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For better or worse, Netflix has changed not just the entertainment business, but also the way that we (the audience) watch television. In the process, it has also enriched its investors, as its market capitalization climbed to $139 billion in March 2018 and even after the market correction for the FANG stocks, its value is substantial enough to make it one of the largest entertainment company in the world. Among the FANG stocks, with their gigantic market capitalizations, it remains the smallest company on both market value and operating metrics, but it has almost as big an impact on our daily lives as its larger peers.
The History
This may come as a surprise to some, but Netflix has been publicly listed for longer than Facebook or Google. The difference between Netflix and these companies is that it’s climb to stardom has taken more time.
Don't get me wrong! Netflix was a very good investment between 2003 and 2009, increasing its market capitalization by 33.36% a year and its market capitalization by about $3 billion, during that period. However, it became a superstar investment between 2010 and 2017, adding about $120 billion in value over the period, translating into an annual price appreciation of more than 50% a year.
The fuel that Netflix has used to increase its market capitalization is its subscriber base, as with the other FANG stocks, the company seems to have found the secret to be able to scale up, as it gets larger. That subscriber base, in turn, has allowed the company to increase its revenues over time, as can be seen in the picture below, summarizing Netflix’s operating metrics.
You can accuse me of over analyzing this chart, but it captures to me the essence of the Netflix success story. While Netflix has been able to grow revenues in each of the three consecutive five-year time periods, 2002-2006, 2007-2012 and 2013-2017, that it has been existence, the company has been faced with challenges during each period, and it has adapted. DVDs in the Mail: In the first five-year period, 2002 through 2006, the company mailed out DVDs and videos to its subscribers, challenging the video rental business, where brick and mortar video rental stores represented the status quo, and Blockbuster was the dominant player.ÌýThe Rise of Streaming: It was between 2007 and 2012, where the company came into its own, as it took advantage of changes in technology and in customer preferences. First, as technology evolved to allow for the streaming of movies, Netflix adapted, with a few rough spots, to the new technology, while its brick and mortar competitors imploded. Second, while Netflix saw a drop in revenue growth that was not unexpected, given its larger base, it also saw its content costs rise at a faster rate than revenues, as content providers (the movie studios) starting charging higher prices for content.ÌýThe Content Maker: In hindsight, the studios probably wish that they had not squeezed Netflix, because the company reacted by taking more control of its own destiny in the 2013-2017 time period, by shifting to original content, first with television series and later with direct-to-streaming movies. The results have upended the entertainment business, but more critically for Netflix, they show up in a critical statistic. For the first time in its existence, Netflix saw content costs rise at a rate slower than its growth in revenues, with operating profit margins, both before and after R&D reflecting this development.ÌýThe State of the GameWe can debate whether Netflix is a good or a bad investment, but there is no argument that the way movies and television get made has been changed by the company’s practices. It is the rest of the entertainment business that is trying to adapt to the Netflix streaming model, as evidenced by Disney’s acquisition of BAM Media and Fox Entertainment. If I were to summarize where Netflix stands right now, here would be my key points:1. It's a big spender on content: In 2017, Netflix spent billions on the content that it delivers to its subscribers, and the extent of its spending can be seen in its financial statements. The way that Netflix accounts for its content expenditures does complicate the measurement, since it uses two different accounting standards, one for licensed content and one for productions, but it capitalizes and amortizes both, albeit on different schedules, and based upon viewing patterns. The gap between the accrual (or amortized) cost (shown in the income statement) and the cash spent (shown in the statement of cash flows) on content can be seen in the graph below. In 2017, Netflix spent almost $9.8 billion on content, though it expensed only $7.7 billion in its income statement. If this divergence continues, and there is no reason to believe that it will not, Netflix’s profits will be more positive than their cash flows by a substantial amount. Note that this divergence should not be taken (necessarily) as a sign of deception or accounting game playing. In fact, if Netflix is being reasonable in its amortization judgments, one way to read the difference of $2.14 billion ($9.8 in cash expenses minus $7.66 billion in accrual expenses) is to view it as the equivalent of capital expenditures at Netflix, since it is expense incurred to attract and keep subscribers.2. An increasing amount of that spending goes to original content: The decision by Netflix to produce some of its own content in 2013 triggered a shift towards original content that has picked up speed since that year. In 2017, the company spent $6.3 billion on original content, putting it among the top spenders in the entertainment business:Biggest Spenders on Entertainment Content in 2017The pace is not letting up. In the first quarter of 2018, Netflix introduced 18 new television series and delivered 12 new seasons of existing series, prodigious output by any studio’s standards. There are three reasons for the Netflix move into the content business. The first, referenced in the last section, is to gain more control over content costs and to be less exposed to movie studio price hikes.ÌýThe second is that Netflix has been using the data that it has on subscriber tastes not only to direct content at them, but to produce new content that is tailored to viewer demands.The third is that it introduces stickiness into their business model, a key reason why new subscribers come to the company and why existing subscribers are reluctant to abandon it, even if subscription fees go up.Netflix has moved beyond television shows to making straight-to-streaming movies, spending $90 million on Bright, a movie that notwithstanding its , signaled the company’s ambitions to be a major player in the movie business.3. Netflix has been adept at playing the expectations game: One feature that all of the FANG stocks trade is that rather than let equity research analysts frame their stories and measure their success, they have managed to frame their own stories and make investors and analysts play on their terms. Netflix, for instance, has managed to make the expectations game all about subscriber numbers, and every earnings report of the company is framed around these numbers, with less attention paid to content costs, churn rates and negative cash flows. After its most recent earnings report in January, the stock price surged, as the company reported an increase of 8.3 million in subscribers, well above expectations. 4. The company is globalizing: One consequence of making it a numbers game, which is what Netflix has done by keeping the focus on subscribers, is that you have to go where the numbers are, and for better or worse, that has meant that Netflix has had to go global, with Asia being the mother lode. [image error]
At the end of 2017, Netflix had more subscribers outside the US than in the US, and it is bringing its free spending ways and its views on content development to other parts of the world, perhaps bringing Bollywood and Hollywood closer, at least in terms of shared problems.
In summary, Netflix has built a business model of spending immense amounts on content, using that content to attract new subscribers, and then using those new subscribers as its pathway to market value. It is clear that investors have bought into the model, but the model is also one that burns through cash at alarming rates, with no smooth or near term escape hatch.
The Valuation
In keeping with the focus on subscriber numbers that is at the center of the Netflix story, I will value Netflix with the subscriber-based approach that I used to value Spotify a few weeks ago and Uber and Amazon Prime last year.
Cost Breakdown
The key to getting a subscriber-based valuation of Netflix is to first break its overall costs down into (a) costs for servicing existing subscribers, (b) the cost of acquiring new subscribers and (c) a corporate cost that cannot be directly related to either servicing existing subscribers or getting new ones. I started with the Netflix 2017 income statement:
Since Netflix does not break its costs down into my preferred components I made subjective judgments in allocating these costs, treating G&A costs as expenses related to servicing existing subscribers and marketing costs as the costs of acquiring new subscribers. With content costs, I started first with the $2,146 million difference between the cash content cost and expensed content cost and treated it also as part of the cost of acquiring new subscribers. With the expensed content cost of $7,600 million, I assumed that only 20% of these costs are directly related to subscribers and treated that portion as part of the cost of servicing existing subscribers and that the remaining 80% would become part of the corporate cost, in conjunction with the investment in technology and development. One key difference between the Netflix and Spotify cost models is that most of the content costs are fixed corporate costs for Netflix but almost all content costsare variable costs for Spotify, since it pays for content based upon how its subscribers listen to it, rather than as a fixed fee.
Value of an Existing Subscribers
My decision to treat most of the content content costs as a corporate cost has predictable consequences. The costs associated with individual subscribers are only the G&A costs and 20% of content costs, and the number is small, relative to the revenues that Netflix generates per subscriber:[image error]
A strength that Netflix has built, perhaps with its original content, is that it has reduced it's churn rate (the loss of existing customers), each year since 2015. In 2017, the annual renewal rate for a Netflix subscription was about 91%, and that number improved even more across the four quarters. In my subscriber-valuation, I have used a 92.5% renewal rate, for the life of a subscriber, assumed to be 15 years. I will assume that Netflix investments in original content will give it the pricing power to increase annual revenue per subscriber (G&A and the 20% of content costs), which was $113.16 in 2017, at 5% a year, while keeping the growth rate in annual expenses per subscriber at the inflation rate of 2%. I estimate after-tax operating income each year, using a global average tax rate of 25%, and discount it back at a 7.95% cost of capital (estimated for Netflix, based upon its business and geographic mix, and debt ratio) to derive a value of $508.89 subscriber and a total value of $59.8 billion for Netflix’s 117.6 million existing subscribers.
Value of New Subscribers
To value a new subscriber, I first estimated the total cost that Netflix spent on adding new subscribers by adding the total marketing costs of $1,278 million to the capitalized portion of the content costs of $2,142 million, and then divided this amount by the gross increase in the number of subscribers (30.84 million) during 2017, to obtain a cost of $111.01 for acquiring a new subscriber. I then net that number out from the value of an existing subscriber to arrive at a value of $ subscriber right now; I assume that this value will increase at the inflation rate over time.
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I assume that Netflix will continue to add new subscribers, adding 15% to its net subscriber rolls, each year for the first five years, and 10% a year for years 6 through 10, before settling into a steady state growth rate of 1% a year. Discounting the value added by new subscribers at a higher cost of capital of 8.5%, reflecting the greater uncertainty associated with new subscribers, yields a total value of $137.3 billion for new subscribers.

The Corporate Drag
The final piece of the puzzle is to bring in the corporate costs that we assumed could not be directly linked with subscriber count. In the case of Netflix, the  technology & development costs and 80% of the expensed content, that we put into this corporate cost category amounted to $6.13 billion in 2017 and the path that these costs follow in the future will determine the value that we attach to the company.

I assume that technology & development costs will grow 5% a year, but it is on the content cost component that I struggled the most to estimate a growth rate. I decided that the accelerated spending that Netflix had in 2017 and continued to have in 2018 reflect Netflix’s attempt to acquire standing in the business, and that while it will continue to spend large amounts on content, the growth rate in this portion of the content costs will drop to 3% a year, for the next 10 years. Note that even with that low growth rate, Netflix will be consistently among the top five spenders in the content business, spending more than $100 billion on original content over the next ten years. Discounting back the after-tax corporate expenses back at the 7.95% cost of capital, yields a corporate cost drag of $111.3 billion.
The Netflix Valuation: The One Number
To value Netflix, I bring together the value of existing and new subscribers and net out the corporate cost drag. I also subtract out the $6.5 billion in debt that the company has outstanding and the value of equity options granted over time to its employees.
The value per share of $172.82 that I estimate for Netflix is well below the stock price of $275, as of April 14, 2018. My value reflects the story that I am telling about Netflix, as a company that is able to grow at double digit rates for the next decade, with high value added with new users, while bringing its content costs under control. I am sure that your views on the company will diverge from mine, and you are welcome to use my Netflix subscriber valuation template to come to your own conclusions.Ìý
It is worth taking a pause, and considering the differences between Netflix and Spotify, both subscription-based business models, that draw their value from immense subscriber bases.
By paying for its content, both licensed and original, and using that content to go after subscribers, Netflix has built a more levered business model, where subscribers, both new and existing, have higher marginal value than at Spotify, where content costs are tied to subscribers listening to music.ÌýThe Netflix model, which is increasingly built around original rather than licensed content, provides for a stronger competitive edge, which should show up in higher renewal rates and more pricing power, adding to the value per subscriber, both existing and new.ÌýThe Netflix model will deliver higher value from subscription growth than the Spotify model, but it comes with a greater downside, because a slackening of that growth will leave Netflix much deeper in the hole, with more negative cash flows, than it would Spotify.ÌýNow that both companies are listed and traded, it will be interesting to see whether this plays out as much larger market reactions to subscription number surprises, both positive and negative, at Netflix than at Spotify.

