In this month’s instalment of the Biznews.com Global Share Portfolio Webinar, Alec Hogg once again takes us through the performance and current position of the long-term portfolio, which is proving to be highly successful indeed. If you’ve just joined in on this journey, not to worry. Hogg provides a comprehensive breakdown of how the shares are doing and how the companies, split between the likes of Apple, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, Google, IBM and Novo Nordisk are performing.
We’ve started our broadcast today. Thanks very much for being with us. I see that we have quite a nice attendance for this month’s Global Share Portfolio, put together by Biznews. I’m Alec Hogg and in the studio is Stuart Lowman.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Thanks Alec good to be here again and I see we already have a question.
Just to give you some background how it works. If you’d like to make this as interactive as possible, because it just makes it a lot more fun for everybody. You type in your questions. Stuart will then pick them up, read them out, so that I can concentrate on my notes that I have in front of me, and then we’ll answer those questions as we go along.
If you are on Twitter and you are text savvy. You don’t have to be an Elon Musk to understand how Periscope works but it is, and we’re actually, live streaming via Periscope as well, so you can go onto Periscope on Twitter. Go and have a look @alechogg (that’s my twitter stream), and click on it and you can actually watch us live.
Watch us live, yes. I’m talking Elon Musk because he always wears a black shirt, so if you look on Periscope you’ll see I have a black shirt on today. It makes you a little bit stronger. Right, let’s hit it.
It is the ninth month that the Global Portfolio has been active and, as you can see from our account overview there we have, after a starting point of $200.000, after all costs and dividends that have streamed in. We are now sitting at $219.500, so in U.S. Dollar terms the improvement has been about nine percent overall.
I like putting this up here because people can say any kind of thing they want to about portfolios, if it isn’t in the public domain. This is in the public domain. This is on the Standard Bank Webtrader back end. In fact, I think if you ask Bret Duncan, or Stuart Schady, or Fatima, they’ll even give you access to this but you don’t really need to because we don’t change the portfolio much. It’s a portfolio that we invest in where the holding period is forever, just like Warren Buffett.
Anyway, so in U.S. Dollar terms we’re up nine percent. You’ll see in a moment that the market, as reflected by our biggest holding, which is in the Vanguard S&P500 ETF. The market is up by one-point-nine-six (we’ll call it two percent), over that period, so by being with us you would have got nine percent growth in U.S. Dollars, as against two percent for the market overall. That’s pretty cool.
There’s already a question here. I can see from Alan Dee – ‘Apple Apple’ he says, with a big question mark. Well, you can see Apple has been the one that has dragged back the portfolio a little bit but I just want to give you a bit of an overall view here.
This is the account that you’d see in your own Webtrader portfolio. We’ve made around $10thousand from Amazon, six-and-a-half thousand from Google, four thousand from Novo Nordisk, and the market overall – about a thousand Dollars. The plusses are about $22,000.
The losers in this portfolio are two thousand from Apple, one-and-a-half from Berkshire Hathaway, about a half from IBM, so you take those three, and as you can see, Amazon, and Google, and Novo have been the three big winners, and there’ve been three that have underperformed but nothing terribly concerning. That’s in U.S. Dollars and I think if we just go to the next slide, which gives you that breakdown of the individual holdings. We’ll get to the questions in just a moment.
The best performer by far has been Amazon.com. We only started off with eight percent of the portfolio invested there. We’re not at 12 percent, (quite a lot to talk about that later on today in this webcast).
The under performers is pretty much Apple, which we only have just bought into, so we bought into Apple two months ago, our first chunk, and then the second chunk was a month ago.
We have, roughly a third of the portfolio in the Van Guard S&P 500, so that gives you a nice ballast, (the base), which is the market overall.
Another one-third of the portfolio initially started off with Google and Berkshire Hathaway (the two of them together). We’ve now added to that with the Apple, so we’ve got the three core holdings, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, and Google, which would bring you up to almost 50 percent, and then we’ve got our three-stock picks, which are Amazon, Novo Nordisk, and IBM.
