Long or Short Capital

CIFG’s slogan on their website is CIFG: The New Generation in Triple-A Financial Guaranty.

Well, about that, uhh I don’t know how to say this but I think you need a new slogan. CIFG was downgraded to Ba2:

Moody’s lowered its financial-strength ratings on CIFG Guaranty, CIFG Europe and CIFG Assurance North America to Ba2 from A1, a 7-notch downgrade, and said the future direction of the ratings is uncertain.

The credit rater said “absent material developments, the firm will fail minimum regulatory capital requirements in New York and Bermuda due to expected significant increases in modeled loss reserves on” asset-backed CDOs. Falling short on capital requirements “would put the firm in a precarious position, especially in light of the solvency provisions embedded in its” credit-default-swap exposures.”

Moody’s said as downgrades of residential mortgage-backed securities have continued this year, “Moody’s believes CIFG will experience sizable increases in reserves, and could breach regulatory capital requirements in the near future.” The company has already failed to meet some regulatory-filing deadlines in the U.S. and Bermuda, including first-quarter results for CIFG Assurance North America and the 2007 annual report for CIFG Guaranty.

Recommendation: CIFG the New Generation in Fallen Angel Financial Guaranty is quite catchy. But more accurate would be, CIFG Our Guaranty Is As Valuable As the Paper’s It’s Written On, Which Paper Is Rated By an Independent Third Party Which Says Our Paper Is Not Very Valuable Even Though It Used To Be.

This report is gratis, Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO).

1. Find ways to make money. Sounds simple but like checkers, it takes an instant to learn and about an hour to master when you have a portfolio of the most trafficked sites on the internet and dominate Japan more than low-interest rates or even xenophobia.
2. Rename the company OO-OO. Throwing a double-OO is probably YHOO’s best shot to take down the Goog (NASDAQ: GOOG). If you can find a way to get a triple-OO done, do it, but we’ll believe that’s possible when we see it.
3. Traditionalists would say that Yahoo should stop CEO Jerry Yang from spending so much time playing poker. But, to improve value for Yahoo shareholders, we would encourage Jerry Yang to play much much more poker and much much less CEO. At least he is good at poker.
4. Create a meta Fantasy Game on top of your Fantasy Sports Games. It should be a traditional roto league where you draft fantasy sports participants based on categories such as “Time of Firm Wasted”, “Dollar Value of Firm Wasted”, “Minutes Boring Other People Talking About Your League” and WHIP. The consensus no.1 pick would be Yahoo username “poneilyanks4eva.”
5. Rehire Terry Semel. Just checking to see you if you were paying attention. Seriously, you’d be better off hiring the corpse from Weekend at Bernie’s. Unfortunately, he is currently busy trying to lead an activist campaign against Yahoo’s incumbent management team.
6. Add one or two executives with some experience managing an internet company to the Board of Directors. Although it’s great to have marketing executives, VCs, and Bill Clinton’s best buddy on the Board, it doesn’t help your clueless founder/CEO or your President — who used to be CFO and before that, a Wall St newspaper analyst — to run an internet company.
7. Lie to China. Spread horrible rumors about Google, like that searching through Google.cn makes it so that for its users, every year is the Year of the Goat, which we all know is awful. Also start a marketing campaign based around how “Lucky” Yahoo makes its users, and throw a lot of 8’s in there. They eat that stuff up. Remember, there are a billion of them, so even if you get 5% of that market, it’s going to be about 50 million people.
8. Let the company be bought by Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) at a 50% premium to YHOO’s closing price before MSFT’s February bid.

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.
-Vladimir Lenin

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

“General Motors Corp., the biggest U.S. automaker, said it still has enough liquidity through 2008.” And then what?
If you say you have enough liquidity through the end of the year, you don’t have enough liquidity.

Recommendation: What’s good for GM (subprime loans, CLOs, etc.), is not good for the country.

You know, the usual: supreme power, undue influence over others, world domination.
-David Harding of Winton Capital Management when asked about what drives him in Traderdaily

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

This report on seals has us further concerned about the prospects of the entire species.

After 45 minutes the seal gave up, swam into the water and then completely ignored the bird it had just assaulted, the scientists report.

