I don’t know if TreasuryDirect changed their policy or if EmigrantDirect changed theirs, but my attempt to purchase Series I Bonds and take advantage of the potentially awesome new rates was foiled! I received the following message from TreasuryDirect:

Dear JIM,

We’re sorry, but your purchase request IAAAB was canceled. While trying to collect payment from your bank, they returned our debit. Please check the Investor InBox section of your TreasuryDirect account for more detailed information.

Thank you for using TreasuryDirect.

It was entirely my fault. It wasn’t Emigrant Direct’s fault, or the Treasury Direct’s fault, it was Jim Direct’s fault. The only linked account I had was from an Emigrant Direct savings account and I assumed it would still be valid to make another purchase. I had purchased $100 in Series I bonds a while back just to play with the system and assumed everything was still good. Unfortunately, TreasuryDirect now debits the linked account rather than a regular ACH transfer (I think) and so a savings account doesn’t debit! (The other explanation was that there were insufficient funds, but I confirmed I had enough)

So the only solution is to head over to the bank and buy a paper Series I Bond so I can still take advantage of the upcoming favorable rates. I suspect it should be pretty easy, the government always makes it easy for you to give them your money :).

If you’re a buyer of Series I Savings Bonds, you probably already know this. If you haven’t been paying much attention to them, it might be time to perk up because Series I bonds are looking pretty good given right now. So good that I decided to purchase some of them.

Opening Treasury Direct Account

Fortunately, I opened up a Treasury Direct account a while back and had my bank account linked up so I could skip the setup process. I don’t know if the setup process still only takes five minutes, as I had written, or if it was more complicated now. I do know that Treasury Direct will be sending out new access cards for security purposes, so perhaps the setup process is a little more involved now. Regardless, I was able to find my login credentials (if you lose them, getting your ID requires a tremendous amount of information, the government doesn’t mess around)

If you aren’t familiar with Series I Bonds or Treasury Direct, you can review this primer on them, it should get you up to speed. Everything is still accurate except the annual limit per SSN has been lowered from $30,000 to $10,000 ($5k online, $5k in paper).

New Rates

The Series I Bonds’ interest rate is calculated through a fixed rate and a semiannual inflation rate. The fixed rate is announced every May and November and is valid for all bonds issued during the six month period after the announcement and is valid for the life of the bond. Last November, the announced fixed rate was 1.20%. The inflation portion is also announced every May and November and is based on the CPI-U (Consumer Price Index for all Urban Consumers) and can be reasonably predicted. It’s predicted that the announced inflation portion of the rate will be approximately 2.416%.

If you take that to be true, using the total rate calculation, you’ll get an annual rate of 6.06% - which is nearly double most online savings accounts. That’s why we’re getting some Series I Bonds. By purchasing in April, we lock in the fixed rate portion of 1.2%. This gets us 4.38% for six months then 6.06% for another six months, with the future unknown. What’s nice is that the interest is federal tax deferred (until you cash in the bond) and state & local tax free, so the effective rate is a little higher depending on your state taxes.

Redemption Rules

The only important rules about Series I bonds is that you can’t redeem them for one year and if you redeem it before it’s five years old, you surrender 3 months of interest (most recent three months). Also, in case you were interested, savings bonds are nontransferable so don’t buy them off anyone. And lastly, when you redeem the bonds you will receive a 1099-INT.

If you want more information, here’s the Treasury Direct page on Series I Bonds, which includes a list of historical rates (fixed and inflation) as well as the equation they use to calculate the composite earning rate.

(photo by allyrose18)

If you ever wanted to buy shares of L’Oreal, you probably were introduced to the idea of an American Depository Receipt. American Depository Receipts, or ADRs, are constructs that allow you to purchase ownership interest (stock) in foreign companies on the domestic stock market.

It’s actually a pretty simple construct. The ADR is a certificate issued by a US depository bank and represents a share (could be a fraction, whole, or multiple shares) of a foreign stock the bank is holding overseas. The ADRs are issued in terms of US dollars but the underlying security is still held in the country of origin’s currency. The whole point of ADRs is that it makes it easier and more convenient to own foreign shares. Instead of having to open a brokerage account overseas, transfer the funds, convert them into the local currency, and then make the purchase - you just buy an ADR. (that’s just one-way, so double that headache). You can tell if a stock is traded as an ADR because it will generally have (ADR) next to its name (as L’Oreal does on Google Finance).

