Tag Archives: valuation

Tilson/Tongue Hedge Fund Boot Camp

FREE CLASS in New York City

Whitney Tilson through www.kaselearning.com will be teaching value investing and hedge fund entrepreneurship to the next generation of investors. His programs are aimed at experienced investors and are very hands-on, so they aren’t cheap ($1,500-$2,000/day), but for beginners, he is offering a free two-hour seminar, An Introduction to Value Investing, in midtown NYC (57th and 7th) on Wed., April 4th from 5:30-7:30pm, followed by a cocktail hour. If you’d like to come, just email wtilson@kaselearning.com  and Whitney will send you details.

Investing and Hedge Fund/Entrepreneurship “Boot Camp” And other Courses.

I attended Whitney Tilson’s and Glenn Tongue’s February 6th – 8th Boot Camp.  I was initially skeptical but pleasantly surprised.

Overall, I was impressed with the learning materials, the organization, and most importantly, the participants who attended.  Whitney and Glenn were brutally honest and forthright in showing the rise and fall of their business.  One can know the lessons of Munger, Buffett, Graham, and behavioral finance but still fall into a pit.  Our main enemy is likely to be ourselves. There were many lessons taught, but my promise of confidentiality prevents me from giving details.   The course would not be appropriate for a rank beginner, but for an entrepreneur who wishes to launch their own fund.

The main value–besides the lessons taught–would be to cultivate relationships with the participants including Whitney and Glenn.   I wouldn’t go to Whitney to help you get a job, but if you do a rigorous analysis of a company, I am sure Whitney or Glenn could give you honest feedback.  And if they liked your work, they might suggest how you could reach a larger audience.  Also, your classmates could help.  The opportunity to build strong relationships with knowledgeable investors and hedge fund managers would be invaluable for someone beginning their fund.

Each day was ten hours long with meals and cocktails afterwards, so you had plenty of opportunity to develop relationships.

60% of the course was how to improve as an investor, 20% life lessons, and 20% how to build your hedge fund.

See details here:

Upcoming dates are April 29th to May 1st
and June 12th through 14th.

There are other courses available as well.

See http://www.kaselearning.com/

Make sure you receive at least a 10% discount on the course or other courses by usingCSI10 when you register.

If you want details on my experience of the course and what you might expect, please don’t hesitate to email me at aldridge56@aol.com with BOOT CAMP in the subject line.   I will be happy to discuss with you.

Here are my notes of the comments from the other attendees:

“Regarding last week, I was super impressed by the material.  I liked the practical nature of the lessons they taught – a lot of courses exist that cover investing philosophy, but this was unique in its applicability to a start-up manager like myself.”

“The main lesson I learned from the course was to keep it simple.  Look for the easy investments.”

“I actually really liked the emphasis on short selling, because it tends to be one of the great struggles of hedge funds that need to be long & short to justify the carry but have difficulty executing on compelling short ideas in the midst of a bull market.”

“I would have liked more on portfolio construction because that is what I am struggling with. Ditto for risk management and small funds. Things I loved – the interaction of our group, the LL case, the mea culpas of what Whitney and Glenn did right and wrong.”

All the participants told me that they both enjoyed the boot camp and found it useful in developing their fund.

 
Future Boot Camps

Whitney solicited feedback each day, therefore, Whitney and Glenn should improve their course offerings.

I give a thumbs-up.  To learn more about the boot camp/Kase Learning programs you can go to www.kaselearning.com.

Also, view a video

Update:

I will periodically update information on Kase Capital for interested readers.  If you learn anything from reading this post it should be to KNOW THYSELF!   The market is an expensive place to find out.  John Chew

The hedge fund founder explains why his fund was “sucking the joy” out of his life — and why he’s turning its failure into a teachable moment.

