Month: May 2015

A small note and investing in the lottery!

Almost everything I’ve put bids on (very near the market) have creeped away from the bid. It is also not like I put a ten million dollar limit order in the market either – I break things away into very small sized chunks and scale in as market volatility takes pricing lower (or vice-versa in the event of a sale).

My lead hunch at this point is to simply buy into long-dated US treasury bonds (e.g. NYSE: TLT) and just sit and wait and be patient for other opportunities as they may arise. If long-term 30-year yields go to about 3.2-3.3%, I just may pull the trigger. But if anything is like how things have been throughout the year, it is going to be a very boring year. Maybe I am slightly resentful that had I did the TLT route in early 2014, I’d be sitting on a rough 20% gain at present.

I will also point out that the Lotto MAX is at $50 million plus $33 million bonus draws which means that you have a better than 1-in-a-million probability with a $5 fee to win a million. Although the expected value of the lottery of course is negative, it almost seems like the only real chance of getting a big payout is through this medium compared to what I am seeing out in the markets at present.

Sad times indeed!

Maybe I should have invested in the CPP instead

The Canada Pension Plan reported a 2015 fiscal year-end (their fiscal year goes from April 1 to March 31) performance of 18.7% gross, or 18.3% net after fees.

Over the past 10 years, the CPP has realized a 6.2% real rate of return, while in order to remain sustainable they require a 4% real rate of return. When dealing with a $250 billion dollar fund, two percent compounded over 10 years makes quite a big difference.

I have had my doubts that the CPP would be able to realize increased returns as it grew simply because they are competing with a lot of other big players for the same pool of income. In a smaller scale, individual investors have to scour the beds of the financial oceans in order to find reasonable risk/reward opportunities.

There is likely going to be increased political pressure to either reduce CPP premiums or raise CPP benefits due to the outperformance of the CPP. It is likely such a decision would be a mistake because in the macroeconomic sense, central bank quantitative easing has inflated asset pricing to extremely high levels. It is very improbable the CPP can maintain its current performance and quite probable that they will pull in more “real-world” rates of returns (i.e. single digits).

However, all Canadians should be happy that the CPP is doing what it did – there is this pervasive myth that the CPP will not be able to pay out for existing and future generations and with the existing payment and benefit regime it is quite likely they will be able to pay for the indefinite future. Assuming you have made maximum contributions to the CPP, you would be entitled to a $12,780/year retirement benefit when you turn 65 years of age. While this is not a huge amount of income, when coupled with Old Age Security ($6,765/year) leaves approximately $19,500/year of pre-tax income which, if properly budgeted, will pay for a basic lifestyle in retirement.

Not finding a lot to invest in

Barring any investment discoveries in the next month, the cash balance I will be reporting in June is going to be a considerably high fraction of the portfolio.

While cash is great, it also earns zero yield.

Compounding this problem is the majority of it is in US currency.

Unfortunately I have done some exhaustive scans of the marketplace and there is little in the way of Canadian fixed income opportunities (specifically in the debenture space) that I have seen that warrants anything than a small single-digit allocation. I would consider these to be medium reward to low-medium risk type opportunities. Things that won’t be home runs, but reasonable base hit opportunities.

Rate-reset preferred shares have also piqued my interest strictly on the basis of discounts to par value and some embedded features of interest rate hike protection, but my radar on future interest rates is quite fuzzy at the moment (my suspicion is that Canadian yields will trade as a function of US treasuries and the US Fed is going to take a bit longer than most people expect to raise rates since they do not want to crash their stock market while Obama is still in the President’s seat).

I have yet to fully delve into the US bond space, but right now the most “yield-y” securities in the fixed income sector are revolving around oil and gas companies.

There are plenty of oil and gas companies in Canada that have insolvent entities with outstanding debt issues, so I am not too interested in the US oil and gas sector since the dynamics are mostly the same, just different geographies.

I’m expecting Albertan producers to feel the pain when the royalty regimes are altered once again by their new NDP government. There will be a point of maximum pessimism and chances are that will present a better opportunity than present.

Even a driller like Transocean (NYSE: RIG) that is basically tearing down its own rigs in storage have debt that matures in 2022 yielding about 7.9%. If I was an institutional fund manager I’d consider the debt as being a reasonable opportunity, but I think it would be an even bigger opportunity once the corporation has lost its investment grade credit rating.

Canadian REIT equity give off good yields relative to almost everything else, but my deep suspicion is that these generally present low reward and low-medium risk type opportunities. Residential REITs (e.g. TSX: CAR.UN) I believe have the most fundamental momentum, but the market is pricing them like it is a done deal which is not appealing to myself from a market opportunity.

The conclusion of this post is that a focus on zero-yield securities is likely to bear more fruit. While I am not going to be sticking 100% of the portfolio in Twitter and LinkedIn, the only space where there will probably be outsized risk-reward opportunities left is in stocks that do not give out dividends. It will also be likely that a lot of these cases will involve some sort of special or distressed situations that cannot easily be picked up on a robotic (computerized) screening.

I would not be saddened to see the stock markets crash this summer, albeit I do not think this will be occurring.

The continuing saga of Pinetree Capital

Pinetree Capital (TSX: PNP) announced it will be redeeming another $10 million in its debentures on June 5, 2015. This is on top of the $10 million that was already redeemed on April 30, 2015.

For those of you following the Pinetree Capital saga (history of posts here), I continue to hold Pinetree debentures (TSX: PNP.DB) as I believe it is more probable than not they will be made whole at maturity.

On December 31, 2014 Pinetree Capital had approximately $107 million of investment assets on its balance sheet (at fair value, $75 million level 1, $8 million level 2 and $23 million level 3) and $54.8 million in debentures that are now senior and secured by all assets of the company. They have no other debt. When the debtholders got three of their directors on the board when Pinetree defaulted on their debt covenants in late January, presumably on February they start on their liquidation spree. On March 29, 2015 they had $14.3 million cash in the bank which they used to redeem the first $10 million of debt. After June 5, 2015, they will have $34.8 million in debentures outstanding.

Debentureholders will also receive their semi-annual interest payment (10% annual coupon) on May 31, 2015.

As part of their forbearance agreement (to stave off their debt being declared fully payable with likely CCAA implications), Pinetree Capital was required to redeem a minimum of $20 million face value in debentures by July 31, 2015. They had the option of redeeming the debentures with 1/3rd equity, which they have not done so to date. They are also required to maintain a debt-to-assets ratio of 50% until October 31, 2015 and then 33% afterwards.

When doing a quick and dirty pro-forma with no change in assumed asset value other than the payment of interest and principal on debentures, after the June 5 redemption they will have a debt-to-assets ratio of 40.5%. If Pinetree were to redeem another $11 million in principal by the end of August, this would bring the ratio to 33%. Presumably they would want a little bit of a margin of error to work with, so it is likely before October 31, 2015 that they will redeem around $15-20 million in further principal which would bring them safely below the 33% mark.

Not surprisingly, the market has picked up on this and has bidded up the debentures to 88 cents on the dollar. What has previously been a 75 cent dollar is now considerably more expensive and will likely converge to par throughout 2015 with diminishing market liquidity as the debenture supply dries up.

Disclosure: Still long on PNP.DB, but as the redemptions occur, my portfolio weighting decreases.