| mib - Donnerstag, 25. November 2004 - 12:42 |
| was sagen denn "eure" Zeitschriften/Zeitungen ueber die Nachfrage- und Preisentwicklung von Kobalt in den naechsten paar Jahren? Danke! - Mib |
| isabellaflora - Donnerstag, 25. November 2004 - 13:14 |
| ... dött weess ick nich, aber Handelsblatt + Wirtschaftswoche predigt Weizen, Mais und Soja. Man sollte bekanntermaßen ja gerade bei Rohstoffen antizyklisch arbeiten ;-) Gruß isabellaflora |
| chinaman - Freitag, 26. November 2004 - 11:20 |
| Das Handelsblatt ist eher skeptisch für den Kobalt Preis. Der Artikel ist aber schon zu alt um ihn noch kostenfrei kopieren zu können ... Gruß Chinaman |
| mib - Montag, 13. Dezember 2004 - 11:56 |
| Dr Marc Faber: We Are Never Prepared by What We Expect By Tim Wood 01 Dec 2004 at 08:50 PM EST Note: this is an edited transcript provided by Resource Investor. The verbatim audio version can be downloaded by clicking here: <MP3, 6.4MB>. FRANK HOLMES: Our next speaker, Dr Marc Faber, earned his PhD at the age of 24. He is probably the longest standing interviewee with Barron's that I can think of, and his comments and his looking at the world from a global perspective. Dr Marc Faber. DR MARC FABER: Well thank you very much for the kind introduction, and first of all I’d like to thank the organisers very much for having put this event together. It’s an unbelievable amount of work to have an event like this. And I should also like to thank you all that you came so numerous to this presentation. In fact as a contrarian it’s very disturbing to have a large audience. I remember very well when I started to speak – I was younger than now! I was invited to a seminar in Hong Kong, it was around 1981. In the morning they had sessions about gold and oil, and there were about 5,000 people attending and I had the great honour to speak in the afternoon about the bond market. There was just one participant that came and he said he was embarrassed because he wanted to leave, but he was too polite to leave so he had to stay on for my hourly presentation. So I felt very sorry for him but at that time; obviously bonds were not popular. I am actually glad that Pierre spoke first because he spoke from the bottom of my heart. Now, I want you to imagine the following. You have a rich uncle and he just passed away and he left to each one of you $100m. Your rich uncle was a bit of an odd character. He retired in the late 60s and lived on one of the islands of Pacific. He didn’t read newspapers, he didn’t have a fax machine, no telephone and he was, however, a smart investor. In fact he corresponded with his bank by mail and in the 30 years before he passed away he sent out four letters. In 1970 it had occurred to him that gold at $35 was relatively inexpensive compared to the rate of inflation one had experienced in the 50s and 60s. oil at $30 per barrel struck him as very, very inexpensive so he put all his assets, then about US$1m into gold and oil and he took a 10 year holiday. Then by accident he came back in January 1980 and saw the gold price around $800 an ounce and oil close to $50 per barrel on the spot market. He also realised that then the Dow Jones was not higher than it had been in 1964 and he felt that financial assets were relatively inexpensive compared to commodities so he sold commodities and he looked at the economies and studied a little bit for a week. He worked a week in 10 years so he decided with some good luck to invest all his proceeds into the Japanese stock market. Then he took off again for 10 more years. He came back in 1989 and saw that the Japanese market had gone up seven times and that the whole world was in love with Japan and that Japan would take over the world financially. So he decided to sell his Japanese shares and at the time the world was quite down on the US and to reinvest his proceeds in US stocks and some tech stocks because the Nasdaq didn’t exist then yet. And so again he took 10 years off and came back in 2000 and he saw this mania in Nasdaq stocks and of course he sold out. But as I told you, unfortunately, he died shortly thereafter, that’s why you get the $100m each and your uncle – oh I forgot to mention something. There is one condition attached to you getting the $100m each. You are only supposed to choose one asset class and you have to invest it for 10 years, you cannot change in between. You can choose between US real estate or gold or bonds or equities or equities in Asia or equities in Europe or collectibles or whatnot; but you have to choose one investment and leave it for 10 years. The uncle was well meaning and so he left you some guidelines. One of the guidelines obviously is the good news for all of you is that something somewhere in the world always goes up; that was his experience. Secondly, he observed that if you have say four asset classes, real estate, bonds, equities, commodities and in this room you have the Federal Reserve, Mr Bernanke flying around with his helicopter dropping dollar bills on you, then he can control the quantity of dollar bills that will come into this room, but what he doesn’t control is where it will go to. It can go into real estate at times, it can go into commodities at times and so forth. And so each is an asset class that over an extended period of time – like Nasdaq in the 1990s – goes up at a faster pace than other asset classes,. inevitably this entire room will invest in the asset class that will go up the fastest because university professors will then write books, why this asset class will always rise at a faster pace than something else and the media will have long, long programmes about this asset class and an investors’ conference such as this will also focus on that asset class. So the likelihood that if one asset class outperforms others over an extended period of time it will end up in a bubble is very, very high. The beauty of the bubble, and this is the last observation your uncle made, is not to invest in the bubble factor but imagine if all the money of this room flows into one sector – into Nasdaq – by definition there must be other sectors that are undervalued compared to the overvalued asset. Eventually when the money flows out of the inflated asset and every inflated asset, every bubble eventually bursts, when that money flows out it will flow somewhere else so there is a shift, there’s a new asset class that comes about; there is a shift in leadership taking place. I’d