Wheat in the Market’s Chaff

While we haven’t quite entered official territory yet for a correction, the S&P 500 has plunged a stomach-churning 6.9%. Though the slide seems to be stabilizing, I don’t think I’ve heard so much talk of recession since the last real market correction – a decline of 10% or more – in the summer of 2011 when the S&P dropped just more than 20%. As tough as this latest dip has been for us investors, it’s been even harder on companies for which the market is their business.

Shares of T. Rowe Price Group (NSDQ: TROW), one of America’s largest mutual fund houses and discount brokerage services with more than $738 billion in total assets under management (AUM), has dived nearly 10% since early July. Not only has the company gotten caught up in the market decline, some of its larger institutional clients like pension funds and endowments have been pulling money out over the past few quarters. Institutional investors pulled about $3.8 billion of assets out of T. Rowe price in the second quarter alone, causing the company to miss analyst’s revenue growth forecast for the period.

Zeroing in on revenue growth alone is like missing the forest for the trees. It is true that net revenue in the second quarter was only $984.3 million rather than the $991 million the analysts expected. But at $983 million, net revenue was still up by 15.2% compared to the same period last year. Quarterly earnings were also up from $0.92 in the second quarter of 2013 to $1.13, actually beating analyst estimates and AUM hit a new record high despite the institutional outflows.

It doesn’t sound to me like there’s much to actually worry about there.

There’s also a lot to like about T. Rowe Price. For one thing, more than half of the company’s managed assets are in retirement accounts and variable annuities portfolios, making them very sticky and unlikely to move. Most of us have our retirement plans through our employers, so we don’t have much choice in the matter and employers typically set those plans up where they can get the best deal. There are also often penalties involved in closing variable annuities, making investors loath to move them unless there are very good reasons.

Good reasons for investors to leave T. Rowe Price are pretty hard to find, considering that more than three quarters of the company’s mutual funds are being their peers on 1-, 3-, 5- and even 10-year periods. Mutual fund investors can be quick to dump a dog, but they rarely dump a winner.

The company is also working to expand its presence in international markets, deploying a growing salesforce to Europe in order to attract more institutional clients in the region. That’s a nascent effort that will likely take a few years to pay off, but it is promising, especially if the region’s economy turns around soon.

Aside from that, T. Rowe Price also offers an extremely popular line of target-date retirement funds. Since you’re reading this, you probably know a little something about investing. But there are a lot of other folks that, while they know they should be saving for retirement, don’t have the foggiest idea of what they’re doing.

Target-date funds have proven extremely popular with that latter set of investors, offering one-stop parking places for retirement money. Investors pick the target-date fund which most closely matches their expected retirement date, then the fund manager adjusts the fund’s investments to match the expected risk profile of people working towards retirement. Over the past five years, T. Rowe’s target-date funds have grown from about $33 billion of AUM to more than $140 billion.

The popularity of those funds has helped to drive the company’s 5-year average revenue growth of 5.5% while pushing earnings per share up by 16.5% over the same period. While earnings growth is likely to slow somewhat in the coming years, analysts still forecast average growth of better than 10% over the next five years.

At the same time, this recent sell-off has pushed shares of T. Rowe Price down to an almost 52-week low even as their PE ratio has fallen to 17.5, well below their average of 23.6. The company’s PE-to-growth ratio, which is basically the PE ratio dividend by forecast annual EPS growth, is also 0.97, implying that its shares are undervalued at the moment.

T. Rowe Price also pays a modest but growing quarterly dividend of $0.44, for a yield of 2.3%, having increased it in each of the last 10 years. Despite the recent stumbles, T. Rowe Price Group continues to turn in strong growth on all fronts and is a great buy up to $83.