Genworth MI reports Q3-2016

Genworth MI (TSX: MIC) reported their Q3-2016 report. This was a very “steady as she goes” type report fundamentally, with little hidden surprises. Some highlights:

* Stated book value per share is $39.01 (means the company is trading 29% below book value, which is a huge discount – I will also point out there is about $2.48/share of goodwill, intangibles and the deferred policy acquisition costs, so the most absolute conservative valuation of tangible book value is roughly $36.50/share diluted).

* Loss ratio goes to 25%, up from 20% in the previous quarter mainly due to oil-producing (Alberta, Sask) delinquencies and defaults. Delinquency rate is still at 0.10%.

* Investment portfolio is up another $200 million in invested assets (3.2% average yield).

* Transactional written insurance premiums down 15% from quarter of previous year; portfolio insurance up 7%, which was somewhat surprising given the rule changes after Q2-2016 (quarter-to-quarter comparisons here are not that useful due to seasonality).

* Minimum capital test under soon-to-be-replaced OSFI rules went up to 236% from 233% in previous quarter.

* Dividend raised from 42 to 44 cents (I was expecting a 3 cent raise, but this is probably to ensure they keep raising capital levels for the new rule changes – market may not like this although in strict financial theory they’d do best to scrap the dividend and repurchase shares at current prices).

* Credit score increases of client averaging 752 from 744, gross debt service level is 24% (would lead one to suspect that absent of catastrophe, clients would continue to pay mortgages above all else)

* They seemed to figure out how to stop losing money on buying Canadian preferred shares. They really should just outsource this to James Hymas, who I am sure will be able to provide superior risk/reward on these investments.

The big question is the looming impact of regulatory changes, an issue previously discussed on this site. Some snippets:

* On the issue of OSFI capital calculation changes, the “new” target is 150% (from 220%), and in the new framework, they are at 155-158%, the previous June 30, 2016 quarter had it at 153-156%.

* Impact of BC announcement of 15% property transfer tax on foreign buyers in Vancouver area:

As of August 2, 2016, foreign individuals and corporations will be subject to an additional 15% land transfer tax on the purchase of residential property in Metro Vancouver. The Company does not expect these changes to have a material impact on its business, as foreign borrowers are typically not eligible for high loan-to-value mortgage insurance.

* Impact of the mortgage changes and applicability of transactional and portfolio insurance on various mortgage properties:

After the Company’s review of the mortgage insurance eligibility rule changes announced October 3, 2016, it expects that the transactional market size and its transactional new insurance written in 2017 may decline by approximately 15% to 25% reflecting expected changes to borrower home buying patterns, including the purchase of lower priced properties and higher downpayments.

As the result of clarifications provided by the Department of Finance after the October 3, 2016 public announcement, the Company now expects that portfolio new insurance written in 2017 may decline by approximately 25% to 35% as compared to the normalized run rate after the July 1, 2016 regulatory changes for portfolio insurance. The new mortgage rules prohibit insuring low loan-to-value refinances and most investor mortgages originated by lenders on or after October 17, 2016.

Notes: I had anticipated transactional insurance would drop by 1/6th (so this is within the 15-25% estimate), and I thought portfolio insurance would get completely shot up (which is going to be the case).

Basic calculations would suggest that if transaction insurance gets dropped 20%, the annual run-rate is about CAD$521/year, plus whatever insurance premium increases that will happen in 2017 as a result of heightened capital requirements. I had originally given some conjecture that this number would be CAD$570 in the end – which is still a pretty good number even if the combined ratio goes up to 60% or so – you’re looking at a very, very, very profitable entity.

Portfolio insurance will taper down and contribute about $60 million/year in written premiums.

Going forward, Genworth MI should produce about $570-580 million/year in written premiums, without increases in mortgage insurance premiums.

Cash-wise, at a 50% combined ratio (30% loss and 20% expense) and a 26% tax rate, shareholders are looking at $210-215M/year or about $2.32/share in operating net income. A $6.2 billion investment portfolio at 3.2% blended yield gives $1.60/share, taxed at 26%. Combined, the entity would still pull in cash at $3.92/share – considering the $27.86 share price currently, this is trading at a P/E of 7, at a book value of 30% below par… needless to say, an attractive valuation.

I generally do not care about the top-line revenue number as this just represents an amortization formula of the unearned premium reserve. However, analysts and uninformed members of the public do tend to care about this since revenues translate into bottom-line results, and this number will continue to rise over the next year above the $162 million they booked this year. The only thing that will change this is a change in claim experience and time – for any given insurance policy, more of it gets booked in the earlier stages of the policy than the later ones. The increasing revenue number will result in higher amounts of higher reported net income, and higher EPS.