In my earlier post on Google, I noted that every company has a value driver, one number that more than any of the others determines value. In the case of Netflix, the key value driver, in my view, is content costs. My value per share is premised not just on high growth in subscribers and continued subscriber value, but also on content costs growing at a much lower rate (of 3%) in the future. To illustrate the sensitivity of value per share to this assumption, I varied the growth rate in content costs and calculated value per share:To illustrate the dangers to Netflix of letting content costs grow at high rates, note that the company’s equity value becomes negative (i.e., the company goes bankrupt), if content costs grow at high rates, relative to revenue growth, with double digit growth rates creating catastrophic effects. If Netflix is able to cap the costs at 2017 levels in perpetuity, the estimated value per share is approximately $216,  at the base case growth rate of 15%, and if it is able to reduce content costs in absolute terms over time, it is worth even more. In my view, investing in Netflix is less a bet on the company being able to deliver subscriber and/or revenue growth in the future and more one on the future path of content costs at the company.
The Decision
There is no doubt that Netflix has changed the way we watch television and the movies, and it is changing the movie/TV business in significant ways. By competing for talent in the content business, it is pushing up costs for its competitors and with its direct-to-streaming model, putting pressure on movie theaters and distribution. That said, the entertainment business remains a daunting one, because the talent is expensive and unpredictable, and egos run rampant. The history of newcomers who have come into this business with open wallets is that they leave with empty ones. For Netflix to escape this fate, it has to show discipline in controlling content costs, and until I see evidence that it is capable of this discipline, I will remain a subscriber, but not an investor in the company.
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In my last post, I noted that the FANG stocks have been in the spotlight, as tech has taken a beating in the market, but it is Facebook that is at the center of the storm. It was the news story on Cambridge Analytica's misuse of Facebook user data,  in mid-March of 2018, that started the ball rolling and in the days since, not only have more unpleasant details emerged about Facebook's culpability, but the rest of the world seems to have decided to unfriend Facebook. More ominously, regulators and politicians have also turned their attention to the company and that attention will be heightened, with Zuckerberg testifying in front of Congress. That is a precipitous fall from grace for a company that only a short while ago epitomized the new economy.
A Personal OdysseyMy interest in Facebook dates back to the year before it went public, when it was already getting attention because of its giant user base and its high private company valuation. In the weeks leading up to its IPO, I  at about $29/share, with a story built around it becoming a Google wannabe. If that sounded insulting, it was not meant to be, since having a revenue path and operating margins that mimicked the most successful tech companies in the decade prior is quite a feat.

That initial public offering was among the most mismanaged in recent years and a combination of hubris and poor timing led to an offering day fiasco, where the investment bankers had to step in to support the priced. The first few months after the offering were tough ones for Facebook, with the stock dropping to $19 by September 2012, when and buy its stock, one of the few times in my life when I have bought a stock at its absolute low.

Much as I would like to tell you that I had the foresight to see Facebook's rise from 2012 through 2017 and that I held on to the stock, I did not, and I sold the stock just as it got to $50, concerned that the advertising business was not big enough to accommodate the players (Google, the social media companies and traditional advertising companies), elbowing for market share. I under estimated how much Google and Facebook would both expand the market and dominate it, but I have no regrets about selling too early. I did what I felt was right, given my assessment and investment philosophy, at the time.
A Numbers UpdateTo undersand how Facebook became the company that it is today, let's start with its most impressive numbers, which are related to its user base. At the start of 2018, Facebook had more than 2.1 billion users, about 30% of the world's population:
While the user numbers have leveled off in North America, where Facebook already counts 72.5% of the population in its user base, the company continues to grow its user base in the rest of the world, with an added impetus coming from the scaling up of Instagram, Facebook's video arm. These user numbers, while staggering, are made even more so when you consider how much time Facebook users spend on its platforms:Collectively, users spent more than an hour a day on Facebook platforms, and that usage does not reflect the time spent on WhatsApp, also owned by Facebook, by its 1.5 billion users.
If you are a value investor, it would easy to dismiss Facebook as another user-chasing tech company and deliver a cutting remark that you cannot pay dividends with users, but Facebook is an exception. It has managed to to convert its user base into revenues and more critically, operating profits.
With its operating margin approaching 58%, if you capitalize its technology and content costs, Facebook outshines most of the other companies in the S&P 500, in both growth and profitability:
What makes Facebook's rise even more impressive is that it has been able to deliver these results in a market, where it faces an equally voracious competitor in Google.

In summary, Facebook has had perhaps the most productive opening act in history of any publicly listed company, if you define production in operating results. It promised the moon at the time of its IPO, and has delivered the sun. In my book on connecting stories to value, I pointed to Facebook as a company that seemed to find new ways, with each acquisition, announcement and earning report, to expand and broaden its story, first by conquering mobile and then going global. By the start of 2016, I had changed my story for Facebook from a Google Wannabe to one that would eclipse Google, with added potential from its user base. While the Facebook story has been one of business success, the company, its users and investors have been in denial about central elements in the story. Facebook's users have been trading information on themselves to the company in return for a social media site where they can interact with friends, family and acquaintances, and their complaints about lost privacy ring hollow. Facebook and its investors have been unwilling to face up to the reality that the company's high margins reflect its use of third parties and outsiders to collect and manage data, a business practice that is profitable but that also creates the potential for data leakages.

A Story Break, Twist or Change?If the Facebook story so far sounds like a fairy tale, there has to be a dark twist, and while Facebook's troubles are often traced back to the stories in mid-March 2018, when the current user scandal news cycle began, its problems have been simmering for much longer. Put on the defensive, after the 2016 US presidential elections, for being a purveyor of fake news, Facebook , that it had changed its news feed to emphasize user interaction over passive consumption of public news feeds. That change, which led to a leveling off in user numbers and a loss of advertising revenues was not well received on Wall Street, .
If Facebook was trying to preempt its critics with this announcement, the Cambridge Analytica story has knocked them off stride. Specifically, claimed that the company has not only accessed detailed user data on 50 million Facebook users but had used that data to target voters in political campaigns. In the three weeks since, the story has worsened for Facebook both in terms of numbers (with accessed users ) and culpability (with Facebook's sloppiness in protecting user data highlighted). As politicians, commentators and competitors have jumped in to exploit the breach, financial markets knocked off $81 billion from Facebook's market capitalization. It is unquestionable that Facebook is mired in a mess and that it deserves market punishment, but from an investing perspective, the question becomes whether the loss in value is merited or not.Ìý
The worst case scenario, and some have bought into this, is that the company will lose users, both in numbers and intensity, and that advertisers will pull out. If you add large fines and regulatory restrictions on data usage that may cripple Facebook's capacity to use that data in targeted advertising, you have the makings of a perfect storm, playing out as flat or declining revenues, big increases in operating costs and imploding value. In my view, and I may very well be wrong, I think the effects will be more benign:User loss, in numbers and intensity, will be muted: It is still early in this news cycle, and there may be more damaging revelations to come, but I don't believe that anything that has come out so far is  egregious enough to cause large numbers of users to flee. We live in cynical times and many users will probably agree with Mark Snyder, a Facebook user whose data had been accessed by Cambridge Analytica, who is quoted as saying in this , "If you sign up for anything and it isn’t immediately obvious how they’re making money, they’re making money off of you.� There is some preliminary evidence that can be gleaned from surveys taken right after the stories broke, which indicate that only about 8% of Facebook users are considering leaving and 19% plan significant cutbacks in usage. If this represents the high water mark, the actual damage will be smaller. I will assume that Facebook's push towards more data protections and its larger base will slow growth in revenues down to about 20% a year, for the next 5 years, from the 51.53% growth rate over the last five years.Source: Raymond James, reported by VarietyAdvertisers will mostly stay on: While a , announced that they were pulling their ads from Facebook, there is little evidence that advertisers are abandoning Facebook in droves, since much of what attracted them to Facebook (its large and intense user base and targeting) still remains in place. Facebook, in an attempt to clean up the platform, may impose restrictions on advertisers that may drive some of them away. For instance, last week, Facebook announced that it would stop accepting political advertisements from anonymous entities and I would not be surprised to see more self-imposed restrictions on advertising. I will assume that there will be more defections in the weeks ahead, mostly from companies that don't feel that their Facebook advertising is effective right now, leading to a loss in revenues of $1.5 billion next year.Data restrictions are coming, and will be costly: There is no doubt that data restrictions are coming, with the question being about how restrictive they will be and what it will cost Facebook to implement them. Data privacy laws, , will require the company to hire more people to oversee data collection and protection. I will assume that these actions will push up costs and reduce the pre-tax operating margin from 57%, after capitalizing technology and content costs, to 42% over the next 5 years. Pre-capitalization of technology and content, I am expecting the operating margin to drop from 49.7% (current) to about 37-38%,There will be fines: This is a wild card in this process, with the possibility that the Federal Trade Commission  may impose a fines on the company for violating an , where Facebook agreed to protect user data from unauthorized access. While no one seems to have a clear idea of how much these fines will be, other than that they will be large, there are some who believe that the fines could be as high as a billion dollars. I will assume that the FTC will use Facebook to send a signal to other companies that collect data, by fining it $1 billion.As I see it, the scandal will lead to lost sales in the near term, slow revenue growth in the coming years and increase costs at the company, making the Facebook story a less attractive one. My estimates of how the story changes will play out in the numbers is shown below:
In summary, the story that I have for Facebook is still an upbeat one, albeit one with lower growth and operating margins. The resulting value is shown below:
The value per share that I obtain, with my story, is abut $181, and on April 3, the date of the valuation, the stock was trading at $155 a share. As always, I am sure that there are inputs where you will disagree with me, and if you do, you can and change the numbers that you disagree with. Some of you may be wondering why I have no margin of safety, but as I noted in this post on the topic from a while back, I believe that there are more effective ways of dealing with uncertainty that adopting an arbitrary margin of safety and sitting on the sidelines. In fact, my favored device is to face up to uncertainty frontally in a simulation, shown below:This graph reinforces my decision to invest in Facebook. While it is true that there is a 30% chance that the stock is still over valued, there is more upside than downside potential, given my inputs. The median value of $179 is close to my point estimate value, but that should be no surprise since my distributions were centered on my base case assumptions.
Time to Buy?Every corporate scandal becomes a morality play, and the current one that revolves around Facebook is no exception. Facebook has been sloppy with user data, driven partly by greed (to keep costs down and profits up) and partly by arrogance (that its data protections were sufficient), and is and should be held accountable for its mistakes. That said, I don't see Facebook as a villain, and I don't think that the company should not be used as a punching bag for our concerns about politics and society.  I am sure that when Mark Zuckerberg delivers his prepared testimony in a couple of hours, senators from both parties will lecture him on Facebook's sins, blissfully blind to their hypocrisy, since I am sure that many of them have had no qualms about using social media data to target their voters. I hear friends and acquaintances wax eloquent about invasion of privacy and how data is sacred, all too often on their favorite social media platforms, while revealing details about their personal lives that would make Kim Kardashian blush. I am an inactive Facebook user, having posted only once on its platform, but to those who would tar and feather the company for its perceived sins, I will paraphrase Shakespeare, and argue that the fault for our loss of privacy is not in our social media, but in how much we share online. I will invest in Facebook, with neither shame nor apology, because I think it remains a good business that I can buy at a reasonable price.

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If there is one thing that I have learned about markets over the years, it is that they have a way of leveling egos and cutting companies and investors down to size. The last three weeks have been humbling ones for tech companies, especially the big four (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Alphabet or FANG) which seemed unstoppable in their pursuit of revenues and ever-rising market capitalizations, and for tech investors, many of whom seem to have mistaken luck for skill. Not surprisingly, some of the cheerleaders who were just a short while ago telling us that nothing could go wrong with these companies are in the midst of a mood shift, where they are convinced that nothing can go right with them. As Mark Zuckerberg gets ready to testify to Congress, amidst calls for both regulating and perhaps even breaking up tech companies, it is time to take a sober look at where we stand with these companies, what the last three weeks have changed and the consequences for investment decisions.
The Rise of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google (FANG)The outsized attention paid to the FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google) stocks sometimes obscures how young these companies are in the public market place. Amazon, a company that I valued as an online, book retailer in 1998, a year after its listing, is the granddaddy of the group. The Google IPO , remembered primarily because of its use of a Dutch auction, instead of a banker, to set its offering price was in 2004, but you probably completely missed the Netflix IPO two years earlier in 2002, and Facebook, the youngest of the four, went public in 2012. The growth in market capitalization at these companies is the stuff of investing legend and the table below shows how they have almost tripled their contribution to the overall market capitalization of the S&P 500 between 2012 and 2017 (with all numbers in billions of US $):