By Michelle Celarier
March 20, 2018

https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b17f19gwp3595r/the-last-days-of-whitney-tilson’s-kase-capital

Whitney Tilson’s Facebook friends surely thought he was on top of the world last summer.Photo after photo posted on the social media site tells the story of a rich, exciting life: There’s Tilson watching whales off the coast of Iceland. Next, he’s on the canals of Amsterdam with his wife and daughter. Just a few days later, he’s checking out Lenin’s tomb in Moscow. Last August he even climbed to the top of the famed Eiger mountain in the Swiss Bernese Alps, photographing every step of the arduous journey.

But to hear Tilson talk today, the reality was grim. After 18 years in the hedge fund business, his firm — Kase Capital Management — was losing money, and Tilson found himself dipping into hissavings to keep it afloat.

“I had lost my passion for the game,” Tilson confided in a two-hour, soul-searching interview about the events that led him to shut down his hedge fund last September. After gaining 184 percent, net — when the broader market was up only 3 percent — during the first 11 and a half years of his hedge fund’s existence, Tilson’s returns had been floundering. Since 2010, Tilson says, he trailed the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index, and in 2017 he had lost almost 9 percent on the year by the time he shut down his fund. “In an ironic twist, I always built my firm to survive the worst storm, but it was a nine ­year bull market — complacency and sunshine — that took me out.”

Tilson is one of several veteran hedge fund managers, including Eton Park Capital Management’s Eric Mindich, Hutchin Hill Capital’s Neil Chriss, Eclectica Asset Management’s Hugh Hendry, and Blue Ridge Capital’s John Griffin, who called it quits in 2017. Small hedge funds come and go with great regularity, but the inability of the industry’s stars to profit as the stock market soared to new heights has raised questions about the viability of the model. Tilson was a much smaller player than the others — at his peak he managed only $200 million — but his experiences are a window into the headwinds that have faced these former masters of the universe.

What distinguishes Tilson from many of his peers is his willingness to talk about the long, excruciating road down. “It’s hard, after seven years at sucking at something, to wake up and tap-dance to work. So, I found myself getting distracted. I wasn’t physically getting out of shape; it was the opposite. I was going and climbing mountains. This one part of my life, I was miserable at; I was having no success. It’s hard to have the self-discipline to focus all your attention like a laser, and all your spare time on a particular part of your life in which you’re getting so much negative reinforcement.”

Last year, as his fund’s losses began to mount, Tilson says, “I didn’t feel like I could look my investors in the eye and say, “˜Look, I’m losing you money, but I’m not doing anything else, 18 hours a day that I’m awake, the only thing I am doing is trying to turn performance around.’ ” The vacation photos notwithstanding, Tilson says he even felt guilty attending his daughter’s soccer games. “My hedge fund was sucking all the joy out of my life.”

Tilson’s introspection is uncommon for those in the hedge fund business, where self­confidence and salesmanship are as important to success as any investing prowess. As Tilson readily admits, managers cannot afford to be frank while they are going through turmoil, lest they further hurt their business — and their investors. “The last thing you want to do is air your dirty laundry. That will further shake the confidence of your investors.”

But there’s another reason for Tilson’s uncommon openness: His experiences, both positive and negative, have led him to create a whole new business, turning Kase Capital into Kase Learning (Kase stands for the first letters of the names of Tilson’s wife and three daughters). From a small conference room at the New York Athletic Club, Tilson has started teaching the perils and profits of investing in general — and running a hedge fund specifically — to aspiring youngsters who don’t come out of big seeding platforms like Julian Robertson’s Tiger Management or a multibillion-dollar hedge fund.

“Unless you are the lucky 1 percent who has the chance of learning in an apprenticeship, how are you supposed to learn how to do this?” Tilson says. “Nobody teaches the next generation. There is not one business school on the planet that teaches anything really usable to starting up your own hedge fund.

“It’s so rare to talk to a manager who is injected with truth serum, isn’t it?” he asks as he details his long bumpy journey through hedge fund land. “But I don’t give a crap anymore.”

Sandstorm Back of the Napkin Valuation

We last discussed Sandstorm (SAND) here: http://csinvesting.org/2017/11/01/sanstorm-gold-analysis-other-readings/

I did a back of the envelope valuation here: Sand Report

Sandstorm Gold–So What’s it Worth?