As you can see, the outperformance of Amazon has made it already 12 percent of the portfolio, even though we only started at eight. I hope all of that is pretty explanatory.
The first question is from Peter Cook. He says, “I’ve got around one million Rand in a MoneyMarket account. I’m apprehensive of the current investing climate. What should I do with it?”
Peter, I don’t know your background but what we’re talking about here is an offshore portfolio. Why do we think that offshore is the way to go? We’re not mad here, at Biznews, about the economic policies or Zuma-nomics, if you want to call it that. We think that generally speaking, although the Rand is probably overblown at the moment. It’s probably fallen a little bit further than it should have. Generally speaking, the Rand is likely to be a weak currency, so you should be looking for ways of hedging against that weak currency.
I’d be a little concerned right now to be putting all of that million Rand into offshore investments. The Rand almost certainly will come back. In other words, it will appreciate a little bit because it has just fallen with other emerging market currencies but the way to look at this is, when you look at this portfolio. The S&P 500 Index is still very much at a similar level to what we bought it in U.S. Dollar terms that is, in December last year.
You could put 30 percent of your portfolio into the S&P 500 very comfortably. Where you do have some concerns are the shares that have run. Google is up 23 percent. We think it is now trading at above its intrinsic value. We have Amazon, similarly, above the intrinsic value, but that’s not surprising because it’s up 63 percent. Novo Nordisk – 27 percent, also you don’t get much margin of safety. If you don’t know what I’m talking about here – please go and buy my book. It costs R99.00, ‘How to Invest on the JSE like Warren Buffett’. You can find the links through either our newsletter or the links on Biznews.com. It’s a pretty short book. It will take you an hour-and-a-half, no more, to read and in there we talk about the Buffettology because this is very much a Buffett structured portfolio. What Buffett says is you put your eggs into one basket and watch them very carefully (that’s what we’re doing here). He also says, “You work out the intrinsic value and then make sure that you buy below the intrinsic value.”
The best investment on this portfolio right now is Apple and that I think comes to what Alan Dee’s question was a little earlier. Alan, if you were to buy Apple shares now, you have a margin of safety on our intrinsic value of about 20 percent. That’s a very good place to be buying into, so also for you Peter. If you are looking to make investments offshore I would wait, I certainly wouldn’t jump everything in but you could probably take a third of your million Rand, put it in this month, another third next month, and a further third the month thereafter. We just don’t know about market timing. Although, as I’ve said before, I do think that the Rand has just blown out a little bit too far, in the short term.
Apple is trading below. It’s in our intrinsic value and as is IBM. IBM is very comfortably below intrinsic value, and there is Berkshire Hathaway as well.
I haven’t finished my numbers on Berkshire Hathaway but the intrinsic value there, from other experts, say it’s around 30 to 40 percent above where the current price of those B shares are. Those are the three that one could comfortably go into investing in – the Vanguard S&P500 index and then the three stocks, Apple, Berkshire Hathaway, and IBM.
The other three that have run very hard, I would be a little… We have to wait for the earnings to catch up with them or we have to wait for their share prices to come back a little, to make those worth investing in. Please don’t forget that you really have to do your homework on intrinsic values and then buy into a margin of safety or with a margin of safety. There is no point in just rushing into the stock market because you see that a portfolio, like this, has done as well as it has.
We have 100 attendees, Alec, which is a good number for us. There’s a question around one of your favourite entrepreneurs, with a South African link, Tesla, your thoughts on Tesla shares. I know we don’t have it in the portfolio, but Gerhard Fennimore asks, “How do you feel about it?”
Gerhard, I read a piece on Bloomberg yesterday, where there was an analysis of Tesla, one of the Wall Street houses upgraded their evaluation by double, so Tesla is a magnificent company. Elon Musk is an incredible human being and a wonderful entrepreneur. At this stage we have pretty much everything fully invested, as you can see, there’s no cash here
What we are comfortable in doing would be enlightening the holding of the market overall, Vanguard, if we find a stock that appeals to us a great deal.
