我很少不同意研究员和金融博主巴里·鲁特兹，但时间终于来了。上周巴里写了一列叫做彭博视图的专栏“为什么'峰值盈利模型'是废话.” Though I don’t agree with everything I read, and I hardly ever expend the energy to write a long response, this time I saw an opportunity to discuss several important topics: the Fed model (where Barry and I actually agree) and profit margins and the P/E model (where we disagree).
在他的文章中，巴里辩称，美联储模式是有缺陷的，因为它比较了两个变量 - 利率暗示的估值（十年财政收益率的反比力）和实际估值，市场价格收益 - 告诉您股票是否便宜或昂贵的。巴里写道，“配方的问题是它不包含一个而不是两个变量。...因此，美联储模型告诉您两件事之一：要么equitiesare over/undervalued, or consensus earning estimates are either too high or too low.”
I agree that the Fed model could be telling you that stock valuations are too low or too high in relation to interest rates, but this assumes that interest rates are at the right level and will be at this level in the future. Current interest rates could be too high or too low as well, especially in an environment in which governments globally set the levels of short- and long-term interest rates, rather than letting the market do it. Also, the Fed model confuses an intuitive relationship (that is, higher interest rates lead to lower P/Es and vice versa) with a direct relationship.
除了利息收入和费用on corporate income statements, there is no direct relationship between interest rates and valuations. Also, today’s interest rates are low because the Fed has bought $4 trillion of our bonds, and no one is really sure (except for the Fed, which is certain!) what impact the unwinding of this debt will have on future interest rates.
到目前为止，巴里（谁写过博客中的美联储模型中的缺陷，大局）和我一致意见：您必须预测一个非常困难预测来确定其他比率的比率，我们是甚至不确定一个人对另一个的影响。
然后Barry争辩说，P / E比率也有两个变量（价格和收益），因此，“除非您知道其中一个变量是什么，否则您不知道估值公式的结果是什么将。”
在P / E比率中，毫无疑问当前价格是多少，但收入是一个假设。你可以看看去年的收益 - 这不是一个假设 - 但去年的收入不是很重要;未来的E将是什么是重要的。您可以查找分析师估算股票或全股市的前进收益，但这些只是估计。
I implore you to think about earnings as sales times a profit margin. Let’s put sales aside for a second and focus on the margins. When you talk about profit margins for the whole economy, it is a bit of an equivocal exercise, but once you start thinking about profit margins on the company level, they become a bit more intuitive. If you have a company that earns very high economic profits, another company will want some of those profits; a competitor will lower prices or provide more services and generally try to compete those profits away (think Apple versus Samsung).
或者考虑设备公司卡特彼勒American icon that has benefited tremendously from the commodity supercycle: Its sales suffered a brief pause during the financial crisis and then continued to go up, as if overcapacity in construction in the U.S. and Europe had not taken place. Caterpillar has been greatly helped by operational leverage — as its sales went up, its costs grew at a slower pace, and thus its margins expanded. But even supercycles end, and even if they didn’t, competition from cheaper Chinese and Japanese companies (helped especially by the weak yen) is always lurking. Caterpillar’s profit margins will likely decline significantly.
This is a long way of saying that profit margins mean-revert — because, as GMO co-founder Jeremy Grantham so tidily puts it, capitalism works. It is almost like a law of financial gravity: Profit margins always revert to the mean. (There are some exceptions on a company-by-company basis, but they are rare.) If profit margins are too high, they decline; if they are too low, they go up. Today margins are at a new modern high and will likely decline a lot going forward, driving earnings down with them.
但不是那么快;让我们记住，E是销售的利润率。所以也许销售增长将使我们免除并抵消迫在眉睫的利润率下降的巨大压力。现在让我戴上经济学家的脆弱帽子。我仍然记得这一点来自宏观经济学课程：老师问我们，“想象一下，每个工人都真的很认真，开始啜饮5小时的能量饮料，得到了极具动力，并提供了许多花式的计算机和其他工具。你认为在真正的GDP增长中会发生什么，这之前是，让我们说，3％？“一只手射击，我的同学开始呕吐数字：8％，10％，15％。我记得答案震惊了我。他说，“它将增长0.5％，或者最多可能1％。”
Again, I am wearing a flimsy hat as an economist here, but my teacher was right. If all the wonderful, magical things happen to our economy — taxes are lowered, unemployment falls, productivity rises, and interest rates are very stable, then GDP (the sales of the whole economy) will grow just a bit more strongly — 1 percent or 2 percent more at the most. A developed economy is already a well-oiled machine; it is very difficult to make it grow much faster.
问题是：即使国内生产总值以加速率的加速率为6％，这种增长也不会显着抵消边缘平均逆转。这是一个简化的例子：让我们说，2013年的经济销售额为100美元，利润率为16％（我们在这一级）;因此收益是16美元。如果2014年经济增长，让我们说，6％，销售额为106美元。但如果利润率意味着恢复到10％，那么收入将降至10.60美元 - 下降33％。（这里我非常善良;平均值约为9％，历史上最初的边距在他们的意思恢复时比率低于平均水平。）因此，如果市场的价格为180美元，您认为您正在购买11美元的价格廉价市场。times $16 in earnings, you’d be unpleasantly surprised when earnings dropped to $10.60, because suddenly you’d discover that you owned a very pricey asset at 17 times earnings.
Yes, there are multiple variables in P/E: price, sales and profit margins. But unlike the Fed model, in which one variable was not directly related to another, in the P/E equation there is a direct mathematical relationship between variables. It is an equation with which you have to perform some analysis — just as most of us do when we analyze stocks, and just as Barry did when he was a sell-side analyst.
当然，透过巴里文章闪耀的真实性。即使我对此是对的，我不知道利润边缘将意味着恢复或哪些P / Einvestors将决定持续下降。该市场去年增长了30％以上，但盈利看到了平庸的增加。市场的不合理性可能会使我作为预测者的声誉。