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On Barrons on Radian

There was a piece published in Barrons this weekend on Radian Group.  Barrons is free this weekend so anyone can access it here.  The article. written by Jonathan Laing follows quite closely the arguments written in this SeekingAlpha piece.  Honestly, there is so much overlap between the two articles that I would have hoped that the writer of the Barrons piece contacted OliverDavies, who wrote the SeekingAlpha article, before writing his.

In my post, Does Radian Guaranty have a liquidity problem?, I considered most of the arguments made by Barrons and even came up with my own spreadsheet model to see if they were valid   I have yet to hear of any major errors in my analysis, and it is an analysis I have went over a number of times since then in order to verify.  Thus I remain of the opinion that my analysis is fair and that my conclusion that Radian Guaranty will not run into a liquidity problem absent the drop of another shoe in the housing market.

I have to wonder whether Johnathan Laing ran his own cash flow analysis before publishing his work.  Did he create a model that showed Radian Guaranty would run out of cash?  I would love to see that model.  I am not academic about this argument; if someone can prove me wrong I will sell my stock and move on.  I really couldn’t care less whether I am right or not, I only want to make money on the opportunity. Read more

Summing up Earnings: Impac Mortgage, Rurban Financial, PremierWest Bancorp

In the next few posts I will summarize my thoughts on the quarterly earnings reports released so far for the companies I own.   In this post I am going to look at Impac Mortgage, Rurban Financial, and PremierWest Bancorp.  I will follow that up shortly with another post that looks at Radian Group, PVF Capital and Community Bankers Trust.

Impac Mortgage

In my post last week on Impac Mortgage, I noted the following concern:

In my opinion, the biggest short term risk is that the third quarter GAAP number disappoints. This could easily happen as a result of further charges to the repurchase reserve or mark to market changes to the trusts that overwhelm the profitability of the operating business. Given the run-up in the stock, a low GAAP number could cause some of the short term holders that haven’t looked closely at the businesses to run for the exits.

As it turned out my fear of a poor GAAP number was realized, but the strength of the underlying mortgage origination business was impossible to ignore, and the stock shot up higher anyways.

I was pleasantly surprised with the results.  The mortgage origination segment outperformed even my most optimistic expectations.  Lending volumes increased 33% quarter over quarter.  Earnings from the segment increased an astonishing 100% quarter over quarter.  Further, the company said on the conference call that October volumes were $290 million, which, if extrapolated for the entire quarter, would be another 22% quarter over quarter rise in the fourth quarter from the $709 million originated in Q3. Read more