Tesla is one I’m doing my research on, having read the Ashley Vance’s book on Elon Musk, you just have to understand that it is an exponential corporation. It’s producing a magnificent product and there’s so many things that Elon Musk is doing that will resonate with other entrepreneurs who believe in producing a great company first and that the money will flow, but I haven’t done my analysis yet. I can’t say to you ‘buy Tesla’. I don’t have an intrinsic value for it at this point in time. For me it is one that’s just a little too tough to call.
Getting back to the portfolio, in Rand terms. There you can see the returns so far, over the period. We’re now (in Rand terms) we’ve had a return of about 24 percent the Rand having fallen down to R12.90. The way it works is that the overall portfolio is up nine percent. The Rand has dropped by 14.5 percent in this period that we’ve been going, which is about nine months. You add the two together – you have a 23 percent gain on the portfolio, which takes you above 30 percent in annualised terms.
That’s not repeatable. That’s certainly isn’t something that we came to say ‘let’s shoot the lights out in year one’. We’ve been very lucky at investing. You need to be lucky but we’ve also done some investments at a time that the intrinsic values were above the levels at which we thought it was a good time to buy. Please, just be sensible about these things.
Have a look, for instance here in the Rand terms. There it’s 14 percent depreciation of the Rand, over the period since December – R11.27 to R12.90.
As you can see in the last month the Rand has gone from R12.35 to R12.90, and my suggestion is that that will probably come back a little, so there’s no need to go rushing into Dollars right now. If you have a look at the individual performances in Rands – even Apple hasn’t done badly, generally speaking because of the Rand depreciation.
There’s the dividend receipts that have come through over the period, about $15.000 in all, which has also helped our performance generally, (before we get onto the specifics).
Just a question from Mr Laubscher, he asks how he can participate in your portfolio?
It’s very simple. All you have to do is open an account with Webtrader and then you have access to all of these shares. I think the trading is $20.00, for every trade, so you have to be sure that you want to follow this. We don’t run a portfolio as it were, in other words we’re not saying to you ‘give us 20 percent (the way the hedge funds do it) – 20 percent of your upside and two percent of your capital’ etcetera. We do this as a service for Biznews.com Community and with the sponsorship of Standard Bank Webtrader. We decided to start this in December last year and we do take this very seriously. It doesn’t mean that we aren’t going to have reverses. Of course, we will. That’s the way the market works but what we will be doing is encouraging you to have long term decisions and to be patient, and then you can come back every month, (to this webinar) and pick up with how the individual constituents of the portfolio. What the news flow has been like, and if there’s anything, you need to be concerned about.
All right, shall we move on? I think Vanguard is pretty self-explanatory. This is the S&P500 Index. Vanguard is a manager of index trackers, or exchange traded funds as we call them, and that’s why the performance of the Vanguard S&P500 is virtually in line with the index itself. We think it’s a good place to be, to have a good chunk of your portfolio in the market because most of the asset managers underperform the market, generally. If you were giving your money to an active asset manager – pure arithmetic tells you 50 percent will beat the market the other 50 percent will underperform it and, as a consequence of the costs, it pushes the underperforming percentage to higher than 50 percent.
If we take a third of our portfolio and we just stick it into Vanguard or into the S&P500 Tracking Index. That will actually give us a nice ballast, a nice base from which to work the rest of the portfolio. As you can see in the last six months, it’s pretty much identical. Not a lot has happened in the last six months. In fact, over the last nine months the U.S. market has only gone up by two percent, so it has been steady. Of course, in South African Rand terms, you’ve made 14.5 percent simply by being invested in Dollars, so nothing to work about there.
Moving onto Berkshire Hathaway, I love this picture – Warren Buffett and the lady who retired at 103 and then died at 104. She ran Nebraska Furniture Mart, one of the great stories of the Berkshire Empire, Rose Blumkin, and there she is, the lady herself. This is obviously, some years ago. As you can see, Warren is a lot younger than his current 84 years old.
