A Quick Guide to New Issues, SMRs, Car Market and Brexit

In today’s Financial Times (11/11/2017) Neil Collins gave a quick guide to new issues which is worth repeating. This is what he said: “Do not buy into an initial public offering if most of the capital raised is going out of the business, or if it replaces existing debt (because the capital has already left). Do not buy if private equity is selling. Do not believe any forward-looking statements, because if the prospects really were that good, the vendors would wait and get a higher price. Do not buy any share that has been listed for less than a year. You will miss some bargains but you will avoid many more disappointments. Leave it to the professionals to lose other people’s money.”

Those are wise words indeed. He also made some ascerbic comments on small nuclear power stations which he says have been rebranded as “small modular reactors” (SMRs) to make them less scary. Rolls-Royce, who have produced such reactors for submarines, have touted them as a potential future business growth area for several years, but the FT’s in-depth review of the subject last week suggested that they are not likely to be put into production any time soon. Meanwhile the share price of Rolls-Royce is still below where it was in 2014.

Neil Collins also commented on the car market. You probably don’t need to be told that new car sales have slumped. The share prices of car dealers are cheap as chips and even my shares in Auto Trader are down substantially this year. Indeed one could apply Neil’s comments about IPOs to the company although it has taken a couple of years to reveal that the debt when listed is handicapping the company now. The car market is inherently cyclical which is one reason why car dealers are normally not valued highly, and they also show low barriers to entry with the car manufacturers controlling the market to a large extent and limiting the profits that dealers make. But Auto Trader is similar to Rightmove in the property market. High margins, dominant market position and a business with great network effects with the result that competitors find it difficult to muscle in on their market. I think I’ll stick with it for a while yet.

I am not convinced that we have reached “peak car” as some have suggested. There seem to be more cars on the road than ever although traffic volumes have slowed in London where most such commentators live. But that is as much about political policies that have limited road space and caused congestion, mostly irrational, than car buyers desires. Another good analysis in the FT recently was about how “green” various car types actually are. On total life emissions, some smaller petrol/diesel vehicles can beat “all-electric” cars. How is that? Because the manufacture and decommissioning of electric vehicles generate large emissions, and producing the electricity for them often does also.

With all these plugs I just gave for the FT, it is unfortunate that it coninues to publish such tosh about Brexit. Most of their writers predict the financial outcome will be calamitous. Whether that will be the outcome or not, I don’t have the space to provide a full analysis here, but most people who voted for Brexit did not consider the financial issue as conclusive. Consider an American colonialist in the year 1775, before their declaration of independance. No doubt with an economy very reliant on trade with Great Britain many people would have counselled against leaving the protection of their parent country. Did that deter them? No because they valued freedom more highly. They wanted control over their own affairs including that over taxes, and not to be ruled by a remote and undemocratic regime where they had minimal representation. That is the analogy that all the remainers should think about.

Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )

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