Category: Equity

Rogers Sugar, aftermath

Since Roger Sugar announced its fiscal Q1-2010 results in the middle of February 2’s trading day, the stock has been on a relative free-fall:

The current price of $4.40 is skimming the bottom of my fair value range for the units and it will be interesting to see if it slides below that.

Normal volume for the units are about 140,000 a day, so it is clear that there is some institution or fund that is trying to unload their units. They are not getting much liquidity in the market, which is why the price takes a dive. Opportunistic investors love to wait for moments like these to add to their positions, although it is difficult to game whether the institution or fund dumping units have half a million, or five million units to sell. If the entity dumping units is interested in selling more, they will be pressing the market further.

I would venture that a disproportionate amount of holders of Rogers Sugar are people that will be holding for a very long time, simply because the units do provide a good flow-through entity for investment capital – at a $4.40 unit price, there is a 10.5% yield and even better yet, the yield is sustainable with true earnings.

I also do not think the announcement of the fund considering a distribution cut because of the income trust taxation due 2011 is new news – all profitable income trusts will be doing the same. From my own investment perspective, it will mean shifting units out of my RSP and into my taxable accounts since eligible dividend income is taxed much more favorably than interest income that comes from the trust.

History of stock market crashes

October 28-29, 1929: Marked the beginning of the great depression – although the worst of it was only a couple years later, this was a very powerful signal that something wasn’t right in the US economy. This was characterized mainly by a lot of margin debt purchasing and rampant speculation on equities.

1973 to 1974: Marked the beginning of the rise of OPEC, and concerns about the world supply of crude oil in general. Also marked the beginning of the modern currency exchange systems we see today. This was in the middle of a recession and a period of high inflation (these two together are referred to as “stagflation”) and is the worst possible combination for equity markets.

October 19, 1987 (aka “Black Monday”): Probably the only “true” random market crash, potentially caused with inexperience with complexity through computer program trading, and also the Treasury Secretary mumbling about having to devalue US currency. Federal reserve chairman Alan Greenspan was also new on the job at this time. The US recovered despite having lost 22.7% of its market value for the day. Hong Kong got killed by 45.8%; in all cases buying this crash would have been fruitful. Easy to say when looking at past charts!

October 13, 1989: A small random market crash (6.1% loss on the S&P 500) for no particular reason at all.

October 27, 1997: The S&P lost 6.9% due to the Asian currency crisis and panic selling. This was at the time of the beginning of the run-up in technology issues. Although this was somewhat interrupted by the Long Term Capital Management fiasco in 1998, equities never looked back until February 2000, where they peaked.

September 11, 2001: The largest terrorist attack on US soil, and the biggest death count since the Pearl Harbour attack in December 1941. Equities dropped when markets re-opened a week later, mainly due to insurance and financial firms that had to perform some massive re-balancing after liquidating assets. This would prove to be a local bottom, but not a true bottom until in 2002 when markets finally reached their lows for the decade (up until the 2008 financial crisis).

October 2007 to March 2009: Fresh in everybody’s memory, the financial crisis caused wholesale liquidations in major financial firms, such as Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Wachovia, Washington Mutual, etc. From peak to trough, the S&P 500 lost 56% of its value.

… and after this history lesson, will January 25, 2010 be on the books?

Trading against a computer

Most transactions on the stock market are done with computers and not with people behind the screens. A good example is when I did a minor order to do some tweaking of my portfolio, and got the following execution on something that only trades 1000 shares a day:

01/19/2010 14:28:28 Bought 100 of XXX @ $XX.XX
01/19/2010 14:27:23 Bought 100 of XXX @ $XX.XX
01/19/2010 14:26:16 Bought 100 of XXX @ $XX.XX
01/19/2010 14:25:10 Bought 100 of XXX @ $XX.XX

See the pattern? The computer probably had an algorithm that said “sell 100 shares, space each order at the bid 66 seconds apart until you’ve cleared your order”.

Algorithms that trade against each other fundamentally are playing rock-scissors-paper against each other in order to scalp profits against those who have the weakest or easiest to predict algorithms.

Enterra Energy Trust – Rising for no reason at all

Enterra Energy is a typical small-scale energy trust that has miscellaneous properties in Alberta and Oklahoma. They are not too remarkable other than the fact that they have been very diligent at reducing their balance sheet leverage over the past couple years – their unitholders received their last distribution in August 2007.

Today they announced that they will be converting to a corporation and changing their name. One would think this is typical considering that income trusts that do not give distributions to should change to corporations before the end of 2012 deadline. Income trusts that give out distributions in 2010 still have their tax shield for one more year – although the majority of them after 2010 should convert to corporations in either 2011 or 2012.

For whatever reason, the market decided that the announcement to convert to a corporation from a trust was worth a 25% mark-up in their unit price, as of the moment of this writing.

There is fundamentally no reason for this announcement to cause such a price spike. Either something else is going on, or the market is behaving very, very irrationally. Spikes like this make the market feel very bubbly.

Disclosure – I do own debentures in Enterra Energy Trust (the ones maturing in December 2011). They have been inching up closer to par over the past month and hopefully will continuing bubbling up above par, where I will proceed to dump them. If not, I keep collecting 8% coupons, which is a good reward to wait for a good price.

Don’t invest in corporate largesse

Putting a long story short, the board of directors of Cheasapeake Energy, in their infinite wisdom, decided that it was worth $12.1 million of its corporate assets to purchase antique maps from its CEO.

The only thing you can do when you see such a waste of corporate resources is selling your shares if you own them, and not buying them if you don’t.

I should take this opportunity to point out it was exactly the same company and its CEO that in November 2008 faced a margin call on his own stock, forcing him to liquidate 5.4% of the company in a very rapid transaction.

I said the following back in November 2008:

Some might think this would represent the best buying opportunity – cashing in on the misfortune of somebody’s financial errors. Unfortunately in the case of Chesapeake, the last company I would want to invest in would have a CEO that got caught by a massive forced liquidation like this one – first of all, his incentive to perform well has just disappeared (having no more equity stake in the company) and secondly, one would wonder whether he’d make a similar miscalculation with the company’s finances.

It appears that the CEO is just as reckless with the company’s finances as he is with his own – any prudent investor should blackball the entire Board of Directors of Chesapeake Energy – if any of them serve on a corporate board (or heaven forbid, management) of a company you are invested in, it would be a yellow flag.

This is why the iceberg theory of bad news is applicable – if there is a small piece of bad news, chances are there is a lot more to go with it. In the case of Chesapeake, this is the last energy company I would want my dollars invested in.