Reminiscences of a Stockblogger

Sep 13

Adventures in Ethanol

Over the last week I have played some parts of the ethanol yo-yo well and other parts not so well. Let me review.

On the well side, I significantly reduced my extremely over-sized position in Pacific Ethanol (25% of my portfolio at its peak) at prices of about $23 per share. On the not-so-well side, I added/subtracted and then added back my position in Rex Energy on continuously declining prices and held on to a still not insignificant percentage of Pacific Ethanol (about 5% position) through the declines of Thursday and Friday. What is yest to be determine is that I added back some of Pacific Ethanol at $20.15 on Thursday. While I sold half of that on Friday morning for a bit of a profit, I held the other half through the decline on Friday and now sit with those shares at a lower price than I had purchased them for.

How this all ends remains to be seen. This blog is not intended to be an account of my infallibility. Unlike many others on the blogosphere and on twitter, I have no omniscient insight into what can be absolutely stated as a good or bad decision. Thus it is that you rarely see me laying out the ridicule, condescension or my favorite, the passive-aggressive rhetoric, that seems to be so prevalent in these mediums. I can only wish for such certitude. Unfortunately my world is far too gray to not feel empathetic for those who hold a different opinion than mine.

The beauty and horror of the ethanol stock is that it only takes a small difference of opinion to lead to a drastically different conclusion. To take an example that I tweeted earlier tonight, in my model I get a $1 quarterly earning swing by adjusting the ethanol price by 20 cents – from $2.05 to $1.85 per gallon (note I originally had written 80c but I hadn’t been making an apples to apples comparison in my model). A similar point could be made about Pacific Ethanol. The significance of course is that 20 cents is about the swing that ethanol prices took in the last week. Read more

Aug 20

6 Comments

Week 163: Knowing when you are not at an advantage

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

Note that this update is as of Friday, August 15th. I have been a few days delinquent in getting it out.

I have strayed from my bread my butter of late, away from the tiny micro-caps that pass everyone else by and into the world of still small but not so obscure caps. These are stocks like Air Canada, AerCap and Bellatrix among others, still far from being large caps, but big enough to receive the attention of analysts and funds.

I am not so sure of my own advantage with these stocks. I may be overstepping my own abilities to think that I can see something here the market is not. I am under no misconceptions about my research. There is simply no way that I, as an individual investor with a couple of hours of free time every day, can match the depth and scope of the research that the institutions have. Read more

Aug 18

4 Comments

I added MGP Ingredients because their ingredients are primarily corn and wheat

Sometimes you latch on to a good idea but can’t find a stock that fits it. That’s what happened to me as I scoured through 10-K’s looking for a way to play the fall in corn, wheat and bean prices.

I spent about a week looking and not having much luck. Fortunately one of my twitter acquaintances came to the rescue, as @17thStrCap introduced me to MGP Ingredients (MGPI).

The Business

MGP Ingredients looks like a very good way to bet on lower grain prices. The company operates three businesses, all of which stand to benefit from the decline in the grains:

Distillery Products: via plants in Atchison Kansas and Lawrensburg, Indiana, corn, barley and rye are turned into beverage alcohol and industrial food grade alcohol. The residue from the process is sold as distillers feed. A small amount of fuel grade alcohol (not ethanol) is also produced
Ingredient Solutions: specialty and commodity wheat starches and wheat proteins are produced from wheat flour
Illinois Corn Processing (ICP): a 30% ownership in an ethanol plant in Pekins Illinois that produces around 90 million gallons of ethanol per year. SEACOR owns the other 70% of the plant

Aug 12

2 Comments

More Quarterly Results: Sherritt Thesis Intact

I’ve owned Sherritt International since January, when I posted about the idea here. The timing of my stock purchase coincided with the start of the Indonesian export ban on ferrous nickel and nickel in pig iron. I bought Sherritt throughout the low to the mid $3’s (my average cost is $3.48) and did pretty well on with it until the last couple of weeks when the stock has dropped back to the $4 range.

About half of that drop occurred after the release of the second quarter results. The stock pulled back because nickel production from the Moa joint venture was a bit weak in the first half and because full year guidance for the Ambatovy joint venture was reduced (from the range of 44,000-50,000 tonnes to 37,000 – 41,000 tonnes). The Cuban oil business saw production in-line with what I had expected and the company has recently signed an extension on its oil production sharing contract with the Cuban government and expects to expand that agreement to include new exploration targets.

The Ambatovy Ramp

The slow ramp at Ambatovy comes as no surprise. Its been slowly ramping for almost two years now. The mine has seen one hiccup after another. Yet there is progress being made towards positive cash flow. By the first quarter of 2015 Sherritt is expecting the mine to operate at 90% capacity (its currently in the mid-70’s) and when it does cash costs are expected to drop to the $3-$5 per pound range. Read more