Pengrowth executes an asset sale

Pengrowth Energy (TSX: PGF) managed to execute an asset sale on its conventional production property north of Edmonton, the Swan Hills assets for CAD$180 million.

The debt profile at December 31, 2016 looked like this:

Right now the CAD/USD ratio is 0.75.

At the end of December 31, 2016 they also had CAD$287 million cash in the bank, plus another CAD$250 million for the 4% gross royalty sale on their Lindbergh asset.

They will be redeeming CAD$126.5 million in convertible debentures on March 31, 2017. They also have redeemed US$300 million of their 2017 debt maturity, and will redeem the rest after this transaction concludes at the end of May.

The company announced that after this sale, they have a pro-forma net debt of CAD$970 million.

My math suggests that after the 2017 redemption, they would have CAD$57 million cash left, assuming their operations consume zero cash (not a correct assumption!).

Payment of the debt will result in an interest expense decrease of $42 million per year.

They still need to have CAD$368 million on-hand on August 2018 in order to pay off their next debt maturity. It is possible they will run into covenant issues given that oil hasn’t moved around the US$50/barrel mark – their existing senior debt to adjusted EBITDA ratio would be the most material of it. They have about CAD$1.02 billion outstanding and their EBITDA needs to be above CAD$290 million in order to clear this hurdle.

Although the EBITDA value for covenant purposes was CAD$582 million, this is a skewed figure due to the employment of hedging. People not versed in accounting procedures for commodity hedging will have a tough time figuring out the mess, but I will just point out that management closed out their hedges in 2016 (which had been a VERY profitable transaction to them that otherwise would have guaranteed CCAA had they not had the foresight to doing so when times were much better).

KCG Holdings – Takeover bid from Virtu

The Q1-2017 report is going to be shockingly positive. Genworth MI (TSX: MIC) used to be my largest holding, but I have trimmed the position (mainly for diversification and deleveraging reasons). It still is a decent size of the portfolio, but not as prominent as it used to be.

My largest position after Genworth MI was KCG Holdings (NYSE: KCG).

Yesterday, near the close of trading, they confirmed that they received an unsolicited takeover proposal of US$18.50-20.00 per share from Virtu (Nasdaq: VIRT), another (very credible) high frequency trading firm. KCG did not file with the SEC.

Virtu filed 8-K with the SEC confirming they “made a preliminary, non-binding proposal to acquire KCG”.

Both entities have been quite silent otherwise. There is likely a lot of backroom jockeying going on.

KCG’s stock shot up from about $13.60 a share to $18/share today on over 6 million shares of volume. The company has about 66.4 million shares outstanding, and Jefferies (a wholly owned subsidiary of Leucadia (NYSE: LUK)) owns 15.41 million shares, and insiders own another 3 million shares, leaving a float of about 48 million shares that can be actively traded. 6.65 million shares traded today and suffice to say there is quite a large amount of speculation about what is going to happen.

My take on the matter is the following (in no particular order):

1. Tangible book value of KCG Holdings is $18.71/share as reported in their 10-K filing. A US$18.50 takeover price would allow Virtu to effectively take over KCG for free. This is the primary reason why I wouldn’t think this takeover would go anywhere as-is. My guess is that if Virtu was serious they would have to offer some equity as well, or some sort of premium to book value.

2. Virtu is a logical strategic acquirer to KCG – the synergies are quite obvious to both businesses. There might even be anti-trust issues with this acquisition.

3. Even though the acquisition at the low price range would be “free” for Virtu, it leaves the question of how they would immediately finance it.

4. The Jefferies control block is vital to the situation – if they can be persuaded to sell out, then management will likely have to follow. The question is whether they are motivated to sell out or not – obviously they will at the right price, but US$18.50 is too low.

5. The CEO was granted a huge amount of options at $22.50/share (priced well out-of-the-money at the time of the grant) and probably doesn’t have much of an incentive at this point to selling out the company for cheap.

6. Operationally, KCG is treading water in terms of cash flow, but this is because of unprecedented low market volatility conditions that is practically the worst environment for the firm (and also Virtu). In more normal conditions, one could easily estimate a value of US$25-30/share for the firm which is where I think management is targetting. They’ll probably sell out at 24ish if the bid got there.

