Yahoo Finance Challenger Energy Limited (ASX:CEL): What Does It Mean For Your Portfolio?
If you are a shareholder in Challenger Energy Limited’s (ASX:CEL), or are thinking about investing in the company, knowing how it contributes to the risk and reward profile of your portfolio is important. CEL 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. Different characteristics of a stock expose it to various levels of market risk, and the broad market index represents a beta value 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.
View our latest analysis for Challenger Energy
What does CEL’s beta value mean?
Challenger Energy’s beta of 0.2 indicates that the company is less volatile relative to the diversified market portfolio. The stock will exhibit muted movements in both the downside and upside, in response to changing economic conditions, whereas the general market may move by a lot more. CEL’s beta indicates it is a stock that investors may find valuable if they want to reduce the overall market risk exposure of their stock portfolio.
Does CEL’s size and industry impact the expected beta?
A market capitalisation of AU$5.84M puts CEL in the category of small-cap stocks, which tends to possess higher beta than larger companies. Moreover, CEL’s industry, oil and gas, 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 oil and gas industry, relative to those more well-established firms in a more defensive industry. This is an interesting conclusion, since both CEL’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.
Can CEL’s asset-composition point to a higher 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 examine CEL’s ratio of fixed assets to total assets to see whether the company is highly exposed to the risk of this type of constraint. With a fixed-assets-to-total-assets ratio of greater than 30%, CEL appears to be a company that invests a large amount of capital in assets that are hard to scale down on short-notice. As a result, this aspect of CEL indicates a higher beta than a similar size company with a lower portion of fixed assets on their balance sheet. This outcome contradicts CEL’s current beta value which indicates a below-average volatility.
What this means for you:
You could benefit from lower risk during times of economic decline by holding onto CEL. 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, CEL may be a valuable stock to hold onto in order to cushion the impact of a downturn. In order to fully understand whether CEL is a good investment for you, we also need to consider important company-specific fundamentals such as Challenger Energy’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 CEL’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 CEL 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 CEL’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.
