Finding financial needles in haystacks – an investment opportunity

During the great fixed income purge over the past month, there have been a few babies thrown out with the bathwater. I am still working on accumulation since these securities are not that highly traded. It is my general belief that hedge funds and other institutional managers are still on auto-liquidation mode with their algorithms with respect to these securities and they are being relatively indiscriminate on price – they are just hitting sizable bids at opportune moments. Whenever this selling pressure subsides, prices should rise again.

Anyhow, the next candidate for investment is a debt security that has an embedded debt-to-assets covenant that is well below 1:1 and is currently the most senior debt structure in the corporation. The corporation has tangible equity to more than cover double its outstanding debt, yet the market is worried that there is a solvency risk to the point where the debt product is deeply discounted despite the fact that such investors clearly will get a full recovery if it goes into creditor protection (and it will not unless if management is clearly insane, since their own vested economic interests will take over and pay the debtors).

This is a type of situation where an investor can make a capital gain of roughly 50% over a year time frame, plus interest payments. The risk is that the corporation’s assets are misstated, or cannot be liquidated at book value. The risk/reward, however, seems to be disproportionately positive and there is a very clear reason why the market is actively dumping the product at present. The company’s economic condition is partially the reason but I believe a further factor is the indiscriminate selling by existing holders.

I can’t give more specific figures without giving away the name of the company. I also generally have a belief that the selling pressure will be met with more demand sometime after August 9-12, so investors will have about three weeks left to capitalize on what will likely be the rock bottom for this security.