7. Who leaked this unsolicited offer? Obviously KCG did – probably trying to drum up any counter-proposals out there as there are some other financial institutions that would be interested in acquiring the business. Perhaps management knows the end-game is nearing and this was a last ditch attempt to prevent a forced merger.

The decision forward is a high-stakes game for a lot of participants!

Disclosure: I own common shares of KCG, call options, and also their senior secured debt. Sometimes you really do hit the lottery in the marketplace.

A reason why I’m not a fan of index investing

Reading press releases like this one makes me quite happy to not being an index investor:

SMITHS FALLS, ON, March 10, 2017 /CNW/ – Canopy Growth Corporation (TSX: WEED) (“Canopy Growth” or “the Company”) today announced that by being added to the S&P/TSX Composite Index, it has achieved another major “first” in the cannabis industry. Management expects this to drive liquidity and increase the percentage of institutions holding Canopy Growth positions. In short, more investors than ever will be buying and holding WEED.

It is pretty obvious that future outsized gains to be made in the marketplace are going to be in companies that are not in the major indexes.

Seemingly the only variable that will dampen Canadian Real Estate

I’ve written a lot about this in the past, but Canadian real estate in urban centers is simply about too much capital chasing too little yield. Financially it makes sense to borrow at 2.83% like REITs such as Rio-Can (unsecured debt!!) and turn it around and invest it in a real estate yield product at 5.8% and pocket the difference in income.

This only becomes dangerous when credit markets start shutting down and you’re facing a cascade of debt maturities, or the collateral backing your loans (in this case, real estate) has a material mark-to-market drop (and then your debt leverage ratios will go out of whack and nobody will want to lend you money).

So I will bring your attention to interest rates. I’m fairly convinced at this point that until interest rates start rising (or we start seeing provincial governments enact serious foreign capital restrictions that can’t be easily bypassed like it is in British Columbia) we are not going to see any collapse in real estate pricing in Canada.

However, the US Federal Reserve is going to start to rise all boats fairly soon, and this will likely have knock-off effects in the rest of the world, including Canada.

I’m looking at Canadian interest rates at the Bank of Canada, and notice those longer term yields start to creep up again – 5-year government bond rates are at 1.23% and the trend on yields are seemingly upwards.

It remains to be seen whether this is white noise or whether this is the start of a trend, but it is something worth watching. If interest rates normalize to something resembling historical standards (e.g. 2% higher than present levels), Vancouver residential real estate that is currently renting for a 3% cap rate would be selling for a 5% cap rate – the result would be a 40% drop in price. This is not a prediction, it would be financial reality if a 2% rate increase occurred. Leverage has gotten to the point where such a change in interest rates would cause significant financial dislocation and this is likely why central banks are very afraid to make sudden changes to short term rates.

Difference Capital – Year-End 2016 Report

I wrote about Difference Capital (TSX: DCF) in an earlier post. They reported their 4th quarter results a couple days ago and their financial calculus does not change too much. They have CAD$29.6 million in debentures outstanding, maturing on July 31, 2018. Management and directors own slightly under half the equity, and thus they want to find a dilution-free way to get rid of the debt.

At the end of 2016 they have about CAD$14.4 million in the bank, plus $60.8 million (fair value estimate of management) in investments. One would think that in 2017 and the first half of 2018 some of these investments could be liquidated to cover the debentures. The situation is similar to the previous quarter, except for the fact that they’ve retired about 10% of their debt in the quarter, which is a positive sign.

Due to their investment portfolio not making any money (they have been quite terrible in this respect), they have a considerable tax shield: $186.3 million in realized capital losses, plus $41.9 million in non-capital losses which start to expire in 2026 and beyond. If you assume that they can realize both of these at half of the regular tax rates (I just quickly assumed 13% for the capital losses and 26% for the net operating losses), that’s $17.6 million.

Considering the market cap of the corporation is $26 million, there’s a lot of pessimism baked in. Mind you, there are a lot of corporations out there with less than stellar assets, a ton of tax losses, and tight control over the corporation (TSX: AAB, PNP quickly come to mind) so it is not like these entities are rare commodities. The question minority shareholders have to ask is whether the control group wants to bleed the company through salaries, bonuses and options or whether they are actually genuinely interested in profitably building the corporation (in all three cases, to date, has not been done).