Reminiscences of a Stockblogger

Jan 2

Letter 26: A Move in ACFC, the end of tax loss selling for gold stocks, Mispricing of Aurizon Mines, and All the Devils are Here

All the Devils are Here (though most have probably moved to Europe)

Over the winter break I read the book All the Devils are Here, by Bethany Mclean and Joe Nocera. The book essentially traces out all the strands that culminated in the panic of September 2008. The book identified the following factors:

A reliance on ideology instead of analysis. In particular this applies to the Federal Reserve and Alan Greenspan, whose ideological “market is always right” view permeated the decisions of the Fed and to some extent those of the other regulatory bodies. But more generally, ideology, specifically free market ideology, seemed to permeate through all the political and financial institutions to the point that it replaced a sober look at reality. Similarly, for many traders and investment bankers, an ideological reliance on “the model” often led to an ignorance of the potential risks of an outlier scenario
The absence of regulation. For a variety of reasons (the power of the lobby groups, the political infighting between the regulatory bodies, the ideological free market view of the participants and the myopic focus on regulators on Fannie and Freddie) an attempt to regulate the subprime industry was hardly even contemplated until it was too late.
The development of securitization. The most important consequence of the innovations to pool mortgages, to tranche pools, and then to create pools of pools (CDO’s) was that the lender and the borrower became further and further divorced by more degrees of separation. The securitization process created so many layers of intermediaries between the party who actually ended up with the loan on their books and the party that took the money that risks were easily lost in the translation.
The rubber stamped AAA status provided by the ratings agencies. Some books focus on how the rating agencies didn’t understand what they were rating. Mclean and Nocera point out that the revenue structure of the agencies was doomed to be corrupted. A system where the raters are paid by the producers of the securities they rate might be considered to be an insane one. The result was that the agencies were played off against one another by the investment banks; market share went to the most relaxed rating. Add to this the fact that the agencies, particularly Moody’s, became focused on profits at the expense of their inherent conflict of interest, and you had a situation ripe for abuse.
Greed. Politicians more concerned with their own campaign donations than with promoting sustainable public policy. Company executives intent strictly on their own promotion and profit. Mortgage originators with essentially no moral compass at all. The system was (and is) corrupt.
A lack of understanding. The same characters at play as with greed. So few people saw the disaster coming. Sure some did, there were a few regulators and a few hedge funds that saw how unsustainable the leverage being piled on in the mortgage sector was. But the vast majority didn’t have a clue. Even the supposed smart money didn’t really get smart until 2006-2007.

It is this last point, the lack of understanding, that I think is most relevant to what we face today. It really surprised me how little the people in influential and powerful positions understood the concepts that they were making decisions with regard to. Even Hank Paulson, who is actually portrayed in quite a positive light, was completely blind to the corruption and leverage being amassed in the mortgage market.

This naturally begs the question of Europe: how many of the politicians and bureaucrats in the EU really understand the situation they are trying to navigate? Do they really know the risks inherent in the decisions that they are making? Do they even really understand the banking sector they are trying to protect?

The last 6 months for me has been an education in how the modern banking system works. I have been trying to read all that I can, all the boring, technical aspects. And I don’t think for a minute think that I’ve wrapped my head around it. There are so many moving and interdependent parts. It’s also not a very tangible subject. It simply isn’t something that is easily understood.

Thus I think it’s a legitimate question as to whether the bureaucrats of Europe have the understanding required to navigate the minefield of sovereign defaults and banking bankruptcies. As Lehman showed, it only takes one mistake to create a loss of confidence that spirals uncontrollably.

How can you take on risk with this in mind?

The end of (tax loss) selling?

The week after tax-loss selling is always an interesting one. It provides the first glimpse into whether a security has been facing unrelenting selling because of investors simply wishing to take their losses (and their tax breaks) and move on, or whether something more nefarious is at play. Along the lines of the former, this week provided a rather marked jump in a number of the regional bank stocks that I have initiated a position in. Most conspicuous of these moves was that of Atlantic Coast Financial.