Berkshire has been an underperformer in our portfolio SENS. The results that came out in the past quarter. Remember this is the period of quarterly results. They were overshadowed, somewhat by the biggest acquisition ever done by Berkshire Hathaway. That was the $37.2bn purchase of Precision Castparts. A typical Buffett transaction.
Unfortunately, the market didn’t like it. As you can see, the share price, the blue one, is Berkshire Hathaway. The share price fell on the news. It’s stabilised subsequent to that but in the past month Berkshire is down one-and-a-quarter percent, whereas the market as a whole is down three-quarters a percent. Nothing really to worry about there.
Precision Castparts – do you like the transaction? You have to love it. This is an organisation or a group that sells into the airline industry. It sells parts to Boeing and Airbus. The airline industry is exploding. Boeing and Airbus are the only real players in that field. It is beautifully positioned to continue to grow into the future. Warren Buffett has clearly been watching the company for a long time and he surpassed the acquisition that was made in 2009, of BNSF, when he paid $26bn for 77 percent that he didn’t own. BNSF is the railroad company that was capitalised, if you take them at $33.5bn, so this is even bigger. About five billion Dollars more than the BNSF acquisition, which has made a big difference to Berkshire Hathaway.
Just a couple of little interesting things from the quarterlies of Berkshire Hathaway. There were some portfolio changes, which in the United States they have to disclose, when they come out with quarterly results. There was a purchase of $450m worth of Charter Communications. It is one that you might want to go and have a look at, if you’re interested in buying companies offshore, Charter Communications. The holding there that Berkshire has in that stock is now one-and-a-half billion Dollars. There was also, although this happened in April, a purchase of Axalta Coating Systems. That was for $560m.
They sold out of Phillips 66, did the Berkshire team. Phillips 66, those of you who know the energy sector, was part of ConocoPhillips. They were demerged. They merged actually, in 2002, to become ConocoPhillips. I think t hey demerged in 2012. The Berkshire sold $600m out of the energy sector. We rarely share at Biznews about energy stocks and it’s nice to know Warren Buffett is as well.
Moving onto its performance against the S&P500 Index. Berkshire is down five percent in the last six months. S&P is about flat, in the last six months, so if you are thinking of buying into this company – a good time to do so.
Quickly, Alec, a question on dividends from Shane. He says, “If I buy shares in a company a few days before they declare a dividend will I get the full value they declared, based on the amount of shares I bought or is it pro rata on how long I’ve held them for?”
No, there is a thing, and it’s a really good question Shane. There’s often confusion around this point. The way that dividends work is that they are declared, at a point in time, and then you have a few more days thereafter to have, what they call, the last day to register, and they then cut it off. Let’s just say the dividend (Google doesn’t declare a dividend but IBM is a good example). IBM comes out with its results on the 18th August. It declares a dividend of one Dollar a share. The last day to register, it will tell us, is the 31st August, so at the 31st August everybody who owns the shares, even if they only bought them on that day, will get that full one Dollar dividend.
Okay, shall we move onto Google? Big news for Google in this quarter. In fact, it’s been quite a month for Google, as you can see. We did talk about Google at the last monthly webinar because the financial results had come out, (we’ll show you that in a moment) but there’s the big news that came in early August, where Google decided that it was going to become the next Berkshire Hathaway. Yes, true, it really is. It’s transforming the company into a holding business, where 90 percent of the business resides anyway. It established a chief executive there, and then splitting off other subsidiaries, so Nest Labs, which was bought a couple of years ago for, I think it was around three billion Dollars. Tony Fadell will be running that as a separate organisation, (a separate subsidiary). The driverless cars – Chris Urmson will be running that as a separate organisation and, a little bit like the Berkshire managers. This is what the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are trying to achieve here.
They love Buffett. They’ve read Buffett a lot. They believe that their job should be allocating capital. That means doing acquisitions and determining which chief executives should be running each of the subsidiaries. At the moment, the core search advertising business is 90 percent of the company. That has a new chief executive as well, but Sergey and Larry will be doing more of their acquisitive actions. They are very good at this (if you have a look at their record). The one that jumps out at me is YouTube, which was acquired in 2006 for about one-and-a-half billion U.S. Dollars.