If am able to provide an investing course, then once the fundamentals are covered, we could study cases.  Let me know your thoughts.

The Life of an Analyst

Your boss slaps these documents on your desk.  “Let me know what you think. I want a back-of-the-envelope valuation and a sixty-second summary of this business by this afternoon.”

What’s the essence of this business? Hannibal Lecter will guide you:  https://youtu.be/UhDZPYu8piQ?t=58s

Your analysis should be clear and simple:

How can the portfolio manager expect YOU to answer quickly with this deluge of info? That’s what we will learn here today.

I will post my “answer” by Tuesday of next week.   Email me at aldridge56@aol.com if you wish to share your thoughts or do so at the deep-value group at Google Groups (sign up here: http://csinvesting.org/2015/01/14/deep-value-group-at-google/) rather than post in the comments section, because readers shouldn’t be influenced by others.  No help!   This case illustrates the reality at investment firms.   Your boss dumps a 500-page prospectus and says get back to me in two hours–“What’s it worth?”

Have fun!

Poking Holes in the Market Bubble Hypothesis

Nygren Commentary September 30, 2017

CSInvesting: We can’t increase our IQ but we can try to improve our critical thinking skills by seeking out opposing views to the now current din of pundits screaming that this “over-valued market is set to crash.”  1987 here we come.  What do you think of his arguments?  I certainly agree about how GAAP accounting punishes growth investments.  

At Oakmark, we are long-term investors. We attempt to identify growing businesses that are managed to benefit their shareholders. We will purchase stock in those businesses only when priced substantially below our estimate of intrinsic value. After purchase, we patiently wait for the gap between stock price and intrinsic value to close.

“All the company would have to do is raise prices 50% and the P/E ratio would fall to the low-teens.”   -Analyst recommending a new stock purchase

We are nine years into an economic and stock market recovery and P/E ratios are elevated somewhat beyond historic averages. So when an experienced portfolio manager hears a young analyst make the above comment, he hears alarm bells. But instead of seeing this as a sign that the market has peaked, we purchased the stock for the Oakmark Fund. But, more on that later.

For several years, the financial media has been dominated by pronouncements that the bull market is over. Throughout my career, I can’t remember a more hated bull market. Many state that a recession is “overdue” since past economic booms have almost never lasted as long as this one. But do nine years of sub-normal economic growth even constitute a recovery, much less a boom? If recessions occur to correct excesses in the economy, has this recovery even been strong enough to create any? Maybe recessions are less about duration of the recoveries they follow and more about the magnitude. If so, earnings might not even be above trend levels.

Bears will also point to the very high CAPE ratio—or the cyclically adjusted P/E. That metric averages corporate earnings over the past decade in an attempt to smooth out peaks and valleys. But remember that the past decade includes 2008 and 2009, frequently referred to as the “Great Recession” because of how unusually bad corporate earnings were. I’ll be the first to say that if you think an economic decline of that magnitude is a once-in-a-decade event, you should not own stocks today. But if it is more like a once-in-a-generation event, then that event is weighted much too heavily in the CAPE ratio. If the stock market and corporate profits maintained their current levels for the next two years—an outcome we would find disappointing—simply rolling off the Great Recession would result in a large decline in the CAPE ratio.

Higher P/E ratios are also caused by near-zero short-term interest rates because corporate cash now barely adds to the “E” in the P/E ratio. When I started in this business in the early 1980s, cash earned 8-9% after tax. Consider a simple example of a company whose only asset is $100 of cash and the market price is also $100. In the early 1980s, the $8 or $9 of interest income would generate a P/E ratio of about 12 times. Today, $100 would produce less than $1 of after-tax income, driving the P/E ratio north of 100 times. There is, of course, uncertainty as to whether that cash will eventually be returned to shareholders or invested in plants or acquisitions, but it seems that making a reasoned guess about the value of cash is more appropriate than valuing it at almost nothing.

