Why Woolworths and Coles pricing matters

Supermarket expenses account for about 16% of our annual household expenditure for our family of 4 (2 adults, 2 children excluding mortgage costs). In cash terms, roughly $25,000 per year, and the second highest category of expenditure in the household after childcare. The Australian competition regulator, the ACCC, in an enquiry last year (2008) identified groceries as representing 12-14% of the average household’s after tax income.

The price of supermarket goods year-in year-out therefore has a quite significant impact on household savings.

Whilst there are new entrants coming in like Costco and Aldi the ACCC still considers the market ‘workably competitive’  but notes in its July 2008 report that there are “limited incentives for Coles and Woolworths to compete aggressively on price”.

Online supermarket shopping: checking the pricing of Coles Online versus Woolworths Homeshop

The increasingly sophisticated nature of Coles and Woolworths online shopping operations means you can monitor comparative pricing for the basket of groceries your particular home normally buys.  This is because both online websites enable you to save a ’shopping basket’ of regular items. You can also see on the sites when goods are ‘on special’.

Unlike physically visiting a supermarket it doesn’t make a lot of difference to an online buyer where the food comes from e.g. you don’t have to understand the store layout and you basically don’t care whether the food has to travel 5 kilometres or 15 kilometres to get to you. So some concerns that have been raised about the limitations of the government’s ‘Grocery Watch’ price monitoring may not apply to online shopping so much.

Basically if you’re willing to recreate your normal shopping basket on “the other supermarket’s website” it’s easy to switch (and in our experience it may take you a couple of hours to do this once you print out your list and re-enter each item).

Who is really cheaper: Coles Online or Woolworths Homeshop?

The results from our household basket of about 54 branded items based on our last 6 months purchases (the absolutely identical item from both supermarket chains that you can find at the bottom of this article) was that although more of the items were slightly cheaper at Woolworths the difference was so marginal  that it’s not worth worrying about (the average item price difference across the two supermarkets was less than 1%).

In the end our 54 item basket came out at $334 at Woolworths and $333 at Coles (see below). However if one takes into account the delivery charges for the two chains (the minimum delivery charge at Woolworths is currently $5 and at Coles it’s $9) it all comes out almost identical again.

Are all online products similarly priced though? 

Despite the list below which suggests an average individual price difference of less than 1% (we’re sure the supermarkets themselves monitor eachother closely which may account for this extremely close pricing) we suspect that not all pricing is so equal.  

Our list was based on absolutely identical products. What we could not easily comparatively price, were goods like own-branded goods, and we’re sure the supermarkets are aware of this in the assumptions they make themselves about organisations like the ACCC trying compare their prices or even many individual shoppers comparing pricing.

In these areas the price differences can be much more marked. For example, Woolworths 3 litre milk is $3.95 where Coles 3 litre milk is $3.16, a 20% difference…

The ACCC’s report tends to bear this out:

“Price competition is strongest on promotions of key value items (which are products known by the supermarkets to be used by consumers to assess value). This is to be expected, given that the pricing of these products is most likely to encourage consumers to change where they buy
groceries.”

You need to check this with your own household basket and we suggest bread, milk, and salad may be where you find some of these more extreme differences (just don’t assume they apply across your whole groceries basket).

Are online supermarket shopping prices more expensive than in-store prices?

 We had heard this so we actually asked Woolworths by email:

“Hi, could you clarify how your Homeshop pricing compares to your in-store pricing? My assumption was that the pricing was the same with the exception of the delivery charge (which reflects your increased costs in terms of the delivery components). However I have been informed that Woolworths has a markup on online items over and above the in-store price. Is that correct? ”  

 For what it’s worth this is Woolworths’ response:

“The prices charged online are comparable to that of a metro supermarket. Not all supermarkets charge the same prices in each store for all items, therefore the prices online may differ to that of your local Woolworths supermarket. Homeshop still offers a convenient, high quality and competitively priced service direct to your door. We regularly review our pricing against other online grocery services and generally find we are cheaper on the total basket. “

We have not validated this assertion about identical instore/online pricing (subject to ‘local’ variations) by checking Woolworths dockets versus their online pricing.

