Posts from the ‘Tronox (TROX)’ Category

Dec 10

Week 127: A couple of new stocks and getting rid of a few others (JONE, MHR, PXL.CA, DGIT, TROX)

Portfolio Performance

See the end of the post for the current make up of my portfolio and the last four weeks of trades.

Recent Developments

I don’t have a lot to say about the macro picture or generalized musings about my portfolio this month. The macro continues to be a party-on atmosphere so I guess we’ll keep dancing. My portfolio is still not performing as well as I would like but I don’t have any insights into why that is or what I should do different. I had a very good first seven months of the year, and now I am having a lull. These things ebb and flow. Onto the stocks.

Adding Jones Energy (JONE)

I really like this stock. It’s a recent IPO (it went public at the beginning of August), I don’t think it’s well covered or known by many, but it looks to me like they have been drilling extremely profitable gas-condensate wells in the mid-continent, and they have plenty of undeveloped acreage to drill more. I took a big position in it right off the bat at 6%. Read more

Sep 15

6 Comments

Week 115: On Purges and Renaissance

Portfolio Performance

See the end of the post for the current make up of my portfolio and the last four weeks of trades.

Recent Developments

I ended the month on a high note, at a new all-time high after gains this week from Gastar, Tronox, and Entrec, and notable gains over the last month from Axia, Novus, Ainsworth, Equal and Monarch Financial.

Gastar’s rise took place after the company announced a major asset purchase in the Hunton I wasn’t as enthused about the purchase as the market because I didn’t see the purchase price, which worked out to a little under $100,000 per flowing boe, as particularly cheap, but I understand that the move further consolidates Gastar’s position in the Hunton, and that the news that the company’s fifth well was producing 160 bopd on 1/3 of the well lateral was another positive datapoint to the field’s potential.

In the case of Tronox, apparently there is some speculation that Huntsman may be about to make a play on the company. This was reported on SeekingAlpha.

I’m not really sure what drove the share price of Entrec on Friday though I think its more of a sector move. The stock had been floating down on low volume for a couple of weeks. It was anything but low volume on the move up on Friday, trading over 1.6 million shares. Read more

Jul 21

The (hopefully) Hidden Earnings of Tronox

I was going to write up a short piece on Tronox as part of my monthly portfolio update but as I started to write it the length became significant. I think it justifies its own post, so here you go.

Basically what you’ve got with Tronox is a housing/economy play whose earnings are being obscured by a trough in the price of their commodity and the fresh start accounting associated with an acquisition.

What they do

Tronox produces titanium dioxide, which is used as a whitening agent in paints, plastics, and paper but of the three its application in paints are the primary end use (made up 77% of consumption in 2012). Tronox produces titanium dioxide from manufacturing facilities in The US, the Netherlands and Australia (called their pigment business). The company is the third largest producer of titanium dioxide in the world, and they sell their product to major paint suppliers like Benjamin Moore and Sherwin Williams.

Tronox was spun out of Kerr-Mcgee in 2005 with a boatload of debt. The company filed for bankruptcy after the recession in 2009 and emerged from bankruptcy in 2011. There is about one clean year of financial statements (2011) but then things start to get messy again as the company took over a miner of TiO2 feedstock, Exxaro, in the middle of 2012 in order to become a vertically integrated titanium dioxide producer. Read more