A Take-over Imminent for ACFC?

ACFC had a rather astounding 50%+ move this week. I really have no idea what precipitated the move. To take it with a grain of salt, the volume for the stock this week was less than spectacular, though the same could be said for almost the entire move down.

As I pointed out last week the stock is a bit of a flyer; the bank is a mortgage lender in one of the most crippled mortgage markets (Florida), they have bad loans coming out their wazoo, and a stock that has fallen from $10 to $1 in less than a year generally does not do so on speculative panic alone. Nevertheless, part of the story is the book value, which even with 3 years of bad loan write-downs lies at a rather surreal $19 per share (versus a share price of $1.70 when I bought it).

The other part of the story is simply the realization that what is going on with this bank (and many of these little community banks that got caught up in making bad loans at the wrong time) is a race between the write-downs of their past transgressions and the earnings of their current performing loan book. With ACFC it is not at all clear to me that the bad loans will win out; in fact I tried to make the case last week that with a little luck (and an improving economy) the performing book may very soon be able to out-earn the losses on a consistent basis. If this happens, the shares are clearly worth more than 10% of book value. Even if it just becomes a possibility, a shrewd competitor may be tempted to take a plunge. I constructed the chart below to try to see where ACFC is in that process. The chart compares earnings before provisions (black) to the quarter over quarter change in non-performing loans (red). Its basically a look at whether the company is out-earning the loans going bad each quarter. The 3rd quarter was the first in four that the black won out.

Community Bankers Trust: Another Regional Bank with a Move of its Own

While ACFC was the best of the lot of regionals, there were others that showed signs of life. Community Bankers Trust surged on Friday. The stock remains at about 1/3 of book value. If it were not for Europe and the ever-impending doom there, I would add more. As well, Oneida Financial continues to push higher. Unlike ACFC, BOCH and BTC, Oneida is a terribly boring bank trading at about book that is probably going to do nothing but increase in price by 10% a year and pay a 5% dividend until one day it gets bought out. At some point I might get bored with with relatively low return, but in this environment, I am happy to take a reward with so little risk.

Will Gold Stocks Rise now that Tax-loss Selling is over?

As for the golds, Esperanza, Canaco and Geologix all are showing classic signs of a let-up in tax loss selling. All are well above where I bought them. Aurizon, on the other hand, continues to be sold rather indiscriminately. Yes, I realize that the price of gold is getting clobbered on a regular basis. I can appreciate that investors may be questioning the wisdom of holding gold as a hedge to anything given the fact that it seems to dramatically underperform on risk-off days.

Still, I scratch my head at Aurizon. Here is a low cost gold producer that is comparatively less correlated to the price of gold than most of its competitors. For one, if you are low cost you are by definition high margin. Thus, a $30 move in the price of gold is of much less impact to a producer with $1000/oz margin (like Aurizon), than say a producer with a $500/oz margin. Yet Aurizon regularly trades down MORE than your average gold producer on the down days.

Going Short Argonaut Gold and long Aurizon Mines

So confounded have I been that in order to hedge my risk with Aurizon I have decided to take a short position in a fellow gold producer, Argonaut Gold. To be sure, there is nothing wrong with Argonaut Gold. I wrote the company up rather glowingly a couple months ago. However that was at $5, and now AR trades at $7, while in the same time Aurizon has fallen to less than $5. Below is a comparison of the key metrics of both companies.

So to briefly summarize the above, Aurizon produces more than twice as much gold, it produces over double the cash flow, and to top it off, Aurizon’s 3^rd quarter was stronger than Argonaut’s. Argonaut potentially has a better pipeline of projects, but this is more than nullified by the fact that Aurizon trades at almost half the price on a per producing ounce basis, produces those ounces at $50-$100 cheaper, and has over $1 in cash on its balance sheet while Argonaut has a mere 30 cents. It simply doesn’t make sense.

While I remain bullish the price of gold, I also remain wary that I am not very right in this bullishness at the moment, and so it seems like the prudent thing to do to short what seems relatively over valued and buy what seems relatively undervalued. Anyways, that is what I did.