A less obvious factor that is producing higher P/E ratios today is how accounting practices penalize certain growth investments. When a company builds a new plant, GAAP accounting spreads that cost over its useful life—often 40 years—so the cost gets expensed through 40 years of depreciation as opposed to just flowing through the current income statement.

But when Amazon hires engineers and programmers to help it prepare for sales that could double over the next four years, those costs get immediately charged to the income statement. When Facebook decides to limit the ad load on WhatsApp to allow it to quickly gain market share, the forgone revenue immediately penalizes the income statement. And when Alphabet invests venture capital in autonomous vehicles for rewards that are years and years away, the costs are expensed now and current earnings are reduced.

The media is obsessed with supposedly bubble-like valuations of the FANG stocks—Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google (Alphabet). The FANG companies account for over 7% of the S&P 500 and sell at a weighted average P/E of 39 times consensus 2017 earnings. In our opinion, the P/E ratio is a very poor indicator of the value of these companies. Alphabet is one of our largest holdings, and our valuation estimate is certainly not based on its search division being worth 40 times earnings. If one removed the FANG stocks from the S&P multiple calculation—not because their multiples are high, but because they misrepresent value—the market P/E would fall by nearly a full point. And, clearly, more companies than these four are affected by income statement growth spending.

In addition, no discussion of stock valuations would be complete without some consideration of opportunities available in fixed income. Many experts argue that investors should sell their stocks because the current S&P 500 P/E of 19 times is higher than the 17 times average of the past 30 years. By comparison, if we think of a long U.S. Treasury bond—say, 30 years—in P/E terms, the current yield of 2.9% results in a P/E of 34 times. The average yield on long Treasuries over the past 30 years has been 5.5%, which translates to a P/E of 18 times. Relative to the past 30 years, the long bond P/E is now 90% higher than average. We don’t think the bond market at current yields is any less risky than equities.

The point of this is not to advance a bullish case for stocks, but rather to poke holes in the argument that stocks are clearly overvalued.

We think our investors would also fare best by limiting their in-and-out trading. We suggest establishing a personal asset allocation target based on your financial position and risk tolerance. Then limit your trading to occasionally rebalancing your portfolio to your target. If the strong market has pushed your current equity weighting above your target, by all means take advantage of this strength to reduce your exposure to stocks.

Now, back to the P/E ratio distortions caused by investing for growth. This highlights a costly decision we made six years ago. In 2011, when Netflix traded at less than $10 per share, one of our analysts recommended purchase because the price-per-subscriber for Netflix was a fraction of the price-per-subscriber for HBO. Given the similarity of the product offerings and Netflix’s rapid growth, it seemed wrong to value the company’s subscribers at less than HBO’s. But, at the time, streaming was a relatively new technology, HBO subscribers had access to a much higher programming spend than Netflix subscribers and Netflix was primarily an online Blockbuster store, providing access to a library of very old movies. Netflix had only one original show that subscribers cared about, House of Cards, and churn was huge as they would cancel the service after a month of binging on the show. Despite the attractive price-per-sub, we concluded that the future of Netflix was too uncertain to make an investment.

Today, Netflix trades at $180 per share and has more global subscribers than the entire U.S. pay-TV industry. Netflix provides its subscribers access to more than two times the content spending that HBO offers, making it very hard for HBO to ever match the Netflix value proposition. Finally, Netflix is no longer just a reseller of old movies. The company has doubled its Emmy awards for original programming in each of the past two years and now ranks as the second most awarded “network.” On valuation, Netflix is still priced similarly to the price-per-subscriber implied by AT&T’s acquisition of HBO’s parent company Time Warner, despite Netflix subscribers more than quadrupling over the past four years while HBO subscribers have grown by less than one third.

Last quarter, when our analyst began his presentation recommending Netflix, selling at more than 100 times estimated 2017 earnings, I was more skeptical than usual. His opening comment was that Netflix charges about $10 per month while HBO Now, Spotify and Sirius XM each charge about $15. “All the company would have to do is raise prices 50% and the P/E ratio would fall to the low teens,” he argued. Anecdotally, those who subscribe to several of these services tend to value their Netflix subscription much higher despite its lower cost. Quantitatively, revenue-per-hour-watched suggests Netflix is about half the cost (subscription fees plus ad revenue) of other forms of video. Netflix probably could raise its price to at least $15 without losing many of its subscribers. For those reasons, Netflix is now in the Oakmark portfolio.

