IC Share Tips, National Grid, Brexit and the Audit Market

This week’s Investors Chronicle edition (dated 28/12/2018) provides lots of food for thought. One of the most educational is their review of the share tips they published as “tips of the week” in 2018. Unlike some investment publications, who simply forget about their past tips that go nowhere, while lauding their hits, the IC is open about their performance.

They issued 173 “BUY” tips and 24 “SELL” tips in the year. That is quite some achievement by itself as I rarely have more than a very few good new investment ideas in any one year and tend to hold most of my investments from year to year.

How did their tips perform? Overall the “BUYs” returned minus 11.5% which they calculate as being 0.9% better on average than the relevant index. Hardly worth the trouble of investing in them bearing in mind the need to monitor such individual share investments and the transaction costs. The “SELLs” did better at -18.0% versus an index return of -8.8%.

The BUYs were depressed by some real howlers. Such as tipping Conviviality shortly before it went into administration, although they did reverse that tip to a “SELL” before it did so. The result was only a reported 12% loss. As a consequence they are making some “fundamental changes to the way we recommend shares”.

But with so many share tips, the overall performance was not impacted by one or two failures and tended to approximate to the overall market performance. Which tells us that you cannot achieve significant over or under performance in a portfolio by holding hundreds of shares.

I don’t work out my overall portfolio performance for the year until after it ends on the 31^st December so I may report on it thereafter. That’s if it’s not too embarrassing. With many small cap technology stocks in my portfolio, I suspect it won’t be good. I always look at my individual gains and losses on shares at the year end, as an educational process. As Chris Dillow said in the IC, “Investing like all our dealings with the real world, should be a learning experience: we must ask what we got wrong, what we got right, and what we can learn. The end of the year is as good a time as any for a round up…”.

One BUY tip they made was National Grid (NG.) in May 2018 on which they lost 11.8%. There is a separate article in this week’s IC edition on that company which makes for interesting reading as a former holder of the stock. I sold most of my holding in 2017 and the remainder in early 2018 – that was probably wise as you can see from the chart below (courtesy of Stockopedia).

National Grid has a partial monopoly on energy distribution and always seemed to be a well-managed business. Many investors purchase the shares for the dividend yield which is currently about 6%. But the IC article pointed out that proposals from OFGEM (their regulator) might limit allowed return on equity to 3%, which surely threatens the dividend in the long term. The share price fell 7% on the day that OFGEM announced their proposals. Bearing in mind the risks of running an electricity network, and the general business risks they face, that proposed return on equity seems to be completely inadequate to me. That’s even if one ignores the threat of nationalisation under a possible Labour Government.

Another IC article in the same edition was entitled “Brexit and the UK Economy”. That was an interesting analysis of the UK economy using various charts and tables. One particularly table worth studying was the balance of trade between the UK and our main trading partners. We have a big negative balance (i.e. import more than we export) to Germany, Spain, Belgium, Holland and Italy but positive balances with Ireland and the Rest of the World – particularly the USA. The article makes clear that our trade with EU countries has been declining – exports down from 55% in 1999 to 44% of all exports. But imports have not fallen as much so the trade gap has been widening. Meanwhile our exports to Latin America and China, which have been good economic growth areas, have remained relatively small.

The conclusions are simple. EU economies such as Germany would be severely hit by any trade disruption on Brexit. But opportunities in rapidly growing markets are currently being missed, perhaps hampered by inability to negotiate our own trade deals with them, and that might improve after Brexit.

Audit Market Review

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) have published an “Update Paper” on their review of the audit market. It contains specific recommendations on changes to improve competition and asks for comments. See https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5c17cf2ae5274a4664fa777b/Audit_update_paper_S.pdf .

It mentions a long list of audit failings on pages 12 onwards including banks before the financial crisis of 2008, BHS, Carillion, Autonomy (covered in a previous blog post) and Conviviality which was mentioned above.

This paragraph in their executive summary is worth repeating: “Independent audits should ensure that company information can be trusted; they provide a service which is essential to shareholders and also serves the wider public interest. But recent events have brought back to the surface longstanding concerns that audits all too often fall short. And in a market where trust and confidence are crucial, even the perception that information cannot be trusted is a problem.”

One problem they identify is that “companies select and pay their own auditors” which they consider an impediment to high-quality audits. In addition choice is exceedingly limited for large FTSE companies, with the “big four” audit firms dominating that market.

Their proposals to improve matters are 1) More regulatory scrutiny of auditor appointment and management; 2) Breaking down barriers to challenger firms and mandatory joint audits; 3) A split between audit and advisory business within audit firms and 4) Peer reviews of audits.

Their review of FRC enforcement findings suggests that the most frequent findings of misconduct include:

(a) failure to exercise sufficient professional scepticism or to challenge management (most cases);

(b) failure to obtain sufficient appropriate audit evidence (most cases); and

(c) loss of independence (three out of a total of 11 cases).

That surely indicates a major problem with audit quality, and that is backed up by the FRC’s own analysis of audits that they have reviewed with only 73% being rated as “good or requiring limited improvement”.

Auditors are primarily selected via audit committees and there is a noticeable lack of engagement by shareholders in their selection. But that’s surely because large institutional shareholders have little ability to judge the merits of different audit firms.

Would more competition improve audit quality, or simply cause a focus on the lowest price tenders? The report does not provide any specific comment on that issue but clearly they believe more competition might assist. More competition does appear to drive more quality for a given expenditure in most markets however so it is surely sensible to support their recommendations in that regard. The report does emphasise that the selection and oversight of auditors would ensure that competition is focused on quality more than price which is surely the key issue.

A previous proposal was that auditors be appointed by an independent body but that has been dropped, partly due to shareholder opposition. The new proposal is for audit committees to report to a regulator with a representative even sitting as an observer on audit committees where justified. In essence it is proposing much more external scrutiny of audit committee activities in FTSE-350 companies and decisions taken by them.

The end result, at some cost no doubt, would be that both auditors and audit committees will be continually looking over their shoulders at what their regulators might think about their work. That might certainly improve audit quality so for that reason I suggest this proposal should be supported.

The requirement for “joint” audits where two audit firms including one smaller firm had to be engaged seemed to be opposed by many audit committee chairmen and by the big four accounting firms. Some of their objections seem well founded, but the riposte in the report is that evidence from France, where joint audits are compulsory, suggests they have a positive impact on audit quality. Moreover, it would clearly increase competition in the audit market.

In summary, the report does appear to provide some sound recommendations that might improve audit quality. But investors do need to respond to the consultation questions in the report as it would seem likely that the big audit firms will oppose many of them.

Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )