Canada – Page 32

A basic guide on how to do Canadian equity research

Whenever I hear of a publicly traded company, I follow a fairly standard methodology to do some basic research on the firm.

In a perfect world, you try to do research before looking at the share price of the company. The whole idea of the research methodology is to pin down a valuation for the equity (or in some cases, debt) and seeing a stock price contaminates what should be an unbiased analysis. You want to come up with your own valuation, rather than looking at the market’s valuation and then thinking of ways to rationalize the stock price. Unfortunately 9 times out of 10, the first thing I do is pull up the stock quote. I’ve been trying to train myself to no longer do this, but it is really, really difficult to not see a quote attached to an article.

Once I am ready to research, I pull off these documents from SEDAR in this order:

1. If the “nearest” financial report is an interim statement, I pull down the interim financial statements and MD&A document and read them. Doing analysis on this alone is time-consuming, and you look for tidbits in the statement, get an idea of how the company is capitalized and look at the cash situation. If the “nearest” report is an annual one, I read that and the MD&A.

2. Then I read the management information circular, and look at executive compensation scheme, insider ownership, and executive biographies and get a “feel” for who is running the firm, and who is on the board.

Usually by this point, you can come up with a ballpark number and then it becomes irresistible to look at the share price and hence valuation. Which then leaves:

3. Pulling up the stock chart, and then looking at any significant price moves, and then connecting those price moves to various news releases of the company;

4. Reading every news release of the company over the past X years, chronologically, and then looking at the reaction of the stock to what is significant news;

5. Reading the latest annual report (not the glossy version, the dry financial version) with its MD&A, and/or the Annual Information Form, which is also a good document that has information that is not contained in the interim statements;

6. Insider trading is available on SEDI and can influence a decision. While insider selling is not necessarily a negative signal, whenever you see insider buying it gets your attention much more.

7. The company’s website.

Usually by this point you spent many hours of reading and synthesizing information, and should have a pretty good idea as to what makes the company “tick”. Then the next step is to have a sector-wide comprehension and start investigating competitors, and firms up and down the supply chain to get a feel for the economic variables at stake. This is a never-ending process and eventually at some point you cut it off and then make a buy/sell/leave alone decision.

Learning to prune investment candidates at stage #2 is a very good skill to have – I usually set price triggers on those companies, and when the triggers are hit, I get an email and this triggers me to take a second look at the company to see if anything has changed. In the second half of 2008, so many companies were triggering low price alerts that I had a very, very difficult time keeping up with what was literally an avalanche of securities. I probably could have performed better in 2008 had I had more time to look at all the securities that were flashing at me.

Today, there is hardly anything that triggers my low price alerts, so I am using different screens to put some companies on the research queue.

ING Direct gets into the chequing market

In an interesting corporate strategy shift, ING Direct is now getting into the chequing and bill payment market. The salient details are similar to the local credit union that I deal with, mainly no transaction charges and a nominal fee for other basic services (ordering cheques, writing bank drafts, etc.).

ING Direct used to start off as a basic business model where you can save your money at a high rate of return – ING Direct would then use this as collateral to write mortgages, and then make the money off the spread between the mortgage rates and the savings interest paid. As their deposit base grew, they eventually morphed from giving their clients the best rates available to just giving slightly above average rates for savings. They are now out-competed by Ally and other providers.

As there is nothing preventing competition for funds, the only barrier for customers to switch banks is simply to fill in an application form. Since the interest spread between ING Direct and Ally is 0.5% on short-term savings at present, it is a $50 difference on a $10,000 deposit for a year. While this is not a gigantic amount of money, it is likely worth it for those that can spend the 20 minutes applying and getting an account.

As for the chequing account, I was assuming that the funds you leave on deposit would be earning ING Direct’s typical interest rate on savings, but it is not – apparently the first $50,000 will earn 0.25%, and the remainder will be earning more. This is far below the 1.5% that ING Direct offers.

So what is the point of opening an account? Typically the convenience of opening such a chequing account would be that it works completely in synergy with your main ING Direct account, and offering the high rate while you keep your cash idle in the account. Instead, you still have to go through the same procedure to transfer over your money from the high rate account to the lower rate chequing account, and then make the cheque or bill payment.

I don’t think this is going to attract the type of clients that ING Direct wants, mainly those that keep large amounts of deposits in the account.

