Blessed by the Potato

I took a look at Zenn Motor Company (ZNN on the toronto venture exchange) and it looks pretty bad, maybe bad enough to short.

They’re a company that produced what are basically glorified golf carts (low speed electric vehicles). Their plant is in Quebec, so they were a bit of a Canadian success story for a while, except that they couldn’t quite turn a profit, and Canada wouldn’t license their cars to be used on our roads.

Now they’re going to shut down their manufacturing business and become a “solutions provider” — try to sell their electric drivetrain to a larger OEM. Makes sense since they’ve been burning through their pile of cash and their prospects haven’t been improving much. Except almost all the major car companies already have home-grown electric car divisions, so I can’t see this strategy actually working for them, especially since their drivetrain was fairly unremarkable.

The one thing they do have is an interest in EEStor, a private company developing a “revolutionary” energy storage system for electric cars. Zenn owns 10% of EEStor and has exclusive rights to distribute the EEStor capacitors for automotive use.

Tangible book value of ~$0.30/sh, and ZNN is trading at ~$2.50, so people are basically paying $2.20 for that piece of EEStor.

Now EEStor may have something that works as claimed — supposedly someone at Lockheed-Martin got to look at a prototype, but they haven’t been too open about what they have yet. More importantly, they claim that their capacitors can be produced cheaply, which has yet to be demonstrated. Production was supposed to have started in mid-2008 originally, and here we are into 2010 and we have yet to see the first unit.

I seriously suspect EEStor is just smoke-and-mirrors, and was considering putting my money where my mouth is on that front by setting up a short on Zenn.

Unfortunately on the off chance that they do have something real a short could go quite badly. Also, since Zenn has essentially no debt to speak of, there’s no near-term default-type event to push them down, so we could be right but still lose money if it takes years for them to finally burn through their cash and hit zero.

It looks like a case where the short thesis could be completely right: the company may be worthless in the long run, and EEStor’s long-awaited technology may not be competitive with what the big players have developed in-house for batteries if it ever comes out at all… but you still couldn’t make money off the short since the stock is all hype, and more empty promises from EEStor could send the stock to the moon between now and when it does finally hit zero.

Hat tip to Jonathan Chevreau’s recent blog post: “Younger folk aged 18 to 24 are leading the charge, with those “very likely to buy” almost doubling to 15% from 8% per in 2009.

This is one of the signs of the end stages of the housing bubble.

Low/no downpayments allow people to buy earlier and earlier in their lives, stealing demand from the future, and driving up prices in the present. Skyrocketing prices convince people to buy now or be priced out forever. But there is a limit to it all, unless we start selling houses to children. Home ownership rates are at ~70%, and here we have 15% of people in the youngest (least home-owning) age bracket planning to buy (more than that, actually, since there’s another bunch in the “likely to buy” category below “very likely”), and presumably ~8% who bought over the last year. Won’t take too much more robbing of the cradle here before we run out of ways to bring demand up and hit a wall when high school students can’t join in bidding wars.

That is of course assuming that tightening of interest rates doesn’t do the job first (and now most bank economists are calling for that to happen before the end of the year).

I’ve been bearish on real estate for going on 3+ years now, and I’ve been hesitant to get too excited about the correction that I know must be coming because real estate moves in long, slow cycles. It’ll be years before the time to buy (the undershoot) finally arrives… plus, I get in trouble for being “optimistically bearish” from people with house lust that I’ve convinced to hold off (“the market’s up 20% this year! We could have bought last year, damn you!”). Nonetheless, I can’t help but feel that the stars are aligning for this nonsense to finally end.

Flaherty brought in some rules that I thought would be fairly minor tightenings to the mortgage market. Real basic, common sense tweaks, like that banks shouldn’t give someone all the money they can borrow at today’s rock-bottom rates, but instead have to qualify people on the still-low 5-year rate. I didn’t think there’d be anyone walking that close to the bleeding edge of affordability, but apparently CIBC is forecasting that this rule alone will have a ~5% impact on the mortgage market (hat tip: Canadian Mortgage Trends). The new rules also require a 20% downpayment for non-principal residences, which should help reduce the speculation out there.

Canadian Business had an article this week on “Why Buying a House is a Bad Investment”. Despite the title, it’s not nearly as bearish as I am, though that may be because they’re talking about “Canadian housing”, which is a tough concept, because the market in London and Charlottetown is vastly different than Vancouver or Toronto.

