The Consumer Discretionary sector ranks fourth out of the ten sectors as detailed in my Sector Rankings for ETFs and Mutual Funds report. It gets my Dangerous rating, which is based on aggregation of ratings of 18 ETFs and 21 mutual funds in the Consumer Discretionary sector as of April 2, 2014.
Momentum chasing is never a good strategy. RCL significantly outperformed the market last year, while F lagged it slightly, but don’t expect those trends to continue in 2014 for either stock.
DTAs artificially raise reported assets and do not help generate operating profit while DTLs are like a source of interest-free financing. We remove the impact of DTAs and DTLs from our calculation of invested capital to ensure the more accurate measure of a firm’s return on invested capital (ROIC).
Retail HOLDRS (RTH) is our top pick for consumer discretionary sector ETFs. RTH is one of 51 ETFs that gets an attractive-or-better rating. We rate the investment merit of the
Most investors are not aware that companies hide one-time and unusual charges and income inside normal, operating line items (e.g. “Cost of sales”) on their income statement. These hidden items can mislead investors by artificially decreasing/increasing GAAP earnings. We found 13,000+ one-time items buried in normal line items like “Cost of Sales” by studying the Footnotes of 10-K filings from 1998 thru 2/15/2011. This research revealed that companies have concealed over $41 billion in one-time items.
Ford gets our Dangerous Rating. This means F has poor quality-of-earnings and an expensive valuation. For example, F's ROIC at 0.6% is in our Bottom Quintile. And the valuation of the current stock price ($15.07) implies the company will grow its profits at 10% compounded annually for over 40 years. The takeaway: avoid this stock.