Seven Stocks Showing Deep Value On A Benjamin Graham NCAV Screen

28th Oct '11 by Ben Hobson

15 comments 42960 reads

For investors keen to identify the ultimate value stocks, there is no shortage of investment philosophy and advice to put to the test – and among the most famous are the models formulated by the father of Value Investing - Benjamin Graham. With an approach that emerged from the grim days of the Great Depression, Graham’s techniques have gone on to become a vital tool for value hunters. Within his earliest work, Graham came up with a stringent value test that assesses a company based on the value of its current assets minus its total liabilities. It is a demanding screen to pass especially when market valuations are high, but research has shown that Net Current Asset Value – or NCAV stocks as they are known – offer investors significant potential gains.

Graham and his now legendary books, ‘Security Analysis’ and ‘The Intelligent Investor’ are firmly embedded in the foundations of conventional investment theory. For anyone that isn’t familiar with him, it is worth referring to the views of an equally high profile value investor for guidance – Warren Buffett – who credited his professor for shaping his well known and hugely successful investment philosophy:

Graham began penning his investment philosophy with the publication of Security Analysis in 1934, which was followed by the more accessible guide The Intelligent Investor in 1949. In The Intelligent Investor, Graham sets out two detailed screens for potential investors, one for “Defensive Investors” and another more demanding test for “Enterprising Investors”. As the original ‘quant’ on Wall Street, he aimed to invest purely on the basis of the undervaluation of bargain stocks, seeking safety from individual bankruptcy risk by diversifying his portfolio with a large numbers of companies – he suggested 30. While his legacy has tended to be dominated by his later work, the earlier formulas, in particular NCAV, remains a vital tool in identifying these undervalued stocks.

NCAV for deep value

NCAV is a deep value screen that values a company based on its Current Assets – think cash and cash equivalents, money it is owed and inventories – minus its Total Liabilities. The essence of the model is to identify bargain stocks that are trading at such a low price that they are unlikely to slip further. In the worst case, you would be able to liquidate the company and still emerge with a gain. To add…

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nicole

28th Oct '11

Beddard at iii has been harping on about this stuff too - though he's focused on a tiddler Airea. http://blog.iii.co.uk/airea-falls-at-last-hurdle/

Wouldn't trust those Chinese ones.

marben100

29th Oct '11

As it happens, I know quite a bit about Ceres Power (LON:CWR) and MBL (LON:MUBL)

Ceres is buring through about £14m p.a. and says in it's prelims:

The Board anticipates that the Group will raise an initial tranche of funding during the next 12 months to continue the development, testing and trialing of the mains gas residential CHP product as set out in the Chairman's Statement.

Unfortunately, that makes it too speculative for me to invest in at present, as there is no telling what share price it will be able to raise funds at. I can even envisage that it might be bought out at a low price (e.g. by Centrica, who are already a large shareholder).

Having attended MBL's AGM recently, I can tell you that the chairman stated that the reported net current assets as at end of year are not a reflection of the current position and significant writedowns will be taken. That too makes it somewhat speculative (though less so that Ceres). Given the loss of its major customer, MBL's future is somewhat uncertain but management would have to work hard to destroy more value than already has been.

If you study Graham's work you will find that this screen is very much one element of his stock selection process. There are many other more complex criteria that a stock would have to meet to qualify. One of his criteria for identiying a "defensive stock" is that "each company selected should be large, prominent and conservatively financed."

Mark

ExpectingValue

Chiming in too, as Barratt are in my portfolio.

I think housebuilders fit into this screen by a rather fine wording choice; with land and work in progress classed as 'inventories', this shows up on NCAV. While I don't object to that, it does mean analysis like this - which uses NCAV as a proxy for fairly liquid assets - doesn't really suit housebuilders. When we think of inventories, it usually takes the form of stock in a shop or something similar that can be sold and wound down on fairly short notice.

Barratt's £3bn land bank is probably far less liquid than the fixed assets of most other, smaller companies.

shade

31st Oct '11

Just to add a few points which haven't been said so far:

1. Most if not all of the stocks listed aren't making a profit, or worse, have consistently making losses for the past couple of years.

2. Pretty gloomy for MBL. Digital delivery is where it's at right now. Traditional wholesalers will be struggling as more and more physical sales are losing to digital/internet streaming. Just look at HMV and GAME. Unless they come up with wholesale rights to distribute and stream movies online, I wouldn't invest in them.