I also bought back OceanaGold for another run. Its getting to be repetitive, but it has been a consistant source of profits. Buy OceanaGold below $2.20 and sell it above $2.70. I must have done this 3 times already in the last 9 months.

Portfolio

Dec 27

Letter 25: Tax Loss Buying

I am on vacation with limited computer access so this is going to be a short letter.

There was some good news for the oil stocks in my portfolio this week.

News that should help Equal

Equal Energy has not performed very well lately. I don’t expect much from the stock until something is announced with the companies Mississippian lands in Oklahoma. While we wait, Sandridge, the biggest landholder in the Mississippian, jv’d 363,000 acres of their land to Repsol this week for $1B. That works out to $2,754/acre.

SandRidge will sell an approximate 25% non-operated working interest, or 250,000 net acres, in the Extension Mississippian play located in Western Kansas and an approximate 16% non-operated working interest, or 113,636 net acres, in its Original Mississippian play. The 363,636 net acres in total will be sold to Repsol for an aggregate transaction value of $1 Billion. Repsol will pay $250 million in cash at closing and the remainder in the form of a drilling carry. In addition to paying for its working interest share of development costs, Repsol will pay an amount equal to 200% of its working interest to fund a portion of SandRidge’s cost of development until the additional $750 million drilling carry obligation is satisfied.

Admittedly, this is a little on the low side compared to some of the earlier deals. That is because this deal included 250,000 acres of the second Mississippian play that Sandridge is involved in. The second play is newer and riskier.

The fact that Sandridge was able to get $2,750 per acre while only including 113,000 acres of the prime land (in Oklahoma the heart of the Mississippian is Grant, Alfalfa and Woods) provides another positive data point for Equal.

Equal has 20,000 acres of land in the heart of the Mississippian. This is another deal that suggests that the land is worth around $70M. At $4.50, the stock trades at an enterprise value of $300M and with a market capitalization of $150M. It is clear that that the Mississippian land is not priced into the stock.

I bought some more Equal on Thursday at $4.50. I believe the recent decline in the share price is simply tax loss selling. I believe that the stock would be undervalued at $7/share. At $4.50, its a little ridiculous.

Coastal Energy News

Coastal Energy has been the best performing stock for me over the last few months. They have hit on well after well after well. The string of success continued with the B-09 well news released on Tuesday.

“The Bua Ban North B-09 well encountered the largest pay zone we have seen to date in this field. We are particularly excited that we have encountered oil across five Miocene zones. This confirms the lateral extent of the deeper pay zones below our main producing reservoir. Following this successful result in the deeper zones, we plan to drill further appraisal wells to continue testing the 63.0 mmbbl of prospective resources defined in the RPS report ofNovember 15, 2011, which are incremental to the 67.0 mmbbl of 2P volumes defined in the report.”

What is most important about the result is that it begins to prove up the lower miocene sands. First Energy noted the following:

The Bua Ban North B-09 well discovered 3-4 mmbbl in deeper Micocene sands which could open a new play for Coastal with an overall prize of 63 mmbbl prospective resources.

The Miocene sands that Coastal is drilling into are actually a number of layered sands as shown in the illustration below. Up until the B-09 well, Coastal had been focusing on the upper two layers. The B-09 explored the lower layers. The RPS report distinguished between reserves and prospective resource in the Miocene. While the news release did not say so specifically the above snippit implies that most if not all of the prospective resource is in the deeper sands.

There is an excellent summary of the Micoene sands that Coastal is drilling into that was posted by Oiljack on the Investorsvillage Coastal board.

Midway gets us Excited and then…

The moment I noticed that Midway Energy was halted I went out and bought shares in Second Wave. I thought for sure that the halt was due to a takeover bid and that there would be a subsequent boost to the other Swan Hills players (Arcan and Second Wave). Unfortunately, while a takeover bid may indeed be in the works, the clarification by Midway left the waters muddied.

