Today, Dennis da Silva and Greg Dean commented about whether SBNY-Q, WBA-Q, CSC-N, CNR-T, JE-T, ATD.B-T, QSR-T, DIS-N, BPY.UN-T, FIVE-Q, AD-T, FRU-T, TFII-T, KMI-N, SCTY-Q, LUXTY-5, CXR-T, DEO-N, ATH-T, POU-T, BABA-N, FRU-T, BIR-T, PG-T, OGC-T, RIC-T, NDM-T, TXG-T, TECK.B-T, NXE-T, HSE-T, AR-T, THO-T, LSG-T, HNL-T, TOG-T, YRI-T, TV-T, POT-T, SSRM-T, RNX-T are stocks to buy or sell.
This is really a new story. It has been around for a long time, but in terms of developing its high-grade, underground operation, which is deeper than the original, it has rejuvenated the stock. It is now a matter of execution and getting the company to optimal production and generating positive free cash flow. He is very confident in management. Feels the valuation still has room to go.
Kind of on the periphery for him. He kept looking and wondering when he wants to buy it. Producing in the Philippines. They are looking to grow through the next mine. Thinks it represents reasonable value for what it has. Pays a dividend which is always nice. Going into this development project probably keeps it off of his fund holdings. He would prefer Kirkland Lake (KGI-T).
Just acquired the Mercedes mine from Yamana Gold (YRI-T) for about $140 million, so they are now on the cusp of being a producer. South Arturo in Nevada will be producing any time now with a short mine life, so there are people questioning what happens after 2.5 years. Mercedes is also relatively short with about a 3.5 year reserve life. These are 2 projects the management team feels there is more to.
A name he has always been on the fence with. A dry gas producer. A nice way to play a gas recovery with a torque. He likes the Gordondale acquisition, a gas asset that they got from Encana. Did a very successful $700 million equity offering to finance the purchase. This adds a significant component of liquids, so now it is a 24% liquids company, rather than 10%. That helps the margins.
A royalty company, and a way of trying to reduce risks and volatility. It is always compared to PrairieSky (PSK-T), but about 4th the size and trades at about a 50% discount in terms of valuation. He likes the valuation and recently bought the equity issue, which he feels gives good torque to oil. It is about two thirds oil. Payout ratio is only two thirds of its cash flow, and about two thirds of that is the actual dividend. Solid balance sheet.
Markets. It has been fun evolving the coverage over the years from primarily Canadian centric to global, which has forced him to stay on top of a lot more things in a lot more areas. Everybody looks to Japan and says “the lost decade” and extrapolates that to North America, China, Canada, Europe, etc. There is a little more subtlety to it than that. He is actively looking geography by geography to try and find opportunities where he can ignore the deflation concerns, either because he doesn’t think it is going to happen or because it is priced in. He invests in companies where they can clearly explain what they are doing. Has found most of his mistakes was in businesses where he wasn’t getting the 1st principles of understanding of the business from the management team, where they were hiding behind jargon and acronyms. His company has designed most of its mandates to be very flexible, and able to invest across geographies. He is looking for growth where others don’t anticipate it.
Has spent a lot of time over the last couple of years focusing on e-commerce. When this company went public, there was a lot of love/hate with a lot of people questioning if they could deliver on the growth people expected. It has done a better than expected job in doing that, not just the one e-Commerce business but a marketplace business, with much higher margin than people expected. His challenge is that property rights in China are not as strong as they are in North America, so you actually have a very creative structure that owns the entity, Alibaba, you are not actually a direct investor in the business. Going forward it is going to be a lot more challenging given the size of the business. As margins have compressed, he doesn’t feel he is being compensated through the valuation today.
Has a lot of respect for the family behind this company. This business is predicated upon higher commodity prices than what we see today. The goal for a commodity business is for them to get stronger through a downturn, not having to sell one of their best assets. Doesn’t think they proactively manage their balance sheet, but made some decisions around facilities and infrastructure, that if oil had stayed at $100, it would have looked really smart. With oil at $30, it almost cost them their legacy.
Usually, in resources, if you have a lot of land or a lot of cash, time is your friend. This is the only one in Canada that had a lot of land and a lot of cash, and time was their enemy. What they had promised to investors was taking their conventional oil sands business, using the excess cash it had generated, and investing in a bunch of unconventional opportunities. What they ran out of was time and money.
This is an example of a “me too” strategy within healthcare. Canada, in many ways, becomes the sort of the winner’s curse market, where if you can take a business public and you get the highest multiple in Canada, it comes to Canada and doesn’t always make sense. You have to look at how they drive growth. For them, a big source of their growth was cutting, spending, both headcount and R&D, and then cheap debt. They were able to use a lot of cheap debt to fuel acquisition growth, which fed earnings growth, which got the market excited. If you are not fundamentally creating value in businesses you are acquiring, it is not a sustainable strategy.
Had no idea how dominant their position was, not just in retail eyewear in terms of exclusive retail rights for a lot of brands, but also owning the optical retail locations as well. This is as close to a monopoly as you can be. A phenomenal business and the returns are great. When you have businesses that have to make transitions from the individual to a corporation, you can run into a lot of problems. Great business, but when the management team changed he stopped following it.
The company is really at an interesting time. They had a lot of spinoffs to finance their pipelines. It was really just a cost of capital arbitrage. They brought all those in, slashed the distribution to what they believe is a sustainable level, cut their backlog and stated that they were not going to borrow to fund projects. That worked when we could get money really cheap, but can’t seem to get as much money now or as cheap. They are actually migrating back to a growth stock.
The project is very large and expensive, and he has difficulty with the feasibility of it. There are others you can invest in, without having to painfully wait it out.