Saturday, March 14, 2015

My Kingdom For A Good Stock

I was a bit surprised this morning to see that the MFI index was beating the R3K so far in 2015.  here is a table showing the 50 stocks, and one can see the out performance is really due to a single stock: EBIX.

Stock Start 2-Jan Current YTD Change
  ADMS      17.37         17.49         17.41 0.2%
  AFOP      14.51         14.55         17.70 22.0%
  ANIK      40.74         39.76         39.75 -2.4%
  APOL      34.11         33.26         26.76 -21.5%
  AGX      33.64         33.52         32.40 -3.7%
  AVID      14.21         14.22         14.63 3.0%
  AWRE         4.54           4.50            4.44 -2.2%
  BCOR      13.85         13.51         14.40 4.0%
  BKE      52.52         52.68         51.04 -2.8%
  CA      30.45         30.69         31.64 3.9%
  CSCO      27.82         27.61         28.13 1.1%
  COH      37.56         37.31         41.58 10.7%
  DLX      62.25         61.60         63.79 2.5%
  DEPO      16.11         16.05         25.20 56.4%
  EBIX      16.99         16.81         29.63 74.4%
  FLR      60.63         60.69         56.90 -6.2%
  GME      33.80         33.80         40.70 20.4%
  GORO         3.38           3.44            3.01 -10.9%
  ONE         4.21           4.22            2.65 -37.1%
  IQNT      19.63         19.13         15.64 -20.3%
  IDCC      52.90         52.39         53.05 0.3%
  IILG      20.89         21.02         26.79 28.2%
  ITRN      22.04         21.69         22.33 1.3%
  KING      15.36         15.06         15.84 3.1%
  LCI      42.88         43.28         65.03 51.7%
  LFVN         1.30           1.32            0.79 -39.2%
  LQDT         8.17           7.96            9.69 18.6%
  MSB      17.28         17.45         17.50 1.3%
  NHTC      11.45         11.33         16.69 45.8%
  NSR      27.80         27.74         22.26 -19.9%
  NUS      43.70         42.28         56.09 28.4%
  PDLI         7.71           7.68            7.28 -5.6%
  PFMT         6.65           6.58            3.76 -43.5%
  PETS      14.37         14.49         15.89 10.6%
  PBI      24.37         24.37         22.63 -7.2%
  RPXC      13.78         13.71         14.50 5.2%
  SPOK      17.36         17.42         17.59 1.3%
  STRA      74.28         72.63         59.93 -19.3%
  RGR      34.63         34.90         52.28 51.0%
  TTWO      28.03         28.10         25.43 -9.3%
  TDC      43.68         44.00         42.14 -3.5%
  TZOO      12.62         12.16            9.63 -23.7%
  TPUB      22.90         22.82         17.59 -23.2%
  UBNT      29.64         29.70         30.47 2.8%
  UIS      29.48         28.89         23.20 -21.3%
  USNA    102.59      102.28       100.00 -2.5%
  VEC      27.40         27.39         32.03 16.9%
  VIAB      75.25         75.40         68.46 -9.0%
  WTW      24.84         21.53         10.47 -57.9%
  WILN         2.99           3.02            2.57 -14.0%
Total    19,816      19,666 #N/A 1.2%

 As you can see, EBIX is up 74% and the total index is up 1.2%.  As there are 50 stocks, the impact of EBIX is 74%/50, which is about 1.5%.  So MFI index is negative without EBIX. Actually, that is unfair, there are some other good stocks, such as RGR, DEPO, LCI and NHTC.  Luckily I own a couple of those (as well as GME and NUS).

MFI Formula

As I mentioned, I have two weeks before my next MFI tranche. Again, for yucks, I loaded today's top 50 over $100m into my worksheet to see what will qualify.

Ticker Market Cap Price Dividend Yield
HRB                  8,756         31.81                0.80 2.5%
CA                13,759         31.39                1.00 3.2%
CSCO              142,690         27.94                0.84 3.0%
GME                  4,449         40.70                1.44 3.5%
MSFT              340,061         41.38                1.24 3.0%
PDLI                  1,173           7.28                0.60 8.2%
PBI                  4,510         22.44                0.75 3.3%

Wow,  very interesting.  I will have to decide what to do.  PPC, KING and BKE have fallen off the list.  Not sure if Yahoo has changed how they treat special dividends.  That is a short list to pick five from.

MFI Tracking

The March 2014 tracking portfolio just has a couple weeks to go. It is getting thrashed.  As are the 4 following. Those five are up a mere 4% on average while the index is up 9%.  Not what we're looking for.  Probably helps explain why my May and August tranches are trailing by an average of 3.5%.  But then the tracking portfolios September onward are leading by an average of 2 points.





3 comments:

Unknown said...

Marsh,

PPC, KING, BKE are still on my list as I go to Yahoo Historical Price and do "Dividends ONLY". The special dividend still show up.
I know that is more work, but for my book I would want to include these if I did not own King and Bke.

Marsh_Gerda said...

Thanks John. I do not disagree. It is very little extra work. By the way, I have embarked on a major revamp. I do not mentioned it much in my blog, but I really only started collecting dividend information in 2010. Before that date, I went through my stocks and flagged them as either a dividend stock or not from memory. I am now going back into 10Ks and yahoo finance and pulling actual historical dividends. I am finding there are some stocks I flagged as a dividend stock, but may have been below the 2.6% threshold and there are stocks in the other direction. So far it doesn't look material enough to change my views, the two pieces have largely washed each other out.

But it will give me the ability to refine my historical analysis, when complete, to look at differing cut off points than just 2.6%. It should also allow me, to a large extent, to look at stocks that issued a special dividend versus regular quarterly dividends.

Stay tuned, it is a fair amount of effort.

Unknown said...

Marsh,

I hope you can do it little by little. From what I think I know you do not lose much performance on a +1.8% cut. But we do not really know.

I am thinking that if I don't have 10 stocks on 100m sort to include the DLX and Viab before moving to a 200 sort. Just thinking, but my rules for NOW is to always have 10 +2.4% stocks that I don't own.