Canada – Page 19

General comments – market weakness

Another ranting post with little direction.

With marijuana-related equities and cryptocurrencies plummeting, the market for speculative investments appears to be topping. Probably the next short squeeze that occurs will be the best time to be shorting these instruments. Implied volatility on the options sadly are high, and the borrow rate on WEED, APH, ACB, etc., are astronomical.

I also note Aimia (TSX: AIM) has sold off one of their divisions today and most of the negative news is buried in a later paragraph concerning the tightening of their senior credit facility – this is basically part of the slow march to zero. The company is happy to cite the amount of cash on their balance sheet, but not so happy to cite the balance of their deferred revenues, which represents future commitments that will be offset by cost of goods sold – hence the cash reserve. Using an insurance analogy, they are running off their insurance book with little capacity to collect premiums written after Aeroplan expires in 2020.

There’s a lot of young people out there that have witnessed nothing but rising markets and low interest rates and the financial mindset is fixated on these two conditions. There is going to be a lot of financial roadkill along the way, similar to what happened in 2000-2002 where a lot of people got wiped out for believing the dot-com bubble.

Incidentially, 2002-2003 was the perfect time to invest in the inevitable winners of that technology boom (Amazon and Priceline being two great examples). There will have to be winners out of blockchain software, but it could just as equally come from a major player. Very difficult to say at this point in time as I still have not seen any functional system operating with blockchain that doesn’t have a parallel system that is better – unless if you believe that cryptocurrency’s best application is evading monetary authorities.

As I suggested in my previous post, the roller-coaster is just starting. No point in jumping in too early.

Marijuana stocks – if there was any question of over-valuation

(December 18, 2017: Article featured on the Globe & Mail: TSX short sales: What bearish investors are betting against)

This post applies to the recent December 5, 2017 press release by the British Columbia government regarding how they plan on implementing marijuana regulations in the province.

Saving you from reading the actual release, they plan on having a sole wholesaler (the BC Liquor Distribution branch) and a private/public retail distribution mechanism.

This is very similar to how liquor in other major provinces are distributed – the government gets to keep the lion’s share of the profit on the wholesale side.

In British Columbia, liquor retailers can purchase product from the government monopoly wholesaler at a 16% profit margin for licensed retail stores. These stores will have to then sell enough volume in order to pay for the usual business expenses (leasing a physical location, maintaining inventory, staffing, etc.).

Using the liquor analogy, profits from the retail end of things will be minimal. The best example is Liquor Stores NA (TSX: LIQ) which, despite booking 25% gross margins on their product, when things are good, earn a 3% operating profit margin (not before financing costs, but this is after depreciation expenses).

People following this company will shout out that they are undergoing a significant restructuring, but the central theme still sticks – it is a very low margin industry when your only supplier is government-controlled and has every incentive to maximizing its own profit and not yours.

This is a miserable business climate to be in.

Another, much smaller, example is Rocky Mountain Liquor (TSX: RUM). They operate retail entirely out of Alberta. Cherry-picking their best results in the last year, they are earning a 2% operating profit margin (and this is BEFORE financing and depreciation expenses).

Is marijuana going to be any different than liquor?

I would float the claim that retail marijuana profitability will be even worse than liquor because people can easily grow their own product sufficient for their own consumption. Federal legislation actively encourages people to grow their own marijuana plants at home (4 plants that you can now grow larger than the original 100cm proposed in the initial draft of Bill C-45).

This leaves the question of wholesale – there will need to be suppliers of this. I will also make the claim this will be a race to the bottom, with the exception that the “grow it at home” market will erode profits to the point that wholesale will nowhere near justify the 3.6 billion market capitalization seen from Canopy Growth (TSX: WEED) today – even assuming they captured the entire Canadian marijuana market.

The hype is marijuana producers will be able to achieve tobacco company margins – Rothmans was the last publicly traded Canadian tobacco company and they achieved roughly 50% operating margins (before financing and depreciation). It won’t be happening this way again – this margin will be siphoned by the government from the very beginning.

Canadian interest rate futures

There are three Bank of Canada announcements concerning interest rates for the rest of the year: September 6, October 25 and December 6.

Right now 3-month Banker’s Acceptance rates are 1.2%.

The BAX futures are signalling that there is a better than 50/50 chance that rates will increase 0.25% in the September 6 cycle, and that there is a slight chance of two 0.25% rate increases by the end of the year:

Month	Bid price	Ask price	Settl. price	Net change	Open int.	Vol.
Open interest: 942,178				Volume: 86,058
August 2017	0	0	98.765	0	0	0
September 2017	98.655	98.660	98.645	0.010	137,868	7,160
October 2017	0	0	98.615	0	0	0
December 2017	98.500	98.505	98.490	0.010	224,303	15,544
March 2018	98.395	98.400	98.375	0.020	163,606	19,552
June 2018	98.330	98.335	98.305	0.025	112,558	15,558
September 2018	98.270	98.280	98.250	0.030	120,395	10,055
December 2018	98.210	98.220	98.200	0.020	102,302	9,439
March 2019	98.160	98.170	98.140	0.020	45,030	5,208
June 2019	98.090	98.100	98.080	0.020	17,655	1,763
September 2019	98.010	98.030	98.010	0.010	10,774	827
December 2019	97.940	97.960	97.940	0.010	5,193	646
March 2020	97.860	97.870	97.870	0	2,199	198
June 2020	97.780	97.800	97.800	-0.010	295	108

Guessing the impact of these short-term interest rate changes I will leave as an exercise to the reader for now. The one salient fact, however, is that when short-term financing rates increase, the incentive to leveraging decreases and so marginal investments will be less viable. Parking cash in a rising-rate environment is best done with cash rather than using any debt instruments with duration (I wish I had stuck to this – my cash parked in VSB.TO has decidedly unperformed zero-yield cash!).

Worst-performing portfolio components

The biggest hits my portfolio has taken this year has been with the appreciation of the Canadian dollar and the cash-parking vehicle of VSB.TO. Sadly (not including monthly distributions, which is about 5 cents a month) they’re down about 40 cents over the past couple months, due to the short-term rate curve rising considerably.

I take solace knowing that the increased Canadian dollar gives me larger purchasing power parity and the increase in interest rates in theory should make credit-sensitive assets cheaper to purchase.

Bank of Canada raising rates to 0.75% – makes no sense

Most of Canada has heard that the Bank of Canada raised the short-term target interest rate from 0.5% to 0.75%, which was the first increase in about 5 years. The rate increase itself serves to increase a very small rate into another very small rate and is insignificant other than the fact that this sounds like it is a warning shot.

Indeed, when reading the Monetary Policy Report, I’ve come to the conclusion that there was really no justification for raising interest rates in accordance to the Bank’s mandate of maintaining inflation at a 1-3% band – their own research suggested that the economy was headed in that direction with the current monetary policy. The decision to raise interest rates appears to be completely arbitrary, or guided by other considerations that are not captured in the standard reports.

It is this scenario that makes me believe that barring any economically cataclysmic events, the Bank should probably raise again (to 1%), but for reasons that has nothing to do with maintaining a 2% CPI rate.

All in all, this policy decision by the Bank of Canada is mysterious.