At the end of the 2017, Amazon, Google and Facebook were three of the ten largest market capitalization companies in the world.
The role that the FANG companies have played in driving US equities can be best seen with a different lens, by looking at the total change in the market capitalization of the S&P 500 and how much of that change can be attributed to the rising values of just these four companies:
To add weight to these numbers, consider these facts. The four companies that comprise FANG added almost $1.7 trillion in market capitalization over these five years and accounted for one-sixth of the increase in value for the entire index. Put simply, if you were a large-cap US portfolio manager and you held none of these stocks between 2013-2017, it would have been very, very difficult, if not impossible, to beat the S&P 500 over this period.
A Reversal in Fortunes for the FANG stocksIt is the sustained success of these companies that has made the last few weeks so trying for investors in them and so unsettling for market watchers. While these stocks went through the same ups and downs that the rest of the market was going through in February, it was in the middle of March that they became the central story, with the revelations from Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics and consulting firm, that they had harvested data on about 50 million Facebook users (a number that has since been increased to 87 million) for use in political and commercial campaigns. The political firestorm that followed has not only hurt Facebook, but the other three companies as well, and the graph below chronicles the damage in the days since the news story, since the news story was released:
The numbers are staggering, at least in absolute terms. Collectively, the FANG stocks  lost $282 billion in market capitalization between March 15 and April 2 and contributed significantly to the drop in US equity markets over that period. To put that in perspective, the market capitalization lost in just these four companies in about two weeks was greater than the total value all crypto currencies (Bitcoin and all its relatives) as of the start of April of 2018, perhaps suggesting that we have been letting ourselves get distracted by penny change, when dollars are at stake. It is also interesting that while much of the attention has been directed at Facebook, which lost 15% of its value in just over two weeks, the three other stocks each lost about 12% of their value.
Speaking of perspective, though, investors in these four stocks should consider another fact before they complain too much about being punished by the market. Even with the losses through April 2 incorporated, the collective market value of these companies remains about $400 billion higher than it was a year ago, on April 3, 2017.Ìý
The bottom line is that two weeks of market pull backs cannot take away from the longer term success at these companies. If this is what failure looks like, I would love to see more of it in my portfolio.
The Fang Story LineTo understand both the rise and recent pullback, let's look at what these four companies have in common. As I see it, here are the salient features:Scaling Success: Each of these companies has been able to keep revenue growing rapidly, even as they scale up and acquire larger market share. In effect, they have been able to deliver small company growth rates, while becoming monoliths. This success of these companies at delivering high growth, as they have become bigger, .Bigger Slice of a Bigger Pie: All four of these companies have also been able to change the businesses that they have entered, increasing the size of the total market by attracting new customers, while also changing the way business is run to their benefit. With Google and Facebook, that business is advertising, with Netflix, it is entertainment, and with Amazon, it is just about any business it enters, from retailing to entertainment to cloud services. In each of these businesses, they have not only made the pie bigger but also increased their slice of it, quite a feat!Promise of Profitability: Alphabet and Facebook are money-making machines, with very high profit margins; Facebook's margins are among the highest among large market capitalization companies and Google's are in the top decile.Amazon has lagged on profitability historically, but it seems to be showing progress in the last few years, and Netflix still struggles to generate decent profit margins. The low margins that these companies show are deceptively low because they are after expensing what would be business building or capital expenditures in most other companies - $22.6 billion in technology and content at Amazon and almost $8 billion in content costs at Netflix.ÌýIf, in 2008, you had described the trajectories that these companies would go through, to get to where they are today, I would have given you long odds on it happening. To the question of how they pulled it off, I would point to three factors;Centralized Power: These companies are more corporate dictatorships, than corporate democracies. All four of these companies continue to be run by founder/CEOs, whose visions and narratives have focused these companies; Brin and Page, at Alphabet, Zuckerberg, at Facebook, Bezos at Amazon and Hastings at Netflix, have unchallenged power at these companies, and the only option that shareholders who disagree with them have is to sell and move on.ÌýBig Data: While big data is often a buzz word thrown into conversations where it does not belong, these four companies epitomize how data can be used to create value. In fact, you can argue that what Google learns from our search behavior, Facebook from our social media interactions, Netflix from our video watching choices and Amazon from our shopping carts (and Alexa) is central to these companies being able to scale up successfully and change the businesses they are in. Google and Facebook use what they learn about us to allow companies to target their advertising, Netflix develops content that reflects our watching preferences and Amazon uses our shopping history and Prime membership to run circles around its competitors.Intimidation Factor: There is one final intangible in the mix and that is the perception that these companies have created in regulators, customers and competitors that they are unstoppable. Advertisers facing off against Google and Facebook increasingly settle for crumbs off the table,  convinced that they cannot take on either company frontally, the entertainment business which once viewed Netflix as a nuisance has learned not only to live with the company but has adapted itself to the streaming world and Amazon's entry into almost any business seems to lead to a .In short, if you were an investor in any of these companies until three weeks ago, the story that you would have used to justify holding them would have been that they were juggernauts headed for global domination, and valued accordingly.
Story Break, Recalibration or Tweak?If you have read my prior posts on valuation, you know that I am a great believer that stories hold together valuations, and that it is changes to stories that change valuation. It is still early, but the question that investors face is whether what has happened in the last three weeks has changed the story dynamics fundamentally at these companies.  At the very minimum, we have at least noticed that the strengths that we noted in the last section come with accompanying weaknessesCEO heads cannot roll: Unlike traditional companies facing crises, where CEOs can be offered by a board of director as a sacrificial offering to calm investors, regulators or politicians, the FANG companies and their CEOs are so intertwined, with power entrenched in the current CEOs, this option is off the table. Even if Mark Zuckerberg performs like in front of a congressional committee next week, he will still be CEO for the foreseeable future, an advantage that having voting shares and controlling more than 50% of the voting rights gives him.The Dark Side of Sharing: I don't know what we, collectively as users of these companies' products and services, thought they were doing with all of the information that we were sharing so willingly with them, but until the last few weeks, we were able to look the other way and assume that it would be used benevolently. The Facebook fiasco with Cambridge Analytica has pushed some of us out of denial and perhaps into a reassessment of how we share data and how that data is used. It has also created a firestorm about data sharing and privacy that may result in restrictions in how the data gets used.No Friends: When other companies feel threatened by your success and growth, it should come as no surprise that many of them are cheering, as you stumble. From ] to for misusing data, there seems to be a desire to pile on. Musk has far bigger problems at Tesla than it's Facebook page, and Cook should be careful about throwing stones from a glass house, but watching the FANG companies squirm is evoking joy in the boardrooms of its competitors.So, what now? As I see it, there are three ways to read the tea leaves, with the effects on value ranging from very negative to non-existent.
Second Thoughts on Sharing: It is possible that the news stories about how exposed we have left ourselves, as a consequence of our sharing, will lead us to all to reassess how much and how we interact online. That would have significant consequences for all of the FANG stocks, since their scaling success and business models depend upon continued user engagement.ÌýTempest in a teapot: At the other end of the spectrum, there are some who argue that after the Zuckerberg testimony, the story will blow over and that not only will the companies revert back to their old ways, but that they will continue to accumulate users and grow revenues, while doing so.Data Protections: The third possibility lies somewhere between the first two. While the news stories may have little effect on how people use these companies' products and services, there may be new restrictions on how the data that is collected from their usage is utilized by the companies. That would include not only privacy restrictions, similar to those already in place in the EU, but also regulations on how the data is collected, stored and shared. In addition, the companies themselves may feel pressure to change current business practices, which while profitable, have left data vulnerabilities.ÌýI don't buy into either of the first two scenarios. I think that we are too far gone down the sharing road to reverse field, and that while we will have a few high profile individuals signal their displeasure by abandoning (or claiming to abandon) a platform, most of us are too attached to Google search, our Facebook friends, watching Black Mirror on Netflix and the convenience of Prime to throw them overboard, because our privacy has been breached. In fact, I would not be surprised if Facebook usage has gone up in the days since the crisis, rather than down.Ìý
I also think that assuming that these stories will pass with no effect is a mistake, since there are changes coming to these firms, from within and without, that will have value consequences. To illustrate, Facebook has already announced that it will stop using data from third party aggregators to supplement its own data in customer targeting, because of data concerns, and I am sure that there are more changes  coming, many of which will increase Facebook's costs and crimp revenue growth, and through those changes, the value that we attach to Facebook. I also believe that you will see more restrictions on the use of data and that these rules will also have an effect on costs, growth and value. Rather than extend this post further, by looking at the impact of these changes, I will be using my next post to update my stories and valuations of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google. If you want a preview, suffice to say that I am back to being a Facebook shareholder, that I am close to becoming a Google shareholder for the first time and that Amazon and Netflix remain out of my reach.Ìý
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In , I valued Spotify, using information from its prospectus, and promised to come back to cover three loose ends: (1) a pricing of the company to contrast with my intrinsic valuation, (2) a valuation of a Spotify subscriber and, by extension, a subscriber-based valuation of the company, and (3) the value of big data, seen through the prism of what Spotify can learn about its subscribers from their use of its service, and convert to profits.
1. The Pricing of SpotifyI won't bore you by going through the full details of the contrast that I see between pricing an asset and valuing it, since it has been at the heart of so many of my prior posts (like , and ). In short, the value of an asset is determined by its expected cash flows and the risk in these cash flows, which you can estimate imprecisely using a discounted cash flow model. The price of an asset is based on what others are paying for similar assets, requiring judgments on what comprises similar.  My last post reflected my attempt to attach an intrinsic value to Spotify, but the pricing questions for Spotify are two fold: the companies that investors in the market will compare it to, to make a pricing judgment, and the metric that they will base the pricing on.
Let's start with the simplest version of pricing, a one-on-one comparison. With Spotify, the two companies that are likeliest to be offered as comparable firms are Pandora, a company that is in the same business (music streaming) as Spotify, deriving its revenues from advertising and subscription, and Netflix, a company that is also subscription-driven, and one that Spotify would like to emulate in terms of market success. Since Spotify and Pandora are reporting operating losses, there are only three metrics that you can scale the pricing of these companies to: the number of subscribers, total revenues and gross profits. I report the numbers for all three companies in the table below, in conjunction with the enterprise values for Pandora and Netflix:For Pandora and Netflix, the numbers for users and revenues/profits come from their most recent annual reports for the year ending December 31, 2017, and for Spotify, the numbers are from the prospectus covering the same year. To use the numbers to price Spotify, I first estimate pricing multiples for Pandora and Netflix. and then use these multiples on Spotify's metrics:To illustrate the process, I price Spotify, relative to Pandora and based on subscribers, by first computing the enterprise value/subscriber for Pandora (EV/Subscriber= 1135/74.70 = 15.19). I then multiply this value by Pandora's total subscriber count of 159 million to arrive at a pricing of $2,416 million for Spotify. I repeat this process for Netflix, and then repeat it again with both companies, using revenues and gross profit as my scaling variables. The table of pricing estimates that I get for Spotify explains why those who are bullish on the company will try to avoid comparisons to Pandora and encourage comparisons to Netflix. If, as is rumored, Spotify's equity is priced at between $20 and $25 billion, it will look massively over priced, if compared to Pandora, but be a bargain, relative to Netflix. As you can see, each of these comparisons has problems. Spotify not only has a more subscription-based revenue model than Pandora, yielding higher overall revenues, but its more global presence (than Pandora) has insulated it better from competition from Apple Music. Netflix has an entirely subscription-based model and generates more revenues per subscriber, while facing less intense competition.  The bottom line is that the pricing range for Spotify is wide, because it depends on the company you compare it to, and the metric you base the pricing on. That may come as no surprise for you, but it will explain why there will wide divergences in pricing opinion when the stock first starts to trade, resulting in wild price swings. If you are not adept at the pricing game, and I am not, you should stay with your value judgment, flawed though it might be. I will consequently stick with my intrinsic value estimate for the equity in the company.
2. A Subscriber-Based Valuation of SpotifyLast year, I did a user-based valuation of Uber and used it to understand the dynamics that determine user value and then to value Amazon Prime. That framework can be easily adapted to value Spotify subscribers, both existing and new. To value Spotify's existing subscribers, I started with the base revenue per subscriber and content costs in 2017, made assumptions about growth in each item and used a renewal rate of 94.5%, based again upon 2017 numbers (all in US dollar terms):Note that revenues/subscriber grow at 3% a year, faster than the growth rate of 1.5%/year in content costs, reducing content costs to 70% of subscriber revenues in year 10, consistent with the assumption I made in the top down valuation in the last post. The value of a premium subscriber, allowing for the churn in subscriptions (only 43% make it through 15 years) and reduced content costs, is $108.65, and the total value of the 71 million premium subscriptions works out to about $7.7 billion.
To estimate the value of new users, I first had to estimate how much Spotify was spending to acquire a new user. To obtain this value, I took the total marketing costs in 2017 (567 million Euros or $700 million) and divided that by the number of new subscribers added in 2017:Cost of acquiring new user = 700 / (71 - 48*.945) = $27.30While the number of premium subscribers grew from 48 million to 71 million, I reduced the former value by the churn reported (5.5% of subscribers canceled in 2017). The value of new users then can be computed, assuming that the number of new users grows 25% a year from years 1-5, 10% a year from years 6-10 and 1% a year thereafter:In valuing the cash flows from new users, I use a 10% US$ cost of capital, the 75th percentile of global companies, reflecting the higher risk in this component of Spotify's value, and derive a value of about $18 billion for new users.