So, is Netflix hurting its shareholders by underpricing its product? We don’t think so. Like many network-effect businesses, scale is a large competitive advantage for content providers. Scale creates a nearly impenetrable moat for new entrants to cross. With more subscribers than any other video service, Netflix can pay more for programming and still achieve the lowest cost-per-subscriber. As shareholders of the company, we are perfectly amenable to Netflix’s decision to forfeit current income to rapidly increase scale.

Because we are value investors, when companies like Alphabet or Netflix show up in our portfolio, it raises eyebrows. Investors and advisors alike are full of questions when investors like us buy rapidly growing companies, or when growth investors buy companies with low P/Es. Portfolio managers generally don’t like to be questioned about their investment style purity, so they often avoid owning those stocks. We believe our portfolios benefit from owning stocks in the overlapping area between growth and value. Therefore, we welcome your questions about our purchases and are happy to discuss the shortcomings of using P/E ratio alone to define value.

Back to Basics: Valuing a Cow; Investing Principles

how-to-buy-a-mining-stock-flow-chart

VALUATION

Buffett say there are ONLY two things you need to know as an investor

  1. How to think about prices (Read Chapter 8 in The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham).
  2. How to do valuation: See below

valuing-a-cow_vk

Then place those two skills in an investing philosophy/framework. See below.

manifesto_on-value-investing

Improve the YOU: http://reasonio.teachable.com/courses/enrolled  a free course on Epictetus and Stoic Philosophy–needed for what is coming!

world-stock-markets

http://millionaire-investor.com/program.html   A value investing training program in Singapore.

Damodaran Valuation Lecture at Google

http://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/New_Home_Page/webcasteqfall16.htm

Valuation Readings:  http://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/New_Home_Page/eqread.htm

Class: http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-school-bell-rings-its-time-for-class.html

Or take Buffett’s Course  http://www.buffettsbooks.com/howtoinvestinstocks/course3/when-to-sell-shares.html

I don’t understand why business schools don’t teach the Warren Buffett model of investing. Or the Ben Graham model. Or the Peter Lynch model. Or the Martin Whitman model. (I could go on.)

In English, you study great writers; in physics and biology, you study great scientists; in philosophy and math, you study great thinkers; but in most business school investment classes, you study modern finance theory, which is grounded in one basic premise–that markets are efficient because investors are always rational. It’s just one point of view. A good English professor couldn’t get away with teaching Melville as the backbone of English literature. How is it that business schools get away with teaching modern finance theory as the backbone of investing? Especially given that it’s only a theory that, as far as I know, hasn’t made many investors particularly rich.

Meanwhile, Berkshire Hathaway, under the stewardship of Buffett and vice chairman Charlie Munger, has made thousands of people rich over the past 30-odd years. And it has done so with integrity and a system of principles that is every bit as rigorous, if not more so, as anything modern finance theory can dish up.

On Monday, 11,000 Berkshire shareholders showed up at Aksarben Stadium in Omaha to hear Buffett and Munger talk about this set of principles. Together these principles form a model for investing to which any well-informed business-school student should be exposed–if not for the sake of the principles themselves, then at least to generate the kind of healthy debate that’s common in other academic fields.

Whereas modern finance theory is built around the price behavior of stocks, the Buffett model is centered around buying businesses as if one were going to operate them. It’s like the process of buying a house. You wouldn’t buy a house on a tip from a friend or sight unseen from a description in a newspaper. And you surely wouldn’t consider the volatility of the house’s price in your consideration of risk. Indeed, regularly updated price quotes aren’t available in the real estate market, because property doesn’t trade the way common stocks do. Instead, you’d study the fundamentals–the neighborhood, comparable home sales, the condition of the house, and how much you think you could rent it for–to get an idea of its intrinsic value.