If you take a line through Twitter and you give it a rating of six times the sales. Then that one-point-six-five billion (if you want to be precise), is today worth $60b, and that’s being an eight or a nine year period, so Sergey and Larry are now going to be trying to do something that Buffett has never claimed to do, and that is to check who the winners and who the losers are in technology. Man, if you get that one right, as we’re seeing already in this portfolio, then you really can pump. Just looking at Google’s performance in the last month, and it is very clear hear. You can see the way the share price shot up by 20 percent on that news that it has – or this was a consequence of, the first of all, the first hop there was after the results that we spoke about in the last webinar. If you want to get more insight into that, go and listen to the webinar that is on Biznews.
The second hop was due to the Alphabet (there it is there) – the more recent restructuring. The big move there was, based on the quarterlies, and in a nutshell, they have a financial director, called Ruth Porat that the investment community are delighted with because she is, apparently quite a toughie and she reckons she can hold back the spending of the Google guys. Here’s another way that the spending is going to be more efficient because Sergey and Larry removing themselves from the operations and letting others run the day-to-day operations. Means that if they do have these wacky ideas, and they haven’t been wacky. Most of them have been pretty good ideas. They’re not going to be allowed to open the chequebook too wide.
Sorry Alec. I just have a couple of questions. The first one is Theunis Bosch. It’s on the currency. It just says, “If you’re not in the market is it not too late to buy offshore shares at the moment?”
Theunis, I can’t give you any insight into that I’m afraid but what I can suggest to you is if you ever think that anyone on earth can then go and read the book I’m reading at the moment, by Daniel Kahneman called ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’. Then when you’ve finished that, read a Nassim Taleb’s book ‘Fooled by Randomness’. I know he has others but to me that’s still his classic.
In essence, time in markets is incredibly difficult and anybody who claims that they can time markets – certainly, those two gentlemen have done the research and they say it is bollocks. They can’t, so my only point that I made a little earlier was that there had been a blow off in the Rand because of emerging market currencies, generally. If you were taking all your money right now and you’re wanting to throw it offshore, I would be a little cautious because if you get in at the wrong price it can take you a long time to recover. What you could be doing and what you always should be doing, in investing, is try to iron out or smooth out the market variances by investing, say over a three-month period.
It is not too late to invest offshore. In fact, it’s never going to be too late. As long as this Economic Policy in this country is being dominated by the current socialist approach, the Rand will remain weak and get weaker still.
Just quickly, Alec. From Ian Rossettenstein. He says, “If we buy in forever would Apple really fit into the portfolio? Microsoft, as an example, of how a tech company can be eclipsed. Buffett philosophy is apparently not to invest in tech companies?”
Yes, you’re right, Ian. Warren Buffett doesn’t invest in tech companies. I’ve done quite a lot of homework on Apple. It is a company that, where the intrinsic value, based on a very conservative estimate. What I did there was, instead of going with Google I was comfortable to go to 20 times the most recent free cash flow. With Apple, I went with 15 times the most recent free cash flow, and it still has a margin of safety, exceeding 20 percent. If you have a look at the Apple business – it is very reliant or heavily reliant on Apple iPhones and the iPhone chain, if you like, still has to move up. Fifty-six percent of the revenues come from iPhones – 169 million units that are sold around the world. It is in the emerging markets, very aspirant. The other breakdown, just for interest sake of Apple’s sales – 17 percent come from iPads. They are pretty stable at the moment – 13 percent still comes from the Mac – iPod has fallen almost off the cliff but the big, growing area is in software, their AppStore, iTunes, etcetera. That’s a retail operation. Don’t forget that Apple, in many ways, has become a retail operation as well and 18 billion of it – okay, 182 billion (10 percent of its sales) comes from that side of the business.
