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.

First Capital Realty – Cheap capital

First Capital Realty (TSX: FCR) owns and operates shopping centres. They do so quite profitably, and while not technically an REIT, it does have REIT-type characteristics, including a policy of distributing most of its cash flows through dividends.

When doing some research on this company, I did notice they were able to raise the following debt offering a couple months ago:

First Capital Realty Inc. (TSX:FCR) (the “Company”), Canada’s leading owner, developer and operator of supermarket and drugstore anchored neighbourhood and community shopping centres, located predominantly in growing urban markets, announced today that as a result of investor demand for its public offering of Series Q senior unsecured debentures which was announced earlier today, the size of the offering has been increased by C$75 million to C$175 million. These debentures will bear interest at a rate of 3.90% per annum and will mature on October 30, 2023. The $175 million of debentures were sold at a price of $100.952 per $100 principal amount plus accrued interest, with an effective yield of 3.788% if held to maturity. An aggregate of $300 million of such debentures will be outstanding after giving effect to the offering. The offering is being underwritten by a syndicate co-led by TD Securities, CIBC World Markets Inc. and RBC Capital Markets. Subject to customary closing conditions, the offering will close on May 15, 2013. It is a condition of closing to the offering that the debentures be rated at least BBB (high) with a stable trend by DBRS and at least Baa2 (stable) by Moody’s Investors Service.

This is giving the company 10-year money at 3.8%, which is an amazingly low rate for unsecured debt. If they could raise even more money at this rate, they should – indeed the original offering was for quite less volume. This was at the peak of the market’s thirst for yield.

Something also very different about this company is they have a series of convertible debentures, and a prominent policy of the company states:

It is the current intention of First Capital Realty to satisfy its obligations to pay principal and interest on all of its Convertible Debentures by the issuance of Common Shares.

This is the only corporation I can think of that has this policy.

This leads to some very interesting financial results in terms of shareholder dilution, but it has not impacted the net return to shareholders in the meantime. Glossing through some historical reports, shares outstanding on March 31, 2003 was (split adjusted to present levels) 64.5 million shares, while shares outstanding on March 31, 2013 was 207.3 million. Still, a shareholder on March 31, 2003 would have paid about $7.60 and received at March 31, 2013: a $19 share plus $7.56 in cash dividends. Working the math, that is about 13%/year compounded annually, not a bad haul at all.

The only time I can see this strategy failing is if there is some transient condition where the equity falls below a certain threshold level. Even during the depths of the 2008-2009 economic crisis, the company was fairly resolute in keeping this policy despite the 40% haircut shareholders took from the previous peak.

I won’t be buying into this company (or its debt), but I have to commend their finance crew for a very unconventional policy that does seem to deliver results for shareholders.

Some opportunities hitting the radar

There are a few opportunities that are emerging on the fixed income side. These deal with somewhat distressed entities (but not by any means mortally wounded) and on the fixed income side. Unfortunately these securities are not very liquid (typical volumes are around $10k/day) so I can’t get into any further detail. But suffice to say, there have been some items hitting my radar lately and I’ve been stretched to do some further proper research.

Why blind index investing doesn’t exactly work – or beware the TSX Venture Exchange!

Typical free advice you hear on other channels talk about the virtues of passively investing in indicies. While putting some money in the S&P 500 or TSX Composite (generally speaking, close-to-the-top 500 and 60 capitalized companies in the USA and Canada, respectively) will likely represent a broad proxy for the corporate profitability of those two countries and over the long haul you will make profits in line with the growth of the overall economy, there are also bad indicies one can invest in.

Such as the TSX Venture Exchange.

Right now it has 385 constituents, and they are not doing so well:

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An investor in the TSX Venture index will have lost roughly 2/3rds of their investment over the past two years, while TSX Composite investors would have lost about 15%.

It goes without saying that if you invest in a basket of junk, it doesn’t matter how much diversification there is in that basket, you will get junk results. And this is indeed the case for the TSX Venture – it is an utterly failed index.

If you do have to dip your toes into the index, I would highly suggest cherry-picking for firms that have nothing to do with the mining sector. This leaves about 15% of the index (capitalization-weighted). Fundamentally, it seems nothing has really changed since the Vancouver Stock Exchange era where seemingly half the companies involved were just simply there to defraud investors.