Midway Energy Ltd. (“Midway” or the “Company”) announced today that it has become aware that information may have entered the market with respect to certain potential transactions. The Company has not entered into any definitive agreement with respect to these transactions and will issue a press release when and if a successful transaction has been negotiated.

Nothing like clarity. Nevertheless the stock popped when it opened and Second Wave popped along with it.

I think I will hold onto Second Wave for a while; their latest update was mildly disappointing with a few of the recent wells producing at far less than the earlier more prolific Crescent Point JV wells. However according to an Acumen Capital report, the lower production rates can be attributed to a failure of the packer equipment during the frac operations, while the 100% WI well drilled to the south (08-23-062-10W5) was limited to 100bbl/d by the surface pumping equipment. I’m not sure I understand that second one entirely, I mean why would the company install insufficient surface pumping, but nevertheless I hold out some hope that the going forward results for SCS will improve on these numbers. Meanwhile SCS does not appear to be as encumbered with infrastructure requirements as Arcan is in the short term, so capital is going to be spent drilling wells.

Unfortunately, as seems to happen from time to time, the practice account I post here had my SCS order rejected because of a lack of margin, something that clearly isn’t the case (I don’t think RBC spends much time updating and debugging the practice accounts functionality). I am reluctant to try to re-buy the stock now after the pop so for the moment I will not have my SCS position reflected unless it falls back to the $2.45 range that I bought it at in my actual accounts.

Gold Stocks

I am not sure if it was a smart thing to do but I added positions in a couple of gold stocks this week. These should not be considered long term positions; they are simply me trying to take advantage of what I see as the severe underperformance of the stocks when compared to the bullion. I added a position in Semafo at $6.40. Semafo is a mid-tier producer that has generally held up well in the market but that got taken down to new lows of late. I also added a position in Canaco. Canaco has had a rather spectacular decline from over $5 a share to a low of a $1. That is where I bought it. The company has what looks to be a decent deposit in Tanzania. Moreover, at $1 they have a market capitalization of $200M and with cash on hand of $115M.

Portfolio

Dec 18

Letter 24: Risk and Reward, Atna Analysis, More Community Banks

Last week I wrote that I did not understand why the market was reacting as favourably as it was to the European proposals that came out of the Dec 9th summit.

A tweak here, a tweak there and pretty soon you have… well not a whole lot to be honest.

In a way I felt vindicated by the market collapse that occurred in the early part of this week. In another way I felt sick to my stomach, because though I have been creating an evermore conservative weighting to my portfolio, when the shit hits you still feel it.

Kyle Bass was on CNBC this week giving some more detail on his doomsday-like expectations:

The observation that deposits are leaving Greek banks at an annualized rate of almost 50% is somewhat frightening. Clearly this crisis is going to come to a head soon.

John Mauldin publishes a great conversation between Charles Gave and Anatole Kaletsky. It is quite provoking, and its hard to walk away after reading it without feeling the impending doom that awaits the Eurozone. Kaletsky and Gave both make the quite reasonable point that perhaps Germany would prefer a break-up of the Eurozone. If you watch what Germany is doing, and ignore the platitudes they are saying, you might question their motives. Kaletsky points out that of the necessary measures to fix the Eurozone, Germany seems to be steadfastly opposed to both Eurobonds and to ECB intervention. Absent those measures, what hope does the Eurozone have? Perhaps that is the plan all along.

Gold Stocks – I should went all out

Gold stocks got CREAMED this week. I had been lightening up on my gold stocks the week before in anticipation that something might be about to hit. I didn’t like the way gold was going, I didn’t like the fact that the WSJ was penning articles describing a dearth of Indian demand, and I didn’t like that Draghi talked tough during the EU summit, suggesting that money printing was still some time off.

Nevertheless being that I was not fully out of gold stocks, I got smacked about pretty good over the course of the week. Atna, Aurizon, and with Lydian all performed quite miserably.

What’s Wrong with Aurizon?

