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With Big Tech Crumbling, Here’s Where to Invest Now

Last week, several formerly high-flying, large-cap tech stocks fell back to earth after disappointing third-quarter earnings results. Investors counting on these well-known names will be disappointed.

Instead, it’s time to look at companies that put investors first…

Third-quarter earnings from Alphabet (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), and Meta Platforms (META) came out on Wednesday, October 26. Much slower growth than anticipated resulted in one-day declines of 5% to 8%. Year to date, these three large-cap tech stocks are down 33%, 57%, and 58%, respectively. With numbers like these, it’s easy to understand why many 401k accounts are in the tank.

While stock prices of big-name companies are falling, plenty of smaller companies operate profitably in different sectors of the economy. The large companies listed above have businesses that span the globe, which puts them at risk from slowdowns in other countries and adverse currency fluctuations, but smaller companies can be creative and flexible in order to provide better customer service and maintain profitability. When profits grow, dividends do, too—so I look for companies that share those profits in the form of attractive dividends for their shareholders.

Here are three stocks that pay attractive dividends and recently announced great earnings or substantial dividend increases.

Blackstone Mortgage Trust (BXMT) is a finance REIT that originates commercial property mortgages. For the 2022 third quarter, BXMT reported distributable earnings of $0.71 per share, beating the Wall Street consensus by $0.14. The company grew quarterly earnings, while the analysts had forecast a decline. BXMT pays a $0.62 quarterly dividend, so there is potential for an increase. The shares currently yield 10.3%.

Ares Capital (ARCC) surprised the market with a $0.05, or 11.6%, increase in its quarterly dividend—its third dividend increase this year. Ares is a business development company (BDC) that makes loans to small-to-midsize corporations. The company reported that 73% of its loan portfolio is floating rate, allowing ARCC to grow profits in a rising rate environment. The shares currently yield 10.1%.

On October 25, energy midstream company Energy Transfer (ET) increased its dividend by 15%. ET provides oil and gas pipeline, terminal, and processing services. The company owns 120,000 miles of pipeline and transports 35% of the crude oil produced in the U.S. Over the last year, the ET dividend grew by 51%. Over the same period, the stock rewarded investors with a 29.9% total return. ET shares currently yield 7.6%.

These are just three examples of stocks that pay great (and growing) dividends as their businesses prosper. There are many more stocks that can provide similar returns. If you don’t like how your portfolio has performed this year, consider a new strategy focusing on companies that take care of investors by paying attractive and growing dividends. It’s a strategy that works through both bull and bear market cycles.
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How to Play the White House’s New Oil Price Floor

To help hold down fuel and energy prices, the Biden administration has been selling oil out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), to the tune of three million barrels per week since the start of the year.

Now, with the SPR at its lowest level since the 1980s, the administration’s plan to refill the reserve will prop up profits in the energy patch.

That’s creating some nice profit opportunities…

After selling 180 million barrels out of the SPR to keep oil prices down, that tactic has run its course. After peaking at about $125 in early summer, WTI crude now trades for around $85. It’s impossible to say whether the SPR releases helped bring down the price, or whether fear of a global recession and the China COVID lockdowns had the bigger effect.

However, with oil at $85, gasoline remains expensive. Diesel fuel is also costly, with very little supply to fall back on if there is a disruption in the energy supply chain.

The Biden administration recently shifted gears, releasing a press statement with its plan to refill the SPR. Here is an excerpt:

…the President is announcing that the Administration intends to repurchase crude oil for the SPR when prices are at or below about $67-$72 per barrel, adding to global demand when prices are around that range. As part of its commitment to ensure replenishment of the SPR, the DOE is finalizing a rule that will allow it to enter fixed price contracts through a competitive bid process for product delivered at a future date. This repurchase approach will protect taxpayers and help create certainty around future demand for crude oil. That will encourage firms to invest in production right now, helping to improve U.S. energy security and bring down energy prices that have been driven up by Putin’s war in Ukraine.