The view that one would have is Apple going to become another Nokia. Is it going to be surpassed by technological developments? Well, so far, it’s managed to see off Samsung, which is it’s only really strong technological problem very comfortably and it also spends an enormous amount in research and development. Three percent of sales, of Apple’s total sales, goes into RND. That is six billion Dollars last year and it’s been growing. In 2012 – it was three-and-a-half billion, 2013 – four-and-a-half billion, and 2014 – six billion. Now, if you’re spending that amount of money on research and development, you are in a place where you’re going to, at least be in front.
If something else comes along that is better than what you are or what you have, then you have the resources also, if you’re sitting on $200b in cash – that is what Apple has got, to go and buy them out, so they are very well situated. If anything, Tim Cook’s decision to start repaying shareholder value, they’re buying back shares, they’re paying dividends – is another reason why Apple’s enhanced. I’m not sure why the market is not prepared to give this stock its full valuation but I’m very happy because I think it’s a great time to be buying.
Let’s move on, shall we. I think we’ve kind of done Apple anyway, when we get to that one. Onto Amazon.com. As you can see “PIC” from the month, there was a screaming reaction to Amazon’s quarterly results. Very positive numbers that came out from the company. The benefit of where they’re positioned and the benefit for us, of buying in as early as we did, is reflected here. In the quarterlies, the net income of $92m was reported. You don’t have to worry too much about Amazon’s profits or profitability because they pretty much can turn it on or off, as they want to.
There is an interesting point about this one. Amazon’s market capitalisation is now $250b. Walmart has a market cap of $223b. Amazon’s revenues are about one-fifth. In fact, under one-fifth of Walmart. Revenues, for this quarter, were $23b at Amazon, $120b at Walmart, but here’s the key to all of this. Amazon is growing at 20 percent. Walmart is growing at one-a-half percent.
The big news that did come out in the last week in fact, on Amazon was a scandal in the New York Times about the way people at Amazon are treated. The average tenure there, (high turnover of staff) is only one year. People working 80 hours a week. The New York Times didn’t like it. Jeff Bezos from Amazon came out and said, “Well, it’s not the company he knows.” The interesting thing about all of this is if you have a look at their share price in the past month or indeed, in the past week – there’s been no movement, so even though the publicity against Amazon might have been negative the investment community is shrugging that off. I guess that’s an important point to make.
“PIC”. Here, in the last six months, as you can see – Quarterly results, the last two sets of quarterlies, have been very positive for this company. It’s now heavily outperformed the overall index, in the last six months, 43 percent gain for Amazon as against three percent for the NASDAQ, which is the index that it looks against.
We’ll go through very quickly on IBM. Same old story there. IBM underperforming. The overall S&P500 this month, as it has been doing in the past. It declined there coming through, with the quarterly results.
Every quarter that the company reports you seem to have some new sellers of the stock. That’s fine because the company itself is buying back heavily and Warren Buffett is a big purchaser of this stock as well.
Then Novo Nordisk, one of our top performers, you can see after its quarterly results were released, this one went back up quite nicely.
It was underperforming, the S&P500 by around four percent. It now ended the month, outperforming the S&P500. I’ve been doing quite a lot of work on Novo Nordisk lately and it is the kind of stock where you really can put into your portfolio, not worry about, and just roll with it.
Unfortunately, the share price appreciation and again, in this past six months, has been very strong. It does concern us a little bit that it might be getting close now to its intrinsic value.
Just to close off with, as far as our stocks are concerned.
As you can see Apple, their results, and we spoke about this last month. The market didn’t like the results at all and the share price continues to labour, as a long-term investor, I would regard this as a great opportunity to stock up on it.
In fact, we bought in – the average price that we’ve paid for Apple is considerably higher, than where the shares are trading at the moment, and there’s the real – the six-month graph gives you a very good indication of how Apple has come under pressure over the past month and a bit, since the most recent quarterly results.
Quarterlies are strange things. When the next set of quarterly results comes out, who knows? We’ve seen it happen before with stocks we have in the portfolio. Apple may well just jump to the future. Let’s finish off this webcast by answering all the questions.