Aurizon is a surprise to me. I expected the stock to hold up better than it has been. I might have expected its performance to be closer to that of Alamos. Both are low cost producers. Both are single mine operations. Yet the valuation difference between the two is somewhat staggering.

I can only guess that there is a strong seller of Aurizon out there that wants to be out of the stock by year end. I can only hope that the new year will bring some sanity to the stock.

While reviewing Aurizon, I began to wonder how much having a AMEX listing hurts the stock. Anecdotally it appeared to me that the Canadian stocks with AMEX listings are much more volatile then those without. I decided to take a closer look.

I grabbed price data since August 1st for 9 stocks, 5 with AMEX listings and 4 without. From the web I grabbed a visual basic function that calculates volatility based on the following Black-Scholes formula.

For purposes of Black-Scholes calculations, volatility is the standard deviation of the periodic percent change in prices, divided by the square root of time. Volatility is emphatically NOT the same as “beta”, which measures the correlation of a security’s price movements with those of the overall market. Neither is volatility simply a measure of the standard deviation of a security’s closing prices over time.

Here is the volatility of each security:

Is there a correlation? Perhaps, though its not as clear a one as I had suspected. The distinction is most clear between Aurizon, Alamos and Argonaut Gold. There is no reason, in my opinion, that Aurizon is so much volatile than these other two stocks. But apart from that, volatility seems similar between stocks on the two indexes.

I bought back some of the shares of Aurizon at $5.07 that I had sold at over $6 a few weeks ago.

The NPV of Atna

Another stock to get clobbered this week was Atna Resources. I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I had finished an analyses of the company and would post shortly. I never did that post, until now.

Below is the after tax NPV10 that I calculated for Atna at various gold prices.

I based my model on the following assumptions:

Briggs:

A 11year mine life, at 40,000 t/d
Total produced ounces of 476,000 oz over LOM
0.017 oz/t resource over the mine life, strip ratio of 4 and with 80% recoveries
Resulting in gold production of 39,700 oz per year
Mining costs of $1.30/t mined, milling costs of $4/t milled and G&A costs of $1.7/t mined
Cash costs of $898/oz over LOM

Pinson:

A 15 year mine life, beginning at 350t/d and ramping to 750t/d by year 4.
Total produced ounces of 940,000 oz over LOM
0.4 oz/t resource over the mine life, diluted by 30% with 90% recoveries, resulting in gold production beginning at 50,000 oz and ramping to 75,000 oz.
Mining costs of $110/t, milling costs of $50/t and G&A costs of $11/t
Cash costs of $687/oz over LOM

Reward:

A 8 year mine life, at 24,000 t/d
Total produced ounces of 292,000 oz over LOM
0.026 oz/t resource over the mine life, strip ratio of 4 and with 80% recoveries
Resulting in gold production of 36,400 oz per year
Mining costs of $1.30/t mined, milling costs of $4/t milled and G&A costs of $1.14/t mined
Cash costs of $560/oz over LOM

Columbia and Cecil:

To the current resource of each I assigned a simple asset value per ounce of $40/oz measured and indicated and $20/oz inferred on the total resource of both properties

Atna is, in my opinion, is one of the best gold stock investments out there. As demonstrated above, the stock is trading at about 1/3 of its NPV 10 at $1500 gold. If I wanted to get more aggressive in my evaluation, I would note that many companies are moving to value feasibility on NPV5. On an NPV 5 basis Atna is worth $3.86 per share at $1500/oz gold. That number jumps to almost $8 per share at $2100/oz gold. Clearly there is upside once the momentum begins to build.

I added to my position in Atna on Friday at 78 cents.

Taking Advantage of the Collapse

In addition to Atna and Aurizon, I also added new positions in a few juniors. Call it the beginnings of a basket; I added a couple of non-producing juniors with deposits to my portfolio this week:

Geologix was recommended by Rick Rule as a takeover candidate on BNN about a year ago. Since that time the stock has fallen significantly. The company has a very low grade copper-gold deposit called Tepal in Mexico. The PEA that was published on Tepal a few months ago put the NPV5 of the project at $412M based on $1000/oz gold and 2.75/lb copper. Geologix has $14M of cash on hand. With 145M shares outstanding, the market capitalization of the company was $28M at my entry price of 20 cents. That puts half the market cap in cash and the other half in a project with an NPV that is nearly 10x the value of the company. Something has to give here.