like to talk very briefly about the opportunities that you have now for investing your $100m. The first: be well aware and never overestimate the intelligence of the Federal Reserve! They are well aware that they had created a bubble in the year 2000 in Nasdaq stocks. When they saw that the bubble was coming apart and that there was the threat of a recession they cut interest rates very aggressively after January 2001. In the process they pushed short term rates significantly below the rate of inflation. In other words, they pursued a highly inflationary monetary policy. Pierre mentioned the 70s. The difference in the 70s was that America’s debt to GDP was 120%, but since Mr Greenspan came into power, the debt-to-GDP expanded very dramatically, it’s now at 300% and over. Since the year 2000 total credit market debt has increased by $7.6tr dollars whereas GDP growth was just $1.6tr. So in order to stimulate the economy you need to pump more and more money into the system. I would like to mention that CNBC commentators speak about a Bush boom being similar to a Reagan boom. Yet the conditions; certainly from debt to GDP are totally different. At the time of Reagan debt to GDP was just 120%, now it’s [over 300%]. So the Fed – knowing that in this situation deflation would be a catastrophe – they cut interest rates very aggressively and pursued an expansionary monetary policy which led to the credit expansion I referred to. As mentioned earlier, the Fed maybe controls the quantity of money, but they don’t control where it goes and 80% of new credit went into the housing market, into mortgages. It led to a refinancing boom which came to an end when interest rates no longer fell. But in essence what it did is the following: credit expanded, it led to housing inflation, the housing inflation allowed people to take larger mortgages and to extract money from their homes and to go and spend it. Over the last four years consumption as a percentage of the economy reached a record level. Again, at the time of Reagan, we had pent up demand but not now. We are at the highest level of consumption as a percentage of the economy ever. US borrowings led to asset inflation, thence to consumption, but production and investment activity somewhere else. In China, industrial production until recently was growing at 20% per annum. Trend line growth is around 12% per annum in other words we have over done it. Investment activity, where trend line growth is usually around 15%, where capital spending, net capital formation was growing at 15% annual rate until recently. So what we have is all the spending in the United States, but production and investment and capital formation in China which leads to an interesting situation. You have the growing trade surplus of China, obviously everything is produced in China and consumed in the US. The Chinese have a growing trend for business in the United States, and it is not that the Chinese pursue unfair trade practices – they import goods – they just don’t import them from the United States. You have the Chinese imports from South East Asia which are growing at a very rapid pace. In other words the Chinese probably pursue kind of a political agenda. They export to the United States but they want to strengthen the other Asian countries in order to have strong neighbours that will depend in future more and more on the Chinese economy as an engine of growth and less on the US. Korean exports to China today are larger than to the United States, Japanese exports to China are growing at around 30-40% annual rate, whereas to the US they are falling. Japanese exports to Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China are larger than to the US so you can see the Chinese economy is growing rapidly, and I will return to this subject in a minute. In essence the Chinese have had imports growing at about the same rate as their exports over time and in fact in the last two years frequently import growth has exceeded export growth with the result that the Chinese trade surplus has been diminishing. In the first four months of this year they had a trade deficit; recently it is positive again. But I hope that you can see what the problem is, which is reflected in America’s net asset balance. The newest net asset balance will tell you how many assets the US has overseas compared to assets foreigners have in the United States. All through the 70s we had a positive net asset balance in the United States. In other words Americans had more assets outside the country than foreigners in America. But after 87, as a result of the growing trade and current account deficit, this net asset balance has been deteriorating with the result that today foreigners have assets in the US equivalent to $9tr and Americans have assets in foreign countries equivalent to $6tr which is a negative net asset balance of around $3tr. That’s around negative 30% of US GDP. By the way, you can see here that is gets worse with Bush policies. Bush combined with Greenspan? Recipe for disaster So now you have to see that this has got to grow by the annual current account deficit which in the second quarter of this year was running at an annualised 6% of GDP. So every year the deficit grows until you eventually get to a negative net asset balance of 50% and one day to 100%. Now you have to ask yourself. “Are the Chinese out of their minds to still buy US Treasury Bonds?” They can also see that the US is in deep problems. Here again the Chinese pursue an agenda, they know very well that with the economy growing at around 8% per annum they are on collision course with the United States for a variety of reasons. They also know that militarily they are inferior to the United States. However, they can harm the US economically very badly by keeping the dollar relatively strong. Production and investment will shift to China and other Asian countries and you have to also see that as a result of modern technologies a larger and larger portion of tradable services can now be transferred to countries like India. And ideally you would also outsource the CIA to Bangladesh! This is a trend that is here to stay. The Chinese also supported the dollar for a long time because they love President Bush and his administration! Because with the continuous human rights abuses, suddenly in the eyes of the African continent, Latin America; the Chinese leadership looks like Cinderella and finally, this is