Walruses are models of efficiency. Can you see a walrus ignoring a bird it assaulted? Or do you think he’d make sure the assault was properly finished and the bird either consumed or appropriately stored for later consumption at his Balrus pad?

But the scientists who photographed the event speculate that it was the behaviour of a frustrated, sexually inexperienced young male seal.

Again, a walrus is a model of efficiency. Can you see a walrus doing this, or more apt, a walrus not getting his balrussing on regardless of his experience level? When your species specializes in getting it done, there is never any frustration. There are also no excuses. This is the code they live by.

Recommendation: There is a reason that the movie Andre sucked, and it wasn’t due to the all-star human cast, or the incredible cinematography or the director who shares the same name of the director of Mad Max, but is not actually the director of Mad Max. Hell, you can’t even blame Maine (in this case). No, the problem with that movie was that it wasn’t called Rufus, and wasn’t centered around a walrus with the same name. That movie would have won critical acclaim and probably been so good that just having seen it would get you laid. Additionally, we can’t see seals being a credible species in the context of Global Squidding. Short the seal.

HT to girl

In February, we pointed out Steve Wynn’s colorful and frank commentary on his company’s quarterly call. Today, we follow up with more from the CEO of Wynn (Nadaq: WYNN).

First, if you recall, Wynn issued $660mm of shares at $154 at the end of September after his stock had doubled in 6 months. Explaining his reasoning, he said at the time:
“No company gets to be worth twice as much in 60 days as it was before to any intelligent person, so when that happens, we take advantage of it.”

Smart. Now, one quarter later Wynn has repurchased 2.4 million shares. As he said on this quarter’s call:

“Look, we issued 4.4 million shares for 660 million and promptly distributed it, which was really nice for us shareholders. And a return of capital. We have now bought back at 50 or $60 a share [cheaper] those shares that we issued.”

Translation: You were idiots to buy my shares at $154. But I appreciate you selling them back to me at $95. Thank you.

Additionally, while most companies talk up their own business and exaggerate the prospects and profitability of the business, Wynn opts for honesty.

We report and talk about these EBITDA numbers with our chest puffed out as far as we can get it as an industry. I suppose it tells you how much money you can afford to pay in interest. But the public needs to understand that the profitability, the real profitability of these businesses are much, much less than these puffy EBITDA numbers. Interest expense is very large. And depreciation, I know office building guys and shopping center guys and apartment guys, they get to spend part of the depreciation. But, believe me, in my 40-year history and in the history of every other gaming company here, Kerkorian would agree with me. We spend depreciation. It is a real expense. And when you take the profitability of a hotel like the Venetian or Wynn or Bellagio or any of us it’s a much smaller number when you subtract depreciation and interest. And amortization. We have to pay back the people who lend us the money eventually. It’s a much smaller number. But I know the Wall Street folks, you all like to talk about EBITDA.

Translation: I don’t understand why you think my capital intensive company should be valued on metrics that exclude any measurement of capital intensity. I would use a different approach than you muppets, but then again, your approach is lining my pocket and I will restrict letting you know this explicitly such that no one will pick up on it except those who can parse my words with some kind of proprietary translation algorithm for corporate speak.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.
-Fidel Castro

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

When America had the desire to prop up corn prices a need for cheap sugar what did it do? Make sugar out of corn.

When America had the desire to prop up corn prices a need for an alternative source for cheap liquid gasoline? Make gasoline (ethanol) out of corn (and out of pigs via piganol).

Now America has a floundering real estate market and the need for cheap domestic financing to prop it up. What should she do? Make mortgages out of corn. Turn what is plentiful into what is scarce. Simple.

Corngages can be produced by converting corn into cheap financing by a special process invented by Orville Redenbanker. The best part is that it is a green friendly and renewable source of mortgages, an important point in a world where sustainability is stepping to the forefront. While there are some side effects (including but not limited to: a large amount of emissions which melt the ozone and an increased price of corn, which means an increased price of everything for which corn is an input or a substitute), they can be “offset” by employing other corn products such as cornbon-offset and corn price deflators.

Recommendation: We recommend being long corn, long real estate and long any problem which can be solved by corn, which as far as we can determine is EVERY problem.