It is also interesting how most banks probably take a loss processing these accounts – the big money maker on the retail end are for mortgages, loans and credit card interest debt.

Bank of Canada Interest Rate Projections

Since the last 0.25% rate increase on July 20, the bankers’ acceptance futures have been quite calm. We have the following quotations:

Month / Strike	Bid Price	Ask Price	Settl. Price	Net Change	Vol.
+ 10 AU	0.000	0.000	98.905	-0.005	0
+ 10 SE	98.825	98.835	98.825	0.000	1825
+ 10 OC	0.000	0.000	98.725	-0.005	0
+ 10 DE	98.700	98.710	98.700	0.010	6190
+ 11 MR	98.580	98.590	98.580	0.010	4636
+ 11 JN	98.460	98.470	98.460	0.010	2213
+ 11 SE	98.310	98.320	98.310	0.000	904
+ 11 DE	98.140	98.150	98.130	0.010	303
+ 12 MR	97.950	97.960	97.940	0.020	104
+ 12 JN	97.770	97.790	97.760	0.020	54

This still hints that the short term rate will rise 0.25% by the September 8 or October 20 meeting, and the short term rate will end the year at 1.00% with a possibility of 1.25%. For the year 2011, rates are expected to inch higher by about 0.5 to 0.75%.

It should also be noted that at present, 3-month corporate paper is yielding 0.89%. This was approximately 0.4% half a year ago.

Finally, since 5-year bond rates have dropped considerably over the same time period (which is counter-intuitive to the economics 101 texts that state that longer-term bond yields will rise with an increase in interest rates), 5-year fixed term mortgages should also drop – the best one I can see so far is 3.87%.

Menu Foods cashes out

Menu Foods is a manufacturer of pet food. They are most famous for an incident in early 2008 where some chemical got into their food supply through imported grain from China which was tainted and caused organ failures in pets. Although they were already on the financial skids in a very low-margin industry (they cut distributions to zero in 2005), this tainted food incident took down their share price down to abysmally low levels and presented a considerable financial risk for equity holders since the company was on the brink of insolvency.

They did manage to stage a partial recovery, but then the global economic crisis hit later in 2008 and early 2009, which brought the common shares once again around the 70-90 cent range.

Investors back then, buying equity, were taking an incredible risk, but it is one that has paid off for them – although the business produces cash flows today, it is slim and they have high leverage given the amount of cash they generate. Still, an investor taking the plunge at a dollar would have seen last Friday over a triple gain on their equity investment.

Today, they will be bought out for $4.80/unit, which if I was holding units, would be selling out with a smile on my face.

I remember looking at the company back in early 2008 and thought they were going to go bankrupt. I also did not put this firm on my candidate list during the economic crisis simply because there were so many other (more solvent) offerings on the market at the time.

Another example of yield chasing

Just after a week since I posted a review of Superior Plus, declaring that they probably would have to reduce their dividends in order to be financially sustainable, they announced their quarterly results today. Notably, they lowered expectations for 2010 due to warmer weather (and therefore less natural gas deliveries).

They also had the following snippet in their quarterly release:

– The financial outlook for 2010 has been revised to AOCF per share of $1.50 to $1.65 as a result of lower than anticipated second quarter results and a weaker than previously anticipated economic recovery for the remainder of 2010.

– The financial outlook for 2011 has been revised to AOCF per share of $1.85 to $2.05 as a result of a weaker than previously anticipated economic recovery forecasted for the remainder of 2010 and throughout 2011, particularly impacting Superior’s Construction Products Distribution business.

AOCF is “Adjusted operating cash flow”, which is a non-GAAP metric to approximate how much cash before capital expenditures is available to the corporation. Since their dividend rate is $1.62/share, this leaves the company little to negative real cash to provide for acquisitions (which they have done plenty of over the past couple years), debt repayment or capital projects.

The company’s stock traded down 7.9% as a reaction to their disappointing report.

Investors undoubtedly will be looking at Superior Plus’s 13.03% dividend yield and marvel what a bargain they are getting, but it seems likely they will be forced to reduce dividends and this is reflected in the market price.

Interestingly enough, Superior Plus has four issues of debentures that trade on the TSX – the issue maturing in December 2012 has a yield to maturity of 4.5%, while the issue maturing July 2017 has a yield to maturity of 5.9%. They appear to be priced very expensive and I would not touch them.