President Trump and his administration have brought infrastructure to the fore of the national conversation, and new proposed spending plans could provide a huge boon to infrastructure companies across the board.
In this Industry Focus: Energy clip, Motley Fool analyst Sarah Priestley and Transport Topics reporter Eugene Mulero talk about a few companies in the massive infrastructure space that investors might want to examine more closely and the most important things to remember about investing in a cyclical industry like this.
A full transcript follows the video.
This video was recorded on March 1, 2018.
Sarah Priestley: A couple of companies to mention for people, if this plan goes in place or if we just start to see more infrastructure spending going forward, especially privatization, tolls, Transurban is an Australian company, they run a lot of the tolls in North America. Then, we have a ton of categories, because this is such a huge industry. And it's a cyclical industry, which is important to note. At the minute, we're potentially at the precipice of a kind of boom, but that's not where we have always been. Building materials like cement, Vulcan and U.S. Concrete. Heavy construction equipment, Caterpillar, United Rentals. Building product stocks, Masco, Builders FirstSource. Infrastructure and engineering, Chicago Bridge & Iron, Jacobs Engineering. Raw material like steel, which you really need for pretty much every major construction project, Nucor and United States Steel Corp.
Potentially, there's going to be a lot of winners. One thing I will caution investors with is, as I mentioned right at the start, a lot of these stocks have been bought up in anticipation of this spending plan. So, watch out for those valuations. I would wait for the concrete result to come out of the government, because it sounds like it might take a long time.
Eugene Mulero: Yeah. And seriously, I think the next highway bill, when you look at the math, I think it'll either come into fruition or really come into focus by 2020. That's when the funding authority for the Federal Highway Trust Fund expires. It expires at the end of that fiscal year. Congress has typically waited until the last minute to address the Highway Trust Fund. They haven't done it this year, they didn't do it last year. So, it's a really good expectation based on what we're hearing, the fact that there's no actual legislation so far this year, and this is something that was supposed to come out during Trump's first 100 days in office. So, all these delays really signal to something that would happen around 2020.
Priestley: So, it might be worth waiting for the excitement to die down on some of these stocks, the valuation to come down, and then review them again in preparation in 2020.
