Monday, June 09, 2008

9 Reasons to Short FirstFed Financial. Stated income.

The crack shows that prompt deterioration in the company's allowance portfolio disclosed in the from the start part continued into April. Most notably, non-performing assets as a cut of come to assets increased more than 10% in just 30 days, from 6.20% to 6.85%. With Neg-Am recasts and an damned chicken macroeconomic environment, especially in California, I decide no mind why this bent won't hold up, if not get considerably worse, for the calm of the year.



If this correspondence continues to further at 0.65% per month for the idleness of the year, by December 31st the followers will have non-performing assets of 12.05%. If the partnership is still in business by then, 2009 can only be a grimmer year as option-ARM resets will come in even larger volumes next year. (8) Most loans were brokered, not in-house.

non performing assets






While FED now has about 34 branches, it was pretty much a "virtual" mortgage bank during the blister when it extended most of its loans, lending spondulicks via wholesale mortgage agent referrals rather than originating them in-house. The done two years have shown the feeble-mindedness in this strategy: mortgage brokers beg to expand their own commissions, not the cover of the banks they transfer loans to. It also means performers advance officers generally don't loaded in the communities where they are loaning money, making mortgage deceit and plain-and-simple unwise lending decisions much more common. Since the brokered non-prime residential lending enterprise is now noticeably dead, and has been so for nearly a year, the proprietorship has responded by infuriating to augment into retail stem banking, commercial lending, and high-quality (and lewd margin) conforming accommodation lending.



In doing so, it is spending what much of what remains of its objectivity pad on entering a savagely competitive market that is rapidly shrinking as California enters a span of anti economic growth and the volume of mortgage lending declines with domicile sales, which are now much less than half the expanse of peak months. (9) Phantom cess promote accounting may be overstating the company's equity. The company's most new annual put out showed a net tax talent of $80.7 million, and in the first pity of 2008 the company took an additional $50.3 million proceeds c scot benefit, suggesting this figure is now about $151 million, or more than one lodge of the equity that it is now reporting.



Current trends suggest that by June 30th this acknowledge will eclipse $200 million, even while equitableness decreases by another $60-90 million, leaving more than 40% of the company's rules value consisting of nothing more than a "tax asset" that is silly unless the flock has sufficient other capital to generate income for these assessment loss assets to offset. The cast admits as much in its annual report, noting that the tariff benefit is contingent on that company's judgment that "it is more suitable than not [the rate benefit] will be realized due to the persistence of loss carry-backs and expected time to come earnings." I don't foresee these future earnings to materialize, portrayal this large asset entirely worthless.



Valuation Issues You can't measure against FED against its peers based on P/E ratios since FED and its peers all have cancelling earnings. Price-to-book and price-to-sales ratios, however, are c fruitful metrics. Like its peers, the house currently trades for well below stated volume value because successful losses are changeless to wipe out more and more of that book value as adjust progresses, and because, as discussed above, much of this register value consists of suspect and very illiquid income octroi benefit.



Nonetheless, FED seems overvalued based on these metrics when compared with other troubled mortgage money stocks. FED in my appraisal is most comparable to two other banks with adipose non-prime and adversarial amortization credit portfolios in rickety markets, Downey Savings () and Bank United (). DSL trades at 0.15 to hard-cover and 0.39 to sales, while BKUNA is at 0.17 to regulations and 0.4 to sales.



FED's customary expense looks completely ludicrous by comparison, trading at 0.35 to earmark and 0.84 to sales. FED would destitution to fall another 50% from current prices to arrive at the same relative valuation of these two negative-amortization peers. FED's ratios are also truly richer than Countrywide () and National City ().



Timings Issues I mark about half half of the company's resetting neg-am loans will go into default. The crowd modestly does not have the right-mindedness to absorb the losses here. There is nothing the Federal Reserve can do to bail the visitor out either, since the company's proclamation is not liquidity, but solvency. To put it bluntly, the conjunction of these exceedingly chancy and low-quality loans, the weakening husbandry in California, vision pressurize assets, and the company's scale of leverage leads me to conclude that the bank will sink and be infatuated over by the FDIC, possibly in less than 12 months, and almost certainly within 24, an outcome that would wipe out shareholders and stir the stock to 0.



FED is so heavily shorted goodness now that it is dispassionate for brokers to find shares available, in reality I in person have a second brokerage account only because this stockjobber has been very good at finding me shares to trade of hard-to-short stocks. I have no guess what will happen to the stock in the short-term, but I am certain in a strategy of shorting the stock as shares become available, and then holding the establish for at least 12 months as the run-of-the-mill declines. This master plan has served me well in my pint-sized sales of other real estate underwrite companies such as TMA, DSL, BKUNA, NCT, and FBR, all of which have suffered mighty declines in price, even while enjoying the additional short-term entertain rally.




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