As global inflation continues to wreck world economic systems, the central banks are propping up speculative stock markets in the hopes that the flood of money, which I think is around $2 trillion, doesn’t all flood into rare metals and …
Benjamin Graham (1894-1976) is considered by many to be the architect of Fundamental Analysis and Value Investing. Graham liked to find discrepancies between a stock’s price and its value and would buy large portfolios of undervalued stocks, holding them until they became fully valued. In his 1949 book “The Intelligent Investor, Graham describes a stock selection technique that identifies stocks that are trading at a deep discount to a calculated value termed the Net Current Asset Value or NCAV.
Benjamin Graham (1894-1976) is considered by many to be the architect of Fundamental Analysis and Value Investing. Graham liked to find discrepancies between a stock’s price and its value and would buy large portfolios of undervalued stocks, holding them until they became fully valued. In his 1949 book “The Intelligent Investor, Graham describes a stock selection technique that identifies stocks that are trading at a deep discount to a calculated value termed the Net Current Asset Value or NCAV.
Calculation of a stock’s NCAV is a fairly simple endeavor and is somewhat different from the calculation of Book Value. Whereas Book Value is purely a per share measure of Assets - Liabilities, the NCAV is a little more rigorous.
In calculating NCAV, Graham only considered Current Assets, i.e. cash, cash equivalents, accounts receivable, inventories. However, from this value he still subtracted Total Assets. The result he then divided by the number of shares outstanding to give the NCAV per share. This value would be considered by Graham to be a fair value for the stock.
You might think he would buy at this price, but no. Graham onlybought stocks that were trading under two-thirds or 66% of their NCAV. Consider as an example G-III Apparel Group Ltd, ticker symbol GIII.
Current Assets are $130.25M, Total Liabilities are $68.3M, and there are 7.22M shares outstanding.
NCAV = (130.25 - 68.3) / 7.22 = $8.58.
Two-thirds of this price would be $5.66. At the time of writing (03/07/05), GIII is trading at $7.67, so may not be a buy candidate at present. It is important to note that Graham would consider the NCAV to be a first step in further analysis of the stock. A sensible investor would investigate the balance sheet further to check for a sound business with other desirable factors such as good earnings,revenue growth, low debt-to-equity, and good operational cash flow per share.
Stocks trading at such a deep discount are few and far between, and have usually been beaten down by a combination of bad news and emotional reactions from the investing public. These stocks were Graham’s bread and butter. He repeatedly insisted that the time to buy stocks was when everyone else was selling and the time to sell was when everyone else was buying. Had he been alive, he certainly would have been out of stocks before the dot com bubble burst and would surely have been picking up bargains soon after. It is no secret that one of Graham’s most famous disciples is Warren Buffett who has consistently beaten the market by a large margin with his investments.
One study has shown that Graham’s NCAV strategy works well; in this particular study, portfolios picked using the strategy at the beginning of each year between 1970 and 1983 would have returned an average annual gain of over 29% when held for only the duration of each year in this 13 year period.
Van Tharp mentions an actual investing strategy based on the NCAV or Graham’s Number as it is sometimes called, in his book “Safe Strategies for Financial Freedom”. The strategy as mentioned by Tharp involves buying stocks at two-thirds of their NCAV, and selling a third of your holding when a 50% profit is achieved. If the price continues upwards to give 100% profit, you sell a number of shares to make up half your original holding. You now have your original investment back and have a holding of “free” shares.
This strategy can be performed in an IRA using a large portfolio of perhaps 30 similarly undervalued stocks. If the market has been declining for several months, there will be several such stocks to choose from. In an up trending market, however, it will be much harder to find good value candidates but diligent investors who do their homework will more often than not be well rewarded for their efforts.
Once you`ve found the best entry point for your stock trades, you need to keep your position out of trouble while you hold it and wait for potential profits. How does a position get into to trouble? In an environment as volatile as the market, there are many ways, but the one that often triggers a position to move against you is market news. The only way to guard against sudden turns in the market is by setting stops. Stops must be set on every trade. This topic is so important that I`ve devoted several articles to it that you might want to read for more detailed information.
But generally, when you make your trading plan, you must decide where to stop out if the trade goes against you. Do you want to stop out of the stock at a small loss and abandon the trade, or average down by increasing your holdings at a lower price, keeping a loser stop in place even farther down? The best idea is to stop out at a small loss. There aren`t many times when averaging down works. You should limit the averaging down option to extremely low-risk plays with high chances of success. These should be stock trades in which you`ve determined that a price decrease to the level where you`d average down is not a sign of an impending drop but just a temporary move in the stocks range.
The best way to figure this out is by looking at support levels on charts. Averaging down does not mean you don`t have to set stops. It just means you`ll set them lower and give the stock more room to move around before you trade out of it. With appropriate stops in place, you will be practicing good money management. And good money management is the key to protecting your capital, keeping it intact for the stock trades that will create profits.
Once you`ve started to make profits on your stock trades, you need to decide when to exit the position. Your trading plan should tell you when it`s time to exit. Knowing when to exit is vital, because traders who hold on to their positions too long often find that their paper profits disappear. They often end up making no money, or even incurring a loss, on what should have been good stock trades.
