Today I am looking at three market monsters investors should avoid during spooky season.
Anglo American
Another week, another round of bad news for diversified mining colossus Anglo American (LSE: AAL). Iron ore — a market from which the business generates 27% of total earnings — slumped to three-month troughs under $50 per tonne as fears over Chinese steelmaking activity, combined with rampant production rises the world over, kept prices on a southerly bent.
The mining industry remains content to keep on supplying the market with unwanted material despite falling prices, and Anglo American itself hiked output at its Minas-Rio asset by 60% in July-September from the previous quarter, to 2.9 million tonnes. And metallurgical coal output, another one of the company’s crucial yet battered markets, advanced 8% quarter-on-quarter to 5.5 million tonnes.
Anglo American is embarking on a frantic strategy of cost-cutting, spending scalebacks and asset sales to shore up the balance sheet as resources prices struggle. But these measures are clearly no march for a backcloth of collapsing revenues, a view that is shared by the City — indeed, Anglo American is expected to suffer a colossal 49% earnings drop in 2015 alone. Even though this results in a low P/E ratio of 10.9 times, I believe Anglo American remains a highly-unappealing stock choice as commodity markets deteriorate.