Cohen & Steers: Best Near-Term Investment Management Capital Gain Prospect

Summary

• A 3-5 month prospect from here of CNS share prices could reasonably range from a $74.79 low to an $80.33 high from its present $75.02 price.
• All 12 positions like today’s in the past 5 years of 1261 market days averaged net gains at 11.1% during 23 market days (of one month and 2 days).
• Those holding periods had worst price draw-downs of only -2.2% and all 12 were profitable.
• Prior forecasts by Market-Makers have been rather inconsistent in attention due to the firm’s emphasis on real estate investments rather than stocks. But they have generally followed equities expectations.

Pgiam/iStock via Getty Images

This article's primary focus is on Cohen & Steers, (NYSE:CNS).

Investment Portfolio Discipline Summary

Blockdesk's Standard Performance Comparison fund invests in equities whenever Market-Maker hedging activity forecasts that 80% or more of the near-coming price range is expected to be to the upside and 10% or less may be to the downside. This is a guide to the balance of expectations, since coming price change directions tend to be led by prior extremes, issue by issue.

At the time of each purchase a GTC sell order for all of those just bought shares is placed with the broker where bought. His system will monitor and direct to you the sale confirmation when the closeout is accomplished, probably with encouragement for reinvestment.

At the time of the buy, mark (only ) your own personal private calendar for 3 months after the purchase, making a note to review this holding. If it is not yet sold, but at a loss, sell and put the proceeds into the reinvestment stream. If it is at a gain, after considering alternatives, you decide to sell then or move the calendar note a month further forward - but just once.

Source: Blockdesk.com

Description of Primary Investment Candidate

"Cohen & Steers, Inc. is a publicly owned asset management holding company. Through its subsidiaries, the firm provides its services to institutional investors, including pension funds, endowments, and foundations. The firm invests in public equity, fixed income, and commodity markets across the globe through its subsidiaries. Through its subsidiaries, it invests in companies operating in the real estate sector, including real estate investment trusts, infrastructure sector, and natural energy resources sector for its equity and fixed income investments. Cohen & Steers, Inc. was founded in 1986 and is based in New York, with additional offices in London, United Kingdom; Central, Hong Kong; Tokyo, Japan; and Seattle, Washington."

Source: Yahoo Finance

Yahoo Finance

These growth estimates have been made by and are collected from Wall Street analysts to suggest what conventional methodology currently produces. The typical variations across forecast horizons of different time periods illustrate the difficulty of making value comparisons when the forecast horizon is not clearly defined.

Risk and Reward Balances Among CNS Competitors

Here are several investment management industry services like CNS. Following the same analysis as with CNS, historic sampling of their prior Risk-Reward balances like those of today were taken, and are mapped out in Figure 1.

Figure 1

blockdesk.com (used with permission)

(Used with permission)

Expected rewards for these securities are the greatest gains from current closing market price seen worth protecting short positions. Their measure is on the horizontal green scale.

The risk dimension is of actual price draw-downs at their most extreme point while being held in previous pursuit of upside rewards similar to the ones currently being seen. They are measured on the red vertical scale.

Both scales are of percent change from zero to 25%. Any stock or ETF whose present risk exposure exceeds its reward prospect will be above the dotted diagonal line. Capital-gain attractive to-buy issues are in the directions down and to the right.

Our principal interest is in CNS at location [5], at the edge of the 5-to-1 reward to risk ratio green area. A "market index" norm of reward~risk tradeoffs is offered by SPY at [9]. Most appealing (to own) by this Figure 1 view is CNS.

Comparing features of Alternative Investment Stocks

The Figure 1 map provides a good visual comparison of the two most important aspects of every equity investment in the short term. There are other aspects of comparison which this map sometimes does not communicate well, particularly when general market perspectives like those of SPY are involved. Where questions of "how likely' are present other comparative tables, like Figure 2, may be useful..

Yellow highlighting of the table's cells emphasize factors important to securities valuations and the security CNS, most promising of near capital gain as ranked in column [R]. Cells pink-highlighted alert us to data limitations, in column [L], discussed below.

Figure 2

blockdesk.com (used with permission)

Why do all this math?

Figure 2's purpose is to attempt universally comparable answers, stock by stock, of a) How BIG the prospective price gain payoff may be, b) how LIKELY the payoff will be a profitable experience, c) how SOON it may happen, and d) what price drawdown RISK may be encountered during its holding period.

Readers familiar with our analysis methods after quick examination of Figure 2 may wish to skip to the next section viewing Price range forecast trends for CNS.

Column headers for Figure 2 define investment-choice preference elements for each row stock whose symbol appears at the left in column [A]. The elements are derived or calculated separately for each stock, based on the specifics of its situation and current-day MM price-range forecasts. Data in red numerals are negative, usually undesirable to "long" holding positions.

