TGISVP – H1 2012 Performance – Firing On all Cylinders!

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Aer Lingus, AGI Therapeutics, Alpha Portfolio, Beta Portfolio, Botswana Diamonds, Cove Energy, Datalex, ISEQ, Karelian Diamond Resources, market-neutral, natural resource stocks, Ovoca Gold, Petroneft Resources, portfolio performance, Prime Active Capital, Providence Resources, Readymix, Risk Arbitrage, Siteser, Smart Alpha Portfolio, Smart Beta Portfolio, TGISVP, Worldspreads

Now H1 2012 is over, it’s time to revisit The Great Irish Share Valuation Project. Here’s my Q1 2012 performance post – well worth revisiting as background, but I’ll recap some important points below.

Let’s first look at individual stocks. I count 4 de-listings (which I’ll continue to include for performance purposes, at their final values): AGI Therapeutics (AGI:ID/LN) was a profitable Event-Driven investment for me, and inspiration for some detailed Risk Arb. posts. Siteserv (SSV:ID/LN) & Worldspreads (WSPR:LN/ID) both exited amid scandal – possibly criminal in the case of the latter, with alleged charges now including share price manipulation, in addition to accounting/actual fraud. Finally, Readymix (RYX:ID) succumbed to a Cemex (CX:US) bid, illustrating that the right investment thesis (an eventual takeout by the controlling shareholder) is not enough. Timing & the price you pay are equally important – despite the bid premium, RYX’s multi-year operational & price decline meant v few long term shareholders made any profit. Looking ahead, Cove Energy (COV:LN) seems set to follow the de-listers, but promises to provide some final drama!

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AGI Therapeutics – Anatomy of a Takeover (IV)

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AGI Therapeutics, AIM stocks, compulsory acquisition, delisting risk, EUR/USD, Event Driven, Expected Value, Gross IRR, Irish shares, market-makers, Recommended Cash Offer, Risk Arbitrage, takeover offers, technical analysis

Continued from here.

OK, to recap the latter part of my previous article, I put forward 2 (hopefully strong) arguments why you should embrace (unhedged) FX risk in your event-driven investing (and, of course, elsewhere in your portfolio). With AGI Therapeutics (AGI:ID/LN), however, I essentially faced no FX risk on the deal in the end.

Remember, AGI traded in EUR (or GBP) but the takeover price was $0.1171 per share (and holders could opt for equiv. EUR proceeds). My solution was to round-trip surplus USD I had available. Yes, I’d incur a small FX spread to convert USD for my EUR share purchases, but by opting to receive USD takeover proceeds I’d eliminate subsequent FX risk, and end up back in USD cash.

AGI Therapeutics – Anatomy of a Takeover (III)

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AGI Therapeutics, currency allocation, denarii, Event Driven, Expected Value, FX rates, Gross IRR, Gross Return, home bias investing, probabilities, Recommended Cash Offer, takeover offers

Continued from here.

Expected Return‘s probably the most important, and most difficult, return to calculate & focus on. In its simplest form, it’s binary (deal success or failure), but by all means incorporate multiple outcomes into your analysis, if appropriate. In fact, if you’re contemplating other types of Event Driven investing, this multiple outcome approach will prove essential. However many outcomes, you calculate a Gross Return and a likely probability (which must sum to 1.00, of course) for each, and then combine these to arrive at an Expected Return. This will give you a much more accurate (and lower) deal return. Of course, you won’t actually see this return on any single deal – but over time, this is the best risk/reward measure to employ to evaluate deals & your potential average return. Of course, you can calculate an Expected IRR also, if you wish, but let’s not go crazy here..!

AGI Therapeutics – Anatomy of a Takeover (II)

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AGI Therapeutics, binary outcomes, Gross IRR, Gross Return, intangibles, intrinsic value, John Paulson, junior resource stocks, Risk Arbitrage, Warner Chilcott, Warren Buffett

Continued from here. OK, we’ve run through the key components of the AGI Therapeutics (AGI:ID/LN) offer. You now have a pretty good idea of the terms, attractiveness, timeline and likely success of this deal. But how does it stack up from an investment perspective? Well, as I said, let’s not approach this backwards – as with any investment, no matter your excitement or conviction about the company/stock story, intrinsic valuation comes first:

AGI’s most recent balance sheet (Jun-11) is pretty simple – they’ve $9.251 mio of Cash on hand, while Net Payables of about $0.3 mio are offset by a subsequent sale of patents to Warner Chilcott (WCRX:US) for about $0.3 mio also. This sale probably wiped out some/all of the $0.241 mio in recorded Intangibles, and there’s really nothing else to the B/S. btw I tend to ignore balance sheet Goodwill/Intangibles/etc. anyway when calculating Intrinsic Value. You should be able to confirm/calculate the value of intangibles from other sources – like reserve reports, industry comps, superior/sustainable earnings etc. – if you can’t, it’s usually best to ignore these ‘assets‘ (try tell this to your average junior resource company investor, sigh…).

AGI Therapeutics – Anatomy of a Takeover (I)

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AGI Therapeutics, Ark Therapeutics, Carl Icahn, catalyst, Daniel Loeb, Recommended Cash Offer, Risk Arbitrage, Seth Klarman, TGISVP

This post, and this one here, are good required reading. Yes, AGI Therapeutics (AGI:ID/LN) was the Risk Arb investment to which I was referring.

This is the one Irish share I did not disclose owning during TGISVP. My apologies, readers – but AGI trading volumes were atrocious, and I was still building a position with great difficulty. However, when I got to covering AGI during TGISVP, I simply tagged its fair value as simply being equal to the Recommended Cash Offer – so no issues there, I believe. Now that I recently received my final batch of proceeds from the AGI takeover, I thought it might be useful/interesting to walk through my thinking and exact positioning throughout the process.

7.7% Q1 2012 Outperformance! – TGISVP XI

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AGI Therapeutics, Alpha Portfolio, Beta Portfolio, Conroy Gold, hedge funds, ISEQ, junior resource stocks, market-neutral, portfolio performance, Prime Active Capital, Siteserv, Smart Alpha Portfolio, Smart Beta Portfolio, TGISVP, Worldspreads

It’s early days yet but, rather serendipitously, I managed to complete the valuation stage of The Great Irish Share Valuation Project by quarter-end. That deserves a performance review, I guess..?!

Let’s first take a look at individual stock performance. btw I mentioned I’ve completed 72 Irish stock valuations, but I’ll continue to include AGI Therapeutics (which was taken over) as a 73rd stock for performance purposes. And remember, Gainers/Losers are based on quarter-end prices vs. the original market prices I noted (as I worked my way through each stock’s valuation in Jan-March). Therefore, this is a TGISVP specific performance snapshot, I’m not attempting a full Q1 stock performance ranking here (though I’d expect they would be pretty similar):