The same basic idea applies to buying a business that you’d operate yourself or to being a passive investor in the common stock of a company. Who cares about the price history of the stock? What bearing does it have on how the company conducts business? What’s important is whether you can purchase at a reasonable price a business that generates good returns on capital (Buffett likes returns on equity in the neighborhood of 15% or better) without a lot of debt (which makes returns on capital less dependable). In the best of all worlds, the company will have a competitive advantage that allows it to sustain its above-average ROE for years, so you can hang on to it for a long time–just as you would live in your house–and reap the power of compounding.

Buffett further advocates investing in businesses that are easy to understand–Munger calls it “clearing one-foot hurdles”–so you can come up with more reliable estimates of their long-term economics. Coca-Cola‘s basic business is pretty staid, for example. Unit case sales and ROE determine the company’s future earnings. Companies like Microsoftand Intel–good as they are–require clearing much higher hurdles of understanding because their business models are so dependent on the rapidly evolving world of high tech. Today it’s a matter of selling the most word-processing programs; tomorrow it’s the Internet presence; after that, who knows. For Coke, the challenge is always to sell more cases of beverage.

Buying a business or a stock just because it’s cheap is a surefire way to lose money, according to the Buffett model. You get what you pay for. But if you’re evaluating investments as businesses to begin with, you probably wouldn’t make this mistake, because you’d recognize that a good business is worth buying at a fair price.

Finally, if you follow the Buffett model, you don’t trade your investments just because our liquid stock markets invite you to do so. Activity for the sake of activity begets high transaction costs, high tax bills, and poor investment decisions (“if I make a mistake I can sell it in a minute”). Less is more.

I’m not trying to pick a fight with modern finance theory enthusiasts. I just find it unsettling that basic business-school curricula don’t even consider models other than modern finance theory, even though those models are in the marketplace proving themselves every day.

 

 

 

BEING WRONG (VALE)

Brazil EM

Friday, September 25, 2015

No Mas, No Mas! The Vale Chronicles (Continued)!

Some of my Brazilian readers seem to be upset that I used “No Mas”, Spanish words, rather than Portuguese ones, in the title. To be honest I was not thinking about language, but instead about a boxing match from decades ago, where Roberto Duran used these words to give up in his bout with Sugar Ray Leonard.

I have used Vale as an illustrative example in my applied corporate finance book, and as a global mining company, with Brazilian roots, it allows me to talk about how financial decisions (on where to invest, how much to borrow and how dividend payout) are affected by the ups and downs of the commodity business and the government’s presence as the governance table. In November 2014, I used it as one of two companies (Lukoil was the other one) that were trapped in a risk trifecta, with commodity, currency and country risk all spiraling out of control. In that post, I made a judgment that Vale looked significantly under valued and followed through on that judgment by buying its shares at $8.53/share. I revisited the company in April 2015, with the stock down to $6.15, revalued it, and concluded that while the value had dropped, it looked under valued at its prevailing price. The months since that post have not been good ones for the investment, either, and with the stock down to about $5.05, I think it is time to reassess the company again.

vale

John Chew: At least the author has a process to reassess his investment.  I believe the critical flaw in his analysis (easy to say in hindsight) was not noting the massive mal-investment due to distorted credit markets caused by central bank policies. To normalize iron ore prices you would need pre-distortion prices going back twenty-five years.

Read more: No Mas!

Pop QUIZ

curve

An ode to the end of a con

How long can deception go on?

When prices are set by banks printing debt

All trust in the “markets” is gone!

QUIZ

Two businesses, each earns $10.

Company A: Has $50 in net assets and produces $10 in earnings.

Company B: Has $1,000 in net assets and produces $10 in earnings.

  1. Which is the better business?
  2. Which is the better value?
  3. What is the difference in value between the two companies?

Anyone who doesn’t pass this quiz meets my Ex (Hoping won’t help; prayin’ won’t do you no good!

