Trader’s Narrative

Way back in May 2008 I wondered: Will Sprott IPO Mark Top Of Commodity Bull Market?

Yes. Yes, it did.

For those unfamiliar with them, Sprott is a boutique asset manager in Canada. The IPO of Sprott was an accurate tell for the commodity market top because of the firms expertise in and their cheerleading of the commodities markets.

You had to ask yourself this simple question: If they believed that the bull market in commodities would continue, why would they sell such a highly leveraged asset as their equity?

The dashed line is the CRB Index, the most popular measure of the commodities markets and the solid line is the price of Sprott (SII) on the Toronto Stock Exchange. It closed the first day at around $10 a share but fell immediately. It approached that high again to put in a double top and started to fall in lock step with the CRB index. In mid-November 2008 it traded below $2.50 - less than a 25% of the IPO initial price.

Another case of watching what others are doing and not necessarily saying. In general, you want to always be wary of whatever Wall St. sells. They aren’t doing it out of the kindness of their hearts or to be charitable.

This market ‘tell’ was one of the reasons why I was bearish on commodities and for the most part it was the right posture. The only exception lately of course has been the gold market which has surprisingly revived to once again gain the $1000/oz. level. I’ll come back to the gold market another time since it deserves more attention.

Way back at the end of April 2008 I mentioned that I was skeptical about the ability of Canadian fertilizer giant, Potash (POT) to be able to continue the heady pace it had kept for the past few years. I compared the stock rise of Potash to Nortel during the tech bubble and said:

The problem is that right now it is priced for utter perfection. And if the world is one thing, it is imperfect. For one, there is no reasonable logic to its valuation.

I also brought up several key metrics which made the valuation of Potash simply unsustainable. Of course this was only a small part of the much larger commodity bull run which has since, also imploded along with the equity markets. At the start of June 2008, just before oil ramped up to $145, I pointed out that the chart for crude oil had all the markings of a bubble. Now oil is trading at ~$78 a barrel - down 46%.

Nevertheless, when I wrote my thoughts on Potash, I received insulting comments - which always confirms my position. If someone has to rely on emotional outbursts to defend their trade position, there is something obviously wrong. Here is what happened:

The other fertilizer companies which I mentioned have fallen even more than Potash. Agrium (AGU) -55% and Mosaic (MOS) -70%.

About 4 months ago I wrote about the Canadian stock markets with a dual message: the Canadian retail investor was panicking and cashing in their mutual fund. According to contrarian analysis, this is a good thing because the less knowledgeable and weaker market participants are usually wrong - especially when they react like a herd.

But I also wrote “Caution, Caution, Caution”, saying that even so, I was worried that the market looked heavy. My reasoning was based on the percentage of stocks above their moving average.

My thinking was that although the sentiment would probably put a floor on the market, things could get a bit dicey. Did they ever!

In this case, it pays to be lucky! I was right in being cautious but wrong in thinking that the market would soon rebound from any weakness. After falling, the index has been wrapped up in a tight trading range for the past two months. To be honest, it shocked me to see it so weak in the aftermath of the July sell off.

I wanted to layout my thinking to illustrate that relying on any one indicator, however sound or logical it may be, is dangerous. Timing the stock market is an extremely difficult thing to do and if you’re going to get lucky, it pays to have many tools in your toolbox.

Yes, this is about #2. At least the chemical equivalent. So let’s get the jokes out of the way first…

Whenever one stock grows enough to represent an inordinately large percentage of the index it belongs to, you know there is some major dislocation going on. And it is about to be corrected.

Right now that would be Potash (POT) the fertilizer company from Saskatchewan, Canada. Potash is now the 2nd largest company on the Toronto Stock Exchange, at $60 billion capitalization. The largest is RIM (RIMM), which along with Potash has been the engine that has propelled the Canadian indexes higher in 2007 and so far in 2008, almost unassailable.

From the bottom of the bear market in early 2003 to recent times, Potash stock has given the lucky few to have ridden it loyally higher, a “20 bagger”:

The problem is that right now it is priced for utter perfection. And if the world is one thing, it is imperfect. For one, there is no reasonable logic to its valuation. We have more than ample reserves of yet to be mined. In fact, according to the International Fertilizer Association (who should know) at the current rate of use, we have enough proven reserves to last us another 300 years.

And strangely enough, inflation adjusted potash prices have continuously and consistently fallen over time. It is only in 2007 that we’ve seen an exception to this with KCI (potassium chloride) prices tripling. This is a response to a similar rise in the price of sulfur and natural gas (raw materials) for potash.

To bring back some perspective to this, consider a research note from Merrill Lynch saying that if we add the capitalization of the 3 large fertilizer companies: Potash, Mosaic (MOS) and Agrium (AGU) we have a value larger than the sum of the value of all potash ever mined and sold in modern history!

During the tech bubble of 2000 many Canadians remember how the TSX index was pulled higher by Nortel (NT) to levels it wouldn’t have attained by its own accord. But Potash’s (POT) meteoric rise makes Nortel’s look pathetic in comparison.

If you were lucky enough (or smart enough) to buy Nortel at the 1998 October bottom - around $75/share - and repeat the miracle of perfect timing again to sell at the top: August 2000 at around $830/share, you would only be boasting a 10 to 11 “bagger”.

If you have been fortunate enough to be long Potash, the good times may be over. Time again to look for what most are ignoring.

It would seem that the stealth uranium bull market is over. After spending the past few years levitating non-stop into the stratosphere, uranium (U₃O₈) prices finally succumbed to gravity in June, topping out around $135/lb.

Since then prices have dropped to $90/lb (not shown on graph above). The effect on uranium stocks has been nothing short of devastating.

The Uranium Participation Units (TSE:U) traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange have dropped from almost $19 to $10. And whereas it used to trade at a premium to uranium spot price (sometimes as high as 50%!), not it is trading below NAV.

The last net asset value was July 31st at $14.04 - the August 31st numbers are still to come but I estimate them to be lower than July’s.

And while before it had bounced off it’s 50 day moving average, now it is below both the 50 day and the long term, 200 day moving average.

So what happened? I have no idea really. But I suspect it has something to do with demand and supply

Also, we had a rare contrarian indicator occur in early summer. At the beginning of May 2007, NYMEX started trading a new futures contract. Here’s what I wrote back then:

Historically, the introduction of a new contract has usually meant an intermediate high in prices…If you’re long uranium or uranium stocks though, we could be in for a rough patch as this is a reliable contrarian indicator.

As you can see on the chart, that coincides almost exactly with the top in Uranium Participation. Uranium itself hovered in thin air territory for another month or so:

I don’t like how most uranium stocks have cratered below their short term and long term moving averages. This sort of damage, especially when wrought over a short period of time isn’t at all conducive to the health of a bull market.

The only good thing I can see on the charts is that they are back at support (as you can see with the chart of Uranium Participation Units above).