However we have looked at Coles docket pricing from our local Coles versus their online operation and there did appear to be some signficant differences (see the Online v Instore column in the table below) with items like bread and butter and pasta and yoghurt between 8% and 18% cheaper in-store than via Coles Online (in fact any items we directly compared, albeit on a small sample, the online pricing was always more expensive).

We’d be interested to hear what you’ve found!

The comparative online pricing for this article from Coles and Woolworths

Posted under savings levels

Beliefs of Americans about investment returns from different asset classes

The thing that has bothered me over the years about investing in low cost equity tracker funds which eliminate all that stock-specific risk and have historically performed far better than any other asset class, is that they seem like such a no-brainer. Surely it is so obvious that everyone can see this with average actively managed fund performing worse than low cost passive vehicles?

And if everyone can see this then isn’t there going to be a whole pile of ‘dumb’ money piling in driving index constituents to ever higher price earnings multiples, whilst ignoring the fundamentals of these stocks? Who’s going to be left to actually look at individual stocks to do the number crunching to really evaluate their value?

Ok, I realize that nobody ever went broke (particularly casinos) by basing their business on the public thinking they were cleverer than the average Joe but still? Admittedly there is also a lot of rubbish quoted out there that makes it look like stocks do not offer good long term returns. One of my pet hates is writers just quoting the index e.g.

“the S&P is back where it was 10 years ago”

and the writer not realizing that, for example, (from Standard and Poors) dividend income has represented roughly 1/3rd of the monthly total return on the S&P 500 since 1926, ranging from a high of 53% during the 1940s to a low of 14% in the 1990s (when investors focused on growth).

But there is also a huge amount of very compelling research identifying long term returns on different asset classes…

It looks like I needn’t have worried about crowd mentality when it comes to trackers looking at this survey though!  Sadly another thing that stands out about the Gallup results is that lower income investors are more likely to view savings accounts as better investments (obviously imposing an inherent ceiling on their growing their personal wealth) although equally oddly higher income investors believe most in investment in real estate!

The study also bears out that  we investors are so into driving by looking into the rear vision mirror … with equities (now that they represent better value) falling in popularity by 15% or so over the last 2 years (the same survey has been carried out since 2003) and bonds and cash which have performed better over the same period (despite the forward inflationary risk with a wall of government debt bearing down on us) becoming much more popular…

Posted under index trackers, investment strategies

Watching the Obama government fiddle around with the various creditors in Chrysler (and in other government bailouts where political calculations are coming into play in Australia and the UK) it’s pretty obvious that there is ‘political risk’ coming back into investment in a big way.

It is something that Bill Gross at Pimco was also keen to stress in his latest podcast, “2+2=4″, that equity and debt holders may be looking at a highly regulated future where the ‘dead hand of government’ plays a significant role in setting future growth rates and income distributions (no doubt Mr Gross would be horrified by this oversimplification).

Another way to look at it is simply that the debt being run up in stimulus packages may create an irresistible temptation for governments to tap funding sources which currently might appear to be protected.

One obvious group of people who are being ’stuffed’ in the current environment are holders of cash, with interest rates of .5% in the UK or a (comparatively) generous 3% in Australia, perhaps a realization which may play a small part in the recent market runup.  In a future environment it may be that holders of non-inflation protected assets are also going to get stuffed.

As someone I know puts it more succintly, “the older generation are going to get stuffed somehow.”

However one other obvious source for governments to target are Super funds and pension funds.

As Kris Sayce puts it well in ‘Money Morning’ with regard to Australia:

“perhaps the biggest giveaway is the $1 trillion held in private superannuation accounts. At the moment these balances are almost untouchable by the government. It is up to the fund managers and trustees of the funds to decide where the money is invested.

That is a position that no government will allow to remain for too long. Not when there is a $300 billion public sector debt to be paid off. And a $100 billion public sector pension liability to be financed.

Not to mention all the increases in welfare payments that will arise in the next few years.”  