Hallador Energy, Inc. (HNRG) Valuation Attempt

carlisle_o0c0971

A Reader Writes:
John, Here’s my quick and dirty for Hallador:
Currently not screaming cheap.
Hallador has traded to .6 book before. Current 1.2x. Highest is 4.4 or 30.36 ($4.14-$30 2015 TBV)
ev/ebitda 3mth op. inc + depr = 22341000/.25 to annualize = 6.9

industry multiple (still using the same from CLD) is 8.91

for approx 58.65 – 61.8  TBV is 6.8. Current price is 8.42.

It is making money (not a pure coal company; has oil/gas assets). From VL, it has cash flow after capex, 10% cap of 6.5 for no growth value.
It’s not a bad coal company after buying sunrise coal. The negative thing is its coal is high sulphur whereas CLD has all <1% SO2 coal (some <.5%). China recently announced a ban on high sulphur content coal. Existing shipments from Australia and South Africa in China cannot be used.
It does not break down its international shipments, but gauging CLD exports, its not much. around 4.7mt total shipments.
The thing I need to look into is how the coal companies booked their profits. Using newcastle 2014 price? Currently it is 59.6.
Hallador has good average per ton cost.
2 main areas of coal in the US. East and West.
East is higher while West is lower (CLD is lower because of transportation cost). Hallador has a 11.9 margin per ton with avg cost/ton at 31.43 and price/ton 43.3 as its mine are in the Eastern zone.
As a comparison, ANR’s 2014 Eastern cost/ton is 61.66. And Western 11.5. CLD still lowest but they have only mines in the West.
There was a report earlier in the week about POSCO in talks with Peabody about asset sales or product sales. They may be talking to others. One of the miners in Mongolia announced sales contract to Seoul today. Mongolia coal has a low sulphur too; however, after the Oyu Tolgoi deal recently, top 20 stocks there had a momentum run, and are not cheap. Another market I will look at is Indonesia. The government there has announced plans to remove mining export ban that they blamed on excessive nationalism. Indonesian coal has poor BTU but low sulphur. Also, these things will take a long time to sort out. Maybe next year. Just some things to keep an eye on. There is a special situation SGX catalist stock I’m waiting to see. It has become the parent company of a mongolian miner (2.6x book so not cheap anymore after the run up) and intend to hold other Mongolian coal assets. Will write when I know more.
Looking forward to seeing your write up.
Thank you,
HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND

So What is it worth? Carbo Ceramics (CRR)

paul-singer

 The consensus (bull case): The power of psychology is overwhelming, and investor sentiment indicates that asset prices are being driven higher by QE and Zirp, that the Fed can be trusted, and that we should not worry too much about the unintended consequences, because the Fed will be able to follow a path to normalization and a soft landing. In any event, America is now a safe haven and always will be a safe haven. Moreover, goes the case, we may be at the sweet spot of the economic cycle. It has taken a long time to get here, but finally we are getting sustainable growth, and we can expect more of the same, Interest rates are completely under control, in fact, long-term rates are in a secular decline, which is not nearly at its bottom. Inflation is virtually impossible, and we really ought to be worrying about deflation instead. If we focus on getting inflation higher, then growth will follow. The currency is also under control, goes this line of thinking, In fact, what could the dollar fall against? The competition is in much worse shape. Banks are in far better financial condition than in 2008 and will gradually bleed off any remaining toxic assets that they own. If anything starts to go wrong, the government will step in to fix it. Pushing investors out on the risk curve in search of yield is a good idea and a clever way to encourage them to do what they should be doing on their own (i.e., taking risks to help the ecobnomy grow).  We should not worry, because things will be okay. We can even trust the representative branches of government, because elected officials will not have to do much that is unplatable or challending–the central bankers have it all covered. Above all, trust the Fed.  –Paul Singer

Do the Lessons of History Apply?

So what’s it worth?

Carbo VL

Carbo 2013

Carbo Presentation Sept 2014

Please do a “down and dirty” valuation giving your assumptions within twenty minutes.  I will post mine tomorrow!

ATCE-2014-post2

 

PRIZE: A Date with my EX! for best valuation!