New Era Value Investing: A Disciplined Approach to Buying Value and Growth Stocks
Nancy Tengler
For many years Geraldine Weiss has published a newsletter that identifies stocks trading in the upper range of their historic dividend yields. This method succesfully identifies undervalued stocks.
Tengler took this a step further, comparing stocks' dividend yields to their historic relationship to the yield of the market as a whole. Like Weiss' less sophisticated technique, stocks selected in such manner will, on average, outperform the market. She then goes on to ask and answer the question of how to apply a similar technique to stocks with little or no history of dividend payments. (Hence the "New Era" of the title). The answer is to employ the Relative Price to Sales Ratio.
It is easy enough to obtain price-to-sales ratios for individual stocks, which are routinely published in a number of sources. With a little work, an individual investor can then compare a PSR to the PSR of the market as a whole, obtaining the RPSR. But actual application of this technique requires that you obtain the entire range of RPSRs going back years, i.e. "construct the RPSR charts for each company." (p.48). How is this done? The very next sentence tells the tale, in parentheses: "(This information is generally only available to institutional investors through services such as Compustat)."
Oh.
I feel much as I would had I bought some software through a mass market outlet only to find it runs only on an esoteric operating system used by the Department of Defense.
I won't deny that the ancillary criteria used to winnow the complete universe of low RPSR stocks is of some value (hence the two stars instead of one), but that is like saying you bought a dictionary because you like the way it covers "X", "Y" and "Z".
"New Era Value Investing" is essentially marketing material aimed at convincing trustees for institutional funds to place those funds under Tengler's management. If you are not responsible for investing millions of dollars of other people's money, save your own and look for something better.