Given the time horizons involved we should all be thinking about what the government might do to get their hands on it to pay their bills. Mr Sayce’s view is that there may be inducements from the government to “swap their defined contribution super plans in return for a defined benefit government pension”, however we probably need to consider other possibilities as well. For example:

• could the government change the tax rates on super funds from 15%?
• could the government set maximum super fund sizes?
• could the government change the cap on non-concessional contributions (currently $150k)?
• could the government change the preservation age (the age most of us can access their super) - it’s been suggested that preservation age move to 67 by the interim Henry Review?
• could the government further target temporary residents (it is already taking their unclaimed super within 6 months of them departing Australia)?
• introduce tax on super income streams after preservation age (60), currently for most people there is no tax if the cash was taxed ‘going’ in).

From the government’s point of view there are  two risks:

1. loss of votes amongst a segment of the population that is getting larger (retirees)
2. reducing the savings rate (pretty much what it wants to do at the moment anyway and of course a mandatory super contribution level in effects sets a savings rate the government can fiddle with as well)

The level of risk overall should a key factor (especially for wealthier individuals given the budget changes to super) in whether you choose to put your money into the superannuation sandbox or operate outside it.

Posted under Risk, investment strategies

In the old (pre-internet) days to create a market rumour you actually had to go to the trouble of making a phone call to a broadsheet journalist. As a university prank we rang a major newspaper’s Property columnist, told him we were from the (fictitious) “Real Estate Institute” and did he know if there was any truth to the market rumour that there was a Sheikh in town with $200m to spend on property?

Unsurprisingly (because we’d just made it up) he didn’t know if there was any truth to it but that didn’t stop him printing it prominently the following day, “the real estate scene is abuzz with the rumour that there is a Sheikh in town with $200m to spend on some property acquisitions…” (I have no idea whether or not that benefited someone flogging property over the succeeding couple of weeks, if it did please forward me a cheque care of this blog). 

[PS Don't try this sort of thing at home, it's too easy to succeed, and probably illegal into the bargain.]

These days you don’t need to even get someone on the other end of a phone. Last Monday you could watch the internet equivalent of  this sort of rumour-mongering playing out in the blogosphere and email world and it’s interesting to take a closer look at how the rumour spread and why.

The Rumour

On Wednesday I received the following item forwarded by email:

“Monday, April 20, 2009
Stress Test Results Leaked

Posted by [name omitted] at 8:08 AM
Turner Radio Network out with a shocker on what they claim are the leaked Stress results. We paraphrase:

The Turner Radio Network has obtained “stress test” results for the top 19 Banks in the USA.

The stress tests were conducted to determine how well, if at all, the top 19 banks in the USA could withstand further or future economic hardship.

When the tests were completed, regulators within the Treasury and inside the Federal Reserve began bickering with each other as to whether or not the test results should be made public. That bickering
continues to this very day as evidenced by this “main stream media” report.

The Turner Radio Network has obtained the stress test results. They are very bad. The most salient points from the stress tests appear below.

1) Of the top nineteen (19) banks in the nation, sixteen (16) are already technically insolvent.

2) Of the 16 banks that are already technically insolvent, not even one can withstand any disruption of cash flow at all or any further deterioration in non-paying loans.

3) If any two of the 16 insolvent banks go under, they will totally wipe out all remaining FDIC insurance funding.

4) Of the top 19 banks in the nation, the top five (5) largest banks are under capitalized so dangerously, there is serious doubt about their ability to continue as ongoing businesses.

5) Five large U.S. banks have credit exposure related to their derivatives trading that exceeds their capital, with four in particular - JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, HSBC Bank America and
Citibank - taking especially large risks.

6) Bank of America`s total credit exposure to derivatives was 179 percent of its risk-based capital; Citibank`s was 278 percent; JPMorgan Chase`s, 382 percent; and HSBC America`s, 550 percent. It gets even worse: Goldman Sachs began reporting as a commercial bank, revealing an alarming total credit exposure of 1,056 percent, or more than ten times its capital!

7) Not only are there serious questions about whether or not JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs,Citibank, Wells Fargo, Sun Trust Bank, HSBC Bank USA, can continue in business, more than 1,800 regional and smaller institutions are at risk of failure despite government bailouts!

The debt crisis is much greater than the government has reported. The FDIC`s “Problem List” of troubled banks includes 252 institutions with assets of $159 billion. 1,816 banks and thrifts are at risk of failure, with total assets of $4.67 trillion, compared to 1,568 institutions, with $2.32 trillion in total assets in prior quarter.

Put bluntly, the entire US Banking System is in complete and total collapse.

More details as they become available. . . . . .” 

Spreading a Rumour

There were two other interesting features about the email aside from the fact that it took two whole days (!) to get to us.

Email Your Market Rumour

Firstly, my contact had had this email to him on Tuesday by a large investment banking house which I won’t name whose employee noted that “I am sharing this not to create undue panic but simply to let you know what is out there right now” and who also noted that he was sending this to his “valued clients and friends”.

One could argue that in a sense it’s this professional investor’s job to send round stuff like this if it, a) creates a reason to do a trade (!) and b) to let his clients know what rumours are doing the rounds in the rest of the market. Of course one could also argue that there is a bunch of people out there who could also use the those relatively unknown tools available like Google to check  the truth of what they’re disseminating.

The second thing that I thought was interesting was the speed this rumour spread at and how it spread.  In email terms there were already 3 headers from three different on-forwarders on the version of this story I sent.  Assume, for example, that each person in those 3 ‘layers’ forwarded it to 10 people then that’s 1000 individuals (10 X 10 X 10). Clearly some would have not forwarded it at all and some might have forwarded it to more or less than 10 but you get my drift (and it makes the math trivial).

Blog Your Market Rumour

Bloggers receiving this email unaware (maybe) or at least not bothering to check what was on the web just posted it verbatim on their blogs (actually they had been sent by email the full text of a blog post that was already up). In what NPR’s must-listen-to “On the Media” refers to as the “echo chamber of the blogosphere” it spread quickly, with on Wednesday there being about 96 web pages posted repeating the item verbatim, and when I did this search today (Saturday) there were 441 web pages repeating it. If you’re familar with Google you will also realize that Google’s PageRank system regards a link as a ‘vote’ for the importance of a website (whether your link actually says “here’s a bunch of crap” or “hey look at this item I think is a permanent and unique truth”).

So if you’re trying to spread a bear market rumour you need to realize that a blog post may not be enough: you really need to use email as a mechanism to get it out there (because bloggers reading the email may assume that the item is only being circulated by email and therefore that if they post it quickly on their blogs they may be amongst the first to break it on the web).

What Makes a Market Rumour Work

The best kinds of rumours ride the concerns already out there. This rumour was probably helped by two things: Bank of America’s results happened to also come out on Monday and they weren’t good (a 41% leap in non-performing assets) and of course the general concerns swirling around about banks anyway.

The best kind of spam also circulates effectively because it references an ‘authoritative source’.  The ‘Turner Radio Network’ from the email sounds pretty authoritative doesn’ t it?

Well errr… actually it’s totally unrelated to Turner Broadcasting and as is a blog run by a guy called Hal Turner and hosted using Blogspot’s free hosting service (I’m not going to link to it because PageRank does what it does and I’d merely be driving more traffic to it).

A $527m Market Rumour

Mr Turner himself seems to have been pretty impressed with the results:

“When the U.S. Stock Markets opened, Bank stocks were immediately impacted by folks spreading my report. Bank stock values plunged by eleven percent within 6 minutes. On the S&P 500 alone, bank stock values plunged by about $527 million dollars.”

 And he’s not alone on this anway: CNBC notes that the “Select Sector SPDR Financial ETF was down 5.4 percent after the blog post was widely disseminated by at least two third-party news services” and that a Treasury spokesman actually had to publically say the Treasury didn’t have the Stress Test results.

On one point it looks pretty clear Mr Turner is right, a good market rumour spread by people who don’t fact check carries its own momentum. As he noted on Monday night:

“Sorry guys, but whether the Turner Radio Network has the real results or not is no longer material.”

If you’d read this item from Mr Turner and immediately gone out and shorted US bank stocks (and maybe even forwarded it along ,and filed it a few times yourself as comments on articles on prominent financial sites) you also wouldn’t care whether it was right or wrong.

Posted under investment strategies, market timing

It will not have escaped people’s notice that shorting some indices last year would have been very lucrative. What about in 2009?

