What the Latest Small Business Optimism Index Is Telling Us
Tuesday morning, we received the March Small Business Optimism Index reading from the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB). The index edged higher, month over month, to 101.8.
The Optimism Index reading averaged 101.56 for the first quarter of 2019 (with March’s reading the highest), which was well below the March 2018 quarter’s 106.4 reading and the 105.5 level for the December 2018 quarter. Clearly the year-ago level benefited from tax-reform euphoria and while the index has fallen in recent months, the uptrend during first quarter is another sign the domestic economy continues to grow, rather than contract like we are seeing in the Big 3 economies of Europe: Germany, France and Italy.
Digging into the report, one of the bigger soft spots was inventories, as levels were viewed as too large and plans to invest pointed to more firms reducing rather than adding to their inventories. That’s another sign to us of potentially softer guidance relative to expectations in the upcoming earnings season.
Adding to that we also found the Outlook for General Business Conditions component, which looks at the coming six months, has softened considerably, hitting 11 in March, continuing the downtrend in the data since peaking at 35 last July. To us this reflects that the ongoing trade war, domestic economic data and growing worries over the consumer have taken their toll.
What’s most worrisome to us, however, is the accelerating decline in small business earnings over the last two months. Survey respondents chalk this up to falling sales volume and rising costs that include labor, materials, finance, taxes and regulatory costs.
With lower tax rates and the cut in federal regulation by the Trump administration, the other three factors are the likely culprits behind the month-over-month declines in earnings the last few months. On top of that, the sales expectation for the coming three months has also softened compared to the second half of 2018.
With small business being one of the key job creation engines, these softening sales and earnings expectations could pressure hiring plans and corporate spending, adding to the headwind(s) for the domestic economy. What’s also interesting ahead of bank earnings that kick off later this week is the survey revelation that loan availability became harder to obtain during February and March. There was also a drop in expectations for credit in March.
Rather than relying on just one set of numbers, we prefer to leverage several pieces of data to get a fuller, more robust picture. In this case, however, it does mean that we’ll be on guard with bank earnings, especially for those outside of the bulge bracket banks -- JPMorgan Chase (JPM) , Citigroup (C) , Bank of America (BAC) and the like. Those names tend to be far more diversified in their revenue streams and can weather the potential storm far better than smaller, regional banks, such as First Community Bankshares (FCBC) , that make their profits primarily on deposit and loan volumes.
From a Stocks Under $10 perspective, for now this means avoiding regional and smaller banks like Community Bankers Trust Corp. (ESXB) that happen to meet our investing criteria.
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