How Does Investing In The9 Limited (NASDAQ:NCTY) Impact Your Portfolio?
For The9 Limited’s (NASDAQ:NCTY) shareholders, and also potential investors in the stock, understanding how the stock’s risk and return characteristics can impact your portfolio is important. The beta measures NCTY’s exposure to the wider market risk, which reflects changes in economic and political factors. Not every stock is exposed to the same level of market risk, and the broad market index represents a beta value of one. A stock with a beta greater than one is considered more sensitive to market-wide shocks compared to a stock that trades below the value of one.
Check out our latest analysis for The9
What is NCTY’s market risk?
The9 has a beta of 1.92, which means that the percentage change in its stock value will be higher than the entire market in times of booms and busts. A high level of beta means investors face higher risk associated with potential gains and losses driven by market movements. According to this value of beta, NCTY will help diversify your portfolio, if it currently comprises of low-beta stocks. This will be beneficial for portfolio returns, in particular, when current market sentiment is positive.
Could NCTY’s size and industry cause it to be more volatile?
NCTY, with its market capitalisation of US$67.61M, is a small-cap stock, which generally have higher beta than similar companies of larger size. Moreover, NCTY’s industry, software, is considered to be cyclical, which means it is more volatile than the market over the economic cycle. Therefore, investors may expect high beta associated with small companies, as well as those operating in the software industry, relative to those more well-established firms in a more defensive industry. This supports our interpretation of NCTY’s beta value discussed above. Fundamental factors can also drive the cyclicality of the stock, which we will take a look at next.
How NCTY’s assets could affect its beta
During times of economic downturn, low demand may cause companies to readjust production of their goods and services. It is more difficult for companies to lower their cost, if the majority of these costs are generated by fixed assets. Therefore, this is a type of risk which is associated with higher beta. I test NCTY’s ratio of fixed assets to total assets in order to determine how high the risk is associated with this type of constraint. Considering fixed assets account for less than a third of the company’s overall assets, NCTY seems to have a smaller dependency on fixed costs to generate revenue. Thus, we can expect NCTY to be more stable in the face of market movements, relative to its peers of similar size but with a higher portion of fixed assets on their books. This outcome contradicts NCTY’s current beta value which indicates an above-average volatility.
What this means for you:
You may reap the gains of NCTY’s returns during times of economic growth by holding the stock. Its low fixed cost also implies that it has the flexibility to adjust its cost to preserve margins during times of a downturn. I recommend analysing the stock in terms of your current portfolio composition before deciding to invest more into NCTY. In order to fully understand whether NCTY is a good investment for you, we also need to consider important company-specific fundamentals such as The9’s financial health and performance track record. I highly recommend you to complete your research by taking a look at the following:
Financial Health: Is NCTY’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 NCTY 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 NCTY’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.