As a company we do some business with Hong Kong and Chinese clients. Recently we’ve been receiving letters in response to our invoices which read along the lines of:

“whether there is a possibility of a one-off discount for this year.. In view of the economic clouds and down cycle on the horizon our ..budgets for 2009 are very tight and in fact downsized - we would very much appreciate your kind and considerate courtesy in this matter.”

At the same time there is quite recent investor comment around about shorting China. For instance the Christmas edition of MoneyWeek suggests using the ‘Ultrashort FTSE/Xinhua 25 Proshares (US:FXP), an exchange traded fund that matches 200% of the inverse movement in the Chinese market.

However, looking at an indices chart of emerging markets  comparing the FXI (the long version of the FXP) and the Indian equivalent (the BSE30) and the Dow Jones index both China and India large caps have tracked down very closely (and at least 10% more than the DJI) at levels of 50% or so.

Admittedly China is not the worst emerging market performer of last year (Russia is down for example some 70%) but this does not appear to be a ‘new’ story (on a 5 year view these indexes are down some 150% from the heights they reached at the end of 2007) so one suspects that shorting China at this point could be a risky business. 

In ’short’, this boat has sailed.

Posted under index trackers, investment strategies

Obviously the size of your savings is clearly influenced by your current expenditure, perhaps not so much where compulsory superannuation is concerned in Australia, but definitely when it comes to making voluntary additional contributions to a pension of superannuation scheme.

And clearly, with the market the way it’s been over the last 12 months, many people’s pensions are now looking decidedly smaller, thereby increasing the amount that has to be saved.

So how in a practical sense can you identify what you’re really spending and more to the point, where you are spending it?

An obvious place to look is at the last 12 month’s bank statements but It is not that easy a task. For example, as an Australian resident with a household of 4, including two small children, we primarily use 2 funding sources to operate for household expenditure, a credit card and a bank account.

In Australia, as opposed to the UK, banks tend to impose more small transaction charges for things like direct debits and cash withdrawals so it makes sense to charge as much as possible to a credit card to reduce the number of bank account transactions provided you can pay your card off in full every month (and obviously it’s critical that you can pay it off).  The plus side of this credit-card based system is of course that Australian banks pay less derisory rates of interest on current accounts than do the UK banks.

Most accounts allow you to export transactions into something like Excel but on my accounts this is limited to the last 3 months, so you need to export every 3 months and save to build up a year’s worth.

Your next issue is quite a large number of transactions. For example, for our household of 4 we generated 367 transactions on our joint current account and 510 transactions on our joint credit card. Cash flowing into and out of other investments such as high interest accounts must of course be eliminated and then you’ve got the laborious task of categorising each expenditure item in Excel. To label all significant 850 odd transactions took me about 4 hours.

What you’ll end up with is something like this:

Excel remembers your categorisations and will prompt you after you first type a the first letter of a existing category on a new row (see our category list at the end).

You’ll then have a huge jumbled list of categorisation which you can argue with your partner about for hours but changing things is no problem - you just use Excel’s condition sum feature.

For instance Excel will pick out all items categorised as ‘childcare’ from both our credit card expenditure sheet and our current account expenditure sheet wherever they are and add them using the formula:

=SUMIF(’Credit-card’!E2:E514,”childcare”,’Credit-card’!C2:C514)+SUMIF(’Cash-mgmt’!E2:E514,”childcare”,’Cash-mgmt’!C2:C514)

Incidentally for our household of 4 with two small children these are the categories we came up with and this is our summarized expenditure breakdown for the last 12 months (perhaps useful if you’re an expatriate returning to Australia):

Probably bears no relationship to your own patterns (for example we have no mortgage costs) but that’s the whole point. Going through this exercise enabled us to identify about $13,000 in savings.

Posted under savings levels

Whilst the more visible mass layoffs at banks like Citigroup, RBS and HBOS grab the headlines, there have also been some subtle changes at banks which are equally designed to shore up their balance sheets.

This time however they’re looking to you, the customer, to do it.

In Australia we usually hold the cash component of our super fund in St George term deposits (St George is soon to merge with Westpac).