Table cells with yellow fills are of data for the stocks of principal interest and of all issues at the ranking column, [R].

The price-range forecast limits of columns [B] and [C] get defined by MM hedging actions to protect firm capital required to be put at risk of price changes from volume trade orders placed by big-$ "institutional" clients.

[E] measures potential upside risks for MM short positions created to fill such orders, and reward potentials for the buy-side positions so created. Prior forecasts like the present provide a history of relevant price draw-down risks for buyers. The most severe ones actually encountered are in [F], during holding periods in effort to reach [E] gains. Those are where buyers are emotionally most likely to accept losses.

The Range Index [G] tells where today's price lies relative to the MM community's forecast of upper and lower limits of coming prices. Its numeric is the percentage proportion to the downside of the full low to high forecast seen below the current market price.

The use of prior market actions subsequent to RIs like today make it necessary that those priors be representative of experiences in the just-past 5 year period of 1261 market days. Any RI sample of less than 20 market days could have occurred in one month of 21 market days. Out of the 5 years 60 months such performance might well be not representative of the whole period. For CNS its pink-highlighted column [L] cell flags this problem, impacting CNS's potential Figure 1 appeal, to be discussed later in Figure 3.

[H] tells what proportion of the [L] sample of prior like-balance forecasts have earned gains by either having price reach its [B] target or be above its [D] entry cost at the end of a 3-month max-patience holding period limit. [ I ] gives the net gains-losses of those [L] experiences.

What makes CNS most attractive in the group at this point in time is its basic strength of reward to risk ratio of 3.2 to 1 in [T].

Further Reward~Risk tradeoffs involve using the [H] odds for gains with the 100 - H loss odds as weights for N-conditioned [E] and for [F], for a combined-return score [Q]. The typical position holding period [J] on [Q] provides a figure of merit [fom] ranking measure [R] useful in portfolio position preferencing. Figure 2 is row-ranked on [R] among alternative candidate securities, with CNS in top rank.

Along with the candidate-specific stocks these selection considerations are provided for the averages of some 3000+ stocks for which MM price-range forecasts are available today, and 20 of the best-ranked (by fom) of those forecasts, as well as the forecast for S&P 500 Index ETF (SPY) as an equity-market proxy.

Current-market index SPY is not competitive as an investment alternative with its Range Index of 49 indicating the other half of its forecast range is to the upside, but fewer than 5 of every 8 previous SPY forecasts at this range index produced profitable outcomes, with enough losers to put its average in negative result in column [ I ].

As shown in column [N] of figure 2, those levels in comparison to their row forecasts [E] vary significantly between stocks. What matters is the net profit between investment gains and losses actually achieved following the forecasts, shown in column [I]. The Win Odds of [H] tells what proportion of the Sample RIs of each stock were profitable. Odds below 80% often have proven to lack reliability.

Price range forecast trends for CNS

Figure 3

blockdesk.com (used with permission)

No, this is not a "technical analysis chart" showing only historical data. It is a Behavioral Analysis picture of the Market-Making community's actions in hedging investments of the subject. Those actions define expected price change limits shown as vertical bars with a heavy dot at the closing price on the date of the forecast.

It is an actual picture of experienced market professionals expected future prices, not a simple hope of a recurrence of the past. These expectations are backed up by significant bets of investment capital made to protect market-makers or earn a proprietary profit from risk-taking.

Where the verticals show no change in shape or relation to the heavy-dot market close prices, it is because inadequate information availability prevents conviction or credibility in the forecast. The firm's emphasis on real estate investments, where market competition is absent is believed to be the reason for much of the deficiencies.

The special value of such pictures is their ability to immediately communicate the balance of expectation attitudes between optimism and pessimism. We quantify that balance by calculating what proportion of the price-range uncertainty lies to the downside, between the current market price and the lower expected limit, labeled the Range Index [RI].

Here a RI at zero indicates no further price decline is likely, but not guaranteed. The odds of 3 months passing without either reaching or exceeding the upper forecast limit or being at that time below the expected lower price (today's) are quite low.

The probability function of price changes for CNS are pictured by the (thumbnail) lower Figure 3 frequency distribution of the past 5 years of RI values with the today value indicated.

Conclusion

The multi-path valuations explored by the analysis covered in Figure 2 is rich testimony to the near-future value prospect advantage of a current investment in Cohen & Steers over and above the other compared alternative investment candidates.

Disclosure: I/we have no stock, option or similar derivative position in any of the companies mentioned, but may initiate a beneficial Long position through a purchase of the stock, or the purchase of call options or similar derivatives in CNS over the next 72 hours. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.