I have a short position in Great Panther Silver because it seems like the company does not have strong cash flows.
Market cap: US$156M
Great Panther is listed on both the AMEX/NYSE MKT (symbol: GPL) and the TSX (symbol: GPR).
Cost to borrow: 3.625%
Conn’s originations seem to exceed the amount of money lent to its customers.
In FY2014, Conn’s originations were $1,075M.
It provided $757.2M in in-house financing, including down payments and excluding insurance.
The ratio between originations versus in-house financing was ~142%.
My diagram compares the Static Loss data presented in the Q2 2014 10-Q versus the 2013 10-K. For some reason the numbers are different and I have no idea why. I honestly don’t have any good theories.
(This is not a short writeup where I say what I truly think. I don’t like doing such writeups because I don’t want to get sued.)
In a nutshell, I think that it is worth taking a deep dive into Conn’s lending practices. In my opinion, the 10-Ks and 10-Qs seem to ignore some important ‘nuances’ of Conn’s lending practices.
Search engine optimization is about getting a website to rank higher in search engines. The goal is to increase web traffic without having to pay for ads.
This primer on search engine optimization is relevant to these stocks:
There are subsidies specific to residential solar that aren’t available to other forms of solar. Essentially, homes without solar subsidize the ones with solar by paying higher electricity rates. I don’t think that this is sustainable in the long run. For there to be more residential solar, electricity rates will have to go higher and higher. (Ironically this improves the economics of subsidized residential solar.) At some point, I think that voters will ask for lower electricity bills. Eventually, politicians “ought” to reduce residential solar subsidies.
(The analysis in this post is superficial. I apologize in advance.)
There’s some interesting stuff in the latest 10-K that Avid has filed. While some of these details are good for the short thesis, I still think that there are better shorts out there.
