FYI:
Regards,
Ted
March 17, 2016
Dear WEALTHTRACK Subscriber,
“Caution is appropriate.” So said Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen in a press conference Wednesday after the Fed decided to halve the number of rate hikes planned this year, from four to two. With the Fed Funds’ target remaining between 0.25% and 0.50% another two increases would leave the benchmark rate below 1% by year-end.
There were other significant developments this week. Donald Trump won four of the five Super Tuesday Republican primary races, including Senator Marco Rubio’s home state of Florida, causing Rubio to drop out. Despite a loss in Ohio’s primary to its Governor John Kasich, Trump has a comfortable delegate lead over his major challenger, Senator Ted Cruz. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton pulled well ahead of Senator Bernie Sanders.
Also this week, U.S. crude-oil futures closed above $40 a barrel, the highest since December of last year and the Dow Industrials turned positive for the year in Thursday’s trading, after being down more than 10% in early February.
New this week on our website, we’ll have a link to a report on how much workplace diversity affects the bottom line. It will be available to PREMIUM members tonight and to everyone else over the weekend. According to research published by McKinsey & Company, companies in the top quartile of racial and ethnic diversity are 35 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians. And companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 15 percent more likely. Food for thought for management and investors!
I have always been a big believer in meritocracy. I like to think that in America, people of equal skills, talent and education will be judged on their merits, not by who they are or where they come from, which is why I couldn’t figure out why more women were not advancing in the financial services industry. Women are certainly well represented on air, online and in print in financial journalism. But why are there still so few women in executive and management roles on Wall Street?
Last week I got some surprising answers while emceeing a fascinating and enlightening conference on increasing gender diversity in the financial services industry. “Beyond Talk: Taking Action to Achieve Gender Balance in the Financial World” was co-sponsored by The California State Teachers’ Retirement System, known as CalSTRS and State Street Global Advisors.
Leaders at both organizations have gone “beyond talk” and initiated practices to recruit, promote and mentor women in the industry. They are putting substantial resources into the effort.
SSGA just launched the SSGA Gender Diversity Index ETF, symbol SHE, comprised of more than 140 U.S. companies which have greater numbers of women in leadership positions than other companies in their sectors. CalSTRS invested $250 million in SHE at its launch.
On the television show this week, are you better off with a robot? That is the topic we are revisiting during this final weekend of winter fund-raising on public television. We are interviewing an under the radar value investor who created a robot portfolio to test the theory that statistically cheap stocks will outperform the market over time – and lo and behold they have.
As a long-time financial journalist I have seen investment theories and strategies come and go. Wall Street firms have devoted billions in their quest to find proprietary magic formulas for outperformance.
Michael Lewis’ best-selling book, now a movie, “The Big Short” did a masterful job of describing various mathematical and computer science algorithms that contributed to the financial crisis. They were so complex and arcane that even their creators and certainly their customers had little idea of what was in them and how they would really work in the real world.
This week’s guest has a much simpler approach, which much to his surprise when he first tried it 17 years ago does work, but it comes with a large caveat: it is not appropriate in the vast majority of portfolios. He only applies some of it himself.
He is John Dorfman, Chairman of Dorfman Value Investments, an investment management firm he founded in 1999 that manages money in separate accounts for high net worth individuals, family offices and a few institutions.
He is a deep value investor who runs concentrated stock portfolios that have outperformed the S&P 500 by a wide margin over the years. Dorfman is also a journalist. I knew him at The Wall Street Journal and even though he switched to money management full time in 1997 he still writes financial columns.
One of his most popular, which has been his first column of the year for the last 17 years, is devoted to his 10 stock robot portfolio.
Dorfman starts with all U.S. stocks with a market value of $500 million or more. Then he eliminates those with debt greater than equity. He then picks the ten stocks selling for the lowest price earnings multiples of the past year’s earnings.
The result is the “Robot Portfolio” has had a compound average annual return, with dividends included, of nearly 16%, compared to just over 4% for the S&P 500.
Given the spectacular performance of his robot portfolio why doesn’t Dorfman just use that method for all of his accounts? He will tell us.
If WEALTHTRACK isn’t showing on your local station this week due to local station fund-raising campaigns, you can always watch it on our website. You will also find a link to Dorfman’s 2016’s Robot Portfolio there.
Thank you for watching. Have a great weekend and make the week ahead a profitable and productive one.
Best Regards,
Consuelo
John Dorfman Website:
http://dorfmanvalue.com/