Spotify does get about 10% of its revenues from advertising, and I will assume that this component of revenue will persist, albeit growing at a lower rate than premium subscription revenues; the revenues will grow 10% a year for the next ten year and content costs attributable to these revenues will also show the same downward trend that they do with premium subscriptions. The value of the advertising revenues is shown to be about $2.9 billion:The final component of value is mopping up for costs not captured in the pieces above. Specifically, Spotify has R&D and G&A costs that amounted to 660 million Euros in 2017 (about $815 million), which we assume will grow 5% a year for the next 10 years, well below the growth rate of revenues and operating income, reflecting economies of scale. Allowing for the tax savings, and discounting at the median cost of capital (8.5%) for a global company, I derive a value for this cost drag:The value for Spotify, on a user-based valuation, can then be calculated, adding in the cash balance (1,5091.81 million Euros or $1,864 million) and a cross holding in Tencent Music that I had overlooked in my DCF (valued at 910 million Euros or $1,123 million), and netting out the equity options outstanding (valued at 1344 million Euros or $1660 million):
The operating asset value is about $3.6 billion lower than the value that I obtained in , and there are three reasons for the difference. The first is that I did not incorporate the benefits of the losses that Spotify has to carry forward (approximately $1.7 billion) in my subscriber-based valuation, with the resulting lost tax benefit at a 25% tax rate, of about $300 million. The second reason is that I used a composite cost of capital of 9.24% on all cash flows in top down valuation, whereas I used a lower (8.5%) cost of capital for existing users and a higher (10% cost of capital) for new users; that translates into about $600 million in lower value. The third reason is that I assumed that composite cash flows for Spotify would grow at 2.85% a year forever, while I capped the growth rate in new users to 1%, a more realistic number since inflation cannot help me on user count; using a 2.85% growth rate in the number of users after year 10 adds $2.1 billion in value. The value of equity in common stock, the number that will be most directly comparable to market capitalization on the day of the offering, is $16.8 billion.
3. The Big Data Premium?There is one final component to Spotify's value that I have drawn on only implicitly in my valuations and that is its access to subscriber data. As Spotify adds to its subscriber lists, it is also collecting information on subscriber tastes in music and perhaps even on other dimensions. In an age where big data is often used as a rationale for adding premiums to values across the board, Spotify meets  the requirements for a big data payoff, . It has exclusivity at least on the information it collects from its subscribers on their musical tastes & preferences and it can adapt its products and services to take advantage of this knowledge, perhaps in helping artists create new content and customizing its offerings. That said, I do no feel the urge to add a premium to my estimated value for three reasons:It is counted in the valuations already: In both my top down and user-based valuations, I allow Spotify to grow revenues well beyond what the current music market would support and lower content costs as they do so. That combination, I argued, is a direct result of their data advantages, and adding a premium to my estimated valued seems like double counting.Decreasing Marginal Benefits: The big data argument, even if based on exclusivity and adaptive behavior, starts to lose its power as more and more companies exploit it. As Facebook reviews our social media posts and tailors advertising, Amazon uses Prime to get into our shopping carts and Alexa to track us at home, and uses that data to launch new products and services and Netflix keeps track of the movies/TV that we watch, stop watching and would like to watch, there is not as much of us left to discover and exploit.Data Backlash: Much as we would like to claim victimhood in this process, we (collectively) have been willing participants in a trade, offering technology companies data about our private lives in return for social networks, free shipping and tailored entertainment. This week, we did see perhaps the beginnings of a reassessment of where this has led us, with the savaging of Facebook in the market.ÌýThe big data debate has just begun, and I am not sure how it will end. I personally believe that we are too far gone down this road to go back, but there may be some buyers' remorse that some of us are feeling about having shared too much. If that translates into much stricter regulations on data gathering and a reluctance on our part to share private data, it would be bad news for Spotify, but it would be worse news for Google, Facebook, Netflix and Amazon. Time will tell!YouTube Video

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In the last few weeks, we have seen two high profile unicorns file for initial public offerings. The first out of the gate was Dropbox, a storage solution for a world where gigabyte files are the rule rather than the exception, with a filing on February 23. Following close after, on February 28, Spotify, positioning itself as the music streaming analog to Netflix, filed its prospectus. With it's larger potential market capitalization and unusual IPO structure, Spotify has attracted more attention than Dropbox, and I would like to focus this post on it.
Spotify: The Back StorySpotify was founded in 2008 in Sweden, by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, as a music streaming service. The timing was opportune, since the company caught and contributed to a shift in the music business, as users have moved away from paying for physical (records, CDs) to digital, as evidenced in the graph below:Source: IFPINote that not only has the move towards streaming, in proportional terms, been dramatic, but disruption has come with pain for the music business, with a drop in aggregate revenues from $24 billion in 1999 to about $16 billion in 2016.  In a bright spot, revenues have started rising again in 2016 and 2017, and it is possible that the business will rediscover itself, with a new digital model. Spotify was not the first one in the business, being preceded by both Pandora and Soundcloud, but its success is testimonial to the proposition that the spoils seldom go to the first movers in any business disruption.
The Spotify business model is a simple one. Listeners can subscribe to a free version, with limited customization features (playlists, stations etc.) and online ads. Alternatively, they can subscribe to a premium version of the service, paying a monthly fee, in return for a plethora of customization options, and no ads. The company's standard service cost $9.99/month in the United States in 2018, with a family membership, where up to six family members living at the same address, can share a family service for $, while preserving individualized playlists and stations. Prices vary globally, ranging from a high of $16.94 in the UK (for standard service) to much lower prices in Eastern Europe and Latin America. (You can check out the variations in that reports the prices across the world for Spotify, in dollar terms.) Spotify pays for its music content, based upon how often a song is streamed, but the rates vary depending on whether it is on the free or premium service and where in the world, creating some complexity in how it is computed.  To get a sense of where Spotify stands right now and how it got there, I , with the intent of catching broad trend lines. I came up with the following:
Explosive Growth: Spotify is coming off a growth burst, especially since 2015, in both number of users and revenues, as can be seen in the graph below. Revenues have increased from 1.94 billion Euros to 4.09 billion Euros, reflecting both a growth in subscribers from 91 million to 159 million, and a change in the composition, with premium members climbing from about 31% of total subscribers in 2015 to 45% of subscribers in 2017.Source: Subscription Revenue dominates Ad Revenue: Spotify's focus on improving its premium subscriptions is explained easiest by looking at the breakdown of revenues each year, where subscription revenues have accounted for 90% of revenues each year from 2015 to 2017. The one discordant note is that average revenue per premium subscriber has dropped over the same period 7.06 Euros/month to 5.24 Euros/month, a change that the company ascribes to family memberships, but a problematic trend nevertheless:Source: Content Costs are coming down: While Spotify insists that it is not scaling back payouts to music labels and artists, the company has been able to lower its content costs as a percent of revenues each year from 88.7% of revenues in 2015 to 79.2% of revenues in 2017. In fact, Spotify has conveyed to investors that its intent is to earn gross margins of 30%-35%, implying that it sees content costs dropping to 65%-70% of revenues. There is an inherent tension here between what Spotify has to convince its investors it can do and what it tells the music industry  it is doing and the tension will only intensify, after the company goes public.Source: Other costs are trending up: There are three other buckets of cost at Spotify -R&D, Selling & Marketing and G&A- and these costs are not only growing but eating up larger proportion of revenues. If there are economies of scale, as you would expect in most businesses,  they are not manifesting themselves in the numbers yet. The collective load of these expenses are creating operating losses, and while margins have become less negative, it is primarily through the content cost controls.
Source:
At this stage of its story, Spotify is a growth company with lots of potential (no irony intended) but lots of rough spots to work out.
The Spotify IPOI have posted ahead of IPOs for many companies in the last decade, ranging from Facebook to Twitter to Alibaba to Snap, but Spotify's IPO is different for two reasons:
No Banks: In a typical IPO, the issuing company seeks out an investment bank, which not only sets an offering price (backed up by a guarantee) but also creates a syndicate with other banks  to market the IPO, in roadshows and private client pitches. The Spotify IPO will dispense with the bankers and go directly to the market, letting demand and supply set the price on the opening day.Cashing Out: In most IPOs, the cash that comes in on the offering, from the shares that are bought by the public, is kept in the company, either to retire existing financing that is not advantageous to the firm, or to cover future investment needs. Spotify is aiming to raise about $1 billion from its offering, but none of it will go to company. Instead, existing equity investors in the company will be receiving the cash in return for their holdings.As a potential investor, I am less concerned about the "no banker" part of the IPO than I am by the "cash out:" part of the transaction: 

No bankers, no problem: I think that the banking role in IPOs is overstated, especially for a company as high profile as Spotify. Bankers don't value IPOs; they price them, usually with fairly crude pricing metrics, though they often reverse engineer DCFs to back up their pricing. Their guarantee on the offering price is significantly diluted in value by the fact that they set offering prices 10% to 15% below what they think the market will bear, and their marketing efforts are more useful in gauging demand than in selling the securities. From an investor perspective, there is little that I learn from road shows that I could not have learned from reading the prospectus, and there is almost as much disinformation as information meted out as part of the marketing.Control or Growth: I find it odd that a company like Spotify, growing at high rates and losing money while doing so, would turn away a billion in cash that could be used to cover its growth needs for the near future. The cashing out of existing owners sends two negative signals.  The first is that they (equity investors who cash out) do not feel that staying on as investors in the company, as a publicly traded entity, is worth it. Since they have access to data that I don't, I would like to know what they see in the company's future. The second is that the structure of the share offering, with voting and non-voting shares, indicates a consolidation of control with the founders, and the offering may provide an opportunity to get rid of dissenting voices.
My Spotify ValuationIn keeping with my view that you need a story to provide a framework for you valuation inputs, and especially so for young companies, I constructed a story for Spotify with the following elements:
Continued (but Slower) Revenue Growth: Spotify's success in scaling up over the last three years also sets the stage for a slowing down of growth in the future, with competition for Apple Music (backed by Apple's deep pockets) contributing to the trend. A combination of increases in subscriber numbers and a leveling off and even a mild increase in subscription per member will translate into a revenue growth of 25% a year for the next five years, scaling down to much lower growth in the years after. Implicit in this story is the assumption that the music business overall has turned the corner and that aggregate revenues will continue to post increases like they did in 2016 and 2017.With Reduced Content Costs: Spotify's entire value proposition rests on improved operating margins and a large portion of the improvement has to come from continuing to reduce content costs as a percent of revenues. Since Spotify pays for its content based upon song streams, those savings have to come from either paying less per stream (which is going to and should create push back from labels and artists) or finding ways to create economies of scale on this cost component. In it's defense, Spotify can point to its track record from 2015 to 2017 in reducing content costs. I assume that they can reduce content costs to 70% of revenues, while finding a way to keep artists and labels happy. That is not going to be an easy balance to maintain, especially with the top artists, as evidenced by and decisions to pull their music from Spotify.And Economies of Scale on Other Costs: Of the three other costs, the marketing expenses are the ones most likely to scale down as growth declines, but for Spotify to deliver solid operating margins, it also has to bring R&D costs and G&A costs under control. I may be over optimistic on this front, but here is what my projected values yield for my target operating margin (ten years from now):With Limited Capital Investments: Spotify's business model is built for scaling, with little need for capital reinvestment, except for R&D. Consequently, I assume that small capital investments can generate large revenues, using a sales to capital ratio of 4.00 (putting it at the 90th percentile of global companies) to estimate reinvestment.Manageable Operating Risk but Significant Failure Risk: Spotify's subscription based model and low turnover rate among subscribers does lend some stability to revenues, though adding more subscribers and going for growth is a riskier proposition. Overall, allowing for their business mix (90% entertainment, 10% advertising) and their global mix of revenues yields a  cost of capital of 9.24%, at the 80th percentile of global companies; the firm is planning to convert much of its debt into equity at the time of the IPO, giving it a equity dominated capital structure. However, the company is still young, losing money and faces deep pocketed competition, suggesting that failure is a very real possibility. I assume a 20% chance of failure, with failure translating into selling the company to the highest bidder at half of its going concern value.Loose Ends: To estimate equity value in common shares, I add the cash balance of the company of 1.5 billion Euros, ignore the proceeds from the IPO because of the cash-out structure and net out the value of 20.82 million options/warrants outstanding, with an average strike price of 42.56 Euros per share. Dividing the equity value by 177.17 million shares (including restricted shares) yields a value per share of 88.26 Euros per share or $108.97. The shares that you will be buying will be non-voting, implying a discount on this number, though how much you discount it will depend on how much you like and trust the company's founders.The entire picture, with the story embedded in it, is shown below. You can also download the spreadsheet here:It goes without saying, but I will say it anyway, that I made lots of assumptions to get to my value and that you may (and should) disagree with me or some or even all of these assumptions. You are welcome to that contains my valuation of Spotify and make it your own.
Bottom LineThere are three elements missing in this post. First, I have argued in my prior IPO posts that what happens after initial public offerings is more of a pricing game than a value game. To those of you who want to play that game, I don't think that this post is going to be very helpful. In my next post, I will look at how best to price Spotify, why you will hear pessimists about the company talk a lot about Pandora and optimists about Netflix. Second, there is the argument that top down valuations, like the one in this post, are ill equipped to value user or subscriber based companies. I will also use the user-based model that I introduced last year to value an Uber rider and an Amazon Prime member to value a Spotify subscriber. Finally, there is the lurking question of what Spotify is learning about its subscriber music tastes and how that data can be used to not only modify its offerings but perhaps create content that is more closely tailored to these tastes. That too has to wait for the next post.
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My posts over the last two months have been heavy, dealing first with my data update from January 2018, and with the market and its volatility in the last few weeks. I felt like taking a break and talking about something lighter and more personal, and giving you an update on my teaching, writing and data plans for this year, with news about an app for the iPhone or iPad that you might (or might not) find useful. I won't fault you if you are not in the least bit interested in what I am doing, and if so, please do skip this post, since it will bore you!
Teaching UpdateAs some of you may know, I have taught at the Stern School of Business at NYU since 1986, teaching two classes, a Corporate Finance class every spring and a Valuation class every fall and spring. If you have been reading this blog for a while, you also know that I invite the rest of the world to join me in these classes, through a multitude of platforms (, , ). If you are wondering why you have not received an invite to the classes this academic year, the answer is simple.

