Tag: QE

Dividends vs Capital Gains

There are many people who claim that dividend investing is a bad idea because you end up paying more tax.

Although it depends on country, generally dividends are classified as income, and income is usually heavily taxed whereas capital gains are normally not taxed until you sell the investments. Investors typically sell all their investments when they retire. When investors retire, they are typically earning zero income (because they’ve stopped working), so any tax they pay as a result of capital gains tax is usually minimal.

If you invest in dividend-paying stocks, you are being taxed on those dividends, and in countries with progressive taxation, the tax you pay is usually very high because your salary from work is counted as income as well.

There is also an argument made that companies that pay high dividends sacrifice capital gains because money that the company pays out as dividends could have been reinvested back into the company for expansion.

One in hand is better than two in the bush

While these are all fair arguments, I still believe that investing in dividends is better even if you pay more tax. The reason is due to risk. A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush. When companies pay dividends, you get cold hard cash in your hands. If instead you sacrifice your dividends and instead allow the company to reinvest that money, you don’t know if that reinvestment will work or not. Most people employing a buy-and-hold strategy typically wait multiple decades expecting capital gains to accumulate throughout that time, and when they retire they sell their investments. However, if you wait three or four decades and amass large capital gains, what if, just before retirement, there is a very large global recession that sends asset prices down? Decades of work has been flushed down the drain.

Money printing, negative interest rates, automated trading, and high leverage have made capital gains unreliable

Dividends are simple. A company sells something, they make money, pay their expenses, and a portion of whatever is leftover is given to investors as dividends. Dividend payments therefore depend on the quality of businesses, the quality of their management, products, services, etc.

Capital gains, however, are completely different. In today’s world of constant money printing and stimulus and high leverage products that increase volatility, it’s hard to trust asset prices because asset prices can be instantly manipulated. Asset prices are now so divorced from reality that it’s difficult to know what real or fundamental value is. If a bubble never pops and is continually inflated, is it a bubble?

In my opinion, the lost two decades in Japan following the crash in its asset price bubble in the early ’90s will play out in Western countries. Japan was an economic leader but the crash of the ’90s was its peak, and since then they have simply tried to reinflate their economy with no success, and the economy has gone sideways ever since.

nikkei225-source
The Nikkei 225 since the ’80s

What has played out in Japan will play out in Western countries where peak growth has been realized. We will see a zigzag pattern as stock markets crash and then are reinflated before crashing again, and this continuous forever. The best way to make money in such an economy is to forget about prices and focus on dividends.

Dividends and capital gains are not necessarily a trade-off

Empirically, dividend-paying stocks don’t necessarily perform worse. Below is a chart of the S&P 500 index versus the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats index.

Dividend Aristocrats vs S&P500
The S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats index vs the S&P 500

Source: https://www.indexologyblog.com/2014/12/12/inside-the-sp-500-the-dividend-aristocrats/

My Thoughts on “The Big Short”

Yesterday I was watching a movie called The Big Short and it’s an awesome movie about the GFC. The movie makes me wonder about whether we are in for another financial crash. Stock and property markets went down about 50% in America and most countries around the world, but since then central bank injections of cash seem to have restored everything.

This movie blames the property crash on subprime loans, but at the end of the day subprime lending popped the entire American housing bubble. The bubble was there in the first place, and the bubble was in property, not just subprime property but also prime property, which is why property prices in the US fell across the board.

This movie also really exposed how corrupt and fraudulent the financial system is. The biggest injustice of all, in my opinion, is that investment banks created these toxic assets (CDOs, etc) and then when they were worthless they simply did a deal with the government to unload it onto the government in return for printed money (or bailout money). This pretty much means the banks can do whatever they want knowing that if things go wrong they can simply get the government to bail them out. If you or I started a cafe and the business failed, the government will not bail us out. However, this does not apply to bankers, the holders of capital. Capitalism, therefore, does not apply to capitalists. Bankers can create bubbles, create bad assets, and then sell these assets, and if everything goes wrong they can just tell the government to take it off their hands. There should be no bailout, and those who held CDOs should have been left to learn the errors of their ways. By bailing them out, you only reward bad behavior.

Looking at it this way, the banking industry is simply an arm of the government. Banks are simply government business enterprises.

The original view was that if the government prints money to buy these toxic assets off bankers, this would cause inflation, but these toxic assets are usually highly leveraged, and more debt actually increases the amount of the money in circulation, which is inflationary. As debt prices go down (e.g. there is a debt bubble that pops) then this means the expectation is that loans will not get paid, and the amount of money in circulation goes down, which is deflationary. The government printing money simply restores the money supply back to original levels. 

How to invest

My investing strategy is pretty simple. I’ve been focusing mainly on dividends and looking at funds that provide low volatility. The perfect ETF on the ASX, in my opinion, is Betashares’s HVST, which has a double-digit yield and pays monthly. It also uses derivatives to lower volatility by selling futures when volatility is high. If the market crashes, I’m sure this fund will go down, but it won’t go down that much, and while everything is rosy, this fund will produce great dividends, which is awesome.

If there is a GFC 2, I expect to take a hit. My net worth will go down, but I have been loading my portfolio up with funds that are designed to be low volatility (such as HVST) as well as other defensive investments like gold mining ETFs (ASX: GDX) as well as bond funds, and so if my net worth goes down, it won’t go down much, and when the market bottoms, I will definitely be plowing as much money as possible into leveraged ETFs expecting the government to print money to restore the economy. While the market is likely in bubble territory now, it’s also a good idea to keep debt levels low because a major risk when there is a market crash is that a margin call will be triggered. Keeping debt low reduces the risk of this happening. Furthermore, as the market bottoms, if your debt levels are low, you have more ability to take on more debt to invest when the market bottoms, which means you can leverage into leveraged ETFs and achieve “double leverage” to magnify your returns once central bankers start firing up the printing presses.