a sign, the Chinese showed all the presidential debates in the Chinese media. This is the first time it has happened because they wanted to, the people of China to see what kind of quality of presidential candidates democracy generates. Now nobody in China wants democracy! The dollar will obviously go down. Now the question is if the Chinese revalue, say by 50% - they double the value of the currency. Would anything change? I don’t think so. If you have factory wages of $100 or $200 nothing will change, they will go to 300 or 400. But they don’t have healthcare expenditures, they don’t have pension fund liabilities, retirement benefits and so forth. Production will still shift to Asia and the investment activity will be in Asia. The only way in the long run that this imbalance will be corrected is that consumption in the United States will decline. It can decline if people will spend less or it can decline because inflation starts to exceed income gains and then the purchasing power diminishes. In short, we have in the world five large currencies. We have the US dollar, the euro, the yen, the Chinese currency and gold. Currency realignment won’t do the trick. All paper money will depreciate in time in its purchasing power. The only currency that will gain relative to currency will eventually be gold and silver, and precious metals and hard assets. But in the mean time what is happening here and this has to be clearly understood: there is a transfer of wealth from the Western World to Asia. The ownership of assets is shifting to Asia and in this environment we have to consider how to invest. First of all, the Chinese economy is growing very rapidly and is very large. China produces more steel than the US and Japan combined and is still growing very rapidly. They produce five times more cement than the United States. Some consumer markets are much larger in China than in the United States. I have to explain that in China we have a deflationary boom. Take a TV set that costs US$2,000. Then 1m Chinese households can buy it. If the price declines to say $200 then suddenly 100m Chinese households can buy it. Or take the motor cycle population, it grew in seven years from 12m motor cycles to now 90m motor cycles because prices were declining so more and more people can buy it. Optically the US is a $11.2tr economy, China $1.2tr economy, GDP wise. But in physical terms adjust it for the difference in the price level I would say that the Chinese economy is already 60% of the US economy and still growing. In the process of industrialisation there are certain things that happen, energy needs go up. China is a large oil producer but it has had to import increasing quantities of oil and let me tell you what happens in terms of industrialisation. In the US from 1900 to 1970 per capita consumption of oil rose from 1 barrel to 28 barrels. In Japan industrialisation 1950 to 1970, South Korea 1965 to 1990 per capita consumption rose from 1 barrel to 17 barrels. In China we are at 1.7 barrels; in India 0.7 barrels. The whole of Asia has 3.6bn people including Japan and it consumes 20m barrels of oil a day. The US has 295m people and consumes 22m barrels of oil a day. For sure oil demand in Asia will double to 40m barrels of oil per day. Whether it takes six years or 15 years, that I don’t know, but it will double. So the demand side is very strong, the incremental demand lead to rise in oil price as you can see. By the way, in your lifetime you won’t see oil at $12 a barrel again ever. That is finito, over. Now we had some inventory accumulation this year, In the first nine months the Chinese imported 34% more oil than last year. I think they didn’t need 34% more oil so there has been some inventory accumulation. So oil prices could easily, in my opinion, go anywhere between $30- $40 in the months ahead when growth slows down, but the trend is definitely for oil demand in Asia to rise as people go from the bicycles to the motorcycles to the cars. Once they move from the countryside to the cities they need the refrigerators, they need transportation, heaters and so forth and so energy demands rises a lot. On the supply side world supplies today are 80m barrels of oil a day. In the US oil production has been down since 1971 and elsewhere in Indonesia, Venezuela, and Oman it’s also been down. The structure of the oil industry is interesting. You have 4,000 small fields producing 53% of total oil production of the 80m barrels, slightly more than 40m barrels. They have an average daily production of 9,000 barrels. Then you have 14 large fields, they’re large designed by fields producing over 500,000 barrels a day. All these fields were discovered before 1965 and six of them are in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The six in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia they have an unusual structuring to think that one field produces more than half the production. It used to produce more than 5m barrels; it’s dropped to 4.7m. What I want to say, it’s very difficult to replace these 14 fields, none of which was discovered after 1965. So I think the total oil supplies at 80m barrels today cannot be increased much. In the 70s the oil shock was a surprise shock because Opec was cutting production, they noticed the price shooting up, but this time around Opec isn’t cutting production, it’s actually increasing production but it can’t increase it much more so I think in the long run oil will go up and not only oil. You can see that the demand for all commodities has risen. The Chinese used to take 6% of the world’s copper market in 1990. 