Questions for conference call:
– Impact of Genworth Financial’s acquisition on Genworth MI – what restrictions would there be on equity repurchases – and asking about the out-right sale of the MIC subsidiary (which, at current values, has to be put on the table);
– Ability/willingness for Genworth MI to repurchase shares at extremely discounted book value per share prices;
– Regulatory impact of private mortgage insurance $300 billion cap (currently at $275 billion for all private entities, MIC at $221 billion);
– What the MCT internal target will be with the new OSFI capital regime.

Final thoughts: Right now, repurchasing shares of Genworth MI is such a no-brainer shareholder-enhancing decision. I hope management can snap on it. The common shares are trading on the basis of Canadian real estate fear and not in any regard to the underlying financial reality which show an entity that is generating a massive amount of cash.

US Presidential Election: Current Guess

I apologize to my readers. Instead of writing anything relevant to the financial markets, I’m instead writing about Trump vs. Clinton. Please forgive me – this will pass after Tuesday.

The following is my November 3, 2016 guess. My prediction has nothing to do with endorsement of any candidate or policies they represent. In fact, a Kaine/Pence (choose one for president and vice president by flipping a coin) administration would probably be a lot more acceptable for most of the public.

Canadian readers of this site can remember what happened with the NDP and Jack Layton in the 2011 election in Quebec. While it isn’t huge like that election was, there is an element of it in this particular election.

2016-11-03-electoralmap

Polling:

If you are Hillary you do not want to see this:

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LA Times / USC has always had a pro-Republican skew to it from the very beginning of this election (although they were quite right in 2012), but that “hockey stick” boost at the end is something you don’t want to be seeing if you are a Democrat – people locking in their votes for Trump. Since this is a national poll, it can only be extrapolated so far since there are huge Democratic majorities in California and New York, but this isn’t what you want to be seeing if you are cheering for Clinton.

The aggregate polling also shows a Trump spike, but I have always claimed that poll samples (including the LA Times one above) is not representative of who Trump is going to actually get out to vote – voter turnout and the distribution of voters that show up is of paramount importance in elections in Canada and the USA.

2016-11-03-rcp

Polls do try to correct for this factor by including “likely voters”, but methodologies can only go so far. Since most political pundits use backward-looking lenses to project results, it is not surprising that they are all still predicting a Clinton victory.

The real-money markets (Pinnacle Sports is the best proxy for this) has Trump at +226, which is the highest probability odds I have seen him. Betfair (which is closed to Canadians), I also consider highly credible and they have him as 9/4, which is pretty much the same.

KCG Holdings – very inexpensive risk-reward ratio

KCG Holdings (NYSE: KCG) is probably best known as previously being “Knight Capital”, which was one of the top-tier US market-making firms back in the days when the Nasdaq traded in quotations of 1/16ths.

The second reason why they are well-known is because due to a badly botched software upgrade on August 1, 2012, where their algorithms managed to incur $440 million in 30 minutes of trading losses before technicians were able to pull the plug. I am quite confident with an unlimited amount of equity on my Interactive Brokers account I could not manage to lose that much money using my fingertips and mouse.

The company was forced to recapitalize and what incurred after was a reverse-takeover by the algorithmic trading firm GETCO. The existing shareholders were massively diluted and this functionally served as a way for GETCO shareholders to liquidate their holdings (backed by General Atlantic). The combined entity was renamed “KCG” (yet another example of a firm acronym-ing their name) and what ensued was an internal purge of legacy Knight Capital personnel. The transition at this time is more or less complete.

The corporation still makes the bulk of their money through market making and related trade execution services. Their prime competitors include other high-frequency trading firms, including the newly public Virtu (Nasdaq: VIRT). In general, the firm makes money when market conditions are volatile and they operate at a loss when volatility is quite muted.

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The July to September quarter was a disaster for KCG (and other market-making entities, including Interactive Brokers), while the April to June quarter was quite profitable (think about Brexit!).

Since the last quarter’s results, KCG shares have tail-spinned:

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The business, quarter by quarter, is highly volatile. In the Q2-2016, they reported operating revenues of $280 million, and in Q3-2016 they reported $200 million. As you might tell by this seasonality, it creates volatility in the stock as quantitative algorithms that purchase and sell shares on fundamental data generally go wild with companies like these.

