Betting against the cryptocurrency bubble via AMD

The cryptocurrency craze has infected the real world economy, driving up the prices of GPUs (graphics chips used for playing 3-D computer games that are also really good at crypto calculations).  Mining Ethereum with GPUs has become an increasingly profitable endeavour largely because the price of Ethereum went up about 170 times from $8.24 at the beginning of 2017 to a peak of around $1400.  Mid and high-end GPUs are selling out everywhere, retailing for 2 to 3 times their suggested retail price.  PC Part Picker has some good data on market pricing of GPUs such as the Radeon RX 570.

Note that computer hardware normally depreciates over time, roughly halving in price every 1.5 to 2 years due to Moore’s Law.  Instead of depreciating, most GPUs have appreciated wildly thanks to rising Ethereum prices.

If the crypto mining market collapses (due to a broad collapse in cryptocurrency prices), I am willing to speculate that AMD’s valuation would better reflects its difficulties in generating profits.  Historically AMD has never been a particularly profitable company, losing $7.82B of the $8.34B in capital raised.  In YE2017 AMD earned $62M before taxes, buoyed by aggressive accounting (perhaps $40M-97M+?) and unusually high GPU demand (perhaps a few hundred million?).  If AMD returns to its money-losing ways, its shares ought to trade closer to its $0.611B book value (plus the value of its x86 license) rather than its current $10.83B market cap.

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Some ways to short Bitcoin

The price of Bitcoin has fallen significantly from its peak… perhaps foreshadowing a quick collapse.  Perhaps short positions in Bitcoin will work out quickly.  But who knows… short positions may turn out to be extremely dangerous as Bitcoin may skyrocket even more.  Here are some quick notes…

For the image above, the columns are:

1. Ticker
2. Green = shortable, dark green = no borrow, red = Interactive Brokers won’t let you short it.
3. Borrow rate (retail rates).

Pretium could disclose what happened to their VP Operations

(*I don’t think that this is material to the Pretium thesis.)

On Nov 11, 2017, Pretium issued a press release announcing the promotion of David (Dave) Prins to Vice President, Operations (EDGAR, Marketwired).  Roughly a month later (sometime around Dec 19, 2017) Pretium decided to remove that press release from their website.  The workBC.ca website has a job posting dated a few days later (Dec 22, 2017) for an operations vice-president for Pretium that would start “as soon as possible”.

Is David Prins being demoted?  Was he fired?  Why is he being removed from his position?  If it’s material, Pretium should disclose instead of trying to rewrite history by deleting webpages from the company website.  (Granted, I don’t think that this is a big deal relative to Pretium’s other disclosure issues such as the monthly production reports to some but not all shareholders, Strathcona’s reasons for resigning, etc.)

EDIT (1/8/2018): So I think this is the answer… on Dec. 19, 2017, the Pretium management page changed Prins’ title from “Vice President, Operations” back to “Project Director, Brucejack Mine”.

CNIT’s market cap jumped to $81M

For those of you interested in Chinese reverse mergers… CNIT’s share price jumped by around two-thirds today.

Back in 2013 and 2015, I wrote about the company.  In 2015, CNIT bought a company called Biznest.  Apparently they did not own Biznest already… despite CNIT email addresses showing up on Biznest’s domain registration and despite having the CNIT logo on Biznest’s website.

*Disclosure:  I am short CNIT.

RH has some weird loans

The latest Restoration Hardware 10-Q discloses 2 unusual loans.  The first loan is a $14M promissory note “secured by the Company’s aircraft”.

1. The collateralization of the loan is unusual.  I could not find FAA registration records that would suggest that there are any airplanes currently backing this loan.
2. Secondly, it’s unclear if the interest rate is attractive for the lender.  The statement of cash flows and contractual obligations in the Q2 2017 10-Q imply that the lender will receive $14.0M back ($0.117M plus $13.883M) by 2022 or later.  On the face of it, it seems that this loan has a term of over 4 years and a cash interest rate of 0% (!!).  Now perhaps I am wrong about the terms of this loan as the 10-Q does not disclose many details on the note (e.g. effective interest rate, non-cash components, etc.).
3. Similarly, there is a $20M “equipment security” note that also seems to have a cash interest rate of 0%.

It is a little weird that RH was able to find a party willing to lend money in such an unusual manner.

Unfortunately, I actually don’t know what’s going on… perhaps my readers can figure this one out.

The China hustle lives on

There are reasons as to why Chinese stocks on non-Chinese exchanges have been a problem in the past:

1. The VIE structure used for many China stocks is dubious.
2. China is an easily-marketable theme that attracted the pump and dump industry.
3. No repercussions for egregious accounting fraud.

Have investors learned their lesson?  Apparently not!  More Chinese stocks with VIE structures are being IPOed.  This is despite the VIE structure becoming even more dubious.  China Law Blog has an excellent post explaining why the VIE (should have) died on January 19, 2015.  Go read it.

Draft makes clear that the State Council understands how VIEs work and that their sole function is to evade the requirements of Chinese law. The Draft makes clear that such evasion is illegal and will be prohibited upon the effective date of the new investment law.

I hope that the investors who buy into the newly-minted Chinese VIEs lend their shares out.

Pretium: the feasibility study is not playing out

(This is a follow-up to the post about Pretium’s disappointing grades.)

Pretium’s current production should exceed 13.1g/t, yet it has been 4.660g/t 5.1g/t so far.  (EDIT 11/22/2017: fixed the calculation, which came from this post.)

According to the latest feasibility study (filed June 30, 2014), Pretium should have a stockpile of 81kt of material grading 13.6g/t gold.  The feasibility study anticipated that this stockpile would be processed in years 2 and 3 of the mine’s production phase while higher grade material would be processed first.  This is because conventional mine engineering calls for maximizing the Net Present Value of the project by mining and processing the most profitable ores first (where possible).  So, current production should exceed the stockpile head grades of 13.6g/t.  If we assume recoveries of 96.6% on 13.6g/t gold, then we would expect a hypothetical 81kt stockpile of 13.6g/t gold to yield 13.1g/t.  Production results so far indicate grades of 4.660g/t 5.1g/t for June and July (after processing losses), well below the 13.1g/t level.

It seems inappropriate for Pretium to continue to cite its feasibility study in its investor presentations (they are all most of them are on Slideshare) when current production differs so materially from what the feasibility study anticipated.