I am on sabbatical this academic year, living in California, and will not be teaching at Stern at least through September 2018.  I am enjoying keeping what I call beach bum hours (8.30 am-12.30 pm), but I have to confess that I miss teaching, and my weeks feel unstructured without my Monday/Wednesday classes, but I love teaching too much to take a complete break from it. I continue to teach my compressed valuation classes, trying to fit in everything in my regular classes into one or two days, with stints coming up in Amsterdam (March 7), (March 8-10), (April 19,20), Manila (May 15-16), Bangkok (May 17-18), Warsaw and Prague (June 2018) just in the next few months.

I am also planning on redoing the investments philosophies class that I have only online, but which is showing its age, in the next three months and adding to the in-practice videos that I supplement my valuation and corporate finance classes.Ìý
Research Writing UpdateAfter my most recent post on interest rates and stock prices, I received one response that made me laugh and here is what it said: “Bro, Please stop. get your head out of academia and into reality�. I assume, since I was not this person’s brother, that the “Bro� was an attempt to establish street cred (though I am not sure that it works on this audience), but it was the “academia� part that I found humorous. If I am an academic, I am one in awfully bad standing, since I have not submitted a paper for publication in close to two decades and spend little time at academic conferences.  That said, I love to write and I am continuing to do so on my sabbatical, on several fronts.
First, there are my blog posts, which I know are way too long and not very frequent, but I try (though I sometimes fail) to not spout off about things I do not understand or know much about.ÌýSecond, I spent the last few months of last year finishing the third edition of one my books, The Dark Side of Valuation, the first edition of which was born at the peak of the dot com boom, about valuing difficult-to-value companies from start-ups to banks. The book is in its final printing stages and should be available in bookstores shortly ().ÌýThird, I am turning my attention to what I hope will be my next project, which I hope will become a book, on the difference between pricing an asset and valuing it, a theme that I have mined for multiple posts over the last few years. Fourth, In a couple of weeks, I hope to post the updated installment of my Equity Risk Premium paper, which I first wrote and posted in 2008 (right after the crisis) and have revisited every March since. (). Later this summer, I will update my Country Risk Premium paper, focusing more closely just on country risk. () Finally, during the course of the next few months, I will also be taking the work that I have and converting into a paper.ÌýI will keep you updated as each project is complete.
Data & Tools UpdateI maintain a number of data sets on corporate finance and valuation that I update on an annual basis at the start of the year. I wrote a series of posts on what I learned looking at the data this year, in January, and you can read all ten posts, if you are so inclined.ÌýWhile I will not update much of this data during the course of the year, I will continue to post my estimates for the equity risk premium for the S&P 500 at the start of every month, continuing a series that started in September 2008.Ìý
The tools that I offer are three fold.

First, I have for corporate finance and valuatoion, and they are not polished, lacking formatting finesse and macro add-ons, but I view them as raw material that you can mold to your liking.Ìý Second, my YouTube videos are classified by playlists into my class videos, tool videos and blog post videos.ÌýFinally, I do have , that I co-developed with Anant Sundaram, professor at Dartmouth, that does intrinsic valuation. Give it a shot!You welcome to use these tools, but please recognize that this is all they are, and it is your insight and common sense that will make them shine.

Interface UpdateAs the material that I have grows, I have struggled with how best to organize it and present it. My has much of the material but you need to be on a computer, with an internet connection, to access much of it, and finding what you want can be a challenge. I am glad that there are some people who find the material useful and am humbled by their gratitude and their offers to help. To illustrate, a few months ago, I received an email from Taha Maddam, who had used the site, and he offered to create an app that would contain the material. I thanked him, but I pointed out that since the site was not commercial, I could not spend much to make the conversion, but he graciously offered to do it for nothing. Knowing how much work was involved, I did not expect him to follow through, especially since he works full time in Shanghai and has a young family.

Taha surprised me just over a week ago, when he said the app was ready and that I could take it for a spin.  I did and I was dazzled, since it contained all the information in my website, on my blog and on YouTube, in one location. If you have an Apple device (iPhone or iPad), you can download the app either from the app store (type in "Damodaran" in the search box, and it should pop up) or by going to the . If you like our app (while the material is mine, this app is Taha’s doing), please pass on the word and compliment Taha for a job well done. If you are an Android user, I am truly sorry that the app does not work on your devices yet, but I will have to wait on the kindness of strangers, for that to happen. In the meantime, if you can think of what we can add on to the app to make it more useful, please let us know.Ìý
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Jerome Powell, the new Fed Chair, was on Capitol Hill on February 27, and his testimony was, for the most part, predictable and uncontroversial. He told Congress that he believed that the economy had strengthened over the course of the last year and that the Fed would continue on its path of "raising rates". Analysts have spent the next few days reading the tea leaves of his testimony, to decide whether this would translate into three or four rate hikes and what this would mean for stocks. In fact, the blame for the drop in stocks over the last four trading days has been placed primarily on the Fed bogeyman, with protectionism providing an assist on the last two days. While there may be an element of truth to this, I am skeptical about any Fed-based arguments for market increases and decreases, because I disagree fundamentally with many about how much power central banks have to set interest rates, and how those interest rates affect value.
1. The Fed's power to set interest rates is limitedI have against the notion that the Fed or any central bank somehow sets market interest rates, since it really does not have the power to do so. The only rate that the Fed sets  directly is the Fed funds rate, and while it is true that the Fed's actions on that rate send signals to markets, those signals are fuzzy and do not always have predictable consequences. In fact, it is worth noting that the Fed has been hiking the Fed Funds rate since December 2016, when Janet Yellen's Fed initiated this process, raising the Fed Funds rate by 0.25%. In the months since, the effects of the Fed Fund rate changes on long term rates is debatable, and while short term rate have gone up, it is not clear whether the Fed Funds rate is driving short term rates or whether market rates are driving the Fed.
It is true that post-2008, the Fed has been much more aggressive in buying bonds in financial markets in its quantitative easing efforts to keep rates low. While that was  started as a response to the financial crisis of 2008, it continued for much of the last decade and clearly has had an impact on interest rates. To those who would argue that it was the Fed, through its Fed Funds rate and quantitative easing policies that kept long term rates low from 2008-2017, I would beg to differ, since there are two far stronger fundamental factors at play - low or no inflation and anemic real economic growth. In the graph below, I have the treasury bond rate compared to the sum of inflation and real growth each year, with the difference being attributed to the Fed effect:You have seen me use this graph before, but my point is a simple one. The Fed is less rate-setter, when it comes to market interest rates, than rate-influencer, with the influence depending upon its credibility. While rates were low in the 2009-2017 time period, and the Fed did play a role (the Fed effect lowered rates by 0.77%), the primary reasons for low rates were fundamental. It is for that reason that I , drawing his or her power from the perception that he or she has power, rather than actual power. That said, the Fed effect at the start of 2018, as I noted in a post at the beginning of the year, is larger than it has been at any time in the last decade, perhaps setting the stage for the tumult in stock and bond markets in the last few weeks.Ìý
To examine more closely the relationship between moves in the Fed Funds rate and treasury rates, I collected monthly data on the Fed Funds rate, the 3-month US treasury bill rate and the US 10-year treasury bond rate every month from January 1962 to February 2018. The raw data is , but I regressed the changes in both short term and long term treasuries against changes in the Fed funds rate in the same month:Looking at these regressions, here are some interesting conclusions that emerge:Short term T.Bill rates and the Fed Funds rate move together strongly: The result backs up the intuition that the Fed Funds rate and the short term treasury rate are connected strongly, with an R-squared of 56.5%; a 1% increase in the Fed Funds rate is accompanied by a 0.62% increase in the T.Bill rate, in the same month. Note, though, that this regression, by itself, tells you nothing about the direction of the effect, i.e., whether higher Fed funds rates lead to higher short term treasury rates or whether higher rates in the short term treasury bill market lead the Fed to push up the Fed Funds rate.ÌýT.Bond rates move with the Fed Funds rate, but more weakly: The link between the Fed Funds rate and the 10-year treasury bond rate is mush weaker, with an R-squared of 6.7%; a 1% increase in the Fed Funds rate is accompanied by a 0.19% increase in the 10-year treasury bond rate.ÌýT. Bill rates lead, Fed Funds rates lag: Regressing changes in Fed funds rates against changes in T.Bill rates in the following period, and then reversing direction and regressing changes in T.Bill rates against changes in the Fed Funds rate in the following period, provide clues to the direction of the relationship. At least over this time period, and using monthly changes, it is changes in T.Bill rates that lead changes in Fed Funds rates more strongly, with an R squared of 23.7%, as opposed to an R-squared of 9% for the alternate hypothesis. With treasury bond rates, there is no lagged effect of Fed funds rate changes (R squared of zero), while changes in T.Bond rates do predict changes in the Fed Funds rate in the subsequent period.ÌýThe Fed is more a follower of markets, than a leader.ÌýThe bottom line is that if you are trying to get a measure of how much treasury bond rates will change over the next year or two, you will be better served focusing more on changes in economic fundamentals and less on Jerome Powell and the Fed.
2. The relationship between interest rates and stock market value is complicatedWhen interest rates go up, stock prices should go down, right? Though you may believe or have been told that the answer is obvious, that higher interest rates are bad for stock prices, the answer is not straight forward. To understand why people are drawn to the notion that higher rates are bad for value, all you need to do is go back to the drivers of stock market value:
As you can see in this picture, holding all else constant, and raising long term interest rates, will increase the discount rate (cost of equity and capital), and reduce value. That assessment, though, is built on the presumption that the forces that push up interest rates have no effect on the other inputs into value - the equity risk premium, earnings growth and cash flows, a dangerous delusion, since these variables are all connected together to a macro economy. Note that almost any macro economic change, whether it be a surge in inflation, an increase in real growth or a global crisis (political or economic) affects earnings growth, T.Bond rates and the equity risk premiums, making the impact on value indeterminate, until you have worked through the net effect. To illustrate the interconnections between earnings growth rates, equity risk premiums and macroeconomic fundamentals, I looked at data on all of the variables going back to 1961:The co-movement in the variables and their sensitivity to macro economic fundamentals is captured in the correlation table. Higher inflation, over this period, is accompanied by higher earnings growth but also increases equity risk premiums and suppresses real growth, making its net effect often more negative than positive. Higher real economic growth, on the other hand, by pushing up earnings growth rate and lowering equity risk premiums, has a much more positive effect on value.