A lot of banks have a lot of bad paper in many different forms. Some of it is from ill-advised and underwritten LBOs which top-ticked the buyout market. Some of it is from complicated structured products based on real estate, bank loans, student loans, what have you. Some of it is even financing used to fund a chain of off-balance sheet restaurants to serve the growing off-balance sheet community (as many of you know, this is a space currently under served with respect to basic amenities, more on this in the future).

Regardless, due to the current credit crunch crisis banks are very desirous of (read: being forced to find) a way to unload a lot of debt from their balance sheet. But where to put it? Off-balance sheet locations are coming under increasing scrutiny whether they come in the form of SIVs, super-SIVs, of ultra-megawide–thisonewillwork-SIVs. Under the carpet is where they keep the trillions of derivative exposure, so there’s no room there. If only there was a way to OUTSOURCE the off-balance sheet.

And now there is. The latest credit product is the new OFF-off-balance sheet provided by Private Equity Shop Y and Hedge Fund X (as seen on the internet). In exchange for below market financing, loose structural terms, and a 10-20% down payment, the off-off-balance sheet structure is designed to take an undiversified smorgasborg of the bank’s very own hung deals fresh from the bank’s books. The banks liked it so much, they underwrote it at par, so it must be a steal at 89!

Recommendation: Being that off-off is a double negative, we think that maybe, just maybe, that selling loan assets to highly leveraged entities to which you provide the financing is more of a shell game than a credible solution.

Haha, gotcha! That’s crazy talk, this time it’s different. Between the new Citibank (NYSE: C) reality distortion field and the new non-SAAP acounting measure Earning Before Everything, the bottom has been put in.

Submitted by reader cjm in response to Earnings Before Everything

Many have noted that EBIT is a bad measure of a company’s ability to pay down debt because it includes abstractions like Depreciation and Amortization that aren’t really cash expenses. Hence, EBITDA.

But why stop there?

Your Sales and Marketing team are bounty hunters by blood; let them sharpen their hunger a little.

Thus, I propose EBITDAMS.

Of course, I am about to outdo myself. Aren’t General and Administrative expenses highly theoretical at the end of the day? Is Cindy in accounting, with her two plump mortgages, really going to stop coming to work if you don’t pay her for a quarter?

Thus, (say it with me) EBITDAGSA.

What about COGS, you ask? The power of my theory is rivaled only by its subtlety: pay your vendors in stock options. (for the novitiate: options are a kind of theoretical scrip, not dissimilar from Camel Bucks, Mexican pesos, or Monopoly money.)

Thus, EBITDAGSAC.

By this transformative metric, no business can reasonably be said to be too expensive. It’s like beer-goggles for acquisitions; that 40 P/E heifer with acne scars is a waifish 1/1 cindarella after a few pitchers of EBITDAGSAC.

Wooo!!! Business drunk! More business juice please!
-Liz Lemon on 30 Rock

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

Many companies provide an EBITDA figure along with their earnings, and they let you know it’s a non-GAAP measure, because, well, it’s a non-GAAP measure. Like Skittles, EBITDA comes in a rainbow of fruity flavors: adjusted EBITDA, EBITDAR, EBITDAM, EBITA, EBITDARP, EBITDARM, EBITDARPO, EBITDO and when times get really bad REBITDA.

We think there is an ample opportunity for the introduction of a new non-SAAP measure, one we call EBE or Earnings Before Everything. Let’s cut to the chase, let’s not dicker around, people use EBITDA as a proxy for free cash flow but management wants to use it as a way to inflate the appearance of a company’s health and what better way to do that than EBE? Add-back whatever you want, add it all back, even stuff the firm has nothing to do with. How much did the Chunnel cost? $100 billion? Add that back. Katrina cost a lot too. Add that back. That earthquake in Pakistan or Mexico or wherever? Add that back. Did you donate to charity? Add it back. Did you write something down? Add it back. Did you write something up? Use your discretion to not back that out.

Recommendation: Whenever I see EBITDAM, I say it in my mind like someone who is really surprised at EBIT. Like “EBIT, DAMN, those results are amazing!” or “EBIT-DAM! Cash flow is king!”

We are conducting some research, which we plan to analyze rigorously, produce a model from which to profit, front-run the publication of such a model and then, lastly, publish said model.

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