Equity – Page 69

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.

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.

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:

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.

Looking back at Davis and Henderson

Once upon a time, I had invested some money in David and Henderson Income Fund, which was back in the days when a lot of viable corporate operations were structured in the form of an income trust. I made some reasonably quick capital gains, sold, and never looked back.

Davis and Henderson, similar to Kentucky Fried Chicken, Ernst and Young, PriceWaterhouseCoopers and many other establishments, decided to abbreviate their corporate name to their initials and become D+H Corp (TSX: DH). Considering that their previous business was the printing and processing of Canadian (paper) cheques, diversification of their business was correctly considered and for the most part, they made a fairly good transition into the broader realm of providing financial technology services for big banks.

You can see in the 10-year chart that this has really worked for them, and the market has been on their side, until recently:

What you don’t see is that in today’s trading, they fell 43% on a quarterly announcement (closing at $16.25/share, with a low of $14.97), bringing their stock price to levels frighteningly close to what I had invested back in 2010 with a cost base of $16.10 per unit. This was certainly a case of “back to the future” for Davis and Henderson.

The question of course is whether the six or so years it has been since I had last invested in them, whether they were worth taking another stab at again.

D+H’s fateful decision was the acquisition of Fundtech on March 30, 2015 (which closed a month later). In this acquisition, they issued many hundreds of millions of debt (in addition to doing a secondary offering at $37.95). Unfortunately, while the acquisition was designed to represent a diversification away from their traditional businesses, it has not materialized into anywhere that could be financially rationalized with the price paid. It has also bloated D+H’s balance sheet with the haunted scars of an additional $1.7 billion in goodwill and intangibles, and when considering their pre-existing goodwill and intangibles, they are sitting on a negative $1.3 billion of tangible equity.

Putting this into plain English, their balance sheet is a train wreck.

Train wreck balance sheets can only sustain themselves with positive cash flow, and continued good credit, as the generosity of lenders will be able to see them through.

For the first 9 months of the year, they have generated $167 million in free cash flow. A majority of this goes to dividend payments ($90 million), and the rest of it goes to debt repayment and acquiring other intangibles.

The problem is with the last quarterly result – it is quite evident that the corporation, on a consolidated basis, has flat-lined. While they still generate a very healthy amount of cash, it is obvious that they will be receiving future stress in the form of being able to repay debt as it matures.

They face the following debt situation:

They have an immediate maturity coming in June 2017, which they should be able to pay off with existing cash flow and/or their revolver without issues. The issue is what happens when they start getting into the bulk of their 2021-2023 maturities.

The math is simple – if they continue paying dividends at their current rate, they will have about $100 million a year in cash to acquire businesses (more intangible assets on the balance sheet) plus debt repayment. They will not have nearly enough to pay off the bond maturities without getting another extension of credit from bondholders.

Considering all of the bond issues and the revolving facilities are secured debt, you can be sure that the banks that supply the revolving debt are going to be nervous about using their money which is pari-passu to bondholders – which means that something is going to have to be negotiated in a couple years.

My guess is that the dividend is going to get slashed in half.

In terms of valuation, the balance sheet situation would make me quite uncomfortable as an equity investor. While I see the value in the cash generation potential of the underlying businesses (notwithstanding the fact that cheque processing is a dinosaur industry and is decreasing accordingly), I do not believe a leverage-adjusted valuation of this business is attractive at present prices.

For now, D+H is still a “pass” in my books. I did sell them at $21 back in the year 2010.

Genworth Financial bought out

Imagine my initial surprise when I saw a news feed that Genworth had been bought out. Unfortunately for me, it was Genworth Financial (NYSE: GNW) and not Genworth MI (TSX: MIC).

Genworth Financial is being taken over by China Oceanwide Holdings, chaired by Lu Zhiqiang, who apparently has a networth of $5 billion.

In the press release, there are scant details. They mentioned the buyout price and the intention of the purchaser to inject $1.1 billion of capital into Genworth to offset an upcoming 2018 bond maturity and shore up the life insurance subsidiary, but the release also explicitly stated a key point:

China Oceanwide has no current intention or future obligation to contribute additional capital to support Genworth’s legacy LTC business.

The LTC (long-term care) insurance business is what got Genworth into trouble in the first place, and its valuation is the primary reason why the company’s stated book value is substantially higher than its market value.

The press release also declared that this is primarily a financial acquisition rather than a strategic one, with management and operations being intact.

One wonders how long this will last.

Since Genworth Financial controls 57% of Genworth MI, it leads to the question of what the implications for the mortgage insurance industry will be – and it is not entirely clear to me up-front what these implications may be. Will the government of Canada be comfortable of 1/3rd of their country’s mortgage insurance being operated by a Chinese-owned entity? What is the financial incentive for China Oceanwide’s dealings with the mortgage insurance arms of Genworth Financial (noting they also own a majority stake in Australia’s mortgage insurance division)?