There is a lot here to parse. First is the assumption that crude oil will drop to the $70 range. But when the administration stops selling out of the SPR, it’s likely to push oil higher, not lower. The plan for a “competitive bid process for product delivered at a future date” seems complicated. The plan appears to encourage production by offering less than current market prices.

Instead, the plan puts a floor on the price of oil. Upstream energy producers are very profitable if they get $70 per barrel. I suspect energy traders will use information from the Biden administration’s announcement to keep the price of oil well above $72. I doubt this move will spur energy companies to ramp up production. They want to see more long-term support, which means more drilling permits and fewer regulatory hassles.

All of this means that oil and gas energy producers will remain very profitable. Energy has been the only profitable stock market sector this year, and it will not give up that lead. To invest in energy, you can go with mega-cap companies like Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) and Chevron Corporation (CVX). If you want to go with companies with more leverage to higher energy commodity prices, here are the top 15 holdings of the SPDR S&P Oil & Gas Exploration & Production ETF (XOP).

PSX, VLO, and MPC are refining companies. The rest are primarily upstream producers and will continue to profit from high energy prices.
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Learn to Love What Wall Street Hates

One of my favorite places to hunt for dividend stocks is among the companies Wall Street is avoiding—and chiefly among these, at the moment, are materials stocks. Wall Street is fearful a deep recession will hurt demand for materials, especially industrial metals, so it keeps selling off these companies’ stocks.

Meanwhile, Wall Street is also totally ignoring reports of potentially massive shortages of industrial metals, recession or not. The news—as with so much financial news lately—comes out of the U.K.

That creates a nice opportunity for us…

Russian Metal Ban

We’re all familiar by now with the fact that Russian energy exports have been put on a blacklist, resulting in higher oil and natural gas prices.

But now, the London Metal Exchange (LME)—the world’s largest market in standarized forward contracts, futures contracts, and options on base metals—is facing pressure from many traders to stop accepting Russian metal. The fear is that LME warehouses will become a stockpile for unwanted material, distorting global prices for commodities like aluminum and copper.

The LME plays a critical role in the daily functioning of the global industrial metals market, supplying metals when there is a shortage or taking metals into its warehouses when there is an oversupply.

The Financial Times reports that metals consumers are now saying to the LME: “Your contract is not fit for us at the moment, we are self-sanctioning Russian material, we don’t want to dip into the LME warrant pool and pull out a warrant for Russian material.”

If the LME continues to accept unwanted Russian material into its warehouses while many of its users shun it, there could be an oversupply of unwanted base metals. The effect would be that LME prices would reflect the glut of cheap, unwanted Russian metal it holds and not the everyday price charged in real-life deals that happen directly between producers and consumers.

Many private deals already include a premium on the price for transactions that do not include metal supplied from Russia. For example, Chile’s Codelco—the world’s top copper producer—is selling its metal for $235 per ton above the LME benchmark three-month contract.

If this mismatch continues, it will undermine the LME’s role as a marketplace that sets a fair and accurate global market price for industrial metals.

In addition to the LME, the Biden administration is also considering whether to target Russian aluminum through a U.S. ban, raising tariffs, or putting sanctions on Rusal, the largest Russian producer of aluminum.

Any U.S. sanction on Russian exports of aluminum (used in aircraft, weapons, vehicles, cans, etc.) would have far-reaching implications for global metals trading and also be inflationary.

Aluminum’s Time to Shine?

If there is no ban, but “self-sanctioning” becomes more widespread in 2023, we could see prices for Russian metals fall and the LME warehouse stockpiles keep rising, as it is the market of last resort.

However, aluminum is a different story than copper or nickel, which is already banned by the LME.

Russia contributes around 8% of global aluminum supply, and also exports lots of its precursor materials, bauxite and alumina. In the past, Russia had supplied up to three-quarters of LME aluminum warehouse stocks, so a full ban on its metals would certainly cut the metal available on the exchange.