12% in the year 2000; now they’re the largest copper user, 21%. Iron ore, 27% of total production in the world. The incremental demands coming from the industrialisation not only of China, but also of India, from rising standards through this wealth transfer from the Western World to Asia, will lift commodity prices. You can see that although we’ve gone up since 2001 in real terms adjusted for inflation, commodity prices are still extremely low. So I think that we are at the beginning of a major cycle. Some commodities may have overshot already, but agriculture is one of my favourites because food production in China has been declining. They have a water problem, and through the industrialisation and the construction of golf courses there’s less land available for agriculture. So I would go and look at some agricultural commodity prices that haven’t moved much yet like corn, soya beans, wheat, sugar. The Swiss drink 50 times more coffee per capita than the Chinese, but the Chinese have a population 200 times larger than the Swiss so their market is already larger. If they go to the per capita consumption level of the South Koreans, Taiwanese, Japanese – non-traditional coffee drinkers – they will take up three times the coffee crop in the world. The point is not to plan to invest the inheritance that you got from your uncle, but if commodity prices go up then usually it creates an unfavourable environment for financial assets, certainly for bonds. The 1970s were a hostile environment for equities. Secondly and more importantly, economies have business cycles there are war cycles and usually when commodity prices start to go up international tensions increase. I think that tensions will increase over oil in future. Rising commodity prices lead to international tensions and then at the end of the rising commodity price when countries really go to war for commodities, commodity prices go through the roof. So you may have to wait some time until the next war will lead to gold prices that will be at least as high as the Dow Jones or higher. In the meantime this wealth transfer will lead to an unusual situation. At the moment, the Japanese market cap is 9% of total market cap in the world. The US is 52% and the rest of Asia is 3.5%. So for 12.5% you get the whole of Asia’s 3.6bn people will the fastest growing economies of China, Vietnam and India but for the US you have to pay 52% for a country that is economically doomed. So I think this will change in next five to ten years time the US will be anywhere between zero and 20% and Asia should be between say 30 and 50%. By the way, in 1990 Japan was more than 50%. This can happen in many ways, it can happen both go up, Asia goes up more than the US. Both goes down Asia goes down less than the US or the US goes down, Asia goes up or it can happen both stay at the same level but through currency realignments. That is quite possible that the dollar goes down, it could be that the Dow Jones goes to 100,000 but the dollar drops by 99.9%. It happened in Latin America. By the way the apostles of the new economy they are right, the US has a new economy, it resembles Mexico and Brazil. Well, my time is up, I have to finish here, thank you very much for your attention. http://www.resourceinvestor.com/pebble.asp?relid=7257 |
| mib - Montag, 13. Dezember 2004 - 11:57 |
| also wie investiere ich langfristig in Soja? Mib |
| isabellaflora - Montag, 13. Dezember 2004 - 14:30 |
| Da gibts doch die Mini-Futures von ABN - allerdings haben die auch eine Knock-out-Grenze. Aber, wie haben wirs gerade gelernt, Rohstoffe steigen und steigen und steigen ;-) Kommt mir so ein bißchen vor wie die Internetauguren Ende der 90ziger. Danach sollte sich auch alles ändern und sogar noch in dicke EUROs verwandeln.... Gruß isabellaflora |
| mib - Montag, 13. Dezember 2004 - 16:54 |
| :-)) ja...ja... :-)) bloss, dass die Internet-outfits wie Pilze aus dem Boden schossen... waehrend Oel und Erdgas eben Angebotsprobleme haben, da sie nicht so schnell nachwachsen... ;-) Mib |
| wojtek_m - Montag, 13. Dezember 2004 - 20:53 |
| Deshalb würde ich jetzt auf eine Korrektur der Rohstoffe warten und dann kaufen. Langfristig stimmen die Fundamentals immer noch... Wojtek |
| isabellaflora - Dienstag, 14. Dezember 2004 - 09:49 |
| Genau dem stimme ich zu. Mit den Internetbuden ist das ja im Prinzip nix anderes gewesen. Der Bedarf und die Dominanz von Internetserviceleistungen, -hardware etc. ist ja ungebrochen da und wächst. Also, in dieser Hinsicht war die damalige Sicht der Dinge sehr richtig, allein die Erwartung auf kurze Zeit hin waren vollkommen überzogen - ebenso heute bei den Rohstoffen. Gruß isabellaflora |
| chinaman - Dienstag, 14. Dezember 2004 - 16:22 |
| "Deshalb würde ich jetzt auf eine Korrektur der Rohstoffe warten und dann kaufen" Damit die Diskussion nicht nur rein akademisch bleibt: Bei welchem Kursniveau würdet Ihr welchen Rohstoff denn kaufen ??? |
| wojtek_m - Dienstag, 14. Dezember 2004 - 23:24 |
| "Bei welchem Kursniveau würdet Ihr welchen Rohstoff denn kaufen ???" Na, Silber z.B. jetzt :) |
| chinaman - Mittwoch, 15. Dezember 2004 - 07:29 |
| Jetzt kann ich gut nachvollziehen (zumal ich es auch tue ...) :-) Gruß Chinaman |
| mib - Mittwoch, 15. Dezember 2004 - 10:54 |
| was kauft ihr bei Silber ? SSRI (Silver Standard Resources) ? Gruss - Mib btw: mich interessieren mehr die Minengesellschaften und ihre Explorations(miss)erfolge und die langfristige Angebots/Nachfrageentwicklung als der aktuelle Rohstoffpreis... "The pig gotta fly regardless of commodity price swings!" |
| prof - Mittwoch, 15. Dezember 2004 - 11:14 |
| SSRI sind in Dollar notiert, das ist der Nachteil. Hatte zeitgleich das Quanto-Zertifikat aus meinem Musterdepot gekauft! Prof |
| chinaman - Mittwoch, 15. Dezember 2004 - 18:04 |
| SSRI ist eine (gute) Standardlösung. Darüber hinaus kann man diversifizieren in: Macmin (Australien, auch in D notiert) bzw. aus Nordamerika: Avino Silver (TSX) Chap Mercantile (Toronto) Coeur d'Alene (auch D) Ecu Silver (TSX) First Silver (Toronto) Minefinders (Amex) Mines Management (Amex) Sterling Mining (Nasdaq) Western Silver (Amex) Dollar ist m.E. nicht nur negativ zu sehen. Viele Produzenten haben im Gegenteil den Nachteil, dass die Kosten in Hartwährung (ASD, Rand etc.) anfallen, während die Erlöse in Weichwährung (USD) fakturiert werden. Gruß Chinaman |
| wojtek_m - Mittwoch, 15. Dezember 2004 - 20:50 |
| Ein meiner Meinung nach interessanter Wert ist die KGHM aus Polen. Die sind weltweit bei der Kupferproduktion an 6ter Stelle und nebenbei (nach eigenen Angaben) an 2ter Stelle bei der Silberproduktion, weil Silber gewissermassen ein Nebenprodukt bei der Kupferherrstellung ist. Ich besitze zwar keine Aktien von denen, aber meine Mutter hat bei KGHM lange Jahre gearbeitet und bei der Privatisierung vor ein Paar Jahren 700 Stück abbekommen (sehr fair von denen, weil sie dort seit 14 Jahren nicht mehr arbeitet ;-). Ich habe Anfang 2004 die Aktie etwas genauer unter die Lupe genommen und das prognostizierte 2004er KGV lag bei etwa 11, wobei bei der Gewinnprognose ein Kupferpreis von 2000$/Tonne genommen wurde. Heute liegt der Kupferpreis bei etwa 3000$/Tonne, somit müsste das KGV sicher im einstelligen Bereich liegen. Interessanterweise höre ich in dem englischsprachigem Internet so gut wie Nichts von KGHM, dabei sind sie milliardenschwer und eines der Schwergewichte im WIG20 (Warschauer Börsenindex). Ich jedenfalls rate meiner Mutter sie nicht zu verkaufen :-) Wojtek |
| mib - Mittwoch, 15. Dezember 2004 - 22:42 |
| bei Cu + Au (+Mo) ist NTO bzw. NNO.TO interessant... - ich hab aber z.Zt. kaum Zeit mich um sowas zuc kuemmern... sorry... Mib |
| mib - Sonntag, 20. Februar 2005 - 11:52 |
| Don Coxe February 18, 2005 Ocean Ridge, Florida Topics include: - How to value natural gas companies - Outlook for LNG - Case for owning Alberta oil sands companies - Update on base metal stocks - Update on regional banking stocks - Commentary on Putin’s strategy in regard to energy and base metals “Got Gas?” Thank you all for tuning in to the call which comes to you today from Ocean Ridge, Florida. The chart that we faxed out was two gas prone companies and the question that we rhetorically fired was “Got gas?”. So I want to talk first today about the way to look at the valuation of the natural gas oriented companies and obviously companies such as Burlington, Devon and Encana are the ones that come to mind. And I want to contrast those companies in valuation techniques with the oily stocks. And I think probably over the years since I’ve been telling you to be overweight in both these groups, what I haven’t done is distinguish what the investment characteristics may be of one group or the other as they take on different defining characteristics. Encana is particularly interesting because when they sold their Buzzard Field in the North Sea to Nexen and put the proceeds into buying Tom Brown in this country, which is Powder River coal bed methane, what they’ve basically said is they’re going to take their big bets on gas, not on oil. And in the case of Devon and Burlington, these are the companies that bought out those Canadian gas companies and you know, those of you who have followed me for years, much to my deep chagrin and regret because they bought them at prices that turned out to be steals since Canadians and Canadian analysts continued to value them on the basis of sixty five cents per MCF for natural gas. So, what we’ve got then is a situation of the basic reserve life index problems of the United States gas companies. This is an industry that’s failed to replace its production year in year out for more than a quarter century. And meanwhile, as you know, natural gas, which has always promoted itself as the wonder fuel, then as people got more and more concerned about air quality and when you couldn’t build new nuclear plants as a result of the foam fleck types (?), what it meant was that natural gas got a bigger and bigger share of all new electricity generation plants in the United States. Well, then of course, we came in to this millennium and it’s been a very gaseous millennium. We’re looking at 5.93 for gas now and this is despite the fact that in the major metropolitan centers of the Northern US, it has been an unusually warm winter. Kind of thing that delights the Kyoto advocates but what it should mean is that gas would be very cheap. And analysts scratch their head and say why with the amount of gas in storage and given the fact that the weather is so mild, why is gas 5.93? Today, just this weekend, we’re at the 2/3 mark for winter as calculated by the astronomic style which is December 21st to March 21st and we are very nearly at the end of what the meteorologists call meteorological winter, which is December, January and February, the three coldest months of the year. Which should mean that natural gas would be selling for considerably less than it is. Well, of course, one big reason as you all know is the substitutionality of natural gas for distillate in all sorts of industrial applications. And since oil stays up at forty seven dollars a barrel, what that does is it means for these kinds of industrial applications, natural gas gets priced as its energy equivalent. And going forward, it’s hard to see that those kinds of relationships are going to change, which means that those people out there that still use 3.75 an MCF for natural gas, I think are going to continue to be wrong. However, there is one big thing on the horizon, that we’ve talked about from time to time on these calls, but I want to update you on it and that is LNG, liquefied natural gas. Now you know it’s been our position, that LNG which is supposed to be here by now, is not going to come, that 9/11 basically changed the logic of liquefied natural gas. Now, the economic logic is inescapable, but as we learn from nuclear power, if people are concerned about living anywhere near some situation that’s going to blow up, then the economic logic is put aside. Now in the case of the LNG, as you get these tankers, and they measure liquefied natural gas by the ton, not the MCF, and when I was recently in Boston down at the harbor area there, you were at the area where the LNG tankers come in. And they were proposing a massive new expansion in Boston, this because that’s the part of the country where they really need lots of natural gas, and it’s been held back by citizens groups and by politicians because of the possibility that all you need is an al Qaeda terrorist with a Stinger missile and maybe that would be enough to get rid of the voters who gave Kerry one of his few strong majorities. Which is certainly the kind of thing we’ve got to be scared about. I mean, I don’t know what the real risks are of this. I’ve been at sufficient industry meetings to know that there are deep divisions on this point. And Transcanada, as you’re familiar, tried to get an LNG pipe into Maine and once again they’re being met with resistance from people who are worried of what would happen. The industry continues to be soothing about this, particularly the notably aggressive Lee Raymond of ExxonMobil who says that “We’re going to deliver LNG at 3.75 an MCF and we’re going to hold down energy prices right through the next decade”. Because in Qatar and in Trinidad, what you have is just massive reserves of natural gas. And also in Indonesia, as a matter of fact, Lee Raymond got very familiar with the effect of LNG in Indonesia when shortly after the merger with Mobil that plant blew up. And that produced a huge sell off in the stock exchanges of Japan and South Korea, because that one facility was supplying a big percentage of the total energy