One thought that immediately comes to mind is that if Genworth Financial is not capital-starved, they will no longer be looking at ways to milking their subsidiaries for capital. In particular, if Genworth MI decides to do a share repurchase, they might opt to concentrate on buying back the public float (currently trading at a huge discount to book value) instead of proportionately allocating 57% of their buyback to their own shares (in effect, giving the parent company a dividend). This would be an incremental plus for Genworth MI.

Finally, one wonders what risks may lie in the acquisition closing – while it is scheduled for mid-2017, this is not a slam dunk by any means. Genworth Financial announced significant charges relating to the modelling of the actual expense profile of their LTC business and it is not surprising that they decided to sell out at the relatively meager price they did – there’s probably worse to come in the future.

However, as far as Genworth MI is concerned, right now it is business as usual. There hasn’t been anything posted to the SEC yet that will give me any more colour, but I am eager to read it.

(Update, early Monday morning: Genworth 8-K with fine-print of agreement)

Yes, I’ve read the document. Am I the only person on the planet that reads this type of stuff at 4:00am in the morning with my french-press coffee? Also, do they purposefully design these legal documents to be as inconveniently formatted as possible, i.e. no carriage returns or tabs at all?

A lot of standard clauses here, but some pertaining to subsidiary companies (including Genworth MI), including:

(page 47): Section 6.1,

the Company will not and will not permit its Subsidiaries (subject to the terms of the provisos in the definition of “Subsidiary” in Article X) to:

…

(viii) reclassify, split, combine, subdivide or redeem, purchase or otherwise acquire, directly or indirectly, any of its capital stock or securities convertible or exchangeable into or exercisable for any shares of its capital stock (other than

(A) the withholding of shares to satisfy withholding Tax obligations

(1) in respect of Company Equity Awards outstanding as of the date of this Agreement in accordance with their terms and, as applicable, the Stock Plans, in each case in effect on the date of this Agreement or
(2) in respect of equity awards issued by, or stock-based employee benefit plans of, the Specified Entities in their respective Ordinary Course of Business and

(B) the repurchase of shares of capital stock of Genworth Australia or Genworth Canada by Genworth Australia or Genworth Canada, as applicable, pursuant to share repurchase programs in effect as of the date hereof (or renewals thereof on substantially similar terms) with respect to such entities in accordance with their terms);

(note: Genworth MI’s NCIB expires on May 4, 2017)

(page 53): (e) During the period from the date hereof to the Effective Time or earlier termination of this Agreement, except as set forth on Section 6.1(e) of the Company Disclosure Letter, or as required by applicable Law or the rules of any stock exchange, the Company shall not, and shall cause any of its Subsidiaries that are record or beneficial owners of any capital stock of or equity interest in Genworth Canada or any of its Subsidiaries not to, without Parent’s prior written consent (which consent, in the case of clauses (ii)(B) and (iii) below (and, to the extent applicable to either clause (ii)(B) or clause (iii) below, clause (iv) below) shall not be unreasonably withheld, conditioned or delayed):

…

or (z) any share repurchases that would not decrease the percentage of the outstanding voting stock of Genworth Canada owned by the Company and its Subsidiaries as of the date hereof)

(note: Hmmm… this does open the door for repurchases).

I’m still unsure of the final implication on Genworth MI other than the fact that if this merger proceeds that the parent company is going to lean less on their subsidiaries for capital.

Bombardier will get their money from the federal government

It is quite obvious that Bombardier will eventually get some equity infusion from the federal government, which will be the final signal to all market participants that Canada will not let the corporation fail, even if the C-Series turns out to be an economic disaster (it does not appear to be at the moment – the risk at this point is on execution).

The question is what type of concessions Bombardier will have to make, and I suspect the “win-win” agreement will be only dismantling the dual-class structure of stock if the company keeps less than X jobs outside of Canada (mainly in the Province of Quebec).

The Government of Quebec (and the Quebec Pension Plan) invested previously into Bombardier and received common shares and warrants for a half-stake in the C-Series jet and also a chunk of the Bombardier transportation division.

My whole line of thinking was that preferred shareholders and bondholders would be the primary beneficiary of all of this capital infusion. Currently, the Series 4 preferred shares (TSX: BBD.PR.C) is trading at a 9.4% yield, while the Series 2/3 (floating/fixed) shares are at 8.2% and 9.1%, respectively. The next rate reset will be in August of 2017.

The yield curve for debt is quite healthy for Bombardier and they’ll be in a good position to refinance maturities, especially when they receive another equity injection. Yields should continue to compress in this scenario.