Moat and Risk Demystified
By Ben Butwin/ Morningstar.com
Finding great companies is as much an art as it is a science. If successful investing was as simple as plugging historical numbers into an equation, excess returns could theoretically be had by all--and therefore by no one.
At Morningstar, we believe that the best approximation of a firm's intrinsic worth is the present value of its future forecast cash flows discounted at its cost of capital. This definition inherently contains plenty of "science," but the key word here, where the paths of different investors often diverge, is "forecast." It is here where variation of opinion and intuition regarding a firm's profitability, competitive advantages, and cash flow certainty create the opportunity to dig up treasures now that few others see until it's too late.
Bridging the Gap
There are several tools that Morningstar uses to interpret the fundamentals of a firm in order to bridge the gap between art and science, hopefully paving the way to a nice profit in the process.
Two of our favorite bridges that help us arrive at prediction of a company's intrinsic value and a "consider-buy" price are moat and risk. Briefly, an economic moat is a firm's ability to utilize its sustainable competitive advantages to outperform rivals and earn returns greater than its cost of capital. The risk of a company, on the other hand, is the strength of the underlying business and the predictability and certainty of its future cash flows. Risk is determined by analyzing factors such as cyclicality, leverage, legal issues, and other outside events. In turn, risk ratings affect the size of the margin of safety that we build into our investment recommendations.
But not everyone's opinion, interpretation, or prediction of these metrics is the same. This is where we believe value can be found: by correctly selecting firms with economic moats that are trading at attractive discounts to our fair value estimate, given the margin of safety implied by our risk rating.
So what determines the riskiness of a team? Remember, we believe that the risk of a firm represents the certainty of its future cash flows, or our confidence in our fair value estimate and the price at which we would recommend investing. Baseball risk would therefore be the year-to-year predictability of a team's record. Contributing factors would be those such as the club's experience, performance consistency, player turnover, and injury-proneness.
Whether you're a fan or not, the New York Yankees are one of the most consistent baseball teams in history. They would most likely be awarded a low risk rating. But not only are the Yankees consistent, they are consistently successful. It is not hard to see how a set of low risk factors can coincide nicely with a winning record. After all, a steadily performing, experienced team of healthy veterans (a team with low risk) has little else to worry about except getting better; consequently, it may very often be able to best its opponents throughout the season.
Back to finance. Take companies like Microsoft, Coca-Cola or Fastenal --all firms that we believe have both wide moats and below-average risk. Like the Yankees, we think that the likelihood of these corporations outshining their respective competitors in the long run is good. We also believe that the transparency and certainty of their future cash flows is rather high--hence the low risk rating and small margin of safety.
While a wide moat and low level of risk do not cause one another, they are certainly related, or derived from the same kinds of "scientific" metrics. Think of it this way: A firm's ability to outperform peers and earn more than it spends usually results in strong cash-flow generation. In an "iron-sharpens-iron" sort of manner, strong cash flow can often build on itself, muting cyclicality, reducing the need for leverage, and making returns more predictable. Just like the low-risk baseball team, more-predictable returns mean that the company can better concentrate on moat-widening operations rather than risk-narrowing ones.
There Are Always Exceptions
Just because a firm has a moat or wins more games than it loses, it does not mean that it is without sizable risk. Every so often, an inexperienced, "risky" baseball team with a more-uncertain future emerges as a league-power. This kind of team may be much more unpredictable than your typical moaty team, but its ability to defeat its opponents may nonetheless be undeniable. Might this team still be a good "investment?" Certainly, we would say, but only at a much larger discount to our fair value estimate!
A great corporate parallel here is Merck. We believe that Merck has an economic moat; its successful portfolio of proprietary drugs has enabled it to outperform competitors and generate high returns on capital. If all goes well, we expect this to continue. However, our certainty in the level of its profits and cash flow is less than with a typical firm. Merck's shares may be subject to considerable volatility, as lawsuits and legal costs related to product recalls threaten stifle its ability to keep cash flows consistent.
Finally, let's take a quick look at the opposite extreme: a below-average risk, no-moat stock, of which there are just four in our coverage universe. The leading bookseller in America, Barnes & Noble, operates in a fairly stable industry with reasonably predictable cash flow. However, the bookselling trade is a rather stagnant business and tends not to provide returns on investment in excess of a firm's cost of capital. Barnes & Noble would therefore be akin to a baseball team that, while reliable, is unfortunately expected to reliably chalk up a losing record year after year (sadly, my beloved Chicago Cubs come to mind).
Clearing the Bases
The key takeaway from this discussion is that our risk rating is considered separately from--but is by no means unrelated to--a firm's ability to sustain an economic moat. Furthermore, while the moat rating affects our discounted cash-flow modeling assumptions, the risk rating directly contributes to our margin of safety. Microsoft and Merck earn similar wide-moat benefits in our valuation model, but we would prefer to buy Merck at a 36% discount to our fair value estimate, while we'd be comfortable buying Microsoft at just a 15% discount. Therein lies the difference. Moat reflects our confidence in a firm's competitive position, while risk reflects our confidence in its future cash flows and the price at which we'd consider buying.
(What is a moat? - Ditch dug as a fortification and usually filled with water)