consumption of Japan and South Korea. It was also supplying over fifteen percent of the total earnings of ExxonMobil. So it can be an incredibly profitable business for Big Oil. And Qatar comes out of that rare category of a Gulf state where the politics seem to be good and where the big oil companies are quite eager to invest. The way I think you should look at it for now, is that between now and 2011, when Lee Raymond’s forecast could come true, we’re going to have sustained high gas prices. And that by then, even though they can bring it in at a cheap price, that because of the declining output from lower 48 wells, that prices will hold up. In addition, of course, one of the bits of optimism the industry has had was the pipeline bringing Canadian gas and North Slope gas down into the Midwest. Again, I’ve been to conferences discussing this and the industry has what I regard as dewy-eyed optimism about how easy it is to get this approved. And they shouldn’t really have that view. If you go back to 1981, when the pipeline was first proposed, it was overruled by the judge who sat on the commission on the basis they planned to drive the pipeline through Old Crow which had twenty four hundred consecutive years of habitation there. And when the industry says “Yeah, but there’s only a hundred people there, we don’t mind moving them” the judge, justly in my view said “Well if you’ve got that kind of sensitivity I don’t think we should approve the project.” He thereby saved Imperial Oil and Shell Oil Canada because they were assuming hundred dollar oil and that was the justification for the economics of bringing gas down then. Well now, what we have of course is expensive oil and there’s no question about the economic viability of high arctic gas, but once again, the Inuits have not agreed. And this keeps getting held up and in addition we’ve got a battle going on between a Canadian route and a route from Alaska. And we have some very powerful Senators from Alaska who are insisting on that route. So, from my perspective, you shouldn’t be counting on early deliveries of gas coming out of that part of the world into the gas short US. So my view then is, that notwithstanding that you’re reading all this stuff about LNG and suggesting that natural gas reserves should be valued at lower prices, I think when you balance all the risks you’ve got at least five years of security and it’s quite obvious if we can get through a winter like this without gas prices really falling, then gas in the ground should be valued at something like it’s ordinary barrel of energy equivalent. Which means that these good gas companies, such as the charts we showed and the others, remain, in my view, excellent investments. They are not, however, as attractive as the oil stocks that have long duration reserves. So, if you’re thinking about new money going in to the group, then I’ll reiterate what I’ve said in Basic Points and in these calls which is, that the most attractive, from almost any standpoint are those of the oil sands companies – the Alberta oil sands. Because there is no competitor now in the world for them in terms of duration of reserves in politically secure areas. Now I can’t predict what oil prices are going to do this year or next year but I can simply say that when you’ve got fifty to a hundred years of reserves then at some time during that period of time, the price people paid for the stock right now is going to look trivial. Well, so, when we get beyond oil and gas, this is also a time when we like to come back to looking at our base metals stocks. And I’ve talked so often about the kingpin of the whole group, BHP Billiton, but it was great fun to read their report for their second half of last year. BHP takes the audacious view that they shouldn’t have to and they refuse to issue quarterly earnings statements. They say that’s not how they run their company. So they issue semi-annual reports. And for the last six months of last year, their earnings were up a modest 110% to US $2.8 billion. Let me put that into perspective. That means that in the last six months of last year, they earned 28% as much profits as WalMart earned in the whole year. So we’re not talking about a small company here. And the base metals component of their group, the earnings before interest and tax rose 213%, they said partly because of a 34% increase in the price of copper and of course if you check out copper today you’re going to see it’s selling at a much higher price than it was on average in the last six months of last year. But when you go through it, it’s really fun to see such things as that how well they did on their coking coal. Their earnings up there were 99% increase from last year. But they’re going to be increasing the price this year by 120%. Now, I continually run into people who say “Well, we’re growth investors and yeah, these are just deep commodity cyclicals. They’re not growth stocks.” Well…I think the list of true growth stocks is now probably, you know, about as modest a list as it’s been since I came into this business. Because we kept losing groups that are considered growth groups, most obviously the Big Pharma companies. So it seems to me that when you can buy companies such as Phelps for eight times earnings, Inco at nine times earnings, what you’re looking at is companies whose earnings are bound to grow simply because of the fact that they are tied to the growth in Asia. And I want to take that on to the next part of the story which is Alan Greenspan’s conundrum this week. Now you may say “How are these two stories inter-linked?”