3. Value has to be built around a consistent narrativeIn 0, right after the last market meltdown, I offered an intrinsic valuation model for the S&P 500, with a suggestion that you fill in your inputs and come up with your own estimate of value. Some of you did take me up on my offer, came up with inputs, and entered them into a and, in your collective wisdom, the market was overvalued by about 3.34% in mid-February. While making assumptions about risk premiums, earnings growth and the treasury bond rate, I should have emphasized the importance of narrative, i.e., the macro and market story that lay behind your numbers, since without it, you can make assumptions that are internally inconsistent. To illustrate, here are two inconsistent story lines that I have seen in the last few weeks, from opposite sides of the spectrum (bearish and bullish).
In the bearish version, which I call the Interest Rate Apocalypse, all of the inputs (earnings growth for the next five years and beyond, equity risk premiums) into value are held constant, while raising the treasury bond rate to 4% or 4.5%. Not surprisingly, the effect on value is calamitous, with the value dropping about 20%. While that may alarm you, it is unclear how the analysts who tell this story explain why the forces that push interest rates upwards have no effect on earnings growth, in the next 5 years or beyond, oron  equity risk premiums.In the bullish version, which I will term the Real Growth Fantasy, all of the inputs into value are left untouched, while higher growth in the US economy causes earnings growth rates to pop up. The effect again is unsurprising, with value increasing proportionately.ÌýWhile neither of these narratives is fully worked through, there are three separate narratives about the market that are all internally consistent, that can lead to very different judgments on value.
More of the same: In this narrative, you can argue that, as has been so often the case in the last decade, the breakout in the US economy will be short lived and that we will revert back the low growth, low inflation environment that developed economies have been mired in since 2008. In this story, the treasury bond rate will stay low (2.5%), earnings growth will revert back to the low levels of the last decade (3.03%) after the one-time boost from lower taxes fades, and equity risk premiums will stay at post-2008 levels (5.5%). The index value that you obtain is about 2250, about 16.4% below March 2nd levels.The Return of Inflation: In this story line, inflation returns, though how the story plays out will depend upon how much inflation you foresee. That higher inflation rate will translate into higher earnings growth, though the effect will vary across companies, depending upon their pricing power, but it will also cause T. Bond rates to rise. If the inflation rate in the story is a high one (3% or higher), the equity risk premium may also rise, if history is any guide. With an inflation rate of 3% and an equity risk premium of 6%, the index value that you obtain is about 2133, about 20.7% below March 2nd levels.The Growth Engine Revs Up: In this telling, it is real growth in the US economy that surges, creating tailwinds for growth in the rest of the world. That higher real growth rate, while pushing up earnings growth for US companies (to 8% for the near term), will also increase treasury bond rates (to 3.5%), as in the inflation story, but unlike it, equity risk premiums will drift back to pre-2008 levels (closer to 4.5%).ÌýThe index value that you obtain is about 3031, about 12.7% above March 2nd levels.A Melded Version: I believe in a melded version of these stories, where inflation returns (but stays around 2%) and real growth in the economy increases, but only moderately. That will translate into higher treasury bond rates (my guess would be 3.5%), with a proportionate increase in earnings growth (at least in steady state) and an equity risk premium of 5%, splitting the difference between pre-crisis and post-crisis periods. The index value that I obtain, with these assumptions, is about 2610, about 3.1% below March 2nd levels.You can see, even from this limited list of scenarios, that to assess how stock prices will move, as interest rates change, you have to also make a judgment on why interest rates are moving. An inflation-driven increase in interest rates is net negative for stocks, but a real-growth driven increase in interest rates is a net positive. In fact, the scenario where interest rates go down sees a much bigger drop in value than two of three scenarios, where interest rates rise.Ìý
The Bottom LineWhen macro economic fundamentals change, markets take time to adjust, translating into market volatility. During these adjustment periods, you will hear a great deal of market punditry and much of it will be half baked, with the advisor or analyst focusing on one piece of the valuation puzzle and holding all else constant. Thus, you will read predictions about how much the market will drop if treasury bond rates rise to 4.5% or how much it will rise if earnings growth is 10%. I hope that this post has given you tools that you can use to fill in the rest of the story, since it is possible that stocks could actually go up, even if rates go up to 4.5%, if that rate rise is precipitated by a strong economy, and that stocks could be hurt with 10% earnings growth, if that growth comes mostly from high inflation. I also hope that, after you have listened to the narratives offered by others, for what markets will or will not do, that you start developing your own narrative for the market, as the basis for your investment decisions. You've seen my narrative, but I will leave the feedback loop open, as fresh data on inflation and growth comes in, and I plan to revisit my narrative, tweaking, adjusting or even abandoning it, if the data leads me to.Ìý
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The last week has been a roller coaster ride, though more down than up, and investors have done what they always do during market crises. The fear factor rises, some investors sell and head for the safer pastures, some are paralyzed not knowing what to do, and some double down as contrarians, buying into the sell off. In the last week, I found myself drawn to each of three camps, often at different points in the same day, as the market went through wild mood swings. These are my most vulnerable moments as an investor, since good sense is replaced by "animal spirits", and I feel the urge to abandon everything I know about investing, and go with my gut, never a good idea. I know that I have to step back from the action, regain perspective and return to what works for me in markets, and it is for that reason that I find myself going through the same sequence, each time I face a market crisis.
Step 1: Assess the damage and regain perspectiveThe first casualty in a crisis is perspective, as drawn into the news of the day, we tend to lose any sense of proportion. The last week has been an awful week for stocks, with many major indices down by 10% since last Thursday. If your initial investment in stocks was on February 1, 2018, I feel for you, because the pain has no salve, but most of us have had money in stocks for a lot longer than a week. In the table below, I look at the change in the S&P 500 last week and then compare it to the changes since the start of the year (which was less than 6 weeks ago) to a year ago and to ten years ago.
table.tableizer-table { font-size: 12px; border: 1px solid #CCC; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; } .tableizer-table td { padding: 4px; margin: 3px; border: 1px solid #CCC; } .tableizer-table th { background-color: #104E8B; color: #FFF; font-weight: bold; }
2/1/082/1/171/1/182/1/18S&P 500 on date1355227926742822S&P 500 on 2/8/182581258125812581% Change90.48%13.25%-3.48%-8.54%I know that this is small consolation, but if you have been invested in stocks since the start of the year, your portfolio is down, but by less than 3.5%. If you have been invested a year, you are still ahead by 13.25%, even after last week, and if you've been in stocks, since February 2008, you've not only lived through an even bigger market crisis (with the S&P 500 down 38% between September 2008 and March 2009), but you have seen your portfolio climb 90.48% over the entire period, and that does not even include dividends. That is why when confronted by perpetual bears, with their "I told you so" warnings, I try to remember that most of them have been bearish since time immemorial.

Returning the focus to the last week, let's first look across sectors to see which ones were punished the most and which ones endured. Using the S&P classification for sectors, here is how the sectors performed between February 2, 2018 and February 9, 2018;
Not surprisingly, every sector had a down week, though energy stocks did worse than the rest of the market, with an oil price drop adding to the pain.  Continuing to look at equities, let's now look geographically at returns in different markets over the last week.
While the S&P 500 had a particularly bad week, the rest of the world felt the pain, with only one index (Colombo, Sri Lanka) on the WSJ international index list showing positive returns for the week. In fact, Asia presents a dichotomy, with the larger markets (China, Japan) among the worst hit and the smaller markets in South Asia (Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and Philippines) showing up on the least affected list.Ìý
While equities have felt the bulk of the pain, it is interest rates that have been labeled as the source of this market meltdown, and the graph below captures the change in treasury rates and corporate bonds in different ratings classes (AAA, BBB and Junk) over the last week and the last year:The treasury bond rate rose slightly over the week, at odds with what you usually see in big stock market sell offs, when the flight to safety usually pushes rates down. The increases in default spreads, reflected in the jumps in interest rates increasing with lower ratings, is consistent with a story of a increased risk aversion. Here again, taking a look across a longer time period does provide additional information, with treasury rates at significantly higher levels than a year ago, with a flattening of the yield curve. In summary, this has been an awful week for stocks, across sectors and geographies, and only a mildly bad week for bonds. Looking over the last year, it is bonds that have suffered a bad year, while stocks have done well. That said, the rates that we see on treasuries today are more in keeping with a healthy, growing economy than the rates we saw a year ago.
Step 2: Read the tea leavesIt is natural that when faced with large market moves, we look for logical and rational explanations. It is in keeping then that the last week has been full of analysis of the causes and consequences of this market correction. As I see it, there are three possible explanations for any market meltdown over a short period, like this one:Market Meltdowns: Reasons, Symptoms and Consequences Explanation Symptoms Market Consequences Panic Attack Sharp movements in stock prices for no discernible reasons, with surge in fear indices. Market drops sharply, but quickly recovers back most or all of its losses as panic subsides Fundamentals Event or news that causes expected cash flows, growth or perceived risk in equities to change significantly. Market drops sharply and stays down, with price moves tied to the fundamental(s) in focus. Repricing of Risk Event or news that leads to repricing of risk (in the form of equity risk premiums or default spreads). As price of risk is reassessed upwards, market drops until the price of risk finds its new equilibrium. The question in any meltdown is which explanation dominates, since stock market crisis has elements of all three. As I look at what's happened over the last week, I would argue that it was triggered by a fundamental (interest rates rising) leading to a repricing of risk (equity risk premiums going up) and to momentum & fear driven selling.ÌýThe Fundamentals Trigger: This avalanche of selling was started last Friday (February 1, 2018) by a US unemployment report that , with 200,000 new jobs created, a continuation of a long string of positive jobs reports. Included in the report, though, was a finding that wages increased 2.9% for US workers, at odds with the mostly flat wage growth over the last decade. That higher wage growth has both positive and negative connotations for stock fundamentals, providing a basis for strong earnings growth at US companies that is built on more than tax cuts, while also sowing the seeds for higher inflation and interest rates, which will make that future growth less valuable.  The Repricing of Equity Risk: That expectation of higher interest rates and inflation seems to have caused equity investors to reprice risk by charging higher equity risk premiums, which can be chronicled in a forward-looking estimate of an implied ERP. I last updated that number on ,  and I have estimated that premium, by day, over the five trading days between February 1 and February 8, 2018. There is little change in the growth rates and base cash flows, as you go from day to day, partly because neither is updated as frequently as interest rates and stock prices, but holding those numbers, the estimated equity risk premium has increased over the last week from 4.78% at the start of trading on February 1, 2018 to 5.22% at the close of trading on February 8, 2018.Ìý Implied ERP, by Day: January 31, 2018 (Close) to February 8, 2018 (Close) Date (Close) S&P 500 T.Bond Rate Implied ERP Link to spreadsheet 31-Jan-18 2823.81 2.74% 4.78% 1-Feb-18 2821.98 2.77% 4.78% 2-Feb-18 2762.13 2.85% 4.88% 5-Feb-18 2648.94 2.79% 5.09% 6-Feb-18 2695.14 2.77% 5.00% 7-Feb-18 2681.66 2.84% 5.02% 8-Feb-18 2581.00 2.83% 5.22% The Panic Response: Most market players don't buy or sell stocks on fundamentals or actively think about the price of equity risk. Instead, some of them trade, trying to take advantage of shifts in market mood and momentum, and for those traders, the momentum shift in markets is the only reason that they need, to go from being stock buyers to sellers. Others have to sell because their financial positions are imperiled, either because they borrowed money to buy stocks or because they fear irreparable damage to their retirement or savings portfolios. The rise in the volatility indices are a clear indicator of this panic response, with the VIX almost tripling in the course of the week. Just in case you feel the urge to blame millennials, with robo-advisors, for the panic selling, they seem to be for the most part, and it is the usual culprits,  "professional" money managers, that are most panicked of all.At this point, you are probably confused about where to go next. If you are trying to make that judgment, you have to find answers to three questions:Where are interest rates headed? There has been a disconnect between the equity and the bond market, since the 2016 US presidential election, with the equity markets consistently pricing in more optimistic forecasts for the US economy, than the bond markets. Stocks prices rose on the expectation that tax cuts and more robust economic growth, but bond markets were more subdued with rates continuing to stay at the 2.25%-2.5% range that we have seen for much of the last decade. As I , the gap between the US 10-year T.Bond rate and an intrinsic measure of that rate, computed by adding inflation to real GDP growth, has widened to it's highest level in the last decade. The advent of the new year seems to have caused the bond market to notice this gap, and rates have risen since. If you are optimistic about the US economy and wary about inflation, there is more room for rates to rise, with or without the Fed's active intervention.Is the ERP high enough? Is the repricing of equity risk over? The answer depends upon whether you believe the numbers that underlie my estimates, and if you do, whether you think 5.22% is a sufficient premium for investing in equities. The only way to address that question is to examine it in the context of history, which is what I have done in the picture below: With all the caveats about the numbers that underlie this graph in place, note that the premium is now solidly in the middle of the distribution. There is always the possibility that the earnings growth estimates that back it up are wrong, but if they are, the interest rate rise that scares markets will also be reversed.When will the panic end? I don't know the answer to the question but I do know that it rests less on economics and more on psychology. There will be a moment, perhaps early next week or in two weeks or in two months, where the fever will pass and the momentum will shift. If you are a trader, you can get rich playing this game, if you play it well, or poor in a hurry, if you play it badly. I choose not to play it all.Is there a way that we can bring this all together into a judgment call in the market. I think so and I will use the same framework that I used for my implied equity risk premium to make my assessment. You will need three numbers, an expected growth rate in earnings for the S&P 500, you estimate of where the 10-year treasury bond rate will end up and what you think is a fair equity risk premium for the S&P 500. For instance, if you accept the analyst forecasted growth in earnings of 7.26% for the next five years as a reasonable estimate, that the the T.Bond rate will settle in at about 3.0% and that 5.0% is a fair value for the equity risk premium, your estimate of value for the S&P 500 is below:
With these estimates, you should be okay with how the market is valuing equities at the close of trading February 8, 2018; it is slightly under valued at 3.90%. To provide a contrast, if you feel that analysts are over estimating the impact of the tax cuts and that the historical earnings growth rate over the last decade (about 3.03%) is a more appropriate forecast for future growth, holding the risk free rate and ERP at 3% and 5% respectively, the value you will get for the index is 2233, about 16% below the index level of February 8, 2018. If you want put in your own estimates of earnings growth, T.Bond rates and equity risk premiums, please download this spreadsheet. In fact, if you are inclined to share your estimates with a group, I have created a . Let's see what we can get as a crowd valuation.
Step 3: Review your investment philosophyI firmly believe that to be a successful investor, you need a , a set of beliefs of not just how markets work but who you are as a person, and you need to stay true to that philosophy. It is the one common ingredient that you see across successful investors, whether they succeed as pure traders, growth investors or value investors. The best way that I can think of presenting the different choices you have on investment philosophies is by using my value/price contrast:To the question of which of these is the best philosophy, my answer is that there while there is one philosophy that is best for you, there is no one philosophy that is best for all investors. The key to finding that "best" philosophy is to find what makes you tick, as an individual and an investor, not what makes Warren Buffett successful.

