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In recent weeks we have written several blogs (S&P 500 sector stock watch, Attractive stocks under $35, with potential investment opportunities, Solid S&P Value Companies, Cheapest Stocks In the S&P 500), discussing investment opportunities within the S&P 500. These stocks ideas all had favorable scores under The Applied Finance Group's (AFG’s) investment criteria, which includes economic performance, valuation, earnings quality and management’s ability to create shareholder wealth, among other criteria.

Another way that AFG identifies potentially attractive investments is through the use of its Value Expectations interface, which helps investors get a better understanding of the expectations embedded into stock prices. This interface allows us to understand the Sales Growth, EBITDA Margin, and Asset Turnover a company has to deliver in the future to justify its current trading price. In theory and in normal circumstances, if the imbedded future performance is very conservative relative to the company’s historical performance, the stock is regarded as undervalued. The table below displays the implied future Sales Growth (“Priced-in Sales Growth) of the companies we have recently recommended in our recent blogs, assuming their EBITDA Margins and Asset Turnovers stay at 5-year median levels.

To identify potentially attractive investment ideas, The Applied Finance Group (AFG) uses a combination of proprietary variables including valuation, economic performance, management quality, and Earnings Quality. In December of 2008, ValueExpectations.com released a list of companies sorted only by AFG’s Value Score (defined below). Our valuation techniques have proven successful at identifying mispriced securities, which has helped our clients select stocks that outperform their chosen benchmark.

The ValueExpectations.com blog posted in December 2008 (High Value Score Stocks - S&P 500), contained these high Value Score companies (DDS, S, NOV, MTW, SII, WFR, CHK), and outperformed the S&P 500 by 40% as of our 3-26-09 performance update. We recently checked the average performance of those picks through 8-27-2009 to find that they have returned an astounding 52% above the S&P 500, with 6 of the 7 companies outperforming. High Value Score Stocks Part 2, released on 5-7-09 has also outperformed the S&P 500 by nearly 3% since its release, with a batting average of just over 60%.

Due to the success of the first two “High Value Score” blogs, we again used valuation as a basis for selecting a new set of investment ideas. Listed below are the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 (excluding Financials) based on AFG Value Score alone. These companies look the most attractive from a valuation perspective relative to the rest of the index.

AFG's Valuation Metric – Measures the percent to target (deviation between a stock’s current trading price and its AFG current default target price). To derive the intrinsic value of a firm, AFG uses its proprietary Valuation Model (modified discounted cash flow model).

On Monday we highlighted several companies from our buy/sell list that represented investment ideas for all types of investors, which included Small and Large Cap stocks as well as Growth and Value stocks. Since Value Expectations tends to provide Large Cap Value Stocks for potential Buy ideas, earlier this week we decided it would be helpful to also highlight some small cap stocks we like from the Russell 2000. Now, moving on to the Growth investor, we will focus on companies we classify as growth stocks and find attractive within the S&P 500 (excluding Financials). By definition, AFG classifies growth stocks as companies with a Market Value/Invested Capital (MV/IC) in the top half of their sector.

In the table below are 10 growth stocks that we find attractive based on AFG’s valuation model, and are ranked neutral or higher based on AFG’s default recommendation.

Attractive Growth Companies - S&P 500 (excluding Financials)

AFG's Valuation Metric – Measures the percent to target (deviation between a stock’s current trading price and its AFG current default target price). To derive the intrinsic value of a firm, AFG uses its proprietary Valuation Model (modified discounted cash flow model).

Economic Margin - A corporate performance measurement that addresses the gaps in GAAP, eliminating distortions caused by accounting policies to measure what a company is truly earning above or below their cost of capital.

Management Quality – Assesses management’s ability to make wealth creating decisions.

AFG's Growth Universe - Companies in the AFG universe, which have MV/IC in the top 50% of the universe and have EPS estimates.

Market Value/Invested Capital (MV/IC) - The firm's average total equity, debt and other obligations divided by net invested capital.
 

Traditional Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) models have been been underutilized in equity analysis over the years primarily because of the assumptions one has to sign off on. We will concentrate on just two of the major issues we have with traditional DCF models, the lack of ability to deal with competition and the perpetuity assumption embedded in a DCF model. These assumptions lead to irrational calculations of intrinsic value and force analysts to make compromising decisions in their model building efforts.

AFG uses a modified DCF model that accurately addresses the competitive nature of the business while also dealing with the perpetuity issue through our Economic Margin decay or competitive advantage period.

