Does Buhler Industries Inc (TSE:BUI) Fall With The Market?
If you are looking to invest in Buhler Industries Inc’s (TSX:BUI), or currently own the stock, then you need to understand its beta in order to understand how it can affect the risk of your portfolio. BUI is exposed to market-wide risk, which arises from investing in the stock market. This risk reflects changes in economic and political factors that affects all stocks, and is measured by its beta. Not all stocks are expose to the same level of market risk, and the market as a whole represents a beta of one. A stock with a beta greater than one is expected to exhibit higher volatility resulting from market-wide shocks compared to one with a beta below one.
Check out our latest analysis for Buhler Industries
What is BUI’s market risk?
Buhler Industries’s beta of 0.27 indicates that the stock value will be less variable compared to the whole stock market. This means the stock is more defensive against the ups and downs of a stock market, moving by less than the entire market index in times of change. BUI’s beta implies it may be a stock that investors with high-beta portfolios might find relevant if they wanted to reduce their exposure to market risk, especially during times of downturns.
How does BUI’s size and industry impact its risk?
BUI, with its market capitalisation of CA$100.50M, is a small-cap stock, which generally have higher beta than similar companies of larger size. In addition to size, BUI also operates in the machinery industry, which has commonly demonstrated strong reactions to market-wide shocks. Therefore, investors may expect high beta associated with small companies, as well as those operating in the machinery industry, relative to those more well-established firms in a more defensive industry. This is an interesting conclusion, since both BUI’s size and industry indicates the stock should have a higher beta than it currently has. There may be a more fundamental driver which can explain this inconsistency, which we will examine below.
Is BUI’s cost structure indicative of a high beta?
An asset-heavy company tends to have a higher beta because the risk associated with running fixed assets during a downturn is highly expensive. I test BUI’s ratio of fixed assets to total assets in order to determine how high the risk is associated with this type of constraint. BUI’s fixed assets to total assets ratio of higher than 30% shows that the company uses up a big chunk of its capital on assets that are hard to scale up or down in short notice. As a result, this aspect of BUI indicates a higher beta than a similar size company with a lower portion of fixed assets on their balance sheet. However, this is the opposite to what BUI’s actual beta value suggests, which is lower stock volatility relative to the market.
What this means for you:
You could benefit from lower risk during times of economic decline by holding onto BUI. Take into account your portfolio sensitivity to the market before you invest in the stock, as well as where we are in the current economic cycle. Depending on the composition of your portfolio, BUI may be a valuable stock to hold onto in order to cushion the impact of a downturn. What I have not mentioned in my article here are important company-specific fundamentals such as Buhler Industries’s financial health and performance track record. I urge you to complete your research by taking a look at the following:
Financial Health: Is BUI’s operations financially sustainable? Balance sheets can be hard to analyze, which is why we’ve done it for you. Check out our financial health checks here.
Past Track Record: Has BUI been consistently performing well irrespective of the ups and downs in the market? Go into more detail in the past performance analysis and take a look at the free visual representations of BUI’s historicals for more clarity.
Other High-Performing Stocks: Are there other stocks that provide better prospects with proven track records? Explore our free list of these great stocks here.
To help readers see pass the short term volatility of the financial market, we aim to bring you a long-term focused research analysis purely driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis does not factor in the latest price sensitive company announcements.
The author is an independent contributor and at the time of publication had no position in the stocks mentioned.
