Many investors, especially during earnings season, seem to focus on the income statement. How much revenue was there? How much net income was there? Yet that focus can be dangerous, because the balance sheet actually tells us a lot about how the company is doing, and what it's likely to be doing in the not-too-distant future. Today, I'll focus on two balance sheet line items, accounts receivable (A/R) and inventories, and how they relate to sales.
In Thornton O'Glove's book Quality of Earnings, he calls the analysis of A/R and inventory growth relative to sales the "best method" to get ahead of Wall Street analysts:
One of these simple ploys -- the best method I have ever discovered to predict future downwards earnings revisions by Wall Street security analysts -- is a careful analysis of accounts receivables and inventories. Learn how to interpret these ... a larger than average accounts receivable situation, and/or a bloated inventory. When I see these, bells go off in my head.
If A/R goes up significantly faster than sales, then the company could be stuffing the channel, pulling sales in from the future. It can only do so for so long before customers get fed up and stop buying for a while. Then the company ends up missing revenue and earnings, and the stock price gets whacked.
Similarly, if inventory is rising significantly faster than sales, that could mean demand is slowing down, and a big inventory writedown might be coming. Alternately, sales will be hurt when the company uses large markdowns just to clear out inventory.
Note that I'm not talking about normal business-cycle stuff. Many retailers build up inventory prior to the holiday season in order to meet expected demand. That's normal. Instead, I'm looking for a big disconnect between the growth of sales and the growth of A/R or inventory. That's a potential sign of a risky investment, and it makes me dig a bit deeper to see what's going on.
Let's apply this to U.S. Steel
|
Metric |
United States Steel |
Nucor |
Gerdau Ameristeel |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Revenue growth, TTM |
(11.4%) |
(16.9%) |
(23.9%) |
|
A/R growth, TTM |
246.8% |
48% |
13.7% |
|
Inventory growth, TTM |
13% |
53.9% |
22.2% |
|
Revenue growth, year ago |
(19.9%) |
(19.3%) |
(21.9%) |
|
A/R growth, year ago |
(78.6%) |
(63.2%) |
(53.8%) |
|
Inventory growth, year ago |
(31.3%) |
(49.2%) |
(41.9%) |
|
Revenue growth, 2 years ago |
31.3% |
35.1% |
58.2% |
|
A/R growth, 2 years ago |
40.8% |
70.8% |
80.1% |
|
Inventory growth, 2 years ago |
26.2% |
59.6% |
73.6% |
Source: Capital IQ, a division of Standard & Poor's; TTM = trailing 12 months.
Obviously, the most prominent number belongs to the past year's huge growth in A/R for U.S. Steel. Given that the trend is pretty good, a change to accounting could be fueling this jump, which would be explained in the footnotes to the latest 10-Q or 10-K. However, to be safe, Foolish investors should double-check.
Nucor and Gerdau also have done fairly well over the past few years. The growth in both A/R and inventory over the past year seems to be an industrywide phenomenon, because U.S. Steel also saw such a trend. Hopefully, all three companies will be able to get back on track in the future.
Pay attention to the balance sheet, plug a few numbers into a simple spreadsheet, and according to O'Glove, you can get ahead of Wall Street. This easy analysis, along with a bit of thought, gives you the potential to save yourself the heartache of seeing your investment get sharply cut when a company reports a "surprisingly" disappointing quarter.
The warning signs are often there ahead of time. This tool helps you see them.
To learn more about how we go about analyzing companies, consider taking a 30-day trial subscription to Stock Advisor, the Fool's flagship investing newsletter.