Murakami

Good comments, thanks. Re Graham's full Defensive and Enterprising Investor criteria, we've modelled those out now in full as part of Stockopedia Premium. At the moment, there's only one company on the UK market qualifiying under Graham's Defensive criteria (a stock which incidentally fails on a pure NCAV basis) and none at all qualifying under the Enteprising criteria (see details here).

However, the point of the piece above was to focus on the results of what might be called a single criterion "naive NCAV" screen. The UK research referred to above just used this approach with no additional filtering criteria and generated an annualised return of up to 19.7% per year over five years. The paper is well worth a read.

That's not to say that a more nuanced NCAV strategy with additional filters, which, for example, took account of the lack of liquidity in (housebuilding) inventories or the level of cashburn couldn't do even better than this. It probably would. But c. 20% a year compounding seems pretty respectable for a mechanical strategy, of course assuming it can continue to be replicated in an out of sample period.

However, it is certainly true that the NCAV approach tends to be a "hold your nose and buy" strategy which is not for the faint-hearted...

1st Nov '11

Hi "Murakami",

I wholly support Stockopedia's efforts to provide powerful screening tools. They are a useful "first step" in finding companies that might merit further investigation. However, when you say

But c. 20% a year compounding seems pretty respectable for a mechanical strategy

I must refer you to Jason Zweig's commentary on Chapter 1 of The Intelligent Investor: (Revised edition 2006), in relation to a number of mechanical investing techniques:

...Each of these so-called investing approaches fell prey to Graham's law: All mechanical formulae for earning higher stock performance are "a kind of self-destructive process - akin to the law of diminishing returns...

Graham deprecates mechanical investing techniques (you need to read the chapter and commentary to fully understand exactly why). And his pronouncements exactly match my own experience over a long period. I even tried a semi-mechanical approach (based on a group of investors voting for value stocks) on part of my own portfolio over a four year period. Back testing over the previous 5 years (2002-7) showed that the approach I had selected should yield great results. Unfortuantely, as Graham suggests, back-testing proves little. In the subsequent four years, this approach significantly underperformed the rest of my portfolio. Here is my explanation of the strategy: http://boards.fool.co.uk/Message.asp?mid=10250598&bid=51192 and here is my final article on the results: http://boards.fool.co.uk/Message.aspx?mid=12172685

Note also this comment from Zweig, which also matches my own experience and views:

Graham's definition of investing could not be clearer: "An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return". note that investment, acording to graham, consists of three elements:

you must thoroughly analyse a company, and the soundness of its underlying business, before you buy its stock;

you must deliberately protect yourself against serious losses;

you must aspire to "adequate", not extraordinary, performance.

Proper investment, as opposed to speculation, requires hard work. There are no short cuts.

Regards,

valuer

It seems your mechanical strategy relied on a consensus vote of a group of investors. Isn't the point of contrarian value investing that you shouldn't be investing according to consensus viewpoints? Not sure that your example best illustrates that mechanical investing strategies don't work - perhaps it shows that social investing strategies don't. I know of many successful strategies and rich men that have benefited from mechanical 'quant' investment strategies - although they were certainly more diversified than the Graham one mentioned.

Hi valuer,

Isn't the point of contrarian value investing that you shouldn't be investing according to consensus viewpoints?

In this case, however, the group was one of contrarians! There selections were intended to be of unpopular stocks, that the investing "herd" (very different from the group) hated. The fallacy, however, was that too many placed too much reliance on simply looking at the figures. This led to repeated selection of RBS, which on simple value metrics looked "cheap". The reality, however, was that the raw figures couldn't be trusted - as we now know. Zweig cites several examples of mechanical strategies that appeared to work... until they didn't, including : "Cash in on the calendar", "What Works on Wall Street", "The Foolish Four" (promoted by TMF USA). The simple fact is that if any mechanical strategy worked reliably, it would become widely used, resulting in market disturbance that defeated the strategy!

