Mr. Grantham has a habit of being early and because of this his performance record suffers, see:
Feb. 2010
"Grantham’s ‘Horrifically Early’ Calls Challenge GMO"
March 2014
How Good Is Jeremy Grantham's Forecasting Record?
July 2016
Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo's Mean Reversion Strategy Is Tested In Today's Market
One specific call that exemplifies this is a piece he had published in the journal Nature in 2012 regarding the fertilizers, phosphorus (phosphate) and potassium (potash):
Nov. 2012
Drumbeats: Jeremy Grantham Writing in Nature--"Be persuasive. Be brave. Be arrested (if necessary)
We followed a month later with:
Dec. 2012
Vaclav Smil Takes on Jeremy Grantham Over Peak Fertilizer
The end of our intro to that post:
...We have almost as many posts on Professor Smil as we do on Mr. Grantham. This is the first time they've been together. I feel very uncomfortable being on the opposite side of Mr. G on just about anything but in this case Smil is right.On Dec. 31, 2012 the largest of the fertilizer stocks, Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan (#1 in potash, #3 in phosphate) closed at $40.69.
It closed yesterday at $17.66.
Definitely a better buy now but a long slog for folks who jumped on the peak fertilizer thesis because of a piece in a prestigious journal.
Here's the latest from Barron's Wall Street's Best Minds feature:
The legendary investor argues that equities are the best way to invest in a long-term rise in commodity prices.
Here is the summary of this report:
• We believe the prices of many commodities will rise in the decades to come due to growing demand and the finite supply of cheap resources.
• Public equities are a great way to invest in commodities and allow investors to:
• • Gain commodity exposure in a cheap, liquid manner
• • Harvest the equity risk premium
• • Avoid negative yields associated with rolling some futures contracts
• Resource equities provide diversification relative to the broad equity market, and the diversification benefits increase over longer time horizons.
• Resource equities have not only protected against inflation historically, but have actually significantly increased purchasing power in most inflationary periods.
• Due to the uncertainty surrounding, and the volatility of, commodity prices, many investors avoid resource equities. Hence, commodity producers tend to trade at a discount, and they have outperformed the broad market historically.
• While resource equities are volatile and exhibit significant drawdowns in the short term, over longer periods of time, resource equities have actually been remarkably safe investments.
• By some valuation metrics, resource equities have looked extremely cheap throughout 2015 and the first half of 2016, and that may bode well for future returns.
• Given the difficulty in predicting commodity prices, the low valuation levels of the past year and a half may be unjustified.
• Despite all of this, investors generally don’t have much exposure to resource equities.
Typically, they don’t have large specific allocations to resource equities, and the broad market indices don’t provide much exposure to the commodity producers. The S&P 500’s exposure to energy and metals companies has dropped by more than 50% over the last few years, and the same is true of the MSCI All Country World Index. Those investing with a value bias may be particularly underexposed to resource equities, as value managers tend to be especially averse to the risks posed by commodity investing.
Introduction
Jeremy has written extensively about the long-term prospects for natural resources, but there are advantages to commodity investing beyond potential commodity price appreciation, including diversification and inflation protection. Resource equities are a great way to gain commodity exposure, while also accessing the equity risk premium. Given their somewhat hybrid nature, with one foot in the equity market and the other foot in the commodity market, resource equities display some unusual characteristics; over various timeframes, resource equities may move more with equities or more with commodities and can look more or less risky than the broad market. Perhaps due to their quirky nature, resource equities are generally unloved and possibly misunderstood. However, we believe that resource equities present a compelling investment opportunity, both strategically and tactically, and that long-term investors could benefit from larger allocations to these assets.
Why Access Commodity Exposure via the Public Equity Market?
The equity risk premium is critical
The equity risk premium is the main reason for preferring the equity markets to other means of gaining commodity exposure. While oil prices have risen just slightly in real terms since the 1920s, oil and gas companies have generated real returns of more than 8% per year. That’s a pretty healthy equity risk premium. The industrial metal miners have similarly outperformed the underlying metals. The public equity market has clearly been far superior to direct commodity investment historically, and that’s not even taking into account the storage and transportation costs, perishability issues, etc., associated with direct commodity investment.
The problem with commodity futures
Many investors look to the futures market for their commodity exposure. However, futures investors contend with the futures roll yield when they sell out of an expiring contract and roll into a longer- dated contract. When futures curves are in contango, or upward sloping, there’s a drag associated with selling out of the cheaper near-term contracts and buying the more expensive longer-dated contracts. “Sell low, buy high” is generally not a sound investment practice, and it turns out it hasn’t worked out well for investors in the commodity futures market over the past decade or so. Since 2000, commodities, as represented by the Bloomberg Commodity Spot Index, have gone up by almost 200%. However, this is a theoretical return reflecting the return you would have received if you could have bought commodities at spot prices without incurring the costs associated with dealing with the physical commodities. The investable index, the Bloomberg Commodity Index, covers the same basket of commodities and is implemented via the futures market.
Additional benefits to equities
The equity risk premium and futures roll yield are the two main factors that push us toward equities, but there are other additional benefits to equities as well. Public equities tend to be liquid and cheap to trade, and the public equity market offers a diverse set of business models that offer exposure to natural resources. Furthermore, the ability to value and select stocks within resource equities can yield additional returns.
