Twelve Blue Chip Stocks Of The Future

Using their proprietary valuation models, they have each selected six stocks that exhibit the qualities investors should seek for long‑term outperformance – or as we like to call them, the blue chips of the future.

Where to start looking

George Boubouras, chief investment officer at Contango Asset Management, says that investors should stick to a small number of sectors when looking for the star portfolio performers of tomorrow.

“If you are looking for a good-quality company with a consistent growth profile, I’d suggest you look to infrastructure or services or listed property,” Boubouras says.

What’s equally important, however, is that investors review their portfolio frequently for signs that a company is at risk of being disrupted. Boubouras says investors should ask themselves where the next set of downgrades is coming from.

“Cast your mind back to the year 2000 and ask yourself, ‘What was the Australian company with the biggest market cap?’ Most people think it was a resources company, Telstra or a bank, but it wasn’t. It was News Corp,” Boubouras says.

While News Corp isn’t exactly on the ropes, it’s no market darling either.

Following the demerger of its print and entertainment arms in 2011, both vehicles have been treading water. The print business remains structurally challenged and its entertainment arm is under threat from newcomers such as Netflix.

Mind the disruption

Apart from being a political buzzword, disruption is accelerating the irrelevance of many of former blue chips. According to projections from Koda Capital, the rate of disruption to the incumbents is gathering pace.

Over the past 10 years, about half the companies in the benchmark US S&P 500 have left the index, replaced by bigger companies with brighter prospects.

Koda’s chief investment officer Brigette Leckie says that she expects the speed at which companies are booted from the index to double; that it will take only five years for the index to turn over the next 250 companies.

That has in turn affected the personal wealth of millions, not least the company founders and others at the top of the wealth tree. A joint report from UBS and PricewaterhouseCoopers from December 2015 found that only half the billionaires of 20 years ago could still be defined as billionaires today.

The lesson is that even if you aren’t a billionaire, you still need to carefully consider threats to your portfolio. There’s simply no such thing as a safe set‑and-forget strategy.

Blue chip or red herring?

Roger Montgomery, chief investment officer at Montgomery Investment Management, says that contrary to making money for shareholders, the so-called blue chips are more likely to destroy your capital.

“Take a look at BHP Billiton. It has tripled the equity entrusted to the company and tripled its debt, and its earnings are no higher than they were a decade ago. You would be better off with a bank account,” he says.

Montgomery uses the example of two companies from the telecommunications sector, Telstra and M2 Group, to prove his point. Between 2005 and 2015, if you ploughed $100,000 into a blue chip such as Telstra you would have seen the value of your shareholding rise to $117,000 and the annual yield rise from $5870 to $6500.

But if you had invested the same amount of money in the upstart telco M2 Group – which has since been acquired by Vocus – the value of your shareholding would have risen to $3 million and the annual dividend would be $99,800. That’s right, a yield of about $200 less than your original investment. Every year.

“Telstra’s share price is still lower than where it was 17 years ago. Its earnings per share is not a cent higher [than] a decade ago. Investors need to understand that the majority of the blue chips are being disrupted, challenged or have matured,” Montgomery says.

Allan Gray chief investment officer Simon Mawhinney also believes that the concept of a blue-chip stock is flawed.

“It’s not a phrase we ever use at Allan Gray. Obsessing about blue chips is a complete waste of time because there is no element of valuation in the concept,” he says.

Mawhinney, a respected contrarian investor, is more focused on a stock’s value than its reputation or strength of brand.

“Valuation needs to be first and foremost. What’s important is how much do I pay for a company and what returns will that give me over the next five to 10 years,” he says.

Mawhinney’s brand of value investing, however, is at the extreme end of the spectrum. It is not unusual for Allan Gray to hold significant positions in some of the most distressed companies on the ASX, such as Arrium or Paperlinx.

Allan Gray often engages with the company at board level on issues such as strategy or asset sales in an effort to release hidden value. It is no surprise, then, that Mawhinney has little time for those who do the equivalent of buying IBM for their Australian clients.

“There is so much career risk when it comes to being a fund manager. The greater risk is not owning something that everyone else owns,” he says.

“So sure, you don’t get fired, but you don’t have a business in the long term. The easiest thing for a fund manager to do is to buy those top stocks, clip the ticket and sail off into the sunset. But it also cements mediocrity in your business or portfolio.”