Of course, the LME is hoping the White House acts, taking the decision out of its hands. But whichever entity takes action first, it will be good news for one company whose CEO recently said Russian aluminum should be banned.

Rio Tinto

That company is Rio Tinto Group (RIO), which is the only major mining company in the world that has a significant aluminum division. In fact, aluminum was its second-highest earner in terms of underlying cash profits in the first half of 2022, only behind iron ore and ahead of copper. A ban on Russian aluminum would boost Rio Tinto even further, thanks to its major aluminum operations in Canada. (The company bought Canada’s aluminum giant Alcan back in 2007.)

Of course, there is a lot more to Rio Tinto than aluminum. I like the fact that the company is also investing with a focus on the longer-term. On October 11, Rio Tinto announced that it will modernize its Sorel-Tracy site in Quebec to bolster the supply of minerals controlled by China, while reducing emissions at the site by introducing a new smeltering technology.

The company will start producing titanium metal and quadruple its scandium oxide output to 12 tons annually at the site. These materials are essential to aerospace, medical products, and fuel cells. Currently, China produces three-quarters of finished titanium products and 61% of scandium globally.

In addition, Rio Tinto has bid to take full ownership of Canadian miner Turquoise Hill (TRQ) for $3.3 billion, which would give it greater control over the vast Oyu Tolgoi copper mine in Mongolia. Turquoise Hill holds 66% of the Oyu Tolgoi project, one of the world’s largest known copper and gold deposits, located in the Gobi desert. The Mongolian government owns the remaining stake.

And don’t forget that Rio Tinto has a large portfolio of long-lived assets with low operating costs, meaning it is one of few miners that will remain profitable through the commodity cycle. Plus, most of its revenues come from operations located in the relatively safe havens of Australia and North America.

Rio Tinto’s balance sheet is sound, and I expect the company to run a relatively conservative balance sheet for the foreseeable future. I love the management’s focus over recent years on returning excess cash to its shareholders. In July, Rio Tinto management said it would pay a semi-annual dividend of $4.3 billion ($2.67 per ADR), or 50% of underlying earnings. That was the second-highest half-year payout on record, in line with the company’s dividend policy.

I believe Rio Tinto’s capital discipline will continue, the balance sheet will remain sound, and distributions to shareholders will remain generous (although the current 12.65% yield will drop), even if metals prices like iron ore weaken.

That makes Rio Tinto a buy anywhere in the $50s.
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These Two “Special Situations” Have Huge Upside

While the markets remain in a state of turmoil and prices continue to fall, corporate activists have been picking up their pace. Two developing situations are now worth the attention of patient but aggressive investors…

Because the potential returns are getting quite big. Here’s what I’m seeing…

First, there is the ongoing saga of Kohl’s Corp. (KSS). I am stunned that the board of this company has not been replaced in its entirety, and each of the directors sued personally for negligence. The department store turned down takeover bids as high as $68 back in May when the stock was trading in the mid-50s.

The board felt that the department store chain was worth more than that price.

They were wrong.

Kohl’s missed earnings expectations in the second quarter and dramatically reduced its expectations for the full year.

As soon as the report hit the wires, the rout was on: the stock now trades for less than $30.

Activist investors are piling on, demanding that the board be replaced and the chairman of the board be fired. A proxy fight is shaping up, and I am hard-pressed to see how the board wins the day.

Jonathan Duskin, the head of the activist firm Marcellum Advisors, recently sent a letter to the beleaguered depart store chain’s shareholders. He was not nice about demanding the ouster of the entire board. Instead, the letter highlighted the failed sales process at much higher prices, executive departures, and the downgrading of Kohl’s debt to junk status. Furthermore, the activist called the wounds at Kohl’s self-inflicted due to execution issues on the part of the board.

There is little doubt in my mind that Kohl’s is worth a lot more than its current share price. Of course, there will be headwinds from a weakening economy and margin pressure due to inflation, but the stock price should be well above current levels.

The biggest obstacle will be the board’s willingness to fight the needed changes.

