Buyer Beware
“Sorry to use this term – but that’s all fake News.”
We were attending a certain Private Bank’s conference sometime in late 2018 when the Private Bank’s Head of Equities for the region had just announced that Wirecard was one of his two top picks for the next year (ironically his other pick was Softbank… more on this later). We had been suggested to look at Wirecard by several banks, and each time we had analysed it, we found the model confusing, balance sheet opaque, and simple google searches pulled up several claims of fraud. So knowing this, we were quite shocked when we heard banks were peddling this stock, and quite boldly so. Thus, as soon as the question and answer session started we immediately asked the presenter how they could possibly be comfortable making such a strong recommendation considering all the outstanding claims of fraud. We don’t say this flippantly, we’ve all seen lots of short-seller hit pieces that turn out to be nothing, but you must understand, dear reader, that Wirecard had been accused for years by multiple sources both in Germany (where it is domiciled) and outside about its accounting irregularities – so our question had some weight behind it. However, it seemed from the presenter’s response (the “fake news” quote above) that we were completely foolish to ever think that fraud was prevalent and we should just be thankful we received such a good stock tip.
Now, if you’re not familiar with the Wirecard story – you can read the timeline here, and it is fascinating. Wirecard went from being a little-known company processing payments for the dregs of the internet to a leading company on the DAX 30 Index with a peak market cap of US$ 28 billion (now worth less than US$500 million). However, going all the way back to 2008 their accounts and businesses were called into question (yes you read that right – 12 years’ worth of warnings), which only recently resulted in the company admitting that Euro 1.9bn of money was missing (or never existed), the CEO stepping down and getting arrested, insolvency, and a near total wipe-out of the market cap of the company (side note: much respect to Dan McCrum of the FT who for years tried to warn the market and was met with criticism, investigations, and lawsuits). Now you might ask, maybe the bank we’re discussing wasn’t aware of this, and changed their mind when the news came out. Well – actually not. In fact, we continued our dialogue with the bank as negative stories continued to print. Even though, we never thought of investing (or going short, as it’s just not something we do) we were concerned for other clients of the bank in question who might have invested. Here are some excerpts from our conversation with the equity team of the bank after a chain of negative news came out (timelines taken from FT article we linked to above and some of the quotes are redacted/edited to maintain anonymity of the bank).
Mid-January 2019: The FT publishes its first story on the Singapore investigation, which is immediately described as “false” by Wirecard. BaFin starts to investigate the FT over an allegation of market manipulation.
Bank’s response to us: “Hi Pratyush, we wanted to come back to you with regards to your question on the governance issue for Wirecard. While we note the controversy that this created to the stock price, we took the decision to believe that Wirecard has done their due diligence…. We see Wirecard as a high growth company with the opportunity to gain +56% from current levels (our target price is €240).” (SIC)
Late Jan 2019: News about how Executives suspected of using forged contracts
Bank’s response to us: “Hi Pratyush… This kind of thing appear as a risk for Wirecard (more volatility), but at each time it has been a good occasion to enter the story… We would note that there is an article on Bloomberg that Commerzbank’s analyst thinks that the FT news is fake news. Also, Bafin (German supervision authority) will check for Market Manipulation in Wirecard News.” (SIC)
Early Feb 2019: Wirecard’s law firm found evidence of forgery and false accounts, Singapore office gets raided.
Bank’s response to us: “Hi Pratyush - As stated below, this is not for everyone. It is hard to take a clear positions in these situations where we witness “you say, I say…”. If it does not keep you awake at night, we would look for an entry point below €100 …The fact that BAFIN stopped any new short-seller and that Wirecard is suing the FT is positive for the stock.” (SIC)
You can see from the last quote the bank started to hint that not all was right, but they didn’t pull their rating and in fact they still had a “buy” call just before the events of the last-two weeks. We stopped prodding the bank shortly after February 2019 as our relationship with them changed (for totally different reasons), but suffice it to say they stuck to their guns till the end.
Now we’re not trying to single out one bank in a petty “ha we told you so” manner, because as stated above a number of banks recommended this stock to us. But our goal here is to draw attention to a wider point; Buyer beware. You, dear investor, must, and we repeat, must do your own work/research before investing in a stock. Trusting your bank or analysts to have covered all angles is a dangerous strategy, and all major bankruptcies/scandals are paved by positive equity research reports (see here a buy call on Enron less than a year before it collapsed – ironically, published by Bear Stearns which also went belly-up seven years later). Also, if you think that you have strength in numbers, and that multiple buy calls from Wall Street will save you the time of researching a company yourself – see what the street had to say about Wirecard just before it went bankrupt[1].
Wall Street’s calls on Wirecard shortly before Insolvency
Trusting the auditors will not help you either. Every major accounting scandal has had a big auditor behind it. For Enron it was Arthur Anderson, for Satyam it was PwC, for Wirecard it was E&Y. The famous short seller Jim Chanos’ response to the question “who was the auditor” when a corporate accounting scandal comes out is “who cares.”[2]
Moreover, famous or illustrious investors in the company are not a signal of much. It turns out often that they haven’t done their diligence. In this case, several Softbank executives structured a Euro 900 million investment into Wirecard, and though this structure cleverly protected their principal, the Softbank execs have seen the deal’s profit almost completely wiped out. One of the architects of this deal, instead of taking responsibility, tweeted this:
Lastly, don’t expect an illustrious client list to be an indication of much except for a strong sales team. It seems like large companies like Grab and Uber (allegedly) had begun transitioning to Wirecard and forsaking Adyen which funnily enough has seen its stock rise 73% YTD. To be fair, the risk is less to a client of Wirecard that it is for an investor, but just shows that vendor diligence processes are far from fool proof. (Another side note: it does seem like these companies were put under pressure to engage Wirecard by their biggest investor… Softbank).
Now we’re not saying that we’re perfect, and while it hasn’t happened yet, we can’t rule out that we will never invest/recommend investing in a company that doesn’t turn out to be a scam. Nor can we say that all companies that have negative news will turn out to be scams (short-sellers have been trying to take down Tesla for years without much luck). What we can say though is any investment we make, or recommend, we will do on own work on it, and if it goes wrong, we will only have ourselves to blame.
If you want to read up more on how you can spot, and avoid, potentially hazardous companies, here are a couple of great books to read:
The Smartest Guys in the Room
Financial Shenanigans
The Sleuth Investor
Whichever future book comes out on the Wirecard scandal.
We hope the above has helped you rethink your reliance on external research and gives you a healthy dose of skepticism of the ‘experts’. Here’s to wishing you a scandal-free portfolio. Happy investing all!