The reason I posted was that I feel sure that the idea of having some of his principles applied to a mechanical strategy would have Graham spinning in his grave. If you study his work carefully, you will find that his emphasis on "thorough analysis" (which doesn't just mean looking at a few figures) is the key message he is trying to "sell", alongside the need to forma reasonable valuation metric for a stock and then buying it when it appears cheap vs that metric and selling when it doesn't. That is the philosophy I (try to! - it's easier said than done) apply to my own investing. You will also find that Graham suggested using quality managed funds for those that don't have the time (or inclination) to do their own "thorough analysis". As you read further in his works, you will find that Graham's through analysis includes a careful study of the company's history, to help you judge the likely trajectory of its earnings and balance sheet. I hope and expect that Pro tools will help with this (but it would be wise to go back to source to check any key figures - and, as Graham advocates, to investigate any accounting adjustments that have been made.

I applaud Stockopedia for their efforts on these screens (c'mon guys, let's have the beta, at last!). However, users must be aware that it is not wise to rely on them solely. Rather you should use screens to find possible companies that fit your investing criteria - and then study those companies closely to see whether there are qualitative issues that make those companies less (or more!) undervalued than they seem at first glance - and whether or not they are genuinely safe investments (i.e. unlikely to go bust or be taken over/bought out at a price below what you're paying).

Best,

PS quant strategies are also mentioned in the book . Graham acknowledges that they can work - but they are far more sophisticated than the type of mechanical strategies we're talking about here. Moreover, they're trading strategies, not investments. I actually use one I've developed myself for my trading activities and it has produced small but pretty consistent profits for the last 4 years - but they're pretty different to the types of tool we're talking about here, based on stock screeners. Most quant strategies are forms of arbitraging, capitalising on small market anomalies and statistical methods. My own strategy works because it focusses on a very small niche that is too small for the hedgies to bother with. Such strategies are also likely to require access to far more resources than the typical investor reading these boards will have access to (though my own is relatively simple).

Crusty

6th Nov '11

This method seems to detect value destroyers par excellence. More a list of companies to avoid I would have thought. Ceres - yet to prove their system works, let alone profitably. MUBL - distribution model shot to pieces by the net. Housebuilders - asset value could crumble as prices come up against affordability. Chinese companies ....smell, it's awful. This guy may be very clever, but it sure doesn't look like it from where I stand.

5th Dec '11

Just adding a couple of other interesting NCAV links:

Edward Croft

12th Mar '12

I think its pretty phenomenal how our Ben Graham bargain screen stocks have been performing in recent months and time to resurrect this thread. Since early December the Net Nets and NCAV selections have almost doubled the market return across broadly diversified portfolios. In the last month alone - the net net list has gained almost 9% and its up over 22% overall vs 11% for the market.

http://www.stockopedia.com/screens/category/bargain-stocks-4/?sort=1month

As if to prove the point that we should beware our inherent qualitative biases against the kinds of stocks that come up on these lists Barratt Developments (LON:BDEV) and Telford Homes (LON:TEF) have absolutely rocketed ever since. Barratt is up from 80p to over £1.40 and Telford Homes up from 65p to over £1 - its interesting that these stocks were among those that were highlighted as being substantively misplaced as buys in the original article.

Even Greenblatt of Magic Formula fame has written recently about being careful not to overly weight one's own opinions when selecting stocks. He has found many complaining that the Magic Formula just doesn't perform for individual accounts. The truth is that people have been selecting the wrong stocks from the lists. It's regularly the most surprising and unpopular selections that do the very best - which is kind of the whole point - you just can't beat the market by taking an opinion that the consensus agrees with !

15th Mar '12

Mark, Just thought I'd reflect how well the net-net bargain basket of stocks has been performing in recent months. Up an astonishing 34% since early December and leading our set of screens in this rally. http://j.mp/yO12Rv

Granted some of the outperformance is due to sub £10m microcap companies, but it does tally with your thoughts on capitalising on very small niches that are too small for hedge funds to bother with. The thing with net nets is individually they are enormously risky, but as a basket and in the right circumstances they can perform extremely well as essentially you are buying a set of assets that is priced at less than a worst case liquidation value.

For anyone interested in the longer term history of Net Nets there's some good backtesting on Old School Value for the US Market - http://j.mp/y1yW1G

Geronimo9999

12th Jun '16

Are not these comments (and original 2011 post) now very dated and probably, therefore, not particularly relevant?

smallcapman

13th Jun '16

Any companies mentioned may or may not be, but the principles hold.

Since you decided to post on a four year old plus thread, what's your view?

Scm

Seven stocks showing deep value on a Benjamin Graham NCAV Screen

NCAV for deep value

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Ben Hobson

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