In a brutal bear market, one of the things that may allow you to sleep well at night is investing in value stocks. Value is a somewhat relative term, but generally, it denotes low-priced stocks based on a multiple of earnings or book value. While high-flying growth stocks trading at lofty multiples have huge downside potential if sentiment changes around their prospects, value stocks have a more solid ground on which to stand.
Right now, the following high-quality stocks have fallen to bargain levels. While their prices could fall further from here and results could suffer in the near term, these are resilient companies that should bounce back eventually, making them solid long-term picks for your portfolio today.
Meta Platforms
Warren Buffett once said, "You pay a high price for a cheery consensus," and you couldn't get a less cheery consensus than investors have on Meta Platforms (META -2.96%) right now. Perhaps that's why the dominant social media platform with outstanding financial characteristics trades at less than 12 times earnings.
Meta's problems are many. Last year's iOS changes to Apple's Identity for Advertisers made Facebook's ad targeting less precise; ditto for a recent settlement with federal housing officials on Tuesday, by which Facebook will have to change its algorithms on housing, employment, and credit, to exclude certain characteristics around race, religion, and sex. These new regulations threaten Facebook's price per ad, since ads in these areas will be less targeted.
Then there's the TikTok threat. The ascendant short-video app has been eating into teenagers' online engagement, at the expense of Facebook and Instagram. Meta's response? To make its app look more like TikTok. Management has been rolling out new changes to Facebook, which include showing more TikTok-like Reels, specifically from creators and not just immediate friends and family. A final change includes reintegrating Messenger into Facebook to mimic TikTok's messaging functionality.
Finally, investors have also soured on the company's metaverse bet; if we are in fact going into a slowdown or recession, as some predict, then spending tens of billions of dollars with no payoff for five or 10 years is not what investors want to see.
Yet if one is really looking out years, Meta's stock seems awfully cheap, and it has a history of successfully adapting its platform to counter rivals. In fact, backing out the company's losses from its Reality Labs metaverse segment, and operating profits would have been about 25% higher last quarter. That essentially means if the company stopped investing in the metaverse, it would trade around 10 times earnings. Meanwhile, Meta still had $44 billion in cash on its balance sheet, and it continues to repurchase stock. Meta's huge cash flows should also allow it to outspend TikTok in attracting creators to make more high-quality Reels for Facebook to counter TikTok's recent success.
Meanwhile, the overall digital advertising segment is still growing strongly, so even if Meta loses market share, it should still grow. And of course, there is always the possibility Facebook's new Reels feature actually finds success, just as Stories eventually defended Meta's platform against Snap. If that happens, shares could go significantly higher, as long as we don't have a long and deep recession.
Micron Technology
Micron Technology (MU -4.21%) is one of only three manufacturers of DRAM memory and one of five manufacturers of NAND flash storage chips, with huge barriers to entry in this capital and research-intensive sector. Furthermore, the memory industry is set to grow over the long term, as memory use is growing not only in PCs an smartphones, but increasingly in memory-hungry data centers, industrial applications, and electric and autonomous vehicles. Moreover, Micron has been outperforming the industry in recent years, reaching today's most leading-edge nodes before rivals.
Yet when fears of a recession are in the air, Micron tends to sell off to very cheap levels. That's the case today, with the stock at around 1.3 times book value, and just seven times trailing earnings. Of course, since the price of memory fluctuates, Micron's cyclicality means its low P/E ratio doesn't tell us much. However, Micron's price-to-book ratio is now in the neighborhood of previous troughs.
MU Price to Book Value data by YCharts
Not only that, but as you can see, Micron's price-to-book valuation tends to bottom out at a higher level with each passing cycle. This is because greater and greater scale, consolidation among top memory producers over time, and the increasing difficulty of producing leading-edge supply has made memory companies more profitable, with margins reaching higher highs and lows through each cycle.
Not only that, but Micron's book value is also understated at the moment. The company is set to report its fiscal third-quarter earnings on June 30, in which it's expected to earn $2.46 per share. Subtracting out its $0.10 dividend, Micron should probably add about $2.36 to its book value per share, which would probably bring Micron's book value to around $45 at present. That means the current price-to-book ratio is really around 1.25.
No doubt, the next few quarters could be rough. But for long-term investors, this valuation could end up being a nice entry point, given the long-term growth trajectory for memory chips.
Image source: Getty Images.
Bank of America
Another stock that has cratered on cyclical fears is Bank of America (BAC 3.31%), which is Buffett's favorite bank. Bank of America currently trades at just 9.3 times earnings because of fears of an oncoming recession; however, the company is well positioned to ride out any particular storm. CEO Brian Moynihan has pursued a strategy of "smart growth," selectively growing the business while keeping risk low. Charge-offs are currently near historic lows for the bank, and BofA's balance sheet is sound, with a Common Equity Tier 1 ratio of 10.4%.
Moreover, Bank of America's lending-centric model is more interest rate sensitive than most other large banks. Management said in its first-quarter presentation that a 100-basis-point parallel increase in rates would add about $5.4 billion in net interest income to the bank's revenues over 12 months, a 12% increase over its trailing 12-month figure. As mortgages and other rates have climbed recently, Bank of America should benefit, as that extra interest income will fall to its bottom line. While the bank's investment banking wing is currently suffering from a lack of new IPOs and debt issuances, Bank of America is less exposed there than are other large money-center banks.
The company also continues to wring costs out of its system, with non-financial expenses decreasing 1% compared with last year's first quarter, despite an increase in salaries. This has been a pleasant ongoing theme, as Bank of America continues to benefit from lower costs brought on through digital transformation. These cost reductions occurred even as the bank continued to grow its loan book 10% last quarter.
In all, Bank of America looks really cheap, but even if the worst happens, it looks as if it can weather the storm. Meanwhile, shareholders will continue to receive its 2.6% and growing dividend, along with share repurchases while they wait for the economic cycle to turn more positive.
