In light of recent market moves I wanted to revisit this post about discount rates and how they might impact valuation multiples (spoiler: it’s an inverse relationship). I think the post holds up pretty well. The key feature was this chart:

Recall that there’s an inverse relationship between the discount rate and the multiple you should pay for an earnings stream. The discount rate has two components:

1) a riskfree interest rate representing the time value of money (usually proxied by a long-term government bond yield), and

2) a “risk premium” meant to account for things like economic sensitivity, corporate leverage and the inherent uncertainty surrounding the future.

Back in January I wrote:

By way of anecdotal evidence, sentiment is getting more and more bullish. Every day I am reading articles about the possibility of a market “melt-up.” If the market melts up it may narrow the implied risk premium and further reduce the implied discount rate. If this occurs, it leaves investors even more exposed to a double whammy: simultaneous spikes in both the riskfree interest rate and the risk premium. The years 1961 to 1980 on the chart give you an idea of how destructive a sustained increase in the discount rate can be to equity valuations.

I am reminded of this as I read this post from Josh Brown, featuring the below chart:

Taken together, this is a fairly vivid illustration of why the current level of corporate earnings matters far less than long-run expectations for margins, growth, and (perhaps most importantly) the discount rate.

(You do remember what’s happening with interest rates, don’t you?)

Assuming no growth, a perpetual earnings stream of $1 is worth $20 discounted at 5%.

Raise that discount rate to 10% and the same earnings stream is worth $10.

Raise it to 15% and the value falls below $7.

And so on.

Now, there’s no way to reliably predict what the discount rate will look like over time. The real world is not as simple as my stylized example. On top of that the discount rate is not something we can observe directly. The best we can do is try to back into some estimate based on current market prices and consensus expectations for corporate earnings.

So, what’s the point of the exercise?

First, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect some mean reversion when the estimated discount rate seems to lie at an extreme value. And yes, I counted short-term rates at zero percent as “extreme.” As the above attribution chart clearly demonstrates, multiple contraction can be quite painful.

Second, this should explicitly inform your forward-looking return expectations. Generally speaking, the higher the implied discount rate, the higher your implied future returns. There is good economic sense behind this. “Discount rate” in this context is synonymous with “implied IRR.” To look at a 5% implied IRR and expect a 20% compound return as your base case makes no economic sense. Assuming the implied IRR is reasonably accurate, the only way that happens is if you sell the earnings stream to a greater fool at a stupidly inflated price.

Do fools buy things at irrationally high prices?

Yes. Indisputably. All the time.

Does that make price speculation a sound investment strategy?

No, it does not.

“Multiple expansion” is just a fancy way of saying “speculative price increase.”

Likewise, “multiple contraction” is a fancy was of saying “speculative price decline.”

Sometimes I hear people say we “deleveraged” following the 2008 financial crisis. Sure, the consumer may have deleveraged, but I can assure you there’s plenty of debt left sloshing around in the system. A bunch of it has moved from bank balance sheets to what can loosely be thought of as the hedge fund space.

We call this private credit or direct lending. It’s huge right now in the institutional investing world. Sometimes it feels like every scrappy hedge fund guy in the world is launching a private credit vehicle.

Today, I came across a great paper by Shawn Munday, Wendy Hu, Tobias True and Jian Zhang providing an overview of the space. If, like me, you’ve been inundated with pitch decks from private credit funds over the past couple years, you won’t find much in the way of new information. But the stats are worth perusing.

If you are an allocator this is nice base rate data for the space. According to the pitch decks everyone is targeting a net IRR in the mid-teens. It doesn’t surprise me that the median IRR for the post-crisis era is closer to 10% than mid-teens.

Personally, I’m inclined think median returns over the next decade will look more like the 2006 and 2007 vintages. Anecdotally, I can tell you there are middle market deals getting done out there with six turns of leverage and 7% yields. Unless you’ve got warrant coverage, you’re not getting anywhere near 15% IRR on a deal like that.

That kind of behavior reeks of yield chasing.

And we all know what happens to yield hogs.

Eventually, they get turned into bacon.

Below are my factor return charts, updated for 3Q18. As always, this data lags by one month, so it is technically through August 31. Note also that the more recent bout of market volatility lies outside this date range. It will fall inside the next update.

This one features more of the same. Returns to Market and Momentum continue to grind higher, leaving the more value-oriented factors in the dust.

At bottom I’ve added a snap of Research Affiliates’ latest factor valuations. They’re about what you’d expect given the return data, with Illiqudity (think VC and private equity) and Momentum at the high end of their historical ranges. Value remains at the low end.

It’s worth asking: what’s the point of this exercise?

To better understand and contextualize the following (thanks Rusty Guinn):

[T]here is no good or bad environment for active management. There are good or bad environments for the relatively static biases that are almost universal among the pools of capital that benchmark themselves to various indices.

For a diversified portfolio, the variation in returns is explained almost entirely by the aggregate factor exposures. You’d be surprised how many professionals are ignorant of this.

Now, some of that ignorance is deliberate. There’s a reason investment managers don’t often show clients factor-based attribution analyses. The data typically supports the idea that a significant portion of their returns come from the relatively static biases (“tilts”) mentioned above.

As an allocator of capital, it behooves you to be intentional about how your portfolios tilt, and how those tilts manifest themselves in your realized performance. This self awareness lies at the heart of a disciplined and intentional portfolio management process.