The stock is trading at just eight times forward earnings expectations and 82% of tangible book value.

Management has shown itself capable and willing when it comes to destroying shareholder value, so I would stay small and move slowly with Kohl’s, using weakness in the market to accumulate a position. The profit potential here is too big to ignore.

More experienced investors might want to use cash-secured puts or long-dated out-of-the-money calls to bet on the stock’s recovery.

Farmer Bros. Co. (FARM) is another ongoing saga that has attracted the attention of activists. The history of the coffee roaster is full of drama, including family disputes, ill-fated M&A activity, and what was, at the time, a very unpopular move from California to Texas.

Then the pandemic came, and Farmer Brothers was hit hard. Its biggest customers were hotels, restaurants, and casinos, and sales dropped dramatically. The problem is that business has not recovered as strongly as hoped as the economy began to reopen.

Revenues are still well below pre-pandemic levels, and expenses are rising. Debt levels have increased by more than 20% year over year. Cash on hand is down to less than $10 million. Farmer Brothers is losing money, and none of the analysts following the company expect it to turn a profit in 2023, either.

There has been some insider buying by the CEO, CFO, and chief supply chain officer, but there is no convincing evidence the business is improving.

Now, activist investor KCP Partners has accumulated a stake of more than 6% in the company and is pushing for board seats. Farmer Brothers’ board has not issued a response, but I doubt the company will give in too quickly.

If KCP does get board seats, I expect it to push for the sale of the company.

A sale should get a much higher valuation than the current stock price. The new facilities in the Dallas area are running at half capacity, so there is plenty of room for expansion of management can get the core business back on track.

A buyer whose business is already back to pre-pandemic levels could immediately double the facility’s output.

Again, I don’t think you need to back up the truck for this stock, but a small position could lead to outsized gains. Either management gets the business turned around and starts paying down debt, or activists will force a fight to unlock the obvious shareholder value present in this company’s assets and potential.
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These Two “Special Situations” Have Huge Upside Read More »

Your Cash Could Be Earning You More Income

With interest rates rising, your cash holdings could now earn you some interest income.

Again, they could—but they may not be doing so. Many financial institutions are not passing along higher interest to customers holding cash. You should check to see how much your money earns, and if it’s a pittance, look at some alternatives.

Here are some ways to earn interest income…

In recent months the Federal Reserve Board has aggressively increased its target rate. The rate currently stands at 3.25%. The fed funds rate provides a base rate for short-term loans. For example, the three-month T-bill yields 3.95% at Charles Schwab.

Yet many financial institutions haven’t increased the rates they pay on savings accounts. They continue to pay near-zero rates that resulted from meager market interest rates in years past.

I have quite a lot of cash in a business savings account at my credit union. That money continues to earn the measly 0.10% that has been the rate since I opened the account five or six years ago.

I looked at Bank of America’s savings rates, but they’re even worse. They pay 0.01% to 0.04% on savings accounts and just 0.05% on a 7-month CD, the shortest term they offer.

I have most of my investment portfolio with Charles Schwab. They currently pay 0.40% on cash balances. It’s better than $0.10%, but still pretty meager.

As an alternative to earning nearly nothing on your cash, look for money market mutual funds and bank money market accounts. It’s important to understand the difference between the two types of investments.

Money market mutual funds invest in short-term liquid securities such as Treasury bills or corporate commercial paper. These funds earn short-term market rates minus a management expense. For example, the Fidelity Government Money Market Fund expenses are 0.10%. Net of fees, the fund has a current yield of 2.49%. A money market mutual fund will have a stable $1.00 share price.

Money market savings accounts are FDIC-insured bank accounts. The banks set the yields, which vary widely from bank to bank. You can find accounts paying almost nothing up to around 3.0%. To take the bank path, you need to shop around and be willing to send money to banks with which you may not be familiar.

Your brokerage account may allow you to sweep all cash into a money market mutual fund. Fidelity does that, and it is a nice feature. Charles Schwab does not, so you must manually buy and sell shares if you invest with Schwab. The Schwab Treasury Obligations Money Fund yields 2.76%, which can be worth the effort.

