Debt – Page 9 – Divestor

Retail investment in long-dated fixed income securities

When I read headlines like the following: “Investors hungry for returns are piling in Canada long-bond ETFs at a record pace“, I’d start to get concerned if I held these instruments. Investing in long-term government debt at this time feels like return-free risk compared to just stuffing the cash underneath the mattress.

Canada 10-year government bonds are barely trading above a percent:

The US 30-year treasury bond exhibits a similar characteristic – yields have crashed:

The prototypical Canadian long-bond ETF is TSX:XLB and they have done reasonably well. Since long bond yields have plummeted, investors have seen capital gains.

This leaves a few questions. Will yields go negative in North America? How will pensions actually be able to realize their assumed 7-7.5% net returns when they have to maintain a bond allocation with a 1.1% YTM? How much has quantitative easing programs outside of our borders affected our bond yields? What effect will this have on our currency?

Lots of questions, but few answers. Instinctively, I’d rather want my cash in cash rather than long-term treasury bonds. This has not been a winning attitude, but unless if you’re anticipating negative yields like Western Europe, it is tough to imagine rates going lower from here on in.

Re-examining Teekay Corp

Back in April 2016 I stated I invested in the unsecured corporate debt (January 2020) of Teekay Corp (NYSE: TK). Yields have compressed considerably since then:

Part of this is due to a $100 million equity offering that was purchased by certain insiders, including the 37.7% holder Resolute Investments, Ltd. They paid US$8.32 for their shares which are trading at a market value of about $7.15 as I write this.

Teekay also significantly rectified a capital funding gap in their Teekay Offshore (NYSE: TOO) daughter entity with the issuance of preferred shares, conversion of preferred shares to common units, and other generally dilutive measures to their common unitholders. This will also involve TK with a higher ownership of TOO and the solving of TOO’s liquidity issue will serve to be positive to the payment of TK debt.

The last few trades of TK debt going on today (volume of roughly $400k par value) has been around 90 cents on the dollar, corresponding to a yield to maturity of about 12%.

What I expect to happen is the market will continue to normalize and ideally then we will see yields compress to result in above-par prices. In the meantime I get paid interest income. This is a reasonably heavy portfolio weighting.

Fixed income purchase

As alluded to in my last quarterly report, I have been looking for some fixed income securities that have relatively short durations, marginability, and with a credit risk profile of next to nothing, yet maximizing yield.

Late last month I purchased a secured corporate bond. The debt is the only issue outstanding of the issuer and it was purchased at a mild discount to par. The underlying issuer obtained a credit rating for the debt and it is in the B’s. The issuer itself has a cash balance that is about 40% higher than the amount of debt outstanding. It is also profitable, generating cash flows, and has been doing so for quite some time. There is no good reason to believe that these cash flows will materially change between now and maturity. The debt is covenant restricted, only enabling the issuer to repurchase equity linked to the amount of income it produces. Not surprisingly, the company in question has been repurchasing their debt on the open market at a discount to par.

Yield to maturity that I received on my purchase: 10.0%.

I am not sure who was asleep at the switch as I did get the bonds at the bid, in a size that was sufficient to make me happy. Quite frankly I was surprised to see the trade executing.

The funny thing here is that the capital that I am required to lock up for the next few years (the maintenance margin is approximately 50%) will actually decrease my long-term performance figures, but in terms of the risk/reward ratio, this investment is a slam dunk. I am not aiming for the best returns, I am aiming for the best risk/return ratio.

Teekay Corporation – Debt

Over the past couple months I have accumulated a substantial position in Teekay Corporation’s (NYSE: TK) unsecured debt, maturing January 15, 2020. The coupon is 8.5% and is paid semi-annually. I am expecting this debt to be paid out at or above par value well before the maturity date. The yield to maturity at my cost I will be receiving for this investment will be north of 20% (and obviously this number goes up if there is an earlier redemption).

I was really looking into the common shares and was asleep at the switch for these, especially around the US$7-8 level a month ago. Everything told me to pull the trigger on the commons as well, and this mistake of non-performance cost me a few percentage points of portfolio performance considering that the common shares are 50% above where I was considering to purchase them. This would have not been a trivial purchase – my weight at cost would have been between 5-10%.

However, offsetting this inaction was that I also bought common shares (technically, they are limited partnership units) of Teekay Offshore (NYSE: TOO) in mid-February. There is a very good case that these units will be selling at US$15-20 by the end of 2017, in addition to giving out generous distributions that will most likely increase in 2018 and beyond.

The short story with Teekay Corporation debt is that they control three daughter entities (Teekay Offshore, Tankers, and LNG). They own minority stakes in all three (~~roughly 30% for each~~Update on April 26, 2016: I will be more specific. They have a 26% economic interest and 54% voting right in Teekay Tankers, a 35% limited partner interest in Teekay Offshore, and 31% limited partnership interest in Teekay LNG), but own controlling interests via general partner rights and in the case of Tankers, a dual-class share structure. There are also incentive distribution rights for Offshore and LNG (both of which are nowhere close to being achieved by virtue of distributions being completely slashed and burned at the end of 2015). If there was a liquidation, Teekay would be able to cover the debt with a (painful) sale of their daughter entities.