Esperanza Resources is another old Rick Rule recommendation. Rule doesn’t talk much about specific stocks anymore, but there is some evidence that he is still interested in the company. http://www.investmentu.com/2011/September/why-gold-mining-stocks-will-skyrocket.html . The company certainly fits the bill of the sort of stock Rule likes. Esperanza has 1Moz of gold in Mexico. It’s a heap leach project so it should be able to be brought on production without a massive capital requirement (about $100M). Like Geologix, the company has almost half its market cap ($100M) in cash on hand ($50M).

I plan to add more to both of these stocks in the coming weeks.

Regional Banks: A Position in Community Bankers Trust

Community Bankers Trust (BTC) hit my bid when it sold off back down to a dollar this week. BTC is trading at 27% of tangible book value. This is, of course, partially because of the large number of non-performing loans on their books. Non-performing loans make up 8.9% of total loans in the Q3 quarter. This was down from 10.1% in Q2. In fact, there are some encouraging signs that the worst of the loan losses are behind us. The company has shown 3 quarters of lower loan amounts 30-89 days past due. This trend is beginning to show up in the total non-performing loans, which decreased for the first time in a year in Q3.

Moreover, as I have pointed out previously, insiders continue to buy the stock. Third quarter purchases by insiders were a little less than $50,000.

And Another Regional Bank Position in Atlantic Coast Financial

To be perfectly honest, I might have made a mistake here. I’ve only put a very tiny amount of capital at risk, but even that may have been too much. Atlantic Coast Financial (ACFC) is a lottery ticket. I bought the stock at $1.70 on Friday. There is just as much chance that it will go to zero as there is that it will double.

ACFC is a former Mutual Holding company that did their second step bank in February. The second step added cash to the balance sheet and resulted in a bank trading well below book value. ACFC trades at a rather crazy 10% of tangible book. Clearly there is more to the story.

The more to the story is that the bank is centered in Jacksonville Florida. They primarily make residential real estate loans. Real estate in Jacksonville has not done particularly well over the last few years (though it appears to be bottoming).

The falling real estate prices have led to skyrocketing non-performing loans. Those non-performing loans have not shown any sign of peaking yet (thus the possible mistake on my part).

The questions are, how many of these nonperforming loans will eventually be written down, and will there be value left in the equity once the non-performing loans are written down.

What drove me to take a small position in the stock was in part that an improving economy, and stabilizing home prices in Jacksonville, may mitigate further deterioration of the bank assets. As well, the bank is generating decent earnings before provisions. Ignoring provisions in Q3, the bank earned $1.16 per share. In Q2 that number was $0.55.

What is going on at ACFC is something akin to a tug-of-war, whereby on the one hand loan losses strip away value every quarter, while on the other earnings power of the performing loans adds value back. The share price is so low that it doesn’t take much a a shift in the dynamic between these two forces to change the value equation substantially. Its easy to see how a stabilization in non-performing loans could quickly allow the earnings power to win the race and shareholder value to go up substantially.

The other factor in my decision to buy was the recent announcement that the company was looking into strategic alternatives.

On November 28, 2011, Atlantic Coast Financial Corporation issued a press release announcing that its Board of Directors has engaged Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, Incorporated to assist the Company in exploring strategic alternatives to enhance stockholder value

Part of the reason that the company is looking for options is that they are not in compliacne with the Individual Minimum Capital Requirement (IMCR) agreed to by the Bank with the Office of Thrift Supervision on May 13, 2011. Under the IMCR, ACFC agreed to achieve Tier 1 leverage ratio of 7.0% as of September 30, 2011. Tier I capital at the bank is 6.22% right now.

