Uranium One gets taken over

In a somewhat complex arrangement, Uranium One (which has a primary business of owning and operates several uranium producing mines in Kazakhstan) announced a transaction with its existing 23% owner, JSC Atomredmetzoloto (ARMZ, a Russian corporation that is state-owned by the Russian Atomic Energy Corporation) such that Uranium One will receive an economic stake in two more mines and ARMZ will receive a majority stake in the company.

The salient details are in the press release.

Although I do not have a current position in Uranium One equity or debt, I do keep an active watch of their debentures. They traded up from about 92% to 94% after the announcement. The debentures have a change of control provision, but this is for 2/3rds of the company and not majority ownership.

When dealing with majority-owned companies, you have to be very careful in knowing the motivations of those shareholders – their goals and interests might not line up strategically with the interests of the minority shareholders (which is either to derive an income stream or realize capital gains in the marketplace). As such, you should never own companies that are majority controlled unless if you can answer this question. Some majority owners are there to pillage or otherwise legally transfer the assets of a subsidiary company into a parent corporation and some majority owners like to depress the market valuation of the subsidiary firm just so they can acquire the rest of it. It is rare when the alignment is correct (i.e. the majority owner wants to sell the rest of the stake for a high price, or the majority owner wants to peacefully derive as much long-term income out of their investment).

For shareholders, I would be extremely cautious in the future about Uranium One.

Fortunately, the debenture holders do not really have to care about the motivations of shareholders (other than their willingness to pay off the debt). Even after the proposed special dividend the company is proposing, the corporation will have sufficient liquidity to pay off the $155M of debentures when they are scheduled to mature on December 31, 2011. At a price of 94, they have a current yield of 4.5% and a potential capital gain of 3.9% annualized assuming redemption at maturity.

Both shareholders and debenture holders also realize the same risks with respect to having a Canadian corporation owning and operating mineral rights in foreign countries. I have no idea as to the political stability of Kazakhstan, but would be slightly comforted in knowing there are a few directors on board that speak Russian and would have some clue about the legalities of their political system. However, I would not be comfortable as a shareholder knowing that a Russian government corporation controls the board of directors in the company. Their only vested interest would be to maintain control of the company, and at least this means they should be paying their December 31, 2011 debentures.

Market commentary for Friday

As I write this, the major US indexes are down about 3-3.5%, while the TSX is down about 2%. The usual things in market downturns are happening today – US dollar is rising, Canadian dollar is down relative to the US dollar (nearly two pennies), and there is a rush into US treasuries. Apparently this might be due to another EU country that is on the verge of requiring a bailout, but this was to be expected.

Due to the fixed-income nature of my portfolio, it is relatively stable today – assisted somewhat by the exchange rate fluctuation, but even when you back it out the damage is less than half a percentage point. Although my cash balance is roughly 8%, some of the securities in the portfolio have very little volatility and thus the risk-reward is ratio is minimized. I receive a decent return while waiting and this is by design.

Patience, and stalking targets for purchase is all you can do when the marketplace starts to become volatile. For those that have taken out cheap money on margin and invested it into the marketplace, you can be sure that they are starting to feel a lot of pressure to liquidate and reduce their leverage ratios. Ideally, you want these people to liquidate at exactly the wrong time, and at the same time, and you want to be there to place a bid for those shares or securities that are trading well below your estimated fair value, and you have sufficient buying power (or a whole bunch of cash) to take advantage of the situation.

I am continuing to look at low volatility equities and am really not interested in increasing the risk in my portfolio at present. The reward just isn’t there and there still isn’t enough panic factored into the marketplace.

Also, 2010 has so far been the lowest volatility year to date. Right now the portfolio is less than 1% down from the end of March 2010 (where I stated that I don’t expect much more in the way of performance for the rest of the year).

The state of the Canadian wireless telecom market

Back in the 1990’s, the players were the telecoms we know today (Telus, Bell) and three companies that the younger generation doesn’t know much of today – CanTel (which was taken over by Rogers), Microcell (which is most known as Fido, but was taken over by Rogers) and Clearnet (which was taken over by Telus).

Putting a long business story short, all the original competitors went away except for Telus, Bell and Rogers. Telus and Bell had their landline markets subsidizing the wireless capital construction, while Rogers had (and still has) their cable business. CanTel, Microcell and Clearnet were exclusively wireless providers and did not have enough financial capacity to remain as businesses. Microcell was the last holdout before it got munched by Rogers in 2004; although it should be noted that Microcell was in dire financial straits well before this date.