From the operations perspective of yourself, the investor, there is no difference between buying and selling shares of stock and ADRs. You just need to be aware that in addition to all the risks associated with investing in the domestic stock market, you’re introducing currency and country risk into your portfolio. Currency risk refers to the exchange rate of the dollar and the local currency. Country risk refers to the risk associated with changes in the local country’s economy. In the domestic stock market, all holdings are in dollar and you’re contained within the US economy (for the most part, though the World Is Flat) so you don’t have to account for currency and country risk (from the local country).

(If you want to get technical, an ADR is the actual certificate where as an American Depository Share, ADS, is the actual share. An ADR can represent multiple ADSs. In colloquial use, ADR refers to both.)

According to Wikipedia, the first ADR was introduced by JPMorgan in 1927 for a British retailer named Selfridges&Co. The largest depository bank is the Bank of New york Mellon.

According to historical records, the post-war return of the stock market has been around 12%. It’s a number that has used over and over again (more often people use the 10% value) as the benchmark for stock returns and project of future results, since it’s better than pulling a number out of thing air. However, yesterday afternoon I had the pleasure of reading Warren Buffet’s 2007 Letter to Shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway (if you’ve never read one, you should because it is both informative and entertaining, 2008’s is a mere 21 pages long and chocked full of fun facts).

On Page 18, right after Buffett chastizes 498 of the Fortune 500 for not recording stock options as expenses on their books, he starts talking about the Dow returning 5.3%, compounded annually, in the 20th Century. Wow, what happened to this 10% business? Why are we using it as a benchmark if the Dow’s return over the last hundred years (arguable, the last hundred years starting 8 years ago) is a meager 5.3%? I don’t know, but even assuming 5.3% is pushing it.

Buffett goes on to illustrate that a 5.3% annualized gain going forward would mean the Dow would have to pierce 2,000,000 (that’s two million!) by the end of 2099. That’s working with only 5.3%. If you want 10% annually then you’ll need the Dow to hit 24,000,000 by 2100. Twenty four million…

Though, nominal numbers are merely that, nominal. If you asked someone at the start of the 20th Century if the Dow was going to grow from 66 to 11,497 (especially after you told them the horrors that would come during the Great Depression), they probably would’ve laughed too. So, will Warren Buffett’s prediction that a 10% is outlandish and unreasonable hold true?

I don’t know but I’ll tell you what… while historical returns are not indicative of future results, Warren Buffett’s historical returns are better than my historical returns so I’m siding with him on this one.

I heard this “tip” the other day involving how you could take advantage of the market downturn. Each year, you’re permitted to give up to $12,000 to someone else as a gift absolutely tax free. If you give more than $12,000 to one person, you’re personally obligated to declare it and pay taxes on the gift (yep, it’s in reverse of what you’d expect). So, the suggestion is then to give your depreciated shares as a gift now, before the shares are likely to rebound, so that you can make the most of your gift.

Sound like a crazy idea? (It sounds crazy to me) It’s not so crazy if you subscribe to the idea that the stock market will always appreciate in the long run (if you don’t, then you better not have any shares of anything!), but it’s certainly one way to find a silver lining in this ugly stock market cloud we’ve been under!

The Mechanics

If you are actually going to do this, this is how you do it right. These steps are different than if you gift appreciated property (stock is considered property), so please follow them carefully. You will need to do the following to properly document the gifting of your shares:

1. Obviously, give the shares to your beneficiary.
2. Document the fair market value of the shares by writing a gift letter that indicates the gift and its fair market value at the time of the gifting.

Appreciated vs. Depreciated

The is a big difference between donating appreciated stock and depreciated stock. If the stock has appreciated, the recipient has to claim the appreciation when it is sold. People often take advantage of this by gifting appreciated stock to their children, or family members in a lower tax bracket. With depreciated stock, no one gets to claim the loss. So, it might make more immediate sense to sell the stock, recognize the loss, then give the money to your beneficiary and then have them buy the shares back.

To be honest, I wouldn’t do it. I like crazy, out of the box thinking as much as the next person, but this one doesn’t seem to make much sense to me. It makes more sense to claim the loss against any gains that year, then give the money. The recipient can always buy the shares on the open market and pay the commission.