Profitability also varies. The corporation is still trying to cut costs and become lean and mean (like Virtu), but it is taking them time to get to that position where they can be profitable in a very low volatility environment like the last quarter. On the aggregate, they are profitable in the medium run, which means I do not regard them as much of a risk at this moment (unless if their programmers decide to botch up another software upgrade like what happened in August 1, 2012).

The balance sheet is a little more interesting.

Its tangible book value is $15.54/share at the end of September. The underlying corporation has $508 million in cash, and a whole host of financial instruments that vary from quarter to quarter as they maintain an inventory for market making purposes (13F-HR form attached for illustration). In addition, they also own 13.1 million shares of BATS (Nasdaq: BATS), which is presently in the middle of getting acquired by the CBOE (Nasdaq: CBOE) sometime in 2017. The BATS stake is worth a pre-tax amount of about US$380 million at current market value.

Where my accounting experience comes in handy is how this is reported. You would think that owning US$380 million in a publicly traded entity would be reflected as US$380 million on the balance sheet, but this is not the case with KCG’s BATS stake. Instead, it is reported under the equity method of accounting. I will leave out the complications and state that it is reported as $94 million at present on the balance sheet. As KCG sells their BATS shares, the differential between sale price and their carrying value on the asset side will be reported as a gain (subtracting a provision for income tax).

So there is actually about $285 million of pre-tax money that is bottled up and waiting to escape. After taxes, this will be about $200 million leftover (using 30% as a basis – the actual rate may be higher).

You can see why most people do not have the time or patience to go through this minutiae.

On the liability side, we have one significant liability – $465 million face value outstanding of secured senior debt, with an 6.875% coupon maturing March 2020. The debt restricts the corporation to repurchasing shares at a fraction of KCG’s income (if you care to read the fine print, it is available on this 8-K filing) in addition to other nitty gritty details that I will omit from this post.

KCG initially issued $500 million in debt, but decided to repurchase debt at a discount to market earlier this year, when their debt was trading at about 89 cents on the dollar.

Readers of this site perhaps would not be surprised to know that I decided to purchase a decent-sized block of debt at around 90 cents earlier this year. My first disclosure of that purchase is in this post. Unless if the corporation decides to do an August 1, 2012-style blow-up, I regard it as virtually impossible that they will be unable to pay back this debt.

The company has also been actively engaged with the repurchase of its equity (and warrants related to the GETCO merger) at values that have been below book. They conducted a dutch-auction tender last year with excess capital, and they have not made sufficient amounts of money this year to conduct further stock repurchases – their authorization after the previous quarter was a paltry $2 million. However, they can liquidate BATS shares and use those proceeds for equity buyback purposes.

Considering the firm is now trading at a 15% discount to tangible book value, any equity repurchases would be accretive to their book value, in addition to being an EPS boost whenever the markets are volatile enough for them to make money.

So this is a compelling business with a relatively wide moat (market-making is not as easy as initial perceptions may seem), a decent balance sheet, and reasonable prospects for much better business conditions (did I say anything about Donald Trump in my previous post?). It is a company that would find better business conditions when there are higher amounts of market volatility, and assuming they can keep some sort of competitive business edge on the algorithmic side of things, they should be able to generate positive cash flows.

In other words, the downside appears limited, but the upside is less defined.

A question of what their terminal value would be is an interesting study – one would think that if they decided to go private (which would be a legitimate avenue considering everything presented above) that they could do so at a share price obviously above the US$13.10 they closed at today. Management has made promotions of aiming for a “double digit return on equity” in 2017, which I believe is generous, especially on the operating side, but if they get anywhere close to this (or even half of it), the market should value this well north of US$13.10.

So I’m in. Both the equity and debt.

Markets will be asleep for the next week and a half

Mark November 8, 2016 on your calendars – the date of the US Presidential Election.

Until then, no major market participant is going to be doing anything, short of the knee-jerk reactions from quarterly earnings reports.

You’re also starting to see a build-up of volatility which bettors are using to hedge:

vix

And yes, Donald Trump becomes the next president. This isn’t an endorsement of him, but rather what I have been saying for the past year and a bit. This is an election where the standard calculus does not work, and people are continuing to make the mistake of using those lenses in a very different environment (similar to the error that the Conservative Party of Canada in the lead-up to the 2015 election).

Pinnacle Sports had Trump at +580 (roughly 1-in-7) to win a week ago and now he is at +280 (roughly 1-in-4), so the betting markets have been very volatile.

Also I have noticed most Canadians use Canadian lenses to look at what is going on in this very American election. Most of the time the political culture is similar, but this is a very special situation.