It has been an unusual month in that I’ve been nibbling and taking some small positions on some reasonable bargains.
I’ve taken a half percent position in a very trashy penny stock that will most likely go permanently unnamed. This isn’t a microcap play, it isn’t a nanocap play, it can only be called a picocap play. Suffice to say it is illiquid, infrequently traded, but I managed to get a reasonable fill on what I wanted to get and we’ll see if it goes to zero or whether it’ll triple on some business developments which I believe will stand a good chance of occurring over the year. If anything, at least there is a corporate shell that can be sold as a quick TSX listing.
I find rolling over options to be a royal pain in the rear for stocks that have infrequently traded options. The only reason why I’m in options in the first place is because I believe the implied volatility is badly underestimated (trading in the 20’s when it should be closer to the 40’s) which makes the options a more optimal usage of capital than the common stock. When trading options the only problem is timing, and dealing with a large chunk of a barely in-the-money option when there is a month left to expiry always makes me nervous. So I’ve rolled that over into the latest dated options which is roughly half a year later in time for a moderate cost of about 4.5% of the equity price. The cost of purchasing delta is quite cheap on this one, especially when it is trading under book value and they are buying back shares, coupled with a profitable business operation. Quite frankly I expect a takeover bid.
The mechanics of dealing with a barely in-the-money option is made slightly easier with Interactive Broker’s option spread utility which will automatically perform a transaction whenever the market allows for it. It prevents you from having to manually leg in and out of positions which comes with huge amounts of execution risk.
The most significant of acquisitions has been both equity and debt of a USA entity that was the stinker that I had alluded to earlier. My timing appears to have been quite sharp in that the equity is actually up over 10% since I accumulated the position. I managed to get a fill on 80% of what I had seeked. On the debt side it has hardly budged, but it is trading at such a ridiculously good risk/reward situation that I had to nibble on both debt and equity. If all goes well (and this is always the big “if”), the income this will generate will be very pleasant to receive over the next few years plus a healthy capital gain if there is a payout at maturity. Time will tell.
I’ve acquired some long-dated out-of-the-money warrants (which are thinly traded but there is daily activity and a patient investor will be able to get fills in at the bid) of a reasonably-known firm. Performing a valuation of the overall entity (which has leverage issues but is still quite profitable and has been paying down debt considerably over the past couple years) suggests that given a moderate trajectory, the warrants should get at least at the money in the timeframe of expiration. There is considerable potential, considering past valuations, that the company will be significantly above that valuation so therefore the warrants present themselves as being cheap leverage. The common shares underlying the warrants are trading close to the 52-week lows. This story will take some time to resolve, but the results will become obvious much more sooner than the expiration date.
There are also provisions concerning change of control in the warrant indenture that would result in some form of payout if there was an acquisition bid under the strike price of the warrants. The company’s debt is trading above par.
The last acquisition has been of a company related to the economic crisis that Alberta will be facing. Their shares and debt have been hammered to death as a result of some exposure to capital spending in the oil fields. While my conviction is not huge (and this is represented by the relatively small stake I took), I purchased some debt relatively recently. Insiders have also been purchasing both equity and debt of this issuer and while financially speaking the company looks like it is going through a rough patch, they do have sufficient time to realign their operations where they can satisfy their bank creditors. Once again, time will tell.
Nothing that I have been acquiring is on any major index. I’ve been avoiding anything on an index that is tracked with lots of money for various reasons.
I’m also down to nearly a 25% cash position. The other component is that over half the portfolio is trading under tangible book value of the underlying companies.