. Well they are interlinked because the US yield curve is saying that the US economy is going to slow down. Maybe even go into recession. The spread between the 10-year note and the 2-year, they’ve just been dramatically narrowing in. Now again, no surprise to those of you on these calls, but we reach the stage where you start to worry that the bond market is telling us that the consensus forecast of 3 to 3 ½ % economic growth – that we haven’t got a chance of reaching them. Now, one is always tempted to say that it’s different this time. And in fact, it may be. And I intended to discuss this in the forthcoming issue of Basic Points which I’ll be putting together next week. But on the other hand, I think that you ought there on the call should be a little concerned that what we have now is recession or near recession conditions in several of the Eurozone countries, including Germany, Italy, Holland. We have technically a recession now in Japan. And now we have a US yield curve showing the kind of signal that in the past signaled an oncoming recession. And you have to ask the question, maybe we’re going to have a slower economy this year than we thought. Well, the beautiful thing about investing in the base metals is that they are not driven by the economies of Europe and North America. What you do when you buy these stocks is you are taking a bet on economic growth in coming years in Asia – particularly China and India. So, I would make the case that what you do is you get the chance to bet on the fast growth regions as against the slow growth regions. But that the rest of the stock market, the rest of the S&P or the MSCI Global and everything, is tied primarily to stocks whose earnings are driven by the slow growth regions. Now, if you believe this, what it means then is that you actually have lower economic risk investing in the big base metal companies than you have investing in cyclical companies base here and tied to the economy here, because they are completely dependent on what happens in the US, Canadian and European economies. And whatever happens to China and India and obviously they’re going to slow down if we have a recession in the rest of the world – on any realistic time horizon, they’re going to grow faster than we are. And what we have is these lovely ratios. In the case of China, if you’ve got a unit of GDP growth as measured and they announce, what you can assume by that, and I’ve just done some calculations, for the growth of consumption in metals, it’s on the average three times what the GDP number is. So therefore if GDP is up 9%, then you can assume metals consumption’s up about 27%. Well, when you think about it, there are so few new base metal mines of any size being brought on and when you realize that we’ve run down three quarters of the inventories of the base metals in the London Metal Exchange, the Shanghai and the Comex Exchange, it seems to be we could stand some slowing down in China because we’d still be at the second derivative situation, which is, if we slow down to 3% growth in China, we’d still have a 9% increase in consumption of metals. We don’t have the inventories to deal with even that demand. So, although I am very much aware from the feedback I get that people are saying “Look, these stocks have run so far”, as a matter of fact I was seeing clients in New York this week and one individual said part way through the presentation that he hadn’t heard one noun, adjective or adverb that was controversial, because everybody knew that the Chinese economy was strong and that base metal stocks were a good investment, he said, “You can see that in the price of the stocks, look what’s happened. You’ve got Phelps from 24 to 100, everybody knows what you’re saying, this is a waste of time.” When I demurred to the point of pointing out that Phelps trades at eight times earnings which is more than a 50% discount to the rest of the market, he says “Yeah, but the stock never pulls back so therefore it means everybody agrees with you”. Well, I don’t doubt that 95% of those who listen in on these calls agree with me but at such point as these base metals start to trade anywhere close to a multiple of cyclical stocks even, here, then perhaps we can assume that we’re approaching consensus. It ain’t that way now, it’s got a long way to go. Now, the question about the ability of the bond market to forecast the economy is something that has broad implications. It’s worrisome because…it’s worrisome also for another group that I’ve been so strong on which is the banks, the regional banks. Because the steep yield curve has been Alan Greenspan’s great gift to the banking industry historically. He bailed out the US banks in the early ‘90’s with that and then out of this recession once again the steep yield curve meant banks did very well. Even when they had some loans to write down. So, as the yield curve goes from steep to shallow, certainly if it goes to flat, then I think that people really will be proclaiming the likelihood of recession. It’s already narrowing in, which means that bank spreads are going to narrow. On the other hand, what we’ve seen is the banking business has switched amazingly from being a corporate oriented business where the yield curve is really crucial to being a consumer oriented business where the yield curve is less important. And indeed, the mortgage backed area where what they are doing is investing up the curve anyway. So, again, reflecting concerns expressed at meetings of clients in New York, I am not taking off my overweight position in the bank group – notwithstanding what’s happened in the yield curve, because, you see, the corporate sector is awash in cash of its own and it’s not relying on the banks the way that it did before. So that this isn’t, in looking at the way they develop their earnings, the shape of the yield curve is not as important I would argue for the banks now as it was. So, I grant you that if you look from bank to bank you’re going to find a lot of them that are an exception to that statement. That’s a broad brush generalization. But there’s hundreds and hundreds of banks in this country, our firm Harris Investment Management has gotten all the way up to number one ranked in the country but a big reason for it has been that we’ve been pretty good at finding the good regional banks. So I’m sharing with the rest of you, the view that this remains an attractive are of investing. Finally, before we get to the questions, I’d like to draw everybody’s attention to a piece that was on the editorial page yesterday of the Wall Street Journal, “Give Putin A Break”, and it’s a piece by Padma Dasai who’s Harriman Professor of Economic Systems at Columbia. And the reason I’d like you to look at it is that, for those of you who are reading the current issue of Basic Points where I’ve tried to analyze Bush’s foreign policy and a big part of it is the relation with Putin, this is the only thing that I have read anywhere that makes me feel any better about what I’ve written. Because the torrent of anti-Putin commentary in the press, the demonization of him is such, I mean I just wish as having been a Cold Warrior growing up, just wish that the mainstream media back then had ever said anything as insulting about the Communists