The way that St George configures term deposits is, of itself, of some interest as the “12 month term deposit”, if you read the fine print, actually translates into an ‘indefinite deposit’ if you fail to give the bank “Notice” during a 14 day maturity window at the end of the term deposit. Put simply, if you don’t tell the bank that you wish the term deposit to mature at that point they will simply re-invest it for the identical term at whatever the prevailing interest rate is at that time. 

Leaving aside the somewhat misleading nature of a ‘term deposit’ with an indefinite term (which has always been the case at St George) what has changed with the onset of the credit crunch is that it has suddenly got considerably more difficult to give them the Notice in the form in which they require it…

“You are able to continue to send a signed fax to Fixed Terms with a copy of your passport and drivers licence, outlining your request.  A contact number is required in order for our staff to make a verbal confirmation of the request received.  The Bank’s decision to implement these additional safeguards is to protect your funds and personal information.  As your security is of the utmost importance to us, if we are unable to contact you or identify you once contacted, the request will not be actioned.”

So, for ‘personal security’ reasons you can no longer inform them, in advance, that you wish the deposit to mature as specified in the term (we used to be able to do this by email or using phone banking) and in their online banking system whilst you can extend or vary the term you cannot mature it.

They actually now require verbal instruction to mature a term deposit using their phone banking service.  Bad luck if you’re on holiday or you happen to overlook the maturity statement they provide you in the mail … or if, like us, you happen to be travelling in a different timezone expect to spend some time late at night making sure your term deposit matches the term you agreed in the first place.

Naturally, the real motivation here is likely to be that many clients will overlook the fine print, and the bank will end up with some percentage of term deposits renewing when their owners in reality had the intention of moving the money to a better return elsewhere.  As interest rates fall this is a good thing to keep an eye on.

Posted under Risk, Setup

The current wholesale sell-off in global stock markets is leading to many a baby being thrown out with the bathwater! Inevitably there are some stocks which are being sold off which are sound businesses.  There are certainly far more exciting investment opportunities out there than there have been at for a good four years.  No doubt the forthcoming economic recession will have an impact on all industries, and most companies will see a significant reduction in revenue, profits and cash flow. Many however are currently being priced as if they will go bankrupt, or head into a long painful terminal decline. Some of these very undervalued companies might even manage to grow earnings in the forthcoming recession. 

Cable & Wireless: business segments and spin-off discussions

One example is Cable & Wireless in the UK.  Cable & Wireless essentially has two distinct businesses. The growing internet and broadband division for corporate customers in Europe, Asia and the US, and the International division which includes the legacy cash generative telecoms businesses in the Caribbean, Panama, Macau and Monaco.  For years shareholders have argued that the combination of these two divisions is not strategically compelling and that a demerger would be the best way to realise value.

Earlier this year management announced that they were considering strategic options including a demerger and returning cash to shareholders.  In the following months, the share price rose 20%, dramatically outperforming the sector, but in the last few weeks it has fallen over 30%.  Part of the reason for the recent stock price sell off is that management have suggested, quite sensibly in my view, that the current market turmoil is hardly the time to be realising value via a demerger and spin-off.  This does not signify a change in strategic thinking but rather a delay until more rational markets prevail.  

Cable & Wireless’s acquisition of Thus

C&W has also recently completed a takeover of its smaller UK rival, Thus.  Even after paying £361 million for Thus, the company will still be significantly underleveraged with a net debt position of £184 million, less than 10% of equity. The purchase of Thus, following on from the acquisition of Energis in 2005 gives C&W increased market share and helps them consolidate their position as a clear number two to BT in the provision of internet services to corporate customers in the UK.

Cable & Wireless: guidance and valuation

In the June 2008 interim statement, management said it was on track to achieve its guidance of a 20% increase in operating profits for this year. Let’s be conservative and assume that current economic circumstances mean C&W will not achieve any improvement in the underlying going concern this year or next. At the current price, this would put the business at a very reasonable 6.6X cash flow.  The dividend should be secure too; giving a current yield of 6%. Throw in likely cost savings from the Thus acquisition, and a potential special dividend from the eventual separation of the two key businesses, and it seems to me that Cable & Wireless is a bargain.

Disclaimer:  Note the author may hold investments in any of the companies mentioned in this article. Any new investment should only be considered in the context of the risks in your existing portfolio.