What about private equity?
Private equity shares many of the benefits of its public brethren and seems like a reasonable alternative if you like fees and illiquidity…but we don’t! Complicating matters, all privates are not created equal; it can be difficult and time-consuming to identify the few private equity managers who really add value, and often the good ones are closed to new investment. Locking capital up at high fees with managers who generally don’t add real value gives us pause, especially given the transparency issues involved with private investment. And while complacency regarding liquidity may be normal in a world where central banks are doing everything they can to support asset prices, one need only look back to 2008 for a reminder of how important liquidity can be when you really need it. At the very least, public resource equities seem like a great complement to a private equity program and, in our view, public equities should make up the core of a resources allocation.
The Strategic Case for Investing in Resource Equities
Commodities have long been of interest to investors due to two important benefits: diversification and inflation protection. We will briefly examine whether investors in resource equities have experienced these benefits and review other potential strategic benefits of investing in commodity-linked equities.
Diversification
Let’s start by looking at whether investing in resource equities has provided diversification benefits. Looking at correlations of monthly returns, annual returns, etc., all the way out to 10-year return correlations can provide some insight into how sectors move with the broad market over various time periods. All four sectors examined here have been highly correlated with the rest of the market on a monthly basis. However, while Financials, Consumer Staples, and Utilities have maintained these high correlations over longer periods of time, the correlations for a basket of energy and metals companies with the rest of the market are very low by the time you look at 3- to 5-year returns, and the 10-year correlations have actually gone negative! There aren’t enough non-overlapping 10-year periods for the 10-year correlations to be statistically significant, but we believe there is intuition for the negative correlations: Rising resource prices are a drag on the rest of the economy, whereas falling resource prices are a boon for the economy.
Think about the implications of this for a moment. Here’s an investment that delivers equity-like returns with low to negative correlations with the broad equity market over long periods of time. Hedge fund investors generally accept lower-than-equity returns in order to gain access to uncorrelated returns, so getting equity returns with low to negative correlations should be very exciting. In fact, it’s not obvious that you need to know anything else in order to get excited about investing in commodity producers.
To illustrate the impact of these diversification benefits, let’s consider the long-term returns of a monthly rebalanced portfolio comprised of 50% energy and metals companies and 50% the rest of the U.S. market. Note that the standard deviation of the 10-year returns for a blended 50/50 portfolio is dramatically lower than either of the individual components. This is the beauty of diversification: Historically, investors have been able to boost returns and significantly reduce long-term volatility by adding resource equity exposure to their equity portfolios.
Inflation protection
Inflation protection is another highly desirable trait for an investment, so let’s look at how resource equities have fared during inflationary environments. In the U.S., we’ve identified eight periods of time where inflation, as measured by CPI, was more than 5% per year for a period of one year or longer. In those inflationary periods, a basket of energy and metals companies kept up with or beat inflation six out of eight times, and in all eight periods the commodity producers outperformed the S&P 500. In fact, the commodity producers delivered real returns of more than 6% per year on average during these inflationary periods, as compared to a destruction of purchasing power of around 1.6% per year for the S&P 500.
We believe unexpected inflation risk is one of the two big risks that long-term investors face, along with depression risk. Historically, resource equities have not only protected against inflation, but have actually dramatically increased purchasing power during inflationary periods. As such, one might expect people to pay up for the inflation protection, just as hedge fund investors pay up for diversification by accepting lower expected returns. However, resource equities provide both diversification and inflation protection, and it turns out they can typically be bought at a discount.
Resource equities typically trade at a discount
Based on a composite valuation metric composed of price to normalized earnings, price to book value, and dividend yield, commodity producers have traded at around a 20% discount to the S&P 500 on average since the 1920s. Rather than focusing on the benefits of resource equities, investors are understandably uncomfortable with the wild, unpredictable swings of the industry, driven by over-/underinvestment cycles, supply disruptions, and unexpected changes in demand, among other factors. For those with relatively short timeframes, the boom/bust nature of commodity investing can be untenable. From its peak in April 2011, the MSCI ACWI Commodity Producers Index fell 54% through its trough in January of this year; and this in an equity market that was up almost 15%! With huge swings like that in the offing, our old friend career risk looms front and center. It’s not hard to see why professional investors worried about their livelihoods would be reluctant to play this game.
However, for investors willing to weather the shorter-term storms, resource equities have actually been remarkably safe investments. Over 10-year periods, the real returns for resource equities have been surprisingly stable. Commodity producers have almost never delivered negative real returns over a 10-year period, and when they have, the losses of purchasing power have been minimal. This is an impressive enough finding in and of itself, but when compared to the stalwart S&P 500, it’s rather astonishing. The S&P 500 has gone down in real terms over many 10-year periods, often by large amounts; our unloved basket of energy and metals companies has actually been a much safer long-term investment.
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Long-term investors should always be on the lookout for opportunities where tolerating short-term underperformance enables long-term outperformance, and this is perhaps such an opportunity., Our energy and metals basket has outperformed the broad market by more than 2% per annum over the past 90 years or so, even after the historic commodity collapse of the last few years. The ability to buy commodity producers at a discount due to their short-term riskiness may be yet another attractive feature of resource equity investing.
The Tactical Case for Investing in Resource Equities...
