Finance – Page 42

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.

Get ready for the biggest short squeezes of all times – Bitcoin

It seems pretty obvious to me that talking about Bitcoin as the “biggest short of all times” is only going to end up as one way – the biggest short squeeze ever known in the history of mankind before finally busting down on a slow journey to nearly zero.

I think the last time this happened was when the Hunt brothers were partially successful in cornering the silver futures market, before they lost control and it all collapsed underneath.

Another great example was when Porsche nailed short sellers of Volkswagen stock in 2008 by accumulating a hidden option to acquire 75% of the company, with the German state owning 20% – leaving precious little for short sellers to cover with.

The real issue here is marginability of Bitcoin futures – it doesn’t even matter if margin rates are 35% or 100%, if Bitcoins trade from $10k to $100k in a three-day period, we will start to see FXCM-type action in the brokerage sector and derivative clearing, just as the chairman of Interactive Brokers promised.

Once the short interest in bitcoin futures starts to rise, it is like adding gasoline to a six tonne pile of gunpowder and expecting everything to be all right while lighting up a cigarette next to it. Good luck.

This is starting to make gold look increasingly like a good bet.

Just for full disclosure, I’ve known about Bitcoin since it was under a dollar a coin, and clearly I was taken aback at how it has morphed into present day. I’ve been outright incorrect regarding pricing predictions.

Further disclosure: Have not owned, nor do I intend to take any positions on bitcoins, which is the closest thing one can get to legalized gambling.

Little activity to report

This quarter is looking to make records for low activity on my part. I’ve been attempting to scan the markets for various opportunities but have been coming up with blanks.

In general, most of the debt markets out there are trading out of proportion for risk. Blow-ups on unsecured debt like Toys R Us continue to be a reminder that something can go from 95 cents to 30 in short order.

The fossil fuel industry (specifically natural gas production) appear to have headwinds, and despite rumblings of a recovery in the crude oil market, I still do not see anything on the equity side that appears to warrant action at this point.

Retail has also been killed, but in many cases there is a lot of substance to the story – there is a generational shift occurring for physical shopping, similar to the digitization of newspaper media.

Indeed, it appears that two industries have been dominating the mind-share for investment capital: Marijuana and Blockchain technologies, neither of which I have any interest. I note with amusement that Village Farms (TSX: VFF) appears to be attracting disproportionate interest due to its announcement that it is preparing to grow marijuana in its greenhouses (presumably in British Columbia and not Texas!). I have no idea how far up the market can take these stocks (similar to Bitcoin itself), but it can always be father than one can believe is possible, let alone rational.

The good news is that when a few sectors dominate the allocation of capital, it usually means that other sectors do not receive the same attention and these can be scoured for opportunities.

Despite my antagonistic view on the general marketplace, most of my cash is deployed in cash-parking vessels and are earning incremental yields while I wait for higher risk/reward opportunities. Although I do not think a market crash is imminent, if one did occur, I would not mind.

Will Hurricane Irma cause insurers to drop?

Hurricane Irma is looking like it will blast a path through most of Florida in just over two days:

The media is making it look like that it will be apocalyptic. Indeed, the island St. Martin (famous for having an airport where you can sit on a beach and look up about 100 feet and see a landing Boeing 777 jet) was nearly annihilated. Right now Irma is one of the strongest (if not the strongest) in recorded history, but the question is where it will strike landfall in Florida (if there) and how much it will dissipate by that point – 75 miles can make a material difference in the damage calculation. If it goes through the heart of Miami, there will be tons of damage, but if goes through the western part of the peninsula, there’s a decent chance that the winds will slow down sufficiently by Tampa to still cause a lot of damage, but not the insane amounts the media is making it to be.

Thus while the media hype is overwhelming, the markets are treating certain insurers like the catastrophe is already a done deal, which may not be the case.

This is the classic information mismatch that creates market opportunity.

Canadian interest rates – probably level from here

The Bank of Canada “surprised” the market by increasing rates by a quarter point.

What I am feeling very regretful about is about a month ago I thought they were going to do it, but the BAX futures were assigning a rough 20%-25% probability of them doing it. I should have dipped my toes in there.

Readers of history (and it really feels like history since it happened such a long time ago) will recall that the last time they raised interest rates (from 0.25% to 1.00%) they did it in three consecutive meetings with three 0.25% rate increases.

The Bank of Canada clearly had a target in mind and contrary to what the talking heads on the media have to say about the matter, I think they will hold at 1% for the intermediate term. There are a couple reasons for this, but one is that their original policy stance to stay at 1% (before they dropped to half a point) is that the Bank of Canada has accumulated considerable research that ultra-low policy rates create their own risks by virtue of being so low. There seems to be “mean reversion” to this. The other is that the inflationary threat does not appear to be forthcoming at present, especially now that the Canadian export economy will be dampened by the increased Canadian dollar.

There is also the matter of bringing the short term rates up to a point where the spread between the short-term and 10-year bond will converge to nothing. The federal reserve is going to run into the same problem when their central bankers will be asking themselves a correlation/causation question of whether an inverted yield curve is a predictor of a recession, or whether an inverted yield curve causes one.

Markets are predicting a 70-75% chance that the Bank of Canada will raise rates by the end of the year. If this goes to 80% or higher I’ll probably take a bet against rate increases.

This brings me to my next point, which is the Canadian dollar. It has risen dramatically over the past three months.

In fact, the rise in the Canadian dollar has been my biggest portfolio “miss” over this time – it has generated a lot of paper bleeding since I keep my portfolio balanced between CAD/USD. The Canadian dollar has gone up 6.5% from July 1st of this year, and it has represented a 3.2% drag on performance quarter-to-date. My gut instinct says to increase my own position of USD but I am still reluctant to do so since the momentum of the Canadian dollar feels like it is stepping in front of a freight train. There is probably a logical point to do so (around 85 cents if it gets there?) but it is something I am acutely looking at.

An increase in my USD positioning will mean that my research will be more US dollar-focused. I have been focused on Canadian securities for a considerable period of time, but considering what bland opportunities I have found in domestic markets, it is probably a better for me to set my sights south for investment candidates.