The veteran value investor John Rogers predicted the US is headed for a repeat of the “roaring twenties” a century ago that will finally encourage investors to dump tech stocks in favour of companies more sensitive to the economy.
The founder of Ariel Investments told the Financial Times in an interview that value investing “dinosaurs” like him stood to win as higher economic growth and rising interest rates took the air out of some of the hottest stocks of recent years.
Rogers, who has spent a near four-decade career focused on buying under-appreciated stocks, said the frenzied buying of special purpose acquisition companies, or Spacs, signalled frothiness in parts of the market, even while a coming economic boom underpinned other share prices.
“This will be a sustainable recovery. I think there’s going to be kind of a roaring twenties again,” Rogers said, adding that the strength of the economic recovery would surprise people and challenge the Federal Reserve’s ultra-dovish monetary policy.
The US central bank is “overly optimistic that they can keep inflation under control”, he said, and higher bond market interest rates would reduce the value of future earnings for highly popular growth stocks such as tech companies and for the kinds of speculative companies coming to market in initial public offerings or via deals with Spacs.
“Spacs are a sign that growth stocks are topping. A signal that the market is frothy,” said Rogers, a self-styled contrarian and famed for his Patient Investor newsletter for clients that debuted in 1983.
Value investing is based on identifying cheap companies that are trading below their true worth, an approach long espoused by Warren Buffett. Value stocks and those sensitive to the economic cycle boomed after the internet bubble burst in 2000, but the investment strategy has been well beaten over the past decade by fast-growing stocks, led by US tech giants.
“We’ve been looking like the dinosaurs for so long,” said Rogers. “We’ve been waiting for that booming economic recovery since 2009.”
Proponents of value investing believe that the combination of expensive growth stock valuations and a robust recovery from the pandemic will cause a significant switch between the two investing approaches.
Higher bond market interest rates reduce the relative appeal of owning growth stocks based on their future earnings power.
When 10-year bond yields rise, “growth stocks look way, way too expensive versus value,” said Rogers. “Value stocks are going to come out of the recovery very strong, they’re going to have a tailwind from an earnings perspective. Their earnings are going to be here and now, not 20, 30 years down the road.”
The Russell 1000 Value index outperformed the equivalent growth index by 6 percentage points in February, rising 5.8 per cent versus a drop of 0.1 per cent for the growth index. That was the biggest outperformance for value since March 2001, according to analysts at Bank of America.
“Although rising rates triggered the rotation, we see a host of other reasons to prefer value over growth,” the analysts wrote last week, “including the profit cycle, valuation, and positioning that can drive further outperformance.”
Rogers said he expected higher overall stock market volatility from rising interest rates this year but value should reward investors as it did “20 years ago once the internet bubble burst”. Ariel is bullish on “fee generating financials” and Rogers said preferred names included KKR, Lazard and Janus Henderson, while it was also bullish on traditional media, including CBS Viacom and Nielsen.
Chicago-based Ariel is one of the few large black-owned investment companies in the US, with $15bn of assets under management. It manages the oldest US mid-cap value fund, dating from 1986.