I see myself as an investor, not a trader, and that given my tool kit and personality, what works for me is to be a investor grounded in value, though my use of a more expansive definition of value than old-time value investors, allows me to buy both growth stocks and value stocks. I am not a market timer for two reasons.

First, the overall market has too many variables feeding into it that I do not control and cannot forecast, making my valuations inherently too noisy to be useful.ÌýSecond, I see little that I bring to the overall market in terms of tools or information that will give me an edge over others.  The truest test of whether you have a solid investment philosophy is a week like the last one, where you will be tempted to or panicked into abandoning everything that you believe about markets. I  would lying if I said that I have not been tempted in the last week to time markets, either because of fear (driving me to sell) or hubris (where I want to play market contrarian), but so far, I have been able to hold out.

Step 4: Act consistently
During every market crisis, you will be tempted to look and ask that ever present question of "What if?", where you think about all of the money you could have saved, if only you had sold last Thursday. Not only is this pointless, unless you have mastered time travel, but it can be damaging to your future returns, as your regrets about past actions taken and not taken play out in new actions that you take.  My suggestion is that you return to your core investment philosophy and start to think about the actions that you can take on Monday, when the market opens, that would be consistent with that philosophy. I am taking my own suggestion to heart and have started revisiting the list of companies that I would love to invest in (like Amazon, Netflix and Tesla), but have been priced out of my reach, in the hope that the correction will put some of them into play. More painfully, I have been revaluing every single company in my existing portfolio, with the intent of shedding those that are now over valued, even if they have done well for me. If nothing else, this will keep me busy and perhaps stop me from being caught up in the market frenzy!

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Spreadsheets

In my first nine posts on my data update for 2018, I focused on the costs that companies face in raising equity and debt, and their investment, financing and dividend decisions. In assessing those decisions, though, I looked at their actions through the lens of value creation, arguing that investing in projects that earn less than their cost of capital is not a good use of shareholder capital. While this may seem like a reasonable conclusion, it is built on the implicit assumption that financial markets reward value creation and punish value destruction. As any market observer will tell you, markets have minds of their own, sometimes rewarding companies for bad behavior and punishing companies that take the right actions. In this post, I look at market pricing around the world, and point to potential inconsistencies with the fundamentals.
Value vs PriceIn multiple posts on this blog, I have argued that we need to stop using the words, value and price, interchangeably, that they not only can be very different for the same asset, at any point in time, but that they are driven by different forces, require different mindsets to understand, and give rise to different investment philosophies. The picture below summarizes the key distinctions:
Understanding the difference between value and price, at least for me, is freeing, because it not only makes me aware of the assumptions that I, as an investor who believes in value and convergence, am making, but also makes me respect and recognize those who might have a different perspective. The bottom line, though, is that the pricing process can sometimes reward firms that take actions that no tonly have no effect on value, but may actually destroy value, and punish firms that are following financial first principles. Even though I believe that value ultimately prevails, it behooves to me to try to understand how the market is pricing stocks, since it will help me be a better investor.
The Pricing ProcessI will begin with what sounds like a over-the-top assertion. Much of what we see foisted on us as valuation, including those that you see backing up IPOs, acquisitions or big investment decisions, are really pricing models, masquerading as valuations. In many cases, bankers and analysts use the front of estimating cash flows for a discounted cashflow valuation, while slipping in a multiple to estimate the biggest cash flow (the terminal value) in what I call . I am not surprised that pricing is the name of the game in banks and equity research, but I am puzzled at why so much time is wasted on the DCF misdirection play. There are four steps to pricing an asset or company well, and done well, there is no reason to be ashamed of a pricing.
1. Similar, Traded Assets To price an asset, you have to find "similar" assets that are traded in the market. Note the quote marks around similar, because with publicly traded stocks, you will be required to make judgment calls on what you view as similar. The conventional practice in pricing seems to be country and sector focused, where an Indian food processing company is compared to other food processing companies in India, on the implicit assumption that these are the most comparable companies. That practice, though, can not only lead to very small samples in some countries, but also can yield companies that have very different fundamentals from the company that you are valuing.1.1: With equities, there are no perfect matches: If you are valuing a collectible (Tiffany lamp or baseball card), you might be able to find identical assets that have been bought and sold recently. With stocks, there are no identical stocks, since even with companies that are close matches, differences will persist.1.2: Small, more similar, sample or large, more diverse, sample: Given that there are no stocks identical to the one that you are trying to value in the market, you will be faced with two choices. One is to define "similar" narrowly, looking for companies that are listed on the same market as yours, of similar size and serving the same market. The other is to define "similar" more broadly, bringing in companies in other markets and perhaps with different business models. The former will give you more focus and perhaps fewer differences to worry about and the latter a much larger sample, with more tools to control for differences.  
2. Pricing Metric To compare pricing across companies, you have to pick a pricing metric and broadly speaking, you have three choices:The market capitalization is the value of equity in a business, the enterprise value is the market value of the operating assets of the firm and the firm value is the market value of the entire firm, including any cash and non-operating assets. While firm value is lightly used, because non-operating assets and cash can skew it, both enterprise value and equity value are both widely used. In computing these metrics, there are three issues that do complicate measurement. One is that market capitalization (market value of equity) is constantly updated, but debt and cash numbers come from the most recent balance sheets, creating a timing mismatch. The second is that the market value of equity is easily observable for publicly traded companies, but debt is often not traded (if bank debt) and book debt is used as a stand in for market debt. Finally, non-operating assets often take the form of holdings in other companies, many of which are private, and the values that you have for them are book values.Ìý2.1: When leverage is different across companies, go with enterprise value: When comparing pricing across companies, it is better to focus on enterprise value, when debt ratios vary widely across the companies, because equity value at highly levered companies is much smaller and more volatile and cannot be easily compared to equity value at lightly levered companies.2.2: With financial service companies, stick with equity: As I have argued in my other posts, debt to a bank, investment bank or insurance company is more raw material than source of capital and defining debt becomes almost impossible to do at financial service firms. Rather than wrestle with his estimation problem, my suggestion is that you stick with equity multiples.
3. Scaling Variable When pricing assets that come in standardized units, you can compare prices directly, but that is never the case with equities, for a simple reason. The number of shares that a company chooses to have will determine the price per share, and arguing that Facebook is more expensive than Twitter because it trades at a higher price per share makes no sense. It is to combat this that we scale prices to  a common variable, whether it be earnings, cash flows, book value, revenues or a driver of revenues (users, riders, subscribers etc.).

3.1: Be internally consistent: If your pricing metric is an equity value, your scaling variable has to be an equity value (net income, book value of equity). If your pricing metric is enterprise value, your scaling variable has to be an operating variable (revenues, EBITDA or book value of invested capital).Ìý3.2: Life cycle matters: The multiple that you use to judge pricing will change, as a company moves through the life cycle.Early in the life cycle, the focus will be on potential market size or revenue drivers, since the company's own revenues are small or non-existent and it is losing money. As it grows and matures, you will see a shift to equity earnings first, since growth companies are mostly equity funded, and then to operating earnings and EBITDA, as mature companies use debt, ending with a focus on book value as a proxy for liquidation value, in decline.
4. Control for differences As we noted, when discussing similar companies, no matter how carefully you pick comparable firms, there will be differences that persist between the company that you are trying to value and the comparable firms. The test of good pricing is whether you detect the variables that cause differences in pricing and how well you control for the differences. In much of equity research, the preferred mode for dealing with these differences is to spin them to justify whatever pre-conceptions you have about a stock.4.1: Check the fundamentals: In intrinsic value, we argued that the value of a  company is a function of its cash flows, growth and risk. If you believe that the fundamentals ultimately prevail in markets, you should tie the multiples you use to these fundamentals, and using algebra and a basic discounted cash flow model will lead you to fundamentals drivers of any multiple.
4.2: Let the market tell you what matters: If you are a pure trader, who has little faith that the fundamentals will prevail, you can can take a different path.ÌýYou can look at other data, related to the companies that you are pricing, and look for correlation. Put simply, you are trying to use the data to back out what variables best explain differences in market pricing, and using those variables to price your company.To illustrate the differences between the two approaches, take a look at , where I used fundamentals to conclude that it was under priced, and , at the time of its IPO, where I backed out the number of users as the key variable driving the market pricing of social media companies and priced Twitter accordingly.
Pricing around the GlobeAssuming that you have had the patience to get to this part of the post, let's look at the pricing numbers at the start of 2018, around the world, starting with earnings multiples (PE and EV/EBITDA), moving on to book value multiples (Price to Book, EV to Invested Capital) and ending with revenue multiples (EV/Sales).
1. Earnings Multiples Earnings multiples have the deepest roots in pricing, with the PE ratio still remaining the most used multiple in the world. In the last two to three decades, there has been a decided shift towards enterprise value multiples, with EV/EBITDA leading the way. While I am skeptical of EBITDA as a measure of accessible cash flow, since it is before taxes and capital expenditures, I understand its pull, especially in aging companies with significant depreciation charges. If you assume that depreciation will need to go back into capital expenditures, there is an intermediate measure of pricing, EV to EBIT.

In the chart below, I look at the distribution of PE ratios globally, and report on the PE ratio distributions, broken down region, at the start of 2018.
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I know that it is dangerous to base investment judgments on simple comparisons of pricing multiples, but at the start of 2018, the most expensive market in the world on a PE ratio basis, is China, followed by India, and the cheapest market is Eastern Europe and Russia. If you would like to see the values for , please click at this link.

If you are more interested in operating earnings multiples, the chart below has the distribution of EV/EBIT and EV/EBITDA multiples:China again tops the scale, with the highest EV/EBITDA multiples, and Eastern Europe and Russia have the lowest EV/EBITDA multiples. Earnings multiples also vary across sectors, with some of the variation attributable to fundamentals (differences in growth, risk and cash flows) and some of it to misplacing. The sectors that trade at the highest and lowest PE ratios are identified below:You can download the full list of earnings multiples for all of the sectors, by clicking .Ìý
2. Book Value Multiples The delusion of fair value accounting is that balance sheets will one day provide better estimates of how much a business in worth than markets, and while I believe that day will never come, even accountants are entitled to their dreams. That said, there are investors who still put their faith in book value and compare market prices to book value, either in equity terms or operating asset terms:
Price to Book Equity = Market Value of Equity / Book Value of EquityEV to Invested Capital = (Market Value of Equity + Market value of Debt - Cash)/ (Book value of equity + Book value of Debt - Cash)In the table below, I report on price to book and enterprise value to invested capital ratios, by sub-region of the world: table.tableizer-table { font-size: 12px; border: 1px solid #CCC; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; } .tableizer-table td { padding: 4px; margin: 3px; border: 1px solid #CCC; } .tableizer-table th { background-color: #104E8B; color: #FFF; font-weight: bold; }

The most expensive sub-region of the world is  India, on both a price to book and EV/Invested capital basis, and the lowest priced stocks are again in Eastern Europe and Russia. If you would like to see book value multiples, by country, .  With book value multiples, the differences you observe across sectors not only reflect differences in fundamentals and pricing errors, but also accounting inconsistencies on how capital expenditures in non-manufacturing companies are dealt with, as opposed to manufacturing firms. I tried to correct for these inconsistencies, by capitalizing R&D at all firms, but that correction goes only part way and the most expensive and cheapest sectors, with my corrected book values, are listed below:You can download the book value multiple data, by sector, by .
3. Revenue Multiples To the question of why investors and analysts look at multiples of revenues, my one word answer is "desperation". When every other number in your income statement is negative, you have to keep climbing the statement until you hit a positive value. That said, there is value in focusing on a variable that accountants have the least influence over, and the heat map below captures differences in the enterprise value to sales ratios across the globe.
Unlike earnings and book value multiples, which have a pronounced peak in the middle of the distribution, revenue multiples are more evenly distributed, with quite a few firms trading at more than ten times revenues. As with earnings and book value multiples, I report revenue multiples, by country and  by sector. Note that there no revenue multiples reported for financial service firms, where neither enterprise value nor revenues can be meaningfully measured or estimated.
ConclusionI am an investor, who believes in value, but it would be foolhardy on my part to ignore the pricing game, since I am dependent upon it ultimately to cash out on my value gains. In this post, I have looked at the pricing differences around the globe, at least based upon market prices at the start of 2018. Of all of my data posts, this is the one that is the most dynamic and likely to change over short periods, since markets can react to change far more quickly than companies can.Ìý
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Data Update PostsJanuary 2018 Data Update 10: The Pricing Prerogative