Fast forward ten years and the consolidation, and we now have some new entrants into the Canadian wireless market. They are Public Mobile (concentrating exclusively on the low end user of Toronto/Ottawa/Montreal); Wind Mobile (recently introduced in Vancouver and currently concentrating on a broad approach across metropolitan centers in Canada minus Quebec) and Mobilicity (in the same market space as Wind).

I predict that none of these companies will be making any money, but the consumer, over the next couple years, will be receiving some excellent deals for mobile voice/data service.

In particular, Wind Mobile should be a formidable competitor by virtue of having a deep-pocketed parent, Orascom. I am less certain that Mobilicty will last as long, simply because they likely are less capitalized. I have no idea how Public Mobile will do, but they appear to have a very low cost approach which may work simply because the major companies have too much fixed overhead to compete properly (on a cost basis) against Public.

I also highly suspect that the reason why Shaw Cable is waiting so long to get into the mobile market (even though they have made the proper wireless spectrum purchases) is because they want to see who consolidates with who – or maybe consider its entry into the Canadian wireless market through a purchase once Wind and Mobilicity have lost enough money and want to give up.

So my deep suspicion is that Shaw Cable and the retail consumer will be the big winner in the Canadian wireless market over the next few years.

Merits of technical analysis

Some people claim they can trade by just reading charts. I am not one of them.

However, marketplaces that are crowded with technical traders will have the ability to be successful in the short run. The technical end of the stock market are zero-sum gamers employing algorithms that take advantage of weaker algorithms.

Thus, I do believe in the validity of technical analysis. I just don’t think many people can do it – at a minimum if you are not cognizant of your “enemies” (i.e. other traders) are up to, then you are the proverbial fish around the poker table.

One branch of physics, called econophysics, heavily depends on technical data to drive conclusions. Back in my university days, I dabbled in an econophysical model which was an interesting study. Some professors have taken it to the next level, and have mined technical data to try to predict market crashes, with partial success.

In absence of fundamental data, the model might be successful in predicting algorithmic activity, rather than being a crash predictor.

The danger of yield chasing

I love nearly everything David Merkel writes, and this is a gem:

The lesson is this: in investing, ignore yield to the greatest extent possible. Focus instead on earning a good return, with safety, and ignoring the payout. It is a little known secret that REITs with the lowest payouts tend to be the best performers over the intermediate-to-long term. It is easier to earn money off of taking equity risk than credit risk.

So, aim for best advantage in investing. Don’t trust yields, but rather look at the underlying economics of the business that you are investing in or lending to. Yes, it is a lot more work, but it is work that you should be doing.

One issue I have with a lot of “Dividend stock investors” is that they do not look at the underlying fundamentals of the company to determine whether yield (and growth of that yield) is sustainable. During the Canadian Income Trust mania (roughly in 2003-2006 before the government shut the whole operation down) you had corporate entities converting into a trust that had absolutely no chance of being able to sustain such distributions. To list all of the offenders in this post would be burdensome, but one of my “favourites” (not that I had ever invested in it, but because they were a local business I paid attention to them) was Hot House Growers Income Trust.

HHG went public in late 2003 after they had a good year. They had distributions which were higher than their net income and they had a significant amount of debt. They began to suffer operationally (too many people were crowding into the business sector) and a couple years later they collapsed and had to be taken over by the surviving entity, Village Farms, which is a penny income trust that will not be giving any yield because their business still has too much debt. They are still publicly traded, although they will likely have to recapitalize again to pay for their debt.

People were buying income trusts in droves simply because they saw the yield and did not consider the return on investment, i.e. whether you would be able to retain the capital in the investment.

My own income trust investments are quite “yieldy”, but their underlying business fundamentals are solid, and generate significant net income (not just cash flows) to sustain the business, after required capital expenditures. Probably the easiest screen you can perform is making sure that net income and cash flows are above the yield (dividend/distribution) rate and ask yourself if the business that is underneath it all can be sustained for the indefinite future.

The other question you should be asking is whether the company has the ability to invest capital that is left over after distributions and debt payment into other capital projects that will continue to give yields that are above the current cost of capital. If so, such companies should not have excessively high payout ratios.

Most dividend stock investors have the right idea, but they don’t do the rigorous research to ensure that they will be paid out without taking a disproportionate risk of capital loss – instead, they just look at the yield/dividend number, and just care that it has gone up historically over a period of many years. This blind-style of investment is akin to driving while looking at the rear view mirror.