Posted under individual stocks

The whole market is on sale, 30%+ below its high.

So it doesn’t matter what you buy, you can just buy a tracker fund / index fund right? That will give you a low risk, low cost, highly diversified bet on the long term value of equities. Sure, you may want to drip-feed funds in, because it could fall another 20%.

We….ll, as ever, maybe it’s not that simple.

Industry sector weights in the ASX 100

For example, if you look at the broader Australian stockmarket, you find that actually were you to buy an ASX 100 tracker you are effectively taking a bet on two sectors in a big way, financials and mining. For instance Jun 2008 S&P sector weights show that the ASX 100 is 8.41% energy, 28.17% Financials-ex-Property, and 30.1% materials. In other words 64% of the large cap end of the index.

Industry sector weights in broader ASX indexes

So what about a broader tracker, for instance the State Street SPDRs tracker for the ASX 200?

Well this is actually a similar sector bet. For example Oct 2008 figures (i.e. even after the credit crisis fallout of the last 12 months) show a sector weight of 39% on financials, and 21% on materials, and 6% on energy, a total of 66%…

It is only when you get to the ASX Small Ordinaries (companies in the S&P ASX 300 but not in the S&P ASX 100) that financials drop to 7% but materials is still 31% and energy is still 14% taking the weight for the 3 to 51%.

You can not buy a tracker of the Small Ordinaries, you’d have to look at a managed fund like BT Microcap Opportunities or the equivalent, so in a sense this is rather academic, but it does give you a pointer to the extent that the Australian economy is dependent on these sectors, even after a commodity price fall and the banking price fall.

Sector weights in UK indexes

The FTSE 100 is 22% oil and gas, 21% financials, and 15% basic materials as of June 30 2008, another significant bet on mining and banking.

However the FTSE 250 is a significantly more diversified bet: 27% financials, 6% oil and gas, and 5.4% basic materials as of 30 June (probably significantly less of a financial and mining bet as of Oct 2008).

Non-standard ’stylistic’ trackers can also give you some variation on the standard sectors. For example, the FTSE UK Dividend Plus tracker, which consists of the highest dividend yields in the FTSE 350 filtered by specific liquidity requirements, is 32% financials and 4% oil and gas as of 30 June.

Aren’t trackers about not guessing themes?

None of this is to say that we should be trying to guess what themes will do well (for instance a tracker that is heavily weighted to financials and diversified might not be a bad thing to buy at the moment).

It is also the case that not all trackers are equal. So-called ‘Enhanced Trackers’ where the managers have some freedom to track the index somewhat more loosely and use derivatives, supposedly often perform better over the longer term by anticipating index departures and arrivals, but more of that later.

Posted under index trackers, investment strategies

I received this in an email this morning - don’t know where it originated but it is a good laugh with more than a grain of truth in it.

“I am going to leave you with 21 reasons to buy some beaten up equities.
1.        Good news is taken as bad news (the market is totally glass empty)
2.        Every guest on CNBC is talking about buying US T Bills at record low yield
3.        Every other guest on CNBC is talking about buying gold at a record high (in A$)
4.        Marc Faber was just on CNBC
5.        CBA, the strongest bank in the world right now, struggles to get a placement away at a 15% discount despite the fact they bought a good asset very cheaply from a distressed seller
6.        Volatility is unprecedented
7.        Hedge Funds are massive forced sellers of everything
8.        Central Banks and regulators are pumping more liquidity than at any time in history
9.        Cash rates are going sharply lower; cash will be an underperforming asset class
10.        Equity risk premiums are enormous meaning that real investment risk is low.
11.        The credit markets have bottomed
12.        Fear is the no.1 investment factor
13.        Every headline in the mainstream press is about the equity market
14.        The coffee shop guy kindly asked me today “Charlie are you ok?”
15.        We are all addicted to CNBC: ie we are all focused on the extreme short-term.
16.        Commentators who have predicted 10 of the last 2 recessions are all over the press
17.        Main St now gets we have a problem (ie it’s a known known)
18.        Stocks and currencies are being sold irrespective of fundamentals
19.        The Oil price is down $62 from its high.
20.        Inflationary pressure is dead
21.        Even my Labrador is bearish”

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