(Photo by rednuht)

Late last year, when there was blood in the streets, a well known discount broker (Company A) was said to be on the verge of bankruptcy and the stock tanked 50% in one day. Not only did it tank 50% but the prognosis on the street, at least perpetuated by mainstream media, was that company was hosed and that they were going under. They didn’t have a rich history of being able to fight off adversity, they were relatively new in the financial business and lots of people figured they’d collapse. SIPC insurance would have to be initiated to save accounts and it was going to be yet another one of the casualties of the sub-prime mess. Would you have sensed that the market had panicked and bought shares? Or would you have joined the bandwagon and watched the shares fall into oblivion?

Now consider this scenario. Several months later, an 85 year old investment firm (Company B), well known throughout the world, looked to be royally screwed as traders were concerned that the firm wouldn’t be able to fund future transactions. Their lifeblood, capital, appeared to be bleeding out as investors were pulling out their funds in the firm. Until their last quarter, they had never posted a loss. That’s 85 years worth of straight profits. On a Friday, their shares fell 10% to a five year low of around $57. By Monday, they closed at $30 on those same credit concerns. Did you see this as the market offering a huge discount on a valuable commodity? Or did you see it as the end of pretty good eight-five year old run?

Well, if you guessed, based on the setup, that Company A recovered and that Company B didn’t… you’d be quite astute. You’d be more astute if you made those determinations as the events were unfolding, rather than right now. Company A was E*Trade, which was the impetus for a topic focused on what would happen if your brokerage went bankrupt. Company B was Bear Stearns. JP Morgan Chase recently announced that they’d buy the firm for $2.30 a share, with funding from the Federal Reserve. While the ink isn’t dry yet on that deal, it was announced this past weekend in conjunction with a weekend 25 basis point cut by the Federal Reserve (an event almost as rare as Halley’s Comet, the last weekend rate cut announcement was October 6th, 1979).

The moral of this story is that you shouldn’t even buy individual stocks based on (emotionally-charged) news. The broader corollary to that moral is that you shouldn’t buy individual stocks without careful inspection of its fundamentals, but avoiding emotionally-charged news is always a great first step.

For the record, I thought E*Trade was going under and Bear Stearns would be fine. I didn’t buy shares of either because I’ve been burned (and rewarded) in the past about ignorantly buying on bad news (now I stick to index funds like a good boy!). In the past, I bought Enron because I thought people were over-reacting but one can never underestimate the pervasiveness and severity of outright fraud. I was rewarded when I bought shares of Xerox in 2000 when it was in single digits because I figured a firm with that storied a history probably was going to make it (or at least be acquired). Though it’s like they say, tell your kid that the stove is hot won’t sear in the message quite like actually touching it.

Usually when one company offers to buy another company, it offers a premium on the current stock price and the stock price jumps up pretty close to the offered price. The difference in the current price and the buyout price, that “pretty close” number, includes a variety of factors. Those factors include the risk that the deal won’t be approved by regulators or shareholders, the time value of money (a deal that will close tomorrow has less of a discount versus a deal to close in a year), or a whole host of other factors. The shareholders that held the stock before wind of this pending offer are generally happy since their shares will appreciate more than they expected. Some investors consider buying the stock because there still is a little bit of difference between the current share price and the offered price. It seems like a sure thing right? Wrong.

When Bank of America offered to buy Countrywide Financial, it offered absolutely no premium. It offered $7.16 a share on January 11th. Shares of Countrywide are only trading at $4.27 right now… why not snap up shares of CFC at $4.27 and pick up what appears to be a nice healthy premium for your money? You might not want to do that because Countrywide is going to be investigated by the FBI. Woah! That wasn’t in the list of “factors” I listed above and that’s because it’s not something you typically associate with a buy out! If the FBI finds something bad, Bank of America can still back out.

As Ron Popeil would say, but wait there’s more… let’s say you heard about the Microsoft offer of cash and stock for Yahoo, pricing each share at around $31. Let’s say you decided to snatch up a few shares of Yahoo on the buy-out offer because you wanted to make a few bucks and because you thought the buy-out made sense. Then Yahoo tried to find additional suitors to increase the sale price only to find out no one else was truly interested. In the interim, Yahoo and Microsoft stock prices fell so the original offer wasn’t as high, a scenario not mentioned in the list. The underlying offer, since it was pegged to an asset whose value changed, changed as time passed!

So, if you hear of a buy-out and are considering to snatch up some “sure thing” money, think twice. There are a lot of factors and scenarios out there that you may not be taking into account. The market has figured it out and that’s why there’s a difference in the first place.