The following are today's upgrades for Validea's Low PE Investor model based on the published strategy of John Neff. This strategy looks for firms with persistent earnings growth that trade at a discount relative to their earnings growth and dividend yield.
ROYAL BANK OF CANADA (RY) is a large-cap value stock in the Money Center Banks industry. The rating according to our strategy based on John Neff changed from 60% to 81% based on the firm's underlying fundamentals and the stock's valuation. A score of 80% or above typically indicates that the strategy has some interest in the stock and a score above 90% typically indicates strong interest.
Company Description: Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) is a global financial institution. Its business includes Personal & Commercial Banking, Wealth Management, Capital Markets, and Insurance. The Personal & Commercial Banking comprises its personal banking operations and certain retail investment businesses in Canada, the Caribbean and the United States, as well as its commercial and corporate banking operations in Canada and the Caribbean. Wealth Management provides a full suite of investment, trust and other wealth management solutions for businesses. Capital Markets provides public and private companies, institutional investors, governments and central banks globally with a range of capital markets products and services across its two main business lines: corporate and investment banking and global markets. Insurance offers a range of life, health, home, auto, travel, wealth and reinsurance advice and solutions, as well as creditor and business insurance services to individual, business and group clients.
The following table summarizes whether the stock meets each of this strategy's tests. Not all criteria in the below table receive equal weighting or are independent, but the table provides a brief overview of the strong and weak points of the security in the context of the strategy's criteria.
About John Neff: While known as the manager with whom many top managers entrusted their own money, Neff was far from the smooth-talking, high-profile Wall Streeter you might expect. He was mild-mannered and low-key, and the same might be said of the Windsor Fund that he managed for more than three decades. In fact, Neff himself described the fund as "relatively prosaic, dull, [and] conservative." There was nothing dull about his results, however. From 1964 to 1995, Neff guided Windsor to a 13.7 percent average annual return, easily outpacing the S&P 500's 10.6 percent return during that time. That 3.1 percentage point difference is huge over time -- a $10,000 investment in Windsor (with dividends reinvested) at the start of Neff's tenure would have ended up as more than $564,000 by the time he retired, more than twice what the same investment in the S&P would have yielded (about $233,000). Considering the length of his tenure, that track record may be the best ever for a manager of such a large fund.
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