Now that we have interest rates above one percent, you can pick up extra earnings by ensuring your cash holdings earn interest. The 2.5% to 2.8% current paid by money market funds will increase as the Fed continues to increase interest rates.
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Biogen’s Resurrection

If there is one topic that scientists disagree strongly about in the field of medicine, it is the so-called amyloid hypothesis. This theory, believed by many scientists, holds that the protein amyloid-β accumulates into toxic deposits as Alzheimer’s disease progresses, ultimately causing dementia.

However, others think that amyloid is associated with the problem, but it isn’t the problem. The doubters point to a very detrimental second protein called tau. This protein also deposits in the brains of people who have Alzheimer’s, and it is actually the one that more strongly correlates with cognitive decline.

However, if the amyloid hypothesis does hold up, one company stands to benefit greatly…

Lecanemab and Alzheimer’s

That company is Biogen (BIIB), and it’s all thanks to recent clinical trial results.

Developed by Biogen and Japan’s Eisai (ESALY), lecanemab is a monoclonal antibody designed to clear clumps of amyloid protein from the brain.

The companies conducted a Phase III trial, Clarity AD, which ran for 18 months and covered 1800 patients in more than a dozen countries. According to data released on September 27, the drug candidate slowed the rate of cognitive decline by 27%; however, only a limited amount of data has been made available so far, and scientists are awaiting the full analysis results before proclaiming lecanemab a miracle drug.

Still—for a disease with virtually no effective treatment measures, that 27% is a significant figure.

At the moment, all doctors can offer Alzheimer’s patients are medications that alleviate some of the symptoms. Patients in the early stages of the disease might be given drugs to increase the levels of a brain chemical called acetylcholine, which helps nerve cells communicate. Also, psychiatric medications are sometimes prescribed to manage the behavioral and psychological symptoms that arise as Alzheimer’s advances.

The question remains whether the benefit lecanemab brings is worth the risks. During the trial, about 20% of participants who received lecanemab showed abnormalities on their brain scans that indicated swelling or bleeding, although fewer than 3% of those in the treatment group experienced symptoms of these side effects.

The FDA is reviewing lecanemab for ‘accelerated approval’ on the basis of Phase II results that showed a decrease in amyloid. The new Phase III results could tip the scales in favor of approval, although the trial is not formally part of the review. The agency expects to announce its decision on January 6, 2023.

Biogen Needs an Approval

Biogen needs the FDA approval on lecanemab badly.

Last year, its predecessor, aducanumab, was a flop. It was also designed to target amyloid plaque in the brain, but it wasn’t clear that the drug meaningfully slowed the rate of cognitive decline in clinical trial participants. In addition to the questions over aducanumab’s efficacy, there were concerns about its safety after roughly 40% of clinical trial participants developed brain swelling and bleeding.

Despite this, aducanumab received approval from the FDA, setting off an outcry. The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Medicare, decided to restrict the use of aducanumab to only patients enrolled in clinical trials. So, in effect, the drug’s rollout was over before it began.

Biogen’s share price suffered as a result, plunging from around $400 per share to a bit below $200. Shareholders have been hoping good trial results for lecanemab will turn the company’s fortunes around. For the company itself, lecanemab would be a game changer.

There’s no denying that many uncertainties remain around lecanemab. But Wall Street will be able to form a fuller opinion once the trial’s data is presented at the Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease (CTAD) conference in late November.

Then the drug will need to be approved for reimbursement by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the same body that restricted the use of aducanumab to clinical trials. Both the conference and the CMS verdict have the potential to move Biogen’s share price in a big way.

But if all goes well, the reward could be huge.

Biogen’s Potential

With nearly six million Alzheimer’s patients in the U.S. today—and no effective method of slowing the disease’s progression—demand for lecanemab will likely be significant. Evaluate Pharma, a pharmaceutical industry intelligence provider, has estimated that the market for Alzheimer’s drugs will exceed $12 billion before the end of the decade.

