Category: Equity

The relatively large drop in today’s trading was attributed to a decrease in the reported consumer confidence (which is irrelevant) and China reporting lowered economic growth.

If you look at the Shanghai Index, you can see share prices are already ratcheted down since roughly in April. This also corresponds to the S&P 500:

I don’t have any strong opinions on the broad markets – I find the S&P 500 to be a fairly good screening tool, whereby I would not consider investing in an S&P 500 equity component unless if something really significant was going on that I thought the market had an incorrect take on. The last example I can think of was Philip Morris during the middle of the tobacco lawsuit settlements. Too much money is linked to the S&P 500 index so the equity is likely to be over-inflated. Not only that, but closet index funds do enough research on all of the components to make the markets relatively efficient, so it is generally worth spending your time on smaller and less liquid issues.

If growth in China, however, is slowing then you are going to see ripple effects in the marketplace.

Now that BP has effectively settled with the US Government to the tune of $20 billion and taking out their shareholders’ dividends for the next year, it leaves the question of how Transocean, the owner of the drill, will fare.

I’m guessing that the cessation of risk with BP’s settlement with the US government will not last too long when the government decides to go after Transocean for something. I don’t believe this is correctly priced in the market yet.

One of the smartest decisions Transocean made was relocating its corporate headquarters to Switzerland for tax reasons. Most of the assets of Transocean are international, and thus they can be shielded from US taxation. The ability of the US government to extort money out of Transocean is potentially more limited considering that the only active offshore drilling area in US waters is around the Gulf of Mexico.

I have a mental buy order where I will purchase shares of RIG, but it would require a price trend down in order for the market to reach it.

Fundamentally, the supply of crude oil is limited by the amount of drills available to do offshore drilling, and there are only a few companies on this planet that have the capability of providing such services. Until the field becomes saturated, lease rates should be substantially profitable for the players that are doing it and consequently the shareholders. Higher oil prices will also stimulate more demand for offshore drilling (as well as on-shore development) and are obviously more beneficial to those companies that have unmined oil reserves.

BP has now cut its dividend:

As a consequence of this agreement, the BP Board has reviewed its dividend policy. Notwithstanding BP’s strong financial and asset position, the current circumstances require the Board to be prudent and it has therefore decided to cancel the previously declared first quarter dividend scheduled for payment on 21st June, and that no interim dividends will be declared in respect of the second and third quarters of 2010.

The Board remains strongly committed to the payment of future dividends and delivering long term value to shareholders. The Board will consider resumption of dividend payments in 2011 at the time of issuance of the fourth quarter 2010 results, by which time it expects to have a clearer picture of the longer term impact of the Deepwater Horizon incident.

The Board believes that it is right and prudent to take a conservative financial position given the current uncertainty over the extent and timing of costs and liabilities relating to the spill. BP’s businesses continue to perform well, with cash flows from operations expected to exceed $30bn in 2010 at current prices and margins before taking into consideration costs related to the Deepwater Horizon spill. BP’s gearing level remains at the bottom of its targeted band of 20-30 per cent. In addition, the Company has over $10bn of committed banking facilities. To further increase the Company’s available cash resources, the Board intends to implement a significant reduction in organic capital spending and to increase planned divestments to approximately $10bn over the next twelve months.

This decision has a double benefit to BP – first, it will provide them some mild political cover for not dishing out money to shareholders. In theory, this is a value-neutral decision since the company is effectively investing that capital into its liabilities (either related or not to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill). However, value funds and income funds will likely jettison BP shares for mechanical reasons.

The second benefit is that each quarterly dividend costs BP about $2.63 billion dollars – this money will shore up their balance sheet. Since they have some maturing debt that needs to be paid off, BP needs to conserve cash to avoid a short raid on their stocks and bonds – already their short-term maturities are trading around 7-8% yields to maturity when they should really be trading around 2-3% (i.e. nearly a “sure thing”).

For people that insist on getting into BP, the next couple weeks should be a good time. The exact timing in terms of price is an unknown variable, but I would estimate layering in 25-30 dollars a share (e.g. if it goes down to 28, you will get a 40% allocation).

There is also an off-chance that the US government will introduce some other hidden risk into the equation that would end up tanking the stock price. You would think, however, that most of the risk has already been introduced into the stock price.

Option fans should also consider that the implied volatility for BP is well into the 90’s (very high when compared to its price history).