor and author Larry Swedroe included some concise examples of how significant this small-value premium has been in the past. For one, small-value stocks outperformed the S&P 500 by about 4% annually from 1927-2010.

Put another way, by making a portfolio using small-value stocks and US Treasury bonds, you could have gotten similar performance to the S&P 500 with much lower risk. Specifically, you could have held 1/3rd small-value and 2/3rd Treasury bonds and had close to the same return as the S&P 500 over a 40-year period from 1970-2010. This chart summarizes:

Source: Buckingham Asset Management, New York Times

Will this “small-value premium” continue to persist? There are a few theories out there. One is behavioral, where small-value companies tend to be the more ignored and unpopular companies and thus are consistently underpriced. Another is based on the fact that small-value companies are simply riskier, and thus investors demand a higher return for holding them.

I happen to believe that there is something enduring about small-value stocks, but the size of my bet on that belief is relatively small – only about 5% of my target stock allocation. But I also know that you need to hold a very strong belief in whatever internal explanation you have for the outperformance. Otherwise, when small-value is the dumps for a while relative to the Current Hot Thing – and it will be, one day – you’ll sell and lose any potential edge.

How about this housing market? A few weeks ago, the CEO of Redfin shared a viral Twitter thread about what he was seeing. Here’s just a snippet:

It has been hard to convey, through anecdotes or data, how bizarre the U.S. housing market has become. For example, a Bethesda, Maryland homebuyer working with @Redfin included in her written offer a pledge to name her first-born child after the seller. She lost.

Inventory is down 37% year over year to a record low. The typical home sells in 17 days, a record low. Home prices are up a record amount, 24% year over year, to a record high. And still homes sell on average for 1.7% higher than the asking price, another record.

What about single-family homes as an investment asset class? Larry Swedroe points to a recent academic study about the historical total returns of single family rentals. Here are some highlights from the paper:

• The study covers the nearly 30-year period from 1986 to 2014, including zip codes across the largest 15 US metro areas.
• Total return is broken down into two components: rental income (net of expenses) and house price appreciation, similar to the dividend income and price appreciation of stocks.
• Across all cities, the total returns were approximately the same: 8.5% total annualized return. On average, this broke down to 4.2% rental income + 4.3% price appreciation.
• In higher-priced cities, the total returns were composed of lower rental yields but higher price appreciation.
• In lower-priced cities, the total returns were composed of higher rental yields but lower price appreciation.
• On average, they found that net rental income is about 60% of gross rental income. In other words, for every $1,000 of gross rent, $400 was eaten up by operating expenses like maintenance, repairs, property taxes, etc.
• Single family rentals represent 35% of all rented housing units in the US, and have a market value of approximately $2.3 trillion.

According to Swedroe, during the same period the S&P 500 returned 10.7% annualized but with more volatility.

I definitely acknowledge rental properties are the way that many people have built wealth. As individuals can combine cheap leverage from government-subsidized mortgages along with that 8.5% annualized return, that could make the overall return even better than stocks.

I’ve thought about purchasing a rental property (or four) as well, but I’ve always ended up using my time and life energy in other ways. In the end, I look at managing rental properties as more similar to running your own business. If you have the right personality and skillset, then managing rental properties is a great business and a great way to build wealth in terms of return on invested time. But for me, I’d much rather work on online businesses, what I call “digital real estate”. With excess cash from work, I invest in completely passive shares of businesses (stocks) and REITs which require zero ongoing work. When I am fully retired, the dividend checks will simply show up in my brokerage account. I don’t need to screen tenants, hassle them about late rent, argue about security deposits, or worry about evicting a family during hard times.

What about simply buying an REIT that owns single-family rentals? It appears the two biggest are Invitation Homes (INVH) with 80,000 single-family homes and American Homes 4 Rent (AMH) with 50,000 single-family homes. As you might expect, their recent returns have also been quite hot. The 5-year average return for AMH is 17.45%, per Morningstar, but it’s too young to have a 10-year return history. However, the current forward dividend yields of 1.80% (INVH) and 1.02% (AMH) aren’t terribly exciting.

Here’s a 5-year historical performance chart of American Homes 4 Rent alongside some other REITs and the S&P 500, from YCharts. Buying a specific REIT, even if it owns thousands of properties, can still result in a wide range of results.

If you own the broad Vanguard Real Estate ETF (VNQ), you’ll find that 14% of its portfolio is invested in residential REITs. This includes apartments, student housing, manufactured homes, and single-family homes. INVH is about 1.2% and AMH is about 0.65% portfolio weight in VNQ. The mutual fund version of VNQ is VGSLX, and has a 10.5% annualized average return since inception in 2001. That’s not too bad, either, and I’ve been pretty satisfied with my VNQ holding.

But again, single-family real estate is one of the original “side hustles” that helped folks build their own wealth over time. Sometimes, I wonder if I should work on building the required skills and knowledge base, just to keep my future options open and have something to teach my children.

In my personal portfolio, I’ve been investing in tax-exempt municipal bonds instead of treasury bonds due to their higher taxable-equivalent yields. If you’ve done the same, you may be interested to know that Larry Swedroe at Advisor Perspectives argues that the reason for this yield spread is not credit risk, but liquidity risk.