It is a far from perfect scene. Nevertheless, an improving US economy and stabilizing housing prices could give me a decent return on the stock. The book value of $19 is unrealistic, a return to $3 is not.

Portfolio Composition

Dec 16

The Coastal Cash Generating Machine

I have perhaps underwritten about Coastal Energy given the size of the position I own in the stock. That is mainly because the Coastal Energy Investors Village board provides such great information about the company. It leaves me thinking – what is there left to say?

Nevertheless, sometimes it is worth reevaluating exactly what is fair value for a company, and that is what I want to try to do in this post. For an oil company, the book fair value can be estimated based on reserves, based on a cash flow multiple or based on a more detailed discounted cash flow analysis. The problem with all of these methods is that the lifeblood of any oil stock (not the company but the stock) is its potential to find more oil than what the market is currently willing to price in. Keep that in mind when looking at some of the valuation metrics below. The value the market is willing to assign to Coastal is bound to vary significantly from these book estimates depending on the market expectations of what might be lying in wait to be found. These days it also seems to depend on what happens to pop out of Sarkozy’s or Merkel’s mouth on any given day, but that’s another story.

Coastal is becoming a cash generating machine.

The chart below illustrates how up to this point Coastal, unlike so many of the domestic oil and gas juniors, is not running on a financing treadmill, but has been able to instead fully fund its operations from cash produced.

Its a little difficult to determine exactly when all the wells were drilled but based on the information provided in the MD&A I would estimate the following number of wells were drilled in the last 3 quarters. This does not included recompletions.

Now in the first three quarters about $5M in total CAPEX per well drilled was spent, however I am not trying to contend that this is how much it will cost to drill wells going forward. Some of those costs have been starting up the Bua Ban field (17 wells have been drilled at Bua Ban north in Q2 and Q3). Vertical wells drilled into the Miocene cost $1.5-$2M. The recent horizontal well that Coastal drilled (the Bua Ban North A-10) cost $3M. The point here is that further development of the existing found fields should require capex that is less than it was last quarter ($45M). Capex requirements in the $30M to $40M range going forward seems reasonable, absent another discovery that requires start-up capex but of course that would be a good thing in its own right.

Because of the significant growth occuring from the wells drilled at Bua Ban North, looking backwards to the historical cash flow of the company is of limited value. What is required is a forward looking estimate of cash flow based on current and expected production. Below I have estimated cash flow for 3 scenarios. Current estimated production at the end of the 3rd quarter, plus two increased production scenarios. Capex estimates for all of the scenarios are based on Coastal’s own estimate of $250M for 2012 ($62.5M per quarter).

The above assumes fully taxed cash flow for the entire estimate. This is probably not exactly true. Coastal is going to have to start paying more taxes at some point in 2012. But not right away. When they do they will pay the following taxes:

Royalty that is prorated to the production level. Coastal has said that at 20,000bbl/d offshore they expect a royalty payment of 10%
50% income tax on profits. Now this number is a bit misleading because according to Coastal’s explanation, the tax includes the deduction of all capital expenditures as they are incurred. In their November presentation Coastal presented the following table of the effective tax rate at various oil prices, and 20,000bbl/d of offshore production:

One other thing to note about this table is that offshore EBITDAX of $596M at $100/bbl selling price implies a significant drop in operating costs. I based my cash flow estimates on $29/bbl operating costs, which is consistent with the first 3 quarters. For the same scenario (ie. $100/bbl oil and 20,000bbl/d of offshore production) my EBITDAX is significantly lower. EBITDAX is basically the revenues after royalty, less the production expense and the cash G&A expense (it excludes stock option expense). There isn’t that much to it. The only way I can get the same EBITDAX as they have in the above table is if I drop operating expenses to about $10/bbl.

I also cannot get the tax numbers to quite line up the way Coastal has them stated in their presentation. In the above snippit Coastal stated that the taxes are expressed as a percentage of EBITDAX. I have to wonder if they didn’t mean revenue or revenue after royalty.

But even with my lower and perhaps more conservative estimate, Coastal is still generating a lot of cash.