Buying and Shorting Household Durables

If you want to find winning -- or losing -- stock ideas, you'll need to understand what lies beneath a company's reported revenue. Many investors screen on metrics like net income or related measurements such as EBIT, EBITDA, or operating cash flow. But companies know that Wall Street is closely monitoring these factors, and they can sometimes attempt to massage their numbers in hopes of providing a "good story" for investors.

Investors can get a much better picture of a company's revenue or cash flow story by looking into the quality of earnings instead. Diligent Fools will play the role of forensic accountant, reading all of a company's SEC filings and financial statements in search of accounting tricks that might be masking deteriorating company performance. To help your investigation, I've uncovered a powerful shortcut: subtracting net income from operating cash flow.

Let's test how well this shortcut works by rounding up a clutch of companies with five-year annualized growth rates greater than 10%. Then we'll rank these contenders with my quality-of-earnings metric, divided by each company's market cap to normalize the candidates' different sizes.

Here are the top two and the bottom two companies in my quality-of-earnings screen for household durables companies:

The highest

The lowest

These household companies are in the consumer discretionary sector. Let's look at how companies in this sector have performed over the past decade when ranked by my simple quality-of-earnings metric:

The graphs don't lie
Companies with higher quality of earnings significantly outperform those with lower quality. Stocks in quantile 1 generated nearly 18% annualized returns, while the bottom feeders of quantile 5 stocks returned about 7.5%.

Clearly, the revenue growth story for the household durables companies above is an inadequate measure to evaluate these companies.  Our earnings quality screen (and decade of corroborating evidence!) suggests that Lifetime Brands and Universal Electronics are our buy candidates, while National Presto and Tupperware might be shorting opportunities. Of course, before pulling the trigger, investors should do their homework to get an even better and more comprehensive picture of quality of earnings and earnings growth.

Finding companies to short will take more than my simple quality-of-earnings shortcut. That's why John Del Vecchio, CFA, a leading forensic accountant and The Motley Fool's shorting specialist, put together a detailed report that shows you how to spot five serious red flags that can help you detect time bombs in your portfolio and lead you to the next big short. You can get the entire report free by clicking here or by entering your email address in the box below.