Alec, just a quick one from Eddie. It’s for Amazon and Google. “At what price points would you get into them?”
I can’t tell you that off hand but it would be at least ten percent below their current price levels. We are busy, in fact, at the end of the month we’ll be putting up our intrinsic values and our areas where we think they would be buyers again. At this stage though, I just don’t have them off hand. I’m sorry.
Perfect. Just a quick question from Alex. He says, “What is your view regarding the global equity’s crash as punted by Robert Kiyosaki and his view around investing in property?”
Alex, I like Robert Kiyosaki very much. I think that his book, ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’, is a great entry-level book for anyone wanting to know about investing. His latest book, ‘Second Chance’ is a good read, an excellent read but I don’t think he has the monopoly on forecasting. I don’t think anybody is able to forecast accurately. I’m more in the Nassim Taleb and the Daniel Kahneman’s school, which says ‘the future is so complex and it is unknown to anybody and anyone who forecasts it is setting themselves up for failure’. What Robert Kiyosaki did say, and we spent half-an-hour together when he was out here in the country. Is that ‘this is what his mentor, Bucky Fuller, suggested would happen in 2016 but if it’s well enough prepared against then there won’t be that crash’. It’s almost as though Robert Kiyosaki is saying, “This is what Bucky Fuller,” who has died some time ago and was a futurist. “This is the way he saw the world. I, Robert Kiyosaki, am repeating what Bucky Fuller said but there are always other factors that come into play.” I think he was being pretty sensible in saying that ‘sure the world has expanded its debt quite aggressively’ and ‘sure if it continues like this there will be a crash’ but he also has to be… He is fully aware that nobody knows the future. Only the good Lord.
Alec, just from Peter Mansfield. “Best bet for investing in stocks, other than the ones that are held in the portfolio.” Any other companies.
No, Peter. I would put… Really, right now, I would put Apple right at the top of my list of stocks that are offering value. It is just trading so comfortably below, my assessment of its intrinsic value. That it would be a stock that I would be investing in very comfortably today.
Then just the final question is from Chris van der Berg. He asks, “What software application do you use for these graphs for comparisons?”
What we’ve been doing is just going onto Yahoo Finance, so it’s pretty easy. We’ll have those graphs on Biznews in a month’s time, hopefully. I know our whizzes have been working on it and we’re looking forward to giving you a lot more of a service, on the international portfolio. In fact, we’re moving away from the JSE and doing more and more work on the international side. Our view on this being that, sure the JSE is okay, but it has a fraction of the number of stocks that are available globally. It also likes charging for people to run or to put data up of the JSE. The only stock exchange that we know that does so, and we think that we can provide a better service if we look internationally. Combine that with the weakness or the weakening of the Rand in the longer term, I’m not saying that it won’t bounce back in the short-term, but in the longer-term and then you really should be looking outside of this country to secure your wealth.
Perfect.
That’s it. Thank you Stuart. We have overrun a little bit but I really was keen for us to answer all of those questions. We will be back again in a month’s time, when I’ll be talking to you, would you believe, from the U.K., so that should be quite fun. We’ll be doing a Global Investment Webinar from that part of the world and thanks Robert de Vos. I see from the questions here – he sent a little note that the Investor Chronicle and The Financial Times lists Apple as a buy. Well, it looks like we’re in good company there. Thanks for being with us today. I thoroughly enjoyed taking you through the portfolio. Of course, one does that when the portfolio is doing well but please do not see this as a trading vehicle. This is very much a buy and hold. If we do make changes in the portfolio, they will be not in the underlying stocks. We have very good reason for purchasing every single one of them. They will only be in the Vanguard S&P500. In other words, if we find something that we think warrants or demands inclusion in this portfolio, we will sell part of our bet on the market generally, I mustn’t say bet, but part of our shareholding on the market, generally, to invest it into something that is better. Well, there is nothing that jumps out at us now. I do like Tesla very much but I haven’t done the numbers yet, so we can’t look at that one.
Thank you.
Super.