Even some realtors are starting to think that there may be, possibly, just the teenist whiff of a bubble happening, despite their inherent bias towards believing that real estate prices will always go up.

So I think the end is finally arriving (well, the end did arrive in the fall of ’08, but low interest rates drove it back for an age), and I can start to make some prognostications. Time may prove me wrong, but time’s a bitch like that. I predict that by the end of the year rates will begin moving back up as the need for the emergency stimulus eases and inflation returns. The real estate market will stall around midsummer; by this time next year, it will be clear that the market momentum is down, and by the fall of 2011, the media should start picking up on the slide. Since real estate moves in slow cycles you probably won’t find a decent time to buy until late 2013 (rent-to-buy of <150X), with the final bottom coming somewhere around 2016. For Toronto, top-to-bottom, my crystal ball says we’ll see a 35% drop — still about 10-15% above the 1996 trough in real terms, but a real kick in the nards for anyone that bought in the last few years.

These prophecies of doom are for entertainment only of course, and I’ll be changing my opinions as new data emerges… but now you know what I’m thinking.

In other eschatological news, Netbug has cancelled his World of Warcraft subscription. The end times, they are nigh.

I sold all my Consumers’ Waterheater (CWI.UN) this morning. Their results came out yesterday, and they did not look very good: attrition rate was higher than I had hoped/forecast, along with some other disappointments in the restart of their submetering business. But there were two big things that made me lose confidence in the stock.

The first was pure numbers: their payout ratio for the last quarter was 86%. They had cut the distribution in half a few months ago, and that was supposed to bring the payout ratio down to <70% (i.e.: a level that would be sustainable after the 2011 Harper/Flaherty tax came into effect). Yet despite the vastly reduced payout in effect for the whole quarter, their payout was still so high as to suggest another potential cut in the future if things didn’t start improving.

The second was the conference call. Right at the end they talk about how their competitors (who were already playing dirty with tactics to skirt rules that are supposed to allow consumers to back out of agreements from door-to-door salespeople) were stripping the CWI tanks of valuable components during the switchovers, and CWI hadn’t done anything about it yet. They had the wording in the contract to charge the customers for the damage, but haven’t been.

On the one hand, I can understand that: I’d probably fight a charge for damage to a tank, and it is a little scummy to try to grab some cash from a customer on their way out the door. On the other hand, these are customers that they’ve lost anyway, and their tanks are damaged beyond reasonable wear and tear. Something should have been done — if it is indeed their competitors stripping components as they allege, then there should be a lawsuit in the works. Why is management dragging their feet on this?

My dad put it well: the management at CWI aren’t operations types. They’ve handed off the day-to-day stuff to Direct Energy, and have been caught flat-footed in the face of an extremely aggressive set of competitors.

So for now, I’m out.

The government, in a bit of a surprise move today moved to tighten mortgage lending rules to help reign in the housing bubble here (which, for political reasons they can’t actually admit exists). I don’t mean that rules of this sort coming into play were a complete surprise, indeed there has been much speculation and hope that some sort of tightening would be employed in the budget. Just that it was a surprise to come today when the federal budget is less than a month away. To me that’s an actions-speak-louder-than words type thing, that these rules couldn’t wait until the spring frenzy.

Anyhow, on to the new rules:

The weakest in my opinion is the new rule that refinancing can only take one down to 90% equity. It’s to help prevent people using their homes’ rising valuations as ATMs, but I have trouble seeing how it might actually prevent a bubble — just maybe lessen the pop since it makes it a little harder for existing homeowners to put themselves underwater alongside new homebuyers.

The way the banks and the CMHC will calculate your debt service ratios (i.e.: how much house you can afford) will change slightly, so that now you must be able to afford payments at the 5-year fixed rate instead of the 3-year one. Since the 5-year rate is currently a few hundred basis points higher than the variable-rate, it will help protect people from themselves, and ensure that a small jump in rates won’t cause people to have to leave their homes. Supposedly, many people in this rate environment are taking 5-year mortgages anyway, but I have to suspect that this is going to screen out at least a few first-time buyers whose real estate agents have sold them on a price point based on the “monthly carry” at 3% or some ridiculous temporary interest rate. Personally, I’d like to see this as an even more conservative rule: i.e., ensuring people could afford their houses if rates shot up to beyond the current 5-year rate — perhaps an arbitrary 8 or 10% rate, or perhaps the high water mark for the last decade (though that can also lead us towards fooling ourselves in long periods of declining rates).

