Canadian Housing Financing Market

There are three companies that come to mind that are directly related to Canadian residential housing financing: Genworth MI (TSX: MIC), Home Capital Group (TSX: HCG), and Equitable Group (TSX: EQB).

I’ve done extensive research on all of them in the past and I am research-current with all three companies. I do own shares of MIC from the summer of 2012.

The first, which should be no surprise to regular readers here, deals with mortgage insurance. The second and third deal with direct financing of home mortgages (both first-line and refinancing). If a mortgage is required to be insured (which is usually the case for higher ratio mortgages and refinancings) then CMHC and Genworth MI get involved and charge a premium in exchange for the lender being able to give out a lower rate of interest.

HCG today announced that its mortgage originations were down from the previous year and its stock price cratered roughly 15% as of the time of this writing.

Genworth MI is down about 4% in sympathy, although Equitable Group is in the “white noise” range for the markets (i.e. relatively unchanged).

A downturn in mortgage originations will materially affect HCG and EQB’s profitability, while this has more of a muted effect on Genworth MI as cash proceeds from mortgage insurance are not accounted for as revenues until they are recognized according to prior experience (net of expected default losses).

The takeaway to this message is that if Genworth MI gets disproportionately trashed in the upcoming days, it is likely unwarranted as the fundamental profitability in Genworth MI is not through volume, but rather the solvency of the lenders in question. Genworth MI also has the advantage of being able to run off its insurance book and still receive a boost in market value as it is trading below book value, while HCG and EQB are trading above book value.

Option implied volatility does suggest that institutional interest suspects further volatility. Tread carefully as always!

General market overview

The past two weeks in the markets have seen the S&P 500 go down a whopping 3% from its rough highs of 2120.

While I do see some signs of margin selling, it is still quite light and I am still not interested in dipping my toes further in the market.

I would love to see evidence of large-scale margin liquidations in illiquid securities. That makes me salivate financially, but we are another 100 points away from the S&P descending further before this may happen.

A few other points:

* 30-year US treasuries seem to have peaked at 3.2% and are now trading at 3%. The 3% gain you would have lost in the S&P 500 you would have gained by investing in long-term treasuries.

* The Canadian currency has also been hacked to death and BAX futures are hinting, but not fully pricing in, the notion of another interest rate cut to 0.5%. If the Canadian currency slips further I will likely convert some USD to CAD, likely around the 76 cent level. This seems to be directly correlated to the drop in oil prices.

* If the technical glitch on the NYSE was determined to be caused by hackers, I am curious how this would be priced into the markets.

Positions:

Happily majority cash.

Genworth MI repurchases shares

Genworth MI (TSX: MIC) recently disclosed that they repurchased 1,454,196 shares in mid-May for roughly $34.38 per share, a repurchase representing $50 million.

The buyback algorithm they employed was less than subtle, mainly the repurchase of 137,210 shares per day for 10 days and 82,096 shares for the last day. As 57% of the shares outstanding are owned by Genworth (NYSE: GNW), they supplied 57% of the liquidity for these transactions. 620,818 shares were taken out of the public float.

This repurchase was executed at slightly less than book value, which means it will be mildly beneficial to book value per share – my estimates are that based off of end of Q1-2015, the transaction would add 3 cents of book value per diluted share.

Of course, the transaction will be hugely accretive to earnings – the buyback represents 1.56% of shares outstanding, which means this will add a couple pennies a share to the quarterly EPS figures. In addition, the buyback also means that the company will not have to give out an extra $2.3 million a year in dividends.

At the end of Q1, the company had $200 million in surplus of its own internal buffer, which is 220% of the minimum capital test required to operate. The company reported 233%.

As the company typically book about $90 million in income a quarter, the buyback likely represents a “cash neutral” policy of balancing dividends (est. $36 million in this upcoming quarter) and share buybacks, at least with its current market value. If their market value remains suppressed below book value and they keep executing buybacks on a quarterly basis, I foresee higher equity prices in the future.

Long-time readers here will remember that I disagreed strongly with management’s decision to repurchase shares at $40/share back in 2014. May 2015’s repurchase I completely agree with – a shame they could not execute it in March, but still, they (and shareholders) will receive good value for this $50 million repurchase.

I continue holding Genworth MI shares since mid-2012.

Liquidation spree – cash heavy

I have substantially liquidated a large position in my portfolio today and am sitting on an approximate 50% cash position yielding precisely 0.00%. The majority of this is denominated in US currency. I have no interest in swapping it for Canadian currency at this time.

For various reasons, while I have thought about investing cash temporarily in 30-year treasury bonds, at this time I prefer the comfort of plain cash. There are quite apparent liquidity issues concerning US treasuries (on an institutional level) that alerts my brain to a form of tail risk that I can’t quite express in words.

I have substantially completed nibbling on a small equity position in a company that I have not disclosed but since I am aiming for a 2% position and have obtained 1.3% to date, you can guess what kind of conviction I have for the underlying company. Looking for a double in a year for the reasons that the market is pricing in worse profitability than what will actually occur, and the industry the company is in can be described as fairly un-sexy at present.

Pinetree Capital (TSX: PNP.DB) will be redeeming more debentures at the end of this week and this will also result in a further injection of cash. There will likely be another redemption notice coming between now and the end of August which will clear out half of the remaining position, and the last half will occur between October and maturity (May 2016).

My largest equity holding is now Genworth MI (TSX: MIC) that I have held on since 2012. At its current price I am not interested in liquidating or purchasing more shares.

I am completely out of ideas and thus the next seven months may be a very boring period of time for portfolio management. I have a bunch of interesting companies that I have researched, but valuations are nowhere close to the point where I would pull the trigger. Examples include cash generators like Rogers Sugar (TSX: RSI) where I would ideally purchase under $4 a share. Companies like this I have on my watchlist, but are nowhere close to where I would want to purchase them with an acceptable margin of error.

I would not want to be a portfolio manager for a firm that required 100% deployment of capital. The decisions at this point would not be pleasant and I would take an extreme perspective of putting capital in the most defensive equities as possible. Most (if not all) of these have been bidded up due to the low interest rate environment.

For now, I wait and twiddle my thumbs.