To keep this from happening to you, it`s useful to think about how the risk-to-reward ratio changes as a stock you`re holding rises in price. The reward level decreases as the profits in your portfolio increase. There is less reward there because you`ve already collected most of it. The risk rises at the same time. As the price rises to a point where traders start to question how much more it can move, they start to take profits. If the risk is increasing while the reward is decreasing, at some point your risk-to-reward ratio will become unfavorable. You will already know that point is for each trade, since you will have calculated it before you made the trade, according to your trading plan.
Your plan may specify a particular number you`ve chosen as the exit point, or it may tell you to exit when the volume dries up, or to use trailing stops and hold the stock until a trailing stop is triggered. All of these are firm plans that tell you when to leave the position. Your exit plan also may have alternative exit points, and may tell you that if any of several possible things happen, you should exit. These are all good exit plans.
Last, in your stock trades, as long as you have an exit plan in place that is triggered by an unfavourable risk-to-reward ratio, you will never lose your profits. Instead, like all other successful traders you will take your profits at the point that is best for your personal trading style, in accordance with your carefully thought out trading plan.
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Once you`ve put the time and effort into coming up with a sound trading plan for your stock trades, and have found a good trading opportunity, it makes sense to start the trade right. Finding a good point to enter into a position involves several issues. Fist, you must know the time frame of your trade. For a particular trend stock trades, for example, you might know that you should enter no earlier than a week before the event creating the trend. Next, you must examine charts to see where the stock trades have been and where its support and resistance levels are, and think about it`s psychological support and resistance levels as well. Last, you should wait for a pullback in price if you believe that the price is temporarily high and that it will drop and create a better buying opportunity for you.
The way to make sure you enter where you plan to is to use a limit order. A limit order is an order that can execute only at the stated price or better. Limit orders sometimes make you wait behind others who placed their orders at the same price before you did, but in most situations, placing a reasonable limit order is the only smart way to enter a position. In certain situations, it may make sense to stagger your entry by buying half the shares you want at a price you think may be the lowest the stock trades will reach, and then waiting to buy the other half either when the price does get better, averaging down, or when the stock trades starts to move, adding on strength.
The wrong way to enter a position is to chase moving stock trades. Chasing stocks is a form of panic, and it practically guarantees that you`ll pay too much for the stock. Why is it so bad to pay too much? The more you pay for stock trades, the further your risk to reward ratio is shifted away from reward and toward risk. This happens because your upside has decreased due to the high price of the stock, and because the probability of the run ending increases as the stock gets more and more expensive.
There are two ways to look at the decrease in your upside: First of all, you`ll capture less of the stock`s movement, so your percentage return will be less; second, the more the stock trades costs per share, the fewer shares you`ll be able to buy. Which means that any return you get will be multiplied by fewer shares. Remember, it doesn`t matter if you miss a trade or a position because the entry price has gotten too high. It`s not the last good trade in the market. There will always be more stock trades to make. It`s much better to miss a trade than to chase a stock and end up with a loss.
Morning gaps down present good opportunities to buy stocks you want. Buying a gap down is an excellent way to enter a position, since when a stock gaps down, it often opens near what will turn out to be the low of the day. On the other hand, buying a gap up is one of the worst stock trades you can make. The gap up generally reflects the top of the market`s level of interest in the stock. Any good news from overnight has generally been priced in, so the stock`s opening price and volatility on a gap up often establishes the stock`s high of the day. Therefore, buying, or really chasing, the gap up means that you will likely buy the stock for top dollar. A good trader buys stocks that have an upside that hasn`t been priced into the stock.
Entering a short position on a gap up is a great plan, though shorting a gap down is foolish. The opening price and volatility on a gap down often establishes the stock`s low of the day, so shorting at the lowest point would be a poor trade to make. However, if you keep these guidelines in mind, you will be able to find a safe entry point for your trade. One that fits with your trading plan, and puts you on the path to consistent trading success.
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To make money in the stock market, setting stops is an imprecise science and involves a lot of trial and error, but it is an integral part of being a successful trader. A good analogy is to compare stops to buying insurance for your business. Should you avoid insurance altogether just because you`re not sure exactly how much you need, or because it will cost you a little money? No. Instead, you estimate and do the best you can, and in the end it will be well worth the effort.
Where insurance limits risk of loss through disasters, stops limit your risk of loss on bad trades. Stops make it possible to take small losses and get out when a stock goes against you, protecting your capital. Yet, some traders find that they are unwilling to take a loss on any stock. They don`t want to admit that they made a mistake.
Another key to make money in the stock market, what often separates a good trader from a bad one is the ability to take small losses. Your goal, as a successful trader, is to take small losses and make big gains. If you do this, you`ll be profitable. But, you ask, what if you stop out of a stock you still want to trade? Well, you can always buy it back later, and likely at a better price, if the trade still has potential.
Besides limiting risk and helping you take small losses, stops are valuable because they protect profits on winning trades. As I discussed in a previous article, you must lock in your profit when you trade, or you can lose it. You can ensure that you keep your profits by using trailing stops. A trailing stop is a stop order you place below the current price of a long position, progressively moving it up as the price of the position increases so that the stop follows the position up. For a short position, to make money in the stock market you set a stop above the current price and then move it progressively down, following the position as it trends downward.
This means that once you have a profit, you move your stop nearer to the current price so you`ll stop out with most of your profits intact if the position moves against you. If the stop executes and you decide you want to trade the position again, you can buy it back at a better price than you sold it for and then ride it up again. That`s how a good trader makes and keeps money, make money in the stock market by taking small profits multiple times, rather than risking too much waiting for a big win.
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