How SandRidge Mississippian Trust II (NYSE:SDR) Can Impact Your Portfolio Volatility
If you are looking to invest in SandRidge Mississippian Trust II’s (NYSE:SDR), 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. The beta measures SDR’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 market as a whole represents a beta 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.
View our latest analysis for SandRidge Mississippian Trust II
An interpretation of SDR’s beta
With a beta of 1.01, SandRidge Mississippian Trust II is a stock that tends to experience more gains than the market during a growth phase and also a bigger reduction in value compared to the market during a broad downturn. According to this value of beta, SDR 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 SDR’s size and industry cause it to be more volatile?
SDR, with its market capitalisation of US$52.54M, is a small-cap stock, which generally have higher beta than similar companies of larger size. In addition to size, SDR also operates in the oil and gas industry, which has commonly demonstrated strong reactions to market-wide shocks. As a result, we should expect higher beta for small-cap stocks in a cyclical industry compared to larger stocks in a defensive industry. This is consistent with SDR’s individual beta value we discussed above.
How SDR’s assets could affect its 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 SDR’s ratio of fixed assets to total assets in order to determine how high the risk is associated with this type of constraint. Given that fixed assets make up an insignificant portion of total assets, SDR doesn’t rely heavily upon these expensive, inflexible assets to run its business during downturns. As a result, the company may be less volatile relative to broad market movements, compared to a company of similar size but higher proportion of fixed assets. However, this is the opposite to what SDR’s actual beta value suggests, which is higher stock volatility relative to the market.
What this means for you:
You could benefit from higher returns during times of economic growth. However, in times of a downturn, it may be safe to look at a more defensive stock which can cushion the impact of lower demand. It’s always wise to take into account your portfolio sensitivity to the market before you invest in SDR, as well as where we are in the current economic cycle. In order to fully understand whether SDR is a good investment for you, we also need to consider important company-specific fundamentals such as SandRidge Mississippian Trust II’s financial health and performance track record. I urge you to complete your research by taking a look at the following:
Financial Health: Is SDR’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 SDR 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 SDR’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.