The four factors that affect AFG’s Competitive Advantage Period (CAP) are;

Profitability – High Profit leads to increased competition and a higher decay rate
Variability – Higher volatility leads to less predictability and a higher decay rate
Trend – AFG gives the benefit of the doubt to an upward trend which leads to a lower decay rate
Invested Capital – Large Invested Capital creates barriers to entry and leads to lower decay rate

The Decay Rate is the rate at which the Economic Margins™ will diminish over time due to competition, market conditions and limited investment opportunities. Higher decay rates translate into shorter competitive advantage periods, while lower decay rates translate into longer competitive advantage periods.

The Decay Rate profile is downward sloping to the right, which means that Economic Margins™ over time diminish to zero. This does not mean that the company will not have earnings, but instead the company will have an Economic Margin™ of zero, which indicates there are no excess profits after the investors are paid and the depreciating assets are replaced.When selecting securities, companies that are maintaining a high level of economic profitability or growing their profits rapidly are attractive from an investment standpoint. However, the more profitable a firm is the more likely other companies will attempt compete away excess returns.

To illustrate this, one has to look no further than Dell Computer. Dell Computer had Economic Margins™ hovering around 40% (top 5% of all companies) in 1997 and 1998, but soon every major firm was announcing that they were going to build computers to order. Why? Because they saw the huge profits that Dell was making. The result is that Dell's Economic Margin™ for 1999 was around 25%, a decline of 37.5% in just one year. The remaining factors are relatively straight-forward, in that volatile returns are worth less than consistent returns, companies with an increasing Economic Margins™ are worth more than a company in decline, and large companies have a natural barrier to entry, thus a lower decay rate.

Theory: Excess return gets competed away

Fact: In 1997, the median top decile Economic Margin (EM) firm = 17.4%. 10 years later, that same group of companies had a median EM of 6.5%. On the other hand, the bottom decile had an EM of -12.2%, 10 years later that same group had a median EM of -1.0%.

Current Top Decile Economic Margin Companies (S&P 500 ex. financials)

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Bloomberg provides a score for companies within the S&P 500 based on an average of all analyst ratings from the street. Below is a table highlighting companies with the best analyst ratings, largest increase in rating, highest price targets, and worst analyst ratings and the valuation attractiveness of each of these companies based on The Applied Finance Group’s (AFG) valuation model.

Companies within each of these groups are ranked from most attractive from a valuation perspective to the least attractive. VE.com will actively track the performance of these recommendations and see how they stack up to the analyst recommendations in each group. AFGview.com, AFG’s professional investor website allows you to compare any company using their rating versus the consensus ratings of the sell side. If you are interested in an analysis on a specific company, contact afgsales@afgltd.com.

Best/Worst Analyst Rated Companies (Bloomberg)

AFG's Valuation Model – Using AFG’s modified discounted cash flow model to measure the intrinsic value of a firm compared to its peers. AFG's Value Score - A score which represents the ranked percent to target (deviation between stock’s current trading price and AFG’s current default target price) or attractiveness (upside) relative to the universe. A Value Score of 100 is the most undervalued and 0 is the most overvalued company in the universe.

The Halloween Indicator in the stock market sometimes defined as “sell in May and go away” is a strategy that is based on the difference in the performance of the market during May to October vs. November to April. The strategy is to invest in the S&P 500 during “the best 6 months” and switch to bonds during “the worst 6 months” to avoid the summer doldrums of small to negative returns. Since January of 1950 the average returns for November to April “good months” is 7.9% compared to the 2.5% average return delivered from May to October ‘bad months”.

Although there is a significant spread in returns between the good and bad months, does this mean you should convert to bonds and go on a vacation until September? There are several views for and against market timing but we feel it is too difficult to identify when to be out and when to be in the market. If you dig deeper into the market performance since 1950, you will find that 20 good and 20 bad months make up a significant part of the market performance. For more information read the following market timing strategy filled with pitfalls.

The market has been up in those worst 6 months 60% of the time since 1989, not as profitable as the best 6 months but still positive. I believe 2009 is a good lesson for many, with all of the inefficiencies and irregularities in today’s market, the mixed macro economic reports, and the belief we are headed toward a recovery, jumping out of the market could mean missing out on making up for some of the losses the market handed us in 2008

However, being invested isn’t enough, identifying quality companies and a good value will put you in an even better position to outpace the general market. Listed below are companies that should be considered as potential investment opportunities. These companies all have a valuation attractiveness near the top of their sector in addition to expected improvement of profitability (Economic Margin) above their sector, and do not follow a wealth destroying strategy defined by AFG’s management quality score.

Attractive companies to consider in each sector instead of selling in may and going away

A brief description of AFG's buy criteria variables is below:
• Economic Margin - A corporate performance measurement that addresses the gaps in GAAP, eliminating distortions caused by accounting policies to measure what a company is truly earning above or below their cost of capital.• Valuation Model – Using AFG’s modified discounted cash flow model to measure the intrinsic value of a firm compared to its peers.• Management Quality – Assess management’s ability to make wealth creating decisions.