Biogen’s portfolio of drugs is far less diversified across diseases than many rival biotechs and has fewer patented products as well. However, Biogen has the distinct advantage of a clearly defined specialty: neurological illnesses. Many of the diseases it seeks to treat, from multiple sclerosis to motor neuron disease, have few, if any, effective treatments available currently. This specialization serves as a kind of economic moat, or competitive advantage, for the company.

And Biogen remains much cheaper than its peers. FactSet places the company’s price-to-earnings multiple at 15.6 times for the full financial year—significantly below the 37.6 times average of its biotech peers.

Obviously, much will depend on government regulators and the release of full trial data for lecanemab. Nevertheless, there is plenty to be optimistic about with Biogen, making it a speculative buy.

You can buy shares anywhere in the $240 to $275 range.
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Biogen’s Resurrection Read More »

How to Fix the Worst Ever Year for 401k Balances

This year is on pace to be the worst in history for the standard 401k investment strategy. A balanced portfolio of stock and bond index funds has performed terribly in 2022. Workers who get their third-quarter 401k statements will be shocked.

Today, let’s discuss why this happened and how to do better…

The traditional 60/40 portfolio has 60% in stock index funds and 40% in bond index funds. The bond funds are supposed to be less volatile and make up for some of the stock market losses during bear markets. But that strategy hasn’t worked out this year: so far in 2022, stocks are down 23%, the iShares 7-10 Treasury Bond ETF (IEF) is down 17%, and investment-grade corporate bonds have fallen by 22%.

Put these negative returns together, and never in history has a traditional stock and bond balanced portfolio lost so much money. Most of us understand that stocks go through bull markets and bear markets. What’s harder to grasp is how investment grade and Treasury bonds can lose 20% of their value.

Bonds are interest-paying instruments that pay off a face value when they mature. The expected return should be the yield to maturity in effect when a bond is purchased. The problem comes from how bonds were viewed through 30 years of falling interest rates.

Bond prices move inversely to interest rates. This relationship means when rates are falling, bond prices are supposed to go up. The long period of falling interest rates trained money managers to count on capital gains from bond funds in addition to interest income. As interest rates moved close to zero, financial advisors continued to depend on bond price appreciation from the recommended bond funds.

A return to rising, and quickly rising, interest rates blew up bond fund investing. It’s a direct, mathematical correlation between bond fund prices and interest rates. Since bond funds don’t hold bonds to maturity, bond fund share prices go down and stay down when interest rates go up.

Bond fund prices are different from stock prices. Share prices can and do recover from a market decline. Bond fund share prices will only go up if interest rates fall, and the nature of bond funds (vs. owning bonds directly) makes recovery much less than the magnitude of the decline. And that’s assuming interest rates go down.

I hope you get the idea that index-tracking bond funds are not good for your wealth or your 401k account value. That said, now that interest rates have gone up, investing in fixed income securities makes sense in a balanced portfolio. You want to invest in securities with a fixed maturity that will pay a face value when they mature. Here are a few ideas…

Buy individual bonds. You can easily buy Treasury Bills and Notes through your brokerage account. Six-month T-bills yield above 4.3%, and these bonds are very liquid. Talk to your broker about municipal bonds if you are in a high tax bracket.

Certificates of Deposit (CDs) pay similar yields. You will likely find better CD rates through your stockbroker than from your local bank.

Series I Savings Bonds pay based on the rate of inflation and currently yield close to 10%. I Bonds have some limits and restrictions, but if you have some cash to sock away, the yield is fantastic.

The Invesco BulletShares series of bond ETFs solves the bond fund problem. Each of these ETFs own bonds that mature in a specific year. These funds allow investors to set up an old-fashioned bond ladder, an excellent tactic to maximize investment income and liquidity.

In my Dividend Hunter service, I have provided in-depth information on the BulletShares features and how to use them in a portfolio. See below for how to join.
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