as they do now about Putin. So, they got it wrong then, of course, and maybe they got it wrong now. But I do think it’s very important, particularly as we try to look forwards at the whole situation of the energy and base metal stocks, that Putin is in a position to be incredibly influential on outcomes in both cases, because Russia is still the best hope for major new deposits in both those categories – about them being brought onstream. So, if you can discern, as you go through and read this piece by this lady, that he has a strategy and that he’s not just a throwback to some really bad Czar or some really bad Communist, then what you can see is that there are opportunities there and that what Bush is doing is the logical way of trying to prevent a new global oil shock and also trying to manage China’s entry into the global system. So, simply because it was some kind of endorsation of this, I wanted you all to see it. Anyway, that’s the story for today, are there any questions? So that’s it, any questions? -- Don Coxe Profile from the BMO websites: Donald G. M. Coxe is Chairman and Chief Strategist of Harris Investment Management, and Chairman of Jones Heward Investments. Mr. Coxe has 27 years experience in institutional investing, including a decade as CEO of a Canadian investment counseling firm and six years on Wall Street as a 'sell-side' portfolio strategist advising institutional investors. In addition, Mr. Coxe has experience with pension fund planning, including liability analysis, and tactical asset allocation. His educational background includes an undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto and a law degree from Osgoode Hall Law School. Don joined Harris in September, 1993. Don Coxe Weekly Conference Call – Current http://www.jonesheward.com/Commentary/p_Commentary.aspx Basic Points – Archive Basic Points is a monthly publication of opinions, estimates and projections prepared by Don Coxe of Harris Investment Management, Inc. (HIM) and BMO Harris Investment Management Inc.: http://www.harrisnesbitt.com/bresource/basicpoint/default.asp |
| al_sting - Freitag, 3. Februar 2006 - 15:03 |
| Sind die weltweiten Erdölreserven um 5% abzuwerten? Kuwaits Ölreserven nur halb so groß wie offiziell angegeben Ich weiss nicht, warum es in den deutschen Zeitungen kaum vorkam. Vielleicht dominierte die Bush-Rede zu sehr? Ich habe es nach Google-Suche im österreichischen Standard gefunden, Die Original-Quelle PIW ist nur gegen Bezahlung zu lesen. Standard, 20. Januar 2006: Kuwaits Ölreserven nur halb so groß wie offiziell angegeben Laut Bericht von "Petroleum Intelligence Weekly" London - Kuwaits Ölreserven sind einem Fachblatt zufolge nur halb so groß wie offiziell angegeben. Die Nachricht ließ den Ölpreis am Freitag weiter steigen. "Petroleum Intelligence Weekly" (PIW) berichtete unter Berufung auf interne kuwaitische Unterlagen, die nachgewiesenen und nicht-nachgewiesenen Ölreserven Kuwaits beliefen sich auf zusammen 48 Milliarden Barrel. "PIW hat aus Kreisen erfahren, dass Kuwaits tatsächlichen Ölreserven, welche offiziell mit etwa 99 Milliarden Barrel oder fast zehn Prozent der weltweiten Gesamtmenge angegeben werden, ein ganzes Stück geringer sind", hieß es. Die Zeitung habe Einsicht in die Unterlagen gehabt. Sprecher der staatlichen Ölgesellschaft Kuwait Oil (KOC) waren für eine Stellungnahme nicht erreichbar. In den offiziellen kuwaitischen Zahlen werde nicht zwischen nachgewiesenen, nicht-nachgewiesenen und nur wahrscheinlichen Reserven unterschieden, berichtete PIW. Die bewiesenen Reserven beliefen sich den Unterlagen zufolge auf 24 Milliarden Barrel. (APA/Reuters) 48 Mrd. Barrel statt 99 Mrd. Barrel macht einen "Verlust" von ~ 50% der Kuweitischen Reserven. Da diese etwa 10% der weltweiten Reserven darstellen, stehen alleine in Kuweit 5% der weltweiten Erdölreserven zur Disposition. Ciao, Al Sting |
| al_sting - Freitag, 3. Februar 2006 - 15:39 |
| Wie sieht es mit den Reserven in Saudi-Arabien und den anderen Golfstaaten, Libyen, Nigeria und den restlichen OPEC-Staaten aus? Der größte Teil der offiziell ausgewiesenen Erdölreserven auf unserer Welt liegt in OPEC-Staaten mit, nun ja, eingeschränkt freiem Informationsfluss (von zahlreichen weiteren Freiheiten ganz zu schweigen). Es gibt hier einen Interessenskonflikt, aufgrund dessen ich die aus diesem Kartell stammenden Zahlen zum großen Teil für "geschönt" halte: In der OPEC orientierte sich über Jahrzehnte die pro Land zulässige Höchstförderquote an den Gesamtreserven des Landes. (Das hat sich wahrscheinlich im letzten Jahr geändert, da mittlerweile alle Länder am Maximum fördern.) Hohe Förderung ergibt hohe Einnahmen. Also waren alle Staaten an hohen Erdölreserven interessiert. Die Erdölförderung in den Golfstaaten ist in staatlicher Hand, die westlichen Unternehmen wurden etwa in den siebziger Jahren nationalisiert. Die Reserveschätzungen stammen im wesentlichen aus dieser Zeit. In den folgenden Jahren wurde massenhaft Erdöl gefördert, aber die Reserven sanken nicht. Ganz im Gegenteil, gelegentlich wurden sie sogar erhöht (meistens im Zusammenhang mit dem Poker um OPEC-Förderquoten). In anderen großen Fördergebieten, die seit dieser Zeit ausgebeutet werden wie der Nordsee und den US-amerikanischen Feldern, sinken die Vorräte mittlerweile in erschreckendem Maße... Ein weiteres Problem: In den meisten OPEC-Staaten fehlt die (funktionierenden Demokratien mit Abstrichen innewohnende) Presse- und Informationsfreiheit, die eine kritische Überprüfung der angegebenen Zahlen zumindest erleichtern würde... Die Abwertung der Shell-Vorräte wurde nicht zuletzt wegen Widerständen der nigerianischen Regierung lange hinausgezögert. Diese hätte nach OPEC-Regeln bei geringeren Reserven nur weniger fördern dürfen. Denn die abgewerteten Felder lagen größtenteils in Nigeria. Mein Fazit: Ich rechne in den nächsten Monaten und Jahren mit weiteren unangenehmen Überraschungen. Und zwar nicht nur in OPEC-Ländern, wie die im nächsten Beitrag gepostete aktuelle Abwertung von Repsol in Argentinien zeigt (der auch beschriebene Verlust in Bolivien ist nicht geologisch, sondern politisch motiviert). Ich prognostiziere zwar kein Ende des Öls, aber stabil hohe oder gar weiter steigende Ölpreise, ab denen kostenträchtigere Ölförderquellen und -verfahren die benötigte Nachfrage erfüllen können. Dabei denke ich z.B. an die kanadischen Ölsände und an Tiefseeförderung vor den Falkland-Inseln Ciao, Al Sting |