Opinions
Colin Stewart
Guardian Capital Group
GCG.A-T
COMMENT
Feb 17, 2015
Stock price when the opinion was issued
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He is Long this stock and Short the Bank of Montréal (BMO-T). In 2001, Guardian sold its mutual fund business to BMO in exchange for 5 million BMO shares. It has been sitting on those for the last 14 years. He put this trade on in 2009 when Guardian was trading at a 25% discount to its value in the BMO shares, so historically it was trading at about a 25% premium. Regardless of what the market conditions did, he saw a 50% upside if it returned to normal levels of trading, relative to the BMO holdings. Essentially he has a 3.5% position in this with a 3%-3.5% Short position with BMO, so it is relatively market neutral. The Guardian is less liquid than the BMO, so if he decides he wants to vary his not market exposure, it is a lot easier to trade BMO. He will vary this trade to a variety of conditions.
A deep value company, where it is an asset manager. Market cap of about $650 million-$675 million. They own Bank of Montréal (BMO-T) shares that are worth about $360 million, as well as other securities that are worth about $230 million. You are almost getting the asset management company for free. Extremely cheap. They continue to buy back shares. Dividend yield of 1.58%.
*Long* (Pairs trade with a Short on BMO-T). In 2001, they sold their mutual fund business to BMO in exchange for 5 million BMO shares. They sat on the 5 million for a while, but have started selling them and are down to 4.2 million. However, if you take the value of their BMO shares plus some of their other investments, it comes to $17.96 a share, and is trading at roughly $22.50, so there is not very much value in that stub. Because of this, you can pay a very healthy premium for the current share price if somebody came in. There really is a scarcity value of independent asset managers in Canada, so he expects that one day, if not BMO, that someone else will come in and take this company out.
An asset managing business that happens to have a very large stake in Bank of Montréal (BOM-T) shares. Not quite a pure play asset management business because of that, but often what investors do is to strip out the value of those shares to find the value of the underlying asset management business. In the past he has Shorted the amount of underlying Bank of Montréal shares to hedge out that exposure. By owning Guardian shares and Shorting BMO, you are left with the stub asset management business. It has been performing well and has been growing. Overall a well-run business. The real upside will come if they sell those shares in order to make acquisitions or expand the asset management business.