Tag Archives: AIBYY

Exited the Allied Irish Banks ADR short

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Almost a day trader! A little more than one day after initiating my short on the Allied Irish Banks ADR I already exited my position for a 7.3% gain. The ADR is still slightly overvalued, but since it’s probably going to take one or two months before the ADR is cancelled and you have to pay a 5% borrow fee to short the stock I thought it was a good moment to exit.

What is interesting – and possibly totally bizarre – is that apparently the depository is still allowing holders of the ADR to convert. That this is going on can easily be checked when you look at the 2012 and 2013 annual reports: the number of ADRs has declined from 27 million to 26.5 million during this period. The more interesting question is what people receive when they do convert. Logically you would expect that they get a pro rata share of the underlying cash and equity. But if the comments on this SA article can be believed you can actually still receive the 10 underlying shares. Since the shares are now trading at a higher price than the VWAP price since the depository started liquidating its position this would mean that a lot of value could be extracted from the ADRs at the expense of those who don’t convert. Unfortunately I don’t have a broker that could try this conversion.

Disclosure

No position in ALBYY anymore

Shorting the Allied Irish Banks ADR (AIBYY)

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Allied Irish Banks (AIB.IR) was nationalized in 2011 by the Irish government and it now owns 99.8% of the outstanding shares while the remaining 0.2% remains in public hands. At the time of the nationalization 25% of these shares were traded in New York as ADRs (AIBYY), and because of this development the depository decided that it would cancel the ADRs. As a result they have started to sell the shares underlying the ADRs on the Irish stock exchange, and when the selling is done the cash will be returned to ADR holders.

Because the depository owned a big part of the outstanding float the sale process is taking some time. They have started selling shares on April 10, 2012 and at the end of 2013 they managed to sell 65% of their shares. Because of this the ADRs now consist mostly of cash instead of Allied Irish Banks equity, but despite this fact they trade as if this is not the case.

AIBYY versus ALBK:ID

A Seeking Alpha article alerted me to this opportunity this weekend, and it’s worth a read to get some more background information. Unfortunately the methodology employed by the author to calculate the value of the ADR, and the time remaining before redemption is seriously flawed because he uses a time-weighted average price to estimate the average selling price instead of a more realistic volume-weighted average price.

Valuation

We first need to figure out how much shares have been sold. We know what the number was at the end of 2013, but we don’t know how much has been sold so far this year. I will assume that the depository continues to account for the same percentage of the market in 2014 as it did in the previous years. I think this is a good assumption because in these kind of transactions a broker usually gets an instruction to sell everything as fast as possible, but with a threshold based on the average traded volume to prevent a too big market impact.

  • Total trading volume from 10 April, 2012 to 31 December, 2013: 597 million shares
  • Number of outstanding ADRs: 26.5 million (underlying shares: 265 million)
  • Number of shares sold in this period 172 million (3.5 shares remaining per ADR at the end of 2013 => 6.5 * 26.5 million)
  • This means that the depository accounted for 28.88% of daily volume in 2012/2013.
  • Volume in 2014 has been 238 million shares
  • This means that it could have sold another 68.8 million shares
  • This implies that just 0.91 shares are remaining per ADS
  • The volume weighted average price between 10 April 2012 and today is €0.0993
  • The current share price is €0.12
  • The EUR/USD exchange rate is 1.3875

We now know everything that we need to know to value the ADRs: It’s simply the number of shares sold so far times the average price plus the value of the remaining shares. This gives the following result:

(9.09 * €0.0993 + 0.91 * €0.12) * 1.3875 = $1.4032

With the ADR trading at $1.61 it is significantly overvalued, especially considering the fact that there will be a $0.05 fee when the ADR is cancelled. With less than one share per ADR remaining there is also a clear catalyst for this short. At the elevated trading volume that we have witnessed so far in 2014 selling the remaining 24 million shares should take less than two months. A good thing considering that we do need to pay a 5% borrow fee for the privilege of shorting the stock.

Conclusion

Shorting AIBYY seems a relative save way to generate a return that will be uncorrelated with the market in a short period. There is of course uncertainty with regards to the exact value of the assets underlying the ADR and there are also other risks related to shorting such as facing a buy-in notice or just seeing the borrow fee getting increasingly expensive. But at current prices I think you are paid more than plenty to take these risks.

Disclosure

Author is short AIBYY