If success for a farmer is measured by his or her harvest, success in a business, from an investors' standpoint, should be measured by its capacity to return cash flows for its owners. That is not belittling the intermediate steps needed to get there, since to be able to generate these cash flows, businesses have to find ways to treat employees well, satisfy customers and leave society at ease with their existence, but the end game does not change. That is why I find it surprising that when companies pay dividends, or worse still, buy back stock, there are so many who seem to view them as failures. Perhaps, that flows from the misguided view that reinvesting cash is good, not just for the company but also for the economy, because it creates growth and returning cash is bad, because it is somehow wasted, both flawed arguments. A company that reinvests cash in a bad business is destroying value, not adding to it, and as we saw in , a preponderance of companies globally earn less than their costs of capital. Cash that is returned is not lost to the economy, but much of it is reinvested back into other businesses that often have much better investment opportunities. That said, the way companies determine how much to return to shareholders, either as dividends or in the form of buybacks, is grounded in inertia and me-tooism.
Dividends' Place in the Big PictureIn my corporate finance classes, I present what I term the big picture of corporate finance and the first principles that should govern how a business is run:If you view dividends as residual cash flows, which is what they should be, the sequence that leads to dividends is simple. Every business should start by looking at its investment opportunities first, then finding a financing mix that minimizes its hurdle rate and then based upon its investment and financing choices, determine how much to pay out as dividends.
Note that this sequence holds only if capital markets (debt and equity) remain open, accessible and fairly priced, and companies have no self imposed constraints on raising capital or dividend payments. Those are clearly big and perhaps unrealistic assumptions for most companies, especially so for small firms and companies in emerging market, and that is why I have titled it Dividend Utopia. In the real world, there are multiple constraints, some external and some internal, that change the sequence.Capital markets are not always open and accessible: In utopian corporate finance, a company with a good investment opportunity, i.e., one that earns more than the cost of capital can always  raise capital from equity or debt market, quickly, at a fair price and with little or no issuance costs. In the real world, capital markets are not that accommodating. Raising capital can be a costly exercise, investors may under price your debt and equity, and the process can take time. It should come as no surprise then that if a company pays too much in dividends in this setting, it will find itself rejecting good investments.Banks may be the only lending option: For many companies, the only option when it comes to borrowing money is to go to a bank, and to the extent that banks face their own constraints on lending, companies may be unable to borrow at what they perceive to be fair rates. This will effectively play out in both investing and financing decisions.Dividends are sticky: If there is one word that characterizes dividend policy around the world, it is that it is "sticky". Companies, once committed to paying dividends, are unwilling to either cut or stop paying dividends, for fear of market punishment. That stickiness translates into companies continuing to pay dividends, even as earnings collapse and/or investment opportunities expand.ÌýIn a world with these constraints, dividends are no longer a residual cash flow, determined by choices you make on investments and financing, but a determinative cash flow, driving investment and financing decisions. If you add the desire of companies to pay dividends similar to those that they have in the past (inertia) and to be like the rest of the sector (me-too-ism) and irrational fears of dilution and debt, you have the makings of dysfunctional dividends.
 In this circular universe,  by putting dividend and financing decisions first, companies can end up with too much or too little capital available for projects, and in this dysfunctional universe, they adjust discount rates to make investment demand equate to supply. I never cease to be surprised by companies that claim to use hurdle rates as high as 20% and as low as 3%, both numbers that are . In extreme cases, you can have dividend insanity, where companies that are losing money and are already over levered borrow even more money to pay dividends, making their cash flow deficits worse, leading to more losses, more debt and more dividends.Ìý
Dividends across the Life Cycle
If dividends are, in fact, a residual cash flow, estimating how much you can afford to pay is a simple exercise of starting with the cash flows from operations that equity investors generate and netting out investment cash flows and cash flows to and from debt.
In effect, everything you need to estimate this potential dividend or free cash flow to equity (FCFE) should be in the statement of cash flows for a firm. This measure of potential dividends can be utilized, with my corporate life cycle framework, to frame how dividend policy should evolve over a company's life, if it were truly residual.Note that the FCFE is the cash that is available for return and that companies can choose to return that cash as traditional dividends or in buybacks. If they choose not to do so, the cash will accumulate as a cash balance at the company.
The Compressed Life Cycle and ConsequencesIn this , I argued that as we have shifted from the smoke stack and manufacturing sectors of the last century to the technology and service companies of the modern era, life cycles have compressed, creating challenges for both and .
That compressed life cycle has consequences for both how much companies can return to shareholders and in what form:Once mature, companies will return more cash over shorter periods: The intensity of both the growth and the decline phases, with compressed life cycles, will mean that companies will become larger much more quickly than they used to, both in terms of revenues and earnings, but once they hit the "growth wall", they will find investment opportunities shrinking much faster, thus allowing for more cash to be returned over shorter time periods.Those cash returns will be more likely to be in buybacks or special dividends, not regular dividends: The sweet spot for conventional dividends is the mature phase, where companies get to enjoy their dominance and rest on their competitive advantages, with large and predictable earnings. With the life cycle shortening and becoming more intense, this sweet spot period has become much briefer. Think of how little time Yahoo! and Blackberry got to enjoy being mature companies, before decline kicked in. Even the rare tech companies, like Microsoft and Apple, that have managed to extend their mature phases have to reinvent themselves to keep generating their earnings, making these earnings more uncertain. Paying large regular dividends in this setting is foolhardy, since investors expect you to keep paying them, in good times and bad.Companies that fight aging will see bigger cash build ups: No company likes to age, and it should not come as a surprise that many tech companies fight the turn in their life cycles, deluding themselves into believing that a rebirth is around the corner and not returning cash., even as free cash flows to equity turn positive. At these companies, cash balances quickly balloon, attracting activist investors.In short, much of what managers and investors know or expect to see in dividend policy reflects a different age and time. It should come as no surprise that older investors, especially ones that grew up with Graham and Dodd as their investing bible find this new world bewildering. I can offer little consolation, since globalization and disruption will only make things more unstable and less suited to paying large, stable dividends.Ìý
Cash Return NumbersHaving laid the foundations for understanding the shifts that are occurring in dividend policy, we have a structure for putting the numbers that we will see in this section in perspective. I will start this section by looking at regular dividends and conventional measures of these dividends (dividend yield and payout ratios) but then expand cash return to include stock buybacks and how metrics that capture its magnitude and close by looking at cash balances at companies.
Regular Dividends There are two widely used measures of dividends paid. One is to scale the dividends to the earnings, resulting in a payout ratio. That number, to the extent that you trust accounting income and dividends are the only way of returning cash to stockholders plays a dual role, telling cash-hungry investors how much the company will pay out to them, and growth-seeking investors how much is being put back into the business, to generate future growth (with a retention ratio = 1 - payout ratio). The picture below captures the distribution of payout ratios across the globe, with regional sub-group numbers embedded in a table in the picture:
Note that the payout ratio cannot be computed for companies that pay dividends, while losing money, and that it can be greater than 100% for companies that pay out more than their earnings. Japan has the lowest dividend payout ratio, across regions, a surprise given the lack of growth in the Japanese economy., and Australian companies pay out the higher percentage of their earnings in dividends.
The other measure of dividends paid is the dividend yield, obtained by dividing dividends by the market capitalization. This captures the dividend component of expected return on equities, with the balance coming from expected price appreciation. To the extent that dividends are sticky and thus more likely to continue over time, stocks with higher dividend yields have been viewed as safer investments by old time value investors. The picture below has the distribution of dividend yields for global companies at the start of 2018, with regional sub-group numbers embedded:As with the payout distribution, there are outliers, with companies that deliver dividends yields in the double digits. While these companies may attract your attention, if you are fixated on dividends, these are companies that are almost certainly paying far more dividends that they can afford, and it is only a question of when they will cut dividends, not whether. With both measures of dividends, there is a hidden statistic that needs to be emphasized. While these charts look at aggregate dividends paid by companies and present a picture of dividend plenty, the majority of companies in both the US (75.8%) and globally (57.6%) pay no dividends. The median company in the US and globally pays no dividends.
Buybacks There is a great deal of disinformation out there about stock buybacks and I tried to deal with them from a couple of years ago. The reality is that stock buybacks have largely replaced dividends as the primary mechanism for returning cash to stock holders, at US companies. In 2017, buybacks represented 53.69% of all cash returned by US companies, but the shift to stock buybacks is starting to spread to other parts of the globe, as can be seen in the regional breakdown below: table.tableizer-table { font-size: 12px; border: 1px solid #CCC; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; } .tableizer-table td { padding: 4px; margin: 3px; border: 1px solid #CCC; } .tableizer-table th { background-color: #104E8B; color: #FFF; font-weight: bold; }
Sub GroupNumber of firmsDividends Dividends Buybacks Buybacks as % of Cash ReturnsAfrica and Middle East2,277$65,767 $70,530 6.75%Australia & NZ1,777$50,194 $56,034 10.42%Canada2,850$49,544 $80,470 38.43%China5,552$317,678 $342,282 7.19%EU & Environs5,399$320,027 $514,279 37.77%Eastern Europe & Russia558$21,761 $23,522 7.49%India3,511$20,701 $27,121 23.67%Japan3,755$101,760 $134,087 24.11%Latin America 880$40,395 $47,907 15.68%Small Asia8,630$128,066 $148,607 13.82%UK1,412$101,605 $128,161 20.72%United States7,247$486,009 $1,049,487 53.69%While US companies still return more cash in the form of buybacks than their global counterparts, European and Canadian companies also return approximately 38% of cash returned in buybacks, and even Indian companies are catching on (with about 24% returned in buybacks). If you are interested in how much cash companies in different countries return, and in what form, you can , or the heat map below (you can see the dividend yield and payout ratios, by country, in the live version of the map):
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There are differences in how companies return cash, across sectors, and the table below lists the ten sectors that return the most and the least cash, in the form on buybacks, as a percent of cash returned.Commodity companies and utilities are still more likely to return cash in the form of dividends, while software and technology companies are more likely to use buybacks. If you are interested, you can download, with dividends, buybacks and associated statistics.
Cash Balance
There is one final loose end to tie up on dividends. If companies don't return their FCFE (potential dividends) to stockholders, it accumulates as a cash balance. One way to measure whether companies are returning enough cash is to look at cash balances, scaled to either the market values of these firms or market capitalization. The table below provides the regional statistics on cash balances:
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Sub GroupCash Balance Cash/Firm ValueCash/ Market CapAfrica and Middle East$490,475 16.13%24.43%Australia & NZ$175,578 6.43%11.37%Canada$183,204 4.66%8.10%China$2,724,851 12.84%21.16%EU & Environs$2,935,769 11.85%22.43%Eastern Europe & Russia$112,480 15.08%24.34%India$99,190 3.31%4.18%Japan$4,185,572 34.47%67.73%Latin America $239,664 7.84%13.06%Small Asia$841,230 9.91%15.19%UK$1,087,286 15.80%29.48%United States$2,206,548 4.73%7.52%Japan is clearly the outlier, with cash representing about 34% of firm value, and an astonishing 68% of market capitalization. It may be a casual empiricism, but it seems to me that Japan is filled with , aging companies whose business models have crumbled but are holding on to cash in desperate hope of reincarnation. It is the Japanese economy that is paying the price for this recalcitrance, as capital stays tied up in bad businesses and does not find it way to younger, more vibrant businesses.

Conclusion
If the end game in business, for investors, is the generation and distribution of cash flows to them, many companies and investors seem to be stuck in the past, where long corporate life cycles and stable earnings allowed companies to pay large, steady and sustained dividends. Facing shorter life cycles, global competition and more unpredictable earnings, it should come as no surprise that companies are looking for more flexible ways of returning cash, than paying dividends and that buybacks have emerged as an alternative. As companies take advantage of the new tax law and bring back trapped cash, some will undoubtedly use the cash to buy back stock, and be loudly declaimed by the usual suspects, for not putting the cash to "productive" uses.  I would offer two counters, the first being where I note that more than 60% of global companies destroy value as they try to reinvest and growth, and the second being  that it is better for economies, for aging companies to give cash back to stock holders, to invest in better businesses.
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