After the first month or so following issuance, most municipal bonds tend to trade very infrequently, perhaps once a month or even less frequently. Thus, they are illiquid. Since the financial crisis, banks have dramatically reduced assets committed to their bond-trading activities, decreasing liquidity in the municipal bond market. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that liquidity premiums have widened. The result is that municipal bond yields are higher than they would have been if liquidity had not been reduced.

Many investors can bear liquidity risk, because they buy individual bonds with the intent of holding them to maturity. For them liquidity is not a major risk, at least in some portion of their portfolio; the reduced liquidity in the market makes municipal bonds more attractive.

The spread itself has been narrowing, according the chart below tracking the ratio of AAA-rated GO Muni bonds to Treasuries over the last 12 months (not adjusted for taxes). Taken from the most recent Baird’s weekly muni commentary.

Still, muni bond funds remain relatively attractive for many folks, especially in higher tax brackets. Use this Vanguard taxable-equivalent yield calculator and compare the numbers for your own situation.

Bottom line. My takeaway is that muni investors should acknowledge this liquidity risk, and be prepared for short-term swings in muni bond fund prices (due to illiquidity) if there is a major event (like a surprise bankruptcy filing). However, if you are truly a long-term holder of muni bonds, then you can accept this risk, hopefully ride things out, and be compensated with higher tax-equivalent yields.

A new academic paper was recently published with a confusing yet provocative title: Do Stocks Outperform Treasury Bills?. Of course they do… right? An excerpt from the abstract:

Most common stocks do not outperform Treasury Bills. Fifty eight percent of common stocks have holding period returns less than those on one-month Treasuries over their full lifetimes on CRSP. […]

But everyone knows stocks return more than cash. How does this work? Taken altogether, stocks outperform cash. But if you picked any individual company, your results can vary from total bankruptcy to extraordinary wealth. The paper found that if you pick an individual company and held it over its lifetime, it would be more likely than not to underperform a 4-week T-Bill (classified as a cash equivalent). You can use the T-Bill as an approximate tracker of inflation.

Wes Gray points out at Alpha Architect that this idea has been explored before. Here’s a chart of the distribution of total lifetime returns for individual U.S. stocks. The research is done by Blackstar Funds, via Mebane Faber at Ivy Portfolio.

The U-shaped distribution shows that there are a lot of big losers and a lot of big winners. Actually some are huge winners. In the end, a small minority of stocks have been responsible for virtually all the market’s gains.

Here we see that out of the 26,000 stocks studied, these 10 stocks below have accounted for 1/6th of all the wealth ever created in the US stock market.

I should reiterate that these are lifetime returns, from when they appeared in the CRSP database until now or whenever they liquidated. Unless you bought these stocks essentially at IPO (or 1926 when the database starts), you probably didn’t get these returns. If you go out and buy a well-established company today, your distribution of returns will likely look different. You’d be less likely to go bankrupt but also less likely to make a 20,000% return.

If you take a step back, as Larry Swedroe points out, this means it is technically quite easy to outperform an index fund. You simply either (1) avoid investing in a few big losers or (2) invest extra in a few big winners. That’s it! Gotta be easy to filter out a few duds, right? Yet, the lack of outperformance on average by professional managers continues, and the managers that outperform can’t be predicted ahead of time. So you can keep looking for the needles in the haystack, or you can buy the whole haystack.

Here are some helpful resources on owning only bonds of the highest credit quality as part of your portfolio asset allocation.

• David Swensen in his book Unconventional Success argued that alignment of interests is important. With stocks, the exectives want to make profits, and you want them to make profits. With stocks, your interests are aligned. In contrast, the job of bond issuers is to look as creditworthy as possible, even if they are not. This keeps the interest rates they pay lower. With bonds, your interest are not aligned. The safety ratings of bonds usually only get worse – usually quickly and unexpectedly as we saw with subprime mortgages. Ratings agencies are not very good at their jobs, mostly in a reactionary role, and are often paid by the same people they rate.
• Larry Swedroe at ETF.com:
  

  However, he also observes that the primary objective of investing, at least in stocks, is to make money. On the other hand, he makes an important distinction when it comes to the primary objective of investing in bonds, which is to help you stay invested in stocks when the inevitable bear markets arrive.

  And that leads to his conclusion to invest the fixed-income portion of your portfolio in only the safest bonds (such as Treasurys, FDIC-insured CDs and municipals rated AAA/AA).

  The overall idea to is own the safest thing possible when it comes to bonds.

• Daniel Sotiroff at The PF Engineer:
  

  The primary reason most investors own fixed income securities (bonds) is their ability to limit declines in portfolio value during periods of poor stock performance. From this perspective there is another dimension to safety in the fixed income universe that needs to be understood.

  […] Almost all of the non-Treasury securities experienced a drawdown during 2008 which peaked around October and November. Investors holding corporate bonds, intermediate and longer term municipal issues, and inflation protected securities were no doubt disappointed that their supposedly safe assets posted losses. Corporate bonds in particular have the unfortunate stigma of behaving like stocks during crises. Adding insult to injury those disappointed investors were also faced with taking a haircut on their fixed income returns if they wanted to rebalance and purchase equities at very low prices. Thus there is more to risk than the more academic standard deviation (volatility) of returns.

  My interpretation is that he concludes that intermediate-term Treasury notes are good balance of safety and interest rate risk, while short-term Treasury bills are for those that really don’t want any interest rate risk.

• Also see this previous post: William Bernstein on Picking The Right Bonds For Your Portfolio