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Manipulation of ebitda

If dropping “ebitda” into cocktail party conversation makes you feel like a globetrotting financier, there is something you should know. It makes you sound like a MBA twit-clone with a Hermès tie and two brain cells. A fuzzy proxy for cash flow, ebitda (for the uninitiated, earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) is the unit that investors and analysts reflexively use to talk about profit. (And what else do they talk about? Property?) It can mislead – but shouldn’t be abandoned.

The elegance of ebitda is that it comes straight off the income statement, and very high up on it where it should be purest. Coming ahead of interest expense, it is capital structure agnostic, and takes out recurring non-cash charges, too. But relying on the income statement alone ignores critical uses of cash that appear elsewhere – capital spending, changes in working capital, deferred revenue. Free cash flow captures these, but requires turning to another page of the financial report and is hard to forecast as it depends on the timing of payments. But in telecoms where capex is massive, in retail where inventories oscillate, or in software where revenue recognition is key, ebitda misses too much. (more…)

Top Ten Things Traders Must Change to Survive

  1. When the market goes from bull to bear, or from an uptrend to a down trend you must change from going long to going to cash or selling short.
  2. When a market recovers from a bear market to an uptrend over taking the 200 day moving average you must go from bearish or neutral to long.
  3. New bull markets most of the time have new leaders you can’t just play the same ones from the last up trend.
  4. When you make a trade and it goes against you, then you were wrong. When your stop is hit you must change your position and get out.
  5. When you have a strong opinion about a trade but it goes the opposite of what you believe day after day you must change your mind, you were wrong.
  6. When a trade does not go the way you expected in the time frame you had planned you have to take a time stop and change to something that is moving.
  7. Each day you must change and grow as a trader and improve on your skills through continuous learning.
  8. While the market will change the principles of winning through risk management, correct trader psychology, and playing the probabilities will stay the same.
  9. The market rotates and different market capitalizations come into favor and out of favor, follow the money.
  10. Different sectors rotate in and out of favor based on the cash flow of earnings, follow the capital.

Advantages & Disadvantages of EBITDA

The Advantages of EBITDA

Although there is no silver bullet metric in financial statement analysis, nevertheless there are numerous benefits to using EBITDA. Here are a few:

  • Operational Comparability:  As implied above, EBITDA allows comparability across a wide swath of companies. Accounting standards provide leniency in the application of financial statements, therefore using EBITDA allows apples-to-apples comparisons and relieves accounting discrepancies on items such as depreciation, tax rates, and financing choice.
  • Cash Flow Proxy:Since the income statement traditionally is the financial statement of choice, EBITDA can be easily derived from this statement and provides a simple proxy for cash generation in the absence of other data.
  • Debt Coverage Ratios:In many lender contracts, certain debt provisions require specific levels of income cushion above the required interest expense payments. Evaluating EBITDA coverage ratios across companies assists analysts in determining which businesses are more likely to default on their debt obligations.

The Disadvantages of EBITDA (more…)

Trending Value Metrics by O’Shaughnessy

James O’Shaughnessy is a well known “value quant” for his book What Works on Wall Street (4th Ed). He has a new column in Marketwatch discussing what he calls  “the top stock-market strategy of the past 50 years.”

According to Jim, using a combination of value and momentum strategies — “Trending Value” — is the best performing strategy since 1963. To capture this, he ranks stocks based on:

• Price-to-Sales
• Price-to-Earnings
• Price-to-Book
• Price-to-Cash Flow
• EBITDA/Enterprise Value
• Shareholder yield (dividend yield + rate of share repurchases)

O’Shaughnessy ranks all of these on a 1-100 basis for his Trending Value portfolio. He works with the top 10% of those ranked stocks with the best composite score. He selects a concentrated portfolio of 25 stocks based on trailing six-month momentum, creating an extremely cheap group of stocks that are on the mend.

Its an interesting ideas, one worth exploring . . .