Bottom line is that at this stage you should load up your portfolio with defensive assets, e.g. cash, bonds, gold, as well as “smart beta” low-volatility ETFs, but don’t go all into these defensive assets because it’s almost impossible to determine when a bubble will pop. As they say, a market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, so often when a bubble is formed, it’s often best to simply ride the bubble and make money, but always have a plan to protect yourself if the bubble bursts. There must be a plan B.

 

How Money Printing Can Fail

The world economy came crashing in 2009 but was rescued through money printing. Standard economic theory would say that money printing would increase inflation, but we haven’t seen that.

If anything, the threat has been deflation (prices falling), and central banks lower interest rates or print money to cause inflation and fight deflation.

Lower interest rates encourage more people to borrow, and borrowing increases the money supply, so the effect is similar to money printing in that there is more money in the economy.

When people are confident, they tend to borrow money so that they can e.g. expand their business or buy more shares or real estate so that they can make even more money. However, when people are bearish, they don’t borrow because they may not be able to make enough money to pay off the loan, and so they tend to focus on paying off the debt. If going into debt increases money supply, paying off debt does the opposite, which is reduce the money supply. Paying off debt destroys money, which leads to deflation.

The game central banks seem to be playing is to wait for a dip in the market or a time when there is falling confidence and hence there is deflation. Then they lower interest rates or print money. People then expect the higher money supply will push up the prices of the property, shares, businesses, etc that they hold due to higher money supply increasing inflation, and then they borrow or leverage more, which pushes the market back up.

In theory, this can go on forever. As deflation occurs, just stimulate more.

There is one problem with this, which is what happens when money is printed but the recipients of printed money don’t do anything with it because they are concerned and want to “wait and see.” If interest rates are lowered, the expectation is that people will borrow more, but what if they don’t? Even if interest rates are zero, if returns on investments are negative, it’s not worth borrowing to invest. Likewise, if the recipients of printed money feel that all investments are poor and that the best use of money is to just leave it as cash, then this reduces the so-called velocity of money in the economy, which is deflationary.

In the past, assets produced great income. However, as money is bring printed in record quantities and interest rates are lowered, people are grabbing that easy money and investing it. If, say, a house in South America produced a rental yield of 10 percent, then as investors borrow money and buy the house, the prices go up, which lowers the rental yield. As the yield goes down, investors search for other assets. This is the so-called global hunt for yield.

As the global hunt for yield continues, investors need to search far and wide to find returns. Two ETFs have been released for the ASX that satisfy investor appetite for yield. There is an ETF that invests in junk bonds, i.e. lending money to bad companies (iShares Global High Yield Bond (AUD Hedged) ETF). There is also an ETF that lends money to emerging market governments (iShares J.P. Morgan USD Emerging Markets Bond (AUD Hedged) ETF).

As interest rates and money printing intensify, investors may reach the point where the global hunt for yield ends because all avenues will be exhausted. Investors then either don’t borrow at all or if money is printed and thrown at them, they do nothing with it. This bubble in yield pops.

This is when stimulus fails, and it looks like we are getting close to that day.

The Dismal Future of the Australian Economy

gold price vs asx200 27 august 2015
GOLD vs the ASX200 (Commsec)

The recent volatility in stock markets has gotten me worried. Everyone keeps telling me to relax because “economic fundamentals are sound,” but when I ask them to explain how this is true, it’s revealed that they don’t really know what they’re talking about. It seems that most people just hope for the best and rationalize away bad news.

The Chinese stock market is certainly wobbly. Some say the Chinese economy is very healthy. After all, they have low debt and a massive foreign exchange reserve. They are the biggest lender nation in the world with the USA the biggest creditor nation. However, we don’t really know much about the true size of China’s debt because there is significant activity in the underground economy that is not transparent, and I’m not too confident in official figures provided by the Chinese government. Of course, China has been manufacturing products from t-shirts to smartphones, but the government has in recent years been intervening in the economy to prop up the stock and property markets. It’s uncertain whether these distortions can be held together by the government or whether the market will eventually strike back.

America has resorted to printing money, which has resulted in surges in the stock and bond markets. However, unemployment is still high and wage growth is low. Printing money doesn’t seem to have done anything other than make the holders of stocks and bonds wealthy (these are mostly wealthy people anyway).

In Australia, our economy used to be dominated by two sectors: the banks and the miners. The miners dug resources from the ground and shipped them to China. China makes goods and ships them to US consumer who buys these goods.

But the American consumer (or consumers from any other developed country) is not buying as much as they did before the GFC. This means China is slowing down, the price of resources is dropping, and the mining sector in Australia is getting crushed. We only have the banks left, and how do they make money? The balance sheets of Australian banks is mostly in loans to consumers who buy real estate. Real estate prices have been going up thanks to profits from mining. In other words, banks do well because house prices have been sustained by profits from the resources sector. Now that mining is dead, what will sustain us? Where are our strong fundamentals? House prices only go up with people buy houses, but to buy houses you need to make money in the first place. You can’t make money from houses without putting money into it in the first place.

Many who have bought stocks have made great wealth from quantitative easing, but now that tears are emerging in a bubbling world economy held together by printed money, it’s time to look at investing in gold.

Gold tends to shoot up significantly when stocks tumble, and when stocks go down, gold tends to go sideways or go up anyway, so there doesn’t seem to be any downside to investing in gold.

Personally, I will be buying this shiny metal from now on.