KCG, it was good knowing you (Eulogy)

The merger closed yesterday and I received proceeds from the equity and debt today.

The equity I had purchases between $9-11/share. My first stake in the company was back in Q4-2012!

From my debt purchase at 90.5 at the end of June 2016 to 13 months later, resulted in a capital gain of 13.1% plus the 7.6% current yield, made for a 20.7% CAGR investment on a senior secured debt, first in line, on a cash flow positive entity. I’ll miss you.

KCG Holdings merger arbitrage and should I invest in Virtu?

KCG Holdings (KCG) is due to be bought out by VIRT for $20/share cash. The meeting for KCG shareholders to approve is on July 19 (which at this point is practically a done deal). Over the past two days we had the following trading:

See that spike up to $20/share at the end of yesterday’s trading? I wasn’t expecting that! It is not financially rational to purchase shares at $20 unless if you believe there will be a higher bid for the company. At this point, however, a successor bid is simply not going to be happening.

A more reasonable $19.98/share means a 2 cent premium obtained over a week, which works out to about a 5.2% simple interest rate, assuming no trading costs.

I had some July call options so I figured it was a good time to dump the remainder of my shares into the market. There was a legal complication from one of the class action lawsuits that might require the company to obtain a 2/3rds shareholder vote of all non-insider owned shares and considering the general apathy of voters these days, that is not a threshold that I would want to bet my kidneys over.

Once the merger is completed then KCG’s senior secured bonds will be called away (at 103.7 cents on the dollar, while my purchases were a shade above 90 cents) and that will conclude one of the better investments I’ve made over the past 5 years. It took a lot longer to happen than I anticipated – had it occurred at select points over the past 5 years I had even higher amounts of leveraged option positions on this company (which sadly expired).

One thing I will miss about these bonds is that the 6.875% coupon I was earning was virtually guaranteed money to maturity. I will no longer see that.

The analysis for VIRT is a little more muddy – I expect some serious integration pain to occur after the merger is finished.  In the definitive proxy statement materials, however, I was very intrigued by the following table which illustrated the financial projections of a management restructuring:

So in the above, we had management projecting a 2019 estimated free cash flow of $132 million, which appeared to be sustaining for future years. This worked out to about $2 per KCG share, which VIRT is now purchasing for 10 times earnings.

Management projections are always on the optimistic end of things, so this is not likely to materialize as presented, but it still makes one wonder whether VIRT is worth investing in or not. I do not like their corporate structure (public shareholders have no control over the company and a vast minority of the economic stake of the firm) and I am inclined against it.

KCG cost of capital calculation

I will warn this is a very dry post.

The merger arbitrage spread with KCG has narrowed considerably.

When the $20 cash merger was announced the shares were trading at $19.75. There is little chance of the deal falling through or there being a superior offer.

Today KCG is trading at $19.88. The estimated close of the merger was reported to be “3rd quarter 2017”. The assumption is the mid-range, or August 15, 2017.

So there are 3.5 months until the deal closes.

12 cents appreciation is 0.6% over 3.5 months, which over the course of 3.5 months implies a 2.1% annualized rate, not compounding. This also excludes trading costs.

Because I had a small cash deficit in my USD account and a surplus in CAD, I’ve sold some shares at $19.88 to make up the shortfall. I placed it at the ask to minimize trading costs, which turned out to be 29 cents per 100 shares.

What’s interesting is my trade got hammered away, 100 shares at a time, approximately 2-4 seconds apart per trade. Interesting algorithms at play here.

I also believe Virtu (Nasdaq: VIRT) will have a more difficult time with the integration of KCG than they originally anticipate. The company cultures are significantly different and while the merger makes sense on paper, in practice it is going to be quite different. KCG was also dealing with a non-trivial data migration program on their own, from New Jersey to New York City and these sorts of technical details require highly skilled individuals to pull off without causing trading blow-ups. It might take them a year to get things stabilized after the merger is finished. KCG had huge growing pains of its own after it was reverse-takeovered by GetCo.

KCG Holdings: Bought out

KCG Holdings (NYSE: KCG) looks like it will finally be bought out by Virtu (Nasdaq: VIRT) for US$20/share, cash. They also announced their first quarter results, and according to my scorecard they did better than expected – while their bottom-line net income was slightly negative, they were significantly better on trading revenues than I was expecting. I was expecting a very lacklustre quarter due to incredibly low market volatility in the quarter. Interactive Brokers (Nasdaq: IBKR) is a regular conference call I read and they can attest to the impact of low market volatility on trading.

My investment history with KCG is quite fascinating. I did not disclose things here until October 2016, but I have been trading the stock at various times since 2013, which resulted in material performance gains, especially in 2013 (I took a fairly heavy call option position at the second half of the year). It has exhibited a narrow price range since its merger with GetCo after their August 2012 trading blow-up. The company has generally been off the radar of most investors as it received little analyst coverage and was treated like toxic trash.

Virtu has a plan to raise $1.65 billion in debt financing for the merger and also has sold $750 million in equity at $15.60/share, which should make the buyers happy considering they are now trading at $16.40/share – the market believes this will be quite valuable for Virtu. KCG’s existing 25% shareholder has consented to the agreement, which makes it very unlikely that the deal will not pass through KCG shareholder approval. Given the highly strategic nature of the acquisition, I also doubt there will be other competitors for KCG. Thus, this merger looks like a done deal.

Current trading is at US$19.75. The expected closing is in the third quarter of 2017. As the current spread between market and US$20.00 is around 127 basis points, this would imply a merger arbitrage spread of about 3.8% annualized, so I am in no rush to sell as I have nothing else to deploy my capital into.

The only other issue of concern is KCG’s senior secured debt, maturing on March 15, 2020. According to the fine print, the notes can presently be called off at 103.438 cents on the dollar and there is a required offer for 101 cents on the dollar due to the change of control (which would be redundant since the notes are trading over this in the marketplace). I would suspect Virtu would be eager to get these notes off the books as quickly as possible as they contain covenants that would otherwise restrict the KCG entity. I’ll hold onto these as long as possible but do not think they will survive much longer.