 

Economic Margin is a measure of economic profitability that identifies how much a company earns above or below its cost of capital. We analyzed all companies in the S&P500 Index based on their historical, current and forecasted Economic Margins to see which firms have the best average of past, present and future profitability. We identified the two most profitable and the two least profitable companies from each sector and have presented them in the table below. As a base of reference, the average firm in corporate America earns a 0 (zero) Economic Margin, or is a “break-even business”. Our research has shown that companies with consistently positive EMs that are also expected to increase their EMs in the future tend to outperfom firms with negative or declining EMs.
<!--[if gte mso 10]> Economic Margin is a corporate performance measure, which helps us identify well managed, wealth creating companies. Although not included in this post, we want to remind you that it is also important to understand the attractiveness of corporations' valuations to make sure we invest in great companies at great prices. (Here is an article by ValueExpectations.com explaining Applied Finance Group’s basic valuation concepts).

Note: Only companies in the S&P 500 were included.

S&P 500 Companies With The Best/Worst Average Profitability (Economic Margin)

Economic Margin (EM) Defined: A measure of corporate performance that captures off balance sheet items, by looking at how much a company is earning above or below their cost of capital. EM is expressed in a % or margin. The Economic Margin Framework™ is more than just a performance metric as it encompasses a valuation system that explicitly addresses the four main drivers of enterprise value: profitability, competition, growth and cost of capital. more EM details (PDF)

Economic Margin (EM) Defined - A measure of corporate performance that captures off balance sheet items, by looking at how much a company is earning above or below their cost of capital. EM is expressed in a % or margin. The Economic Margin Framework™ is more than just a performance metric as it encompasses a valuation system that explicitly addresses the four main drivers of enterprise value: profitability, competition, growth and cost of capital.

Here is a list of companies within the S&P 500 that have earned extraordinary Economic Margins (EM) over the last 7 years and are also expected to maintain high levels of EMs over the next two years. Companies expected to improve their EMs more than their peers have proven to be more likely to out-perform. High EM companies on the list below that have low expectations priced-in for sales growth and attractive valuations, are ones that may be worth a look as a potential investment.

S&P 500 Companies That Maintain High Economic Margins

*AFG’s Value Expectation allows us to understand the imbedded Sales Growth, EBITDA Margins, and Asset Turnovers a company has to deliver in the future to justify its current trading price. In theory and in normal circumstances, if the imbedded future performance is very conservative relative to the company’s historical performance, the stock is regarded as undervalued. The table displays the implied future sales growth of companies assuming their EBITDA margins and Asset turnovers stay at the 5 year median levels.

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According to MotleyFool.com, InvestorPlace.com, Jubak’s Journal, Cramer, and FortuneMagazine.com these are the most attractive stocks to own in 2009. Compare the sales growth priced-in to justify the current stock price (VE Sales Growth) to what the company has achieved in revenue growth over the last five years (5 Year Median Sales Growth) to see if what’s priced-in is a reasonable number for the company to meet or exceed expectations. Couple the expectation information with AFG’s ranking for a stock’s attractiveness relative to the universe (Value Score AFG) to find companies that we find attractive on a default basis that also have low expectations for growing sales compared to what they have delivered the past 5 years. Companies with High Value Score’s and low sales growth expectations will be the companies on this list that are more likely to out-perform.

Recommended Stocks for 2009

Related Article: EPS Increased.....Company Underperformed?

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According to Bespoke Investment Group, these ten companies have the highest percentage of Buy ratings from the analysts that follow them. This table shows the number of analysts covering each stock and the number of buy and sell ratings as well as the percentage of buy ratings on the top 10 companies from Bespoke. Also in the table is the achieved 5 year median sales growth and the VE Sales growth (Sales Growth expectations priced in to the stock at today’s price). Only the top 4 companies on the list LO, PM, TMO, and AYE have 100% buy ratings from all analysts. Of those four, only AYE has high expectations relative to what they have delivered in sales growth in the past. Six out of the twelve companies on the list LO, PM, TMO, GOOG, COV, and BLL have very realistic expectations for sales growth priced-in compared to what they have been able to achieve. With the high percentage of buy ratings on these stocks they all deserve a more in-depth look, but the six with low expectations look especially worthy of consideration as potential investments.

S&P 500 Stocks with the Highest Percentage of Analyst Buy Ratings.

*denotes company only has 2 years of historical sales growth
**denotes company only has 3 years of historical sales growth
VE Sales Growth was calculated for these companies on 12/12/08.