The last point is the one that I think is the most needed, and will do the most to stem speculation: people buying real estate other than as their primary residence, i.e., speculators, must put down at least 20%. So anyone that’s been investing in multiple condos in Toronto because you only need 5% to get your foot in the door will find that they have to have some money to buy. Unfortunately, it’s probably also the hardest to enforce — after all, if you search the blogs of the speculators, you’ll find they seem to skate around the other principal residence rules in efforts to make their flipping gains tax-free. I’m sure they’ll argue that they intend to live in each of their units, but had to buy the next three before selling the first… Depending on how this rule is implemented, it could start deflating the condo market quite quickly: if people who signed up for a dozen pre-construction units two years ago for completion this summer find they now have to have 20% down at the close, they may be in a terrible rush to sell. If existing contracts aren’t affected though, then it will still take some time for the hot air to work its way out of the system — which is probably how this will be implemented.

So, some quick (slightly inaccurate) numbers:

Let’s say you’re a couple with a gross income of $100k. 32% of that monthly is $2666/mo — that’s the guideline maximum for your mortgage payment, heating costs, and property tax. Let’s assume your heat and property tax are a fixed $300/mo, which leaves $2366/mo for the mortgage. With a 35-year amortization and a 3-year posted rate of 4%, you can afford a morgage of about $534k. At the 5-year posted rate of 5.4%, that maximum possible mortgage drops to $446k. A decline of ~17% in the maximum house you can buy. Depending on how many people were actually at the limits of their debt service ratios, that could undo the massive run-up that we had in 2009 as a result of the low interest rates.

An RRSP is a tax-sheltering account. Any money you put in it is considered to be “pre-tax”, or tax-deferred, so you are not taxed on contributions you make. If, like most working Canadians, you pay taxes in advance as a deduction on each of your paycheques, this means that you can expect a refund of the taxes you paid on the money you stick in your RRSP.

You can contribute money to your RRSP any time through the year, and also all the way through to the end of February of the following year. However, people being the way they are, tend to leave it until the last minute creating “RRSP season” in February. It was into the midst of this chaotic selling frenzy at the bank that Wayfare made an appointment at the local TD to review her RRSP account (in fact, she was called in to update her risk profile survey). It was there that she was shocked by how misinformed the saleslady at the bank was (and believe me, they are salescritters and not “advisors” or “planners”).

After educating herself (with no small amount of help from yours truly, if I may pat my own back) Wayfare has realized that a lot of the products sold at the bank branch are expensive, with high fees (aka MERs) designed to make the bank rich, rather than her. So she (with some small amount of administrative confusion) converted her RRSP account to an e-series low-cost index fund account almost 2 years ago. At the branch, the salescritter saw that she was in these broad market index funds (~80% equities, ~20% fixed income), and said that her investments were too conservative for her age. Then she tried to sell her on a “balanced fund” which was “more appropriately aggressive”, with nearly 40% in bonds. For anyone who’s even remotely knowledgable about matters financial, you’ll immediately recognize that this is a far less aggressive fund (not to mention more expensive!). Wayfare actually had to hold the line to not get switched over to this poorer option — the sales push was fairly hard. And to add insult to injury, the salesperson spent the whole time selling, and never actually updated Wayfare’s risk profile, her original reason for going in! “We could do that next time when you make an appointment with me to switch over to these funds.” Give me a break!

A few years ago, being just a little less knowledgeable, she probably would have acceded to the salescritter’s suggestions (indeed, 3 years ago she walked out invested in a “market-linked GIC”, which while generally bad deals, was not such a bad idea in hindsight with the market crash of ’08).

So, to the rest of you: remember as you rush out to fill up that RRSP contribution room at the last minute with little time to check your facts that the salesperson at the bank branch is not necessarily your friend, and may in fact know less about the products they’re pushing than you do (or, at least than I do ;). If you’re young (as I believe most of my readers are), and if your RRSP is holding GICs (or equivalently, savings accounts or money market funds), then you’re probably doing it wrong (or have exceptionally low risk tolerance). You can hold stocks, bonds, cash, or mutual funds which own combinations of those. If you have a time frame of decades then you should probably have at least some exposure to equities (though the exact amount will depend on your risk tolerance). And fees matter.