Teekay Corporation itself is controlled – with a 39% equity stake by Resolute Investments, Ltd. (Latest SC 13D filing here shows they accumulated more shares in December 2015, timed a little early.) They have a gigantic incentive to see this debt get paid off as now do I!

The mis-pricing of the common shares and debt of the issuers in question revolve around a classic financing trap (similar to Kinder Morgan’s crisis a few months ago). The material difference that the market appears to have forgotten about is that Teekay Offshore (and thus Teekay Corporation’s) business is less reliant on the price of crude oil than most other oil and gas entities. The material financial item is that Teekay Offshore faces a significant cash bridge in 2016 and 2017, but it is very probable they will be able to plug the gap and after this they will be “home-free” with a gigantic amount of free cash flow in 2018 and beyond – some of this will go to reduce leverage, but the rest of it is going to be sent into unitholder distributions assuming the capital markets will allow for an easy refinancing of Teekay Offshore’s 2019 unsecured debt.

At US$3/share, Teekay Offshore was an easy speculative purchase. Even at present prices of US$7/share, they are still a very good value even though they do have large amounts of debt (still trading at 16% yield to maturity, but this will not last long).

The absolute debt of Teekay Corporation is not too burdensome in relation to their assets, and one can make an easy guess that given a bit of cash flow through their daughter entities, they will be in a much better position in a couple years to refinance than they are at present. They did manage to get another US$200 million of this 2020 debt off at a mild discount in mid-November 2015, which was crucial to bridging some cash requirements in 2016 and 2017. The US$593 million face value of unsecured debt maturing January 2020 is the majority of the corporation’s debt (noting the last US$200 million sold is not fungible with the present $393 million until a bureaucratic process to exchange them with original notes) – I’d expect sometime in 2017 to 2018 this debt will be trading above par value.

The debt can be redeemed anytime at the price of the sum of the present values of the remaining scheduled payments of principal and interest, discounted to the redemption date on a semi-annual basis, at the treasury yield plus 50 basis points, plus accrued and unpaid interest to the redemption date.

This is a very complex entity to analyze as there is a parent and three daughter units to go through (and realizing that Teekay Corporation’s consolidated statements are useless to read without dissecting the daughter entities – this took a lot of time to perform properly). I believe I’ve cherry-picked the best of it and have found a happy place to park some US currency. I still think it is trading at a very good value if you care to tag along.

Pinetree Capital – Redeeming debentures

Pinetree Capital (TSX: PNP) today has announced it is redeeming $10 million of its debentures, at par value plus accrued interest, effective April 30, 2015.

As readers are aware by my previous rantings about Pinetree, their debt has been a remarkably good deal, especially around the 70 cent range, but they are still a reasonable risk/reward at 80 cents. The extra security that was arm-wrestled from management once they blew the covenants is icing on the cake.

Debenture holders will be cashed out pro-rata, which works out to an 18% redemption of debt. I’ll be hard-pressed to find a better alternative for the cash, but I’ll be happy to have it sitting in the bank account until such a time.

The market value of the debentures was bid/ask 80/83 cents and considering the cash-out is at par, this will likely result in an increase in the quoted price for the remaining debentures.

Notable to this announcement is that this is going to be funded by cash on hand, which implies that the company has been doing some liquidation of its non-disclosed holdings (these would be less than 10% ownership stakes in various firms). There has only been a minor trace of activity on SEDI on their 10%+ ownership stakes (the two largest that are publicly known is POET Technologies (TSXV: PTK) and Sphere 3D (Nasdaq: ANY)).

Also notable is that this is the first $10 million of the $20 million that is required to be redeemed by July 31, 2015. Up to half of the remaining amount can be done through open market transactions and also the company has the option of redeeming 1/3rd of its debentures in the form of equity, which has not been the case to date.

Finally, Pinetree has not released its 2014 year-end audited financial statements, but one can assume that they will be able to with this redemption notice. The annual statements are due on March 31, 2015 otherwise very bad things happen to reporting issuers that do not report.

Pinetree must have a debt-to-assets ratio of 50% up until October 31, 2015 and then after that it must be below 33% otherwise it will be in default of its debt covenants (once again). We should get a better view of what may occur once they file their 1st quarter report. Achieving 33% is going to be made much easier once they complete $20 million in redemptions and the question is whether debenture holders are going to receive equity or not (which would likely give debtholders control of the firm).

I’m expecting there will be a reasonably decent chance that investors in the senior secured convertible debentures will be made whole and also be able to collect a 10% coupon between now and the May 31, 2016 maturity date.