The company warrant of Affin Holdings (AFFIN-WC) staged an over 50% rally yesterday with the mother share only up 4 sen or 1.5%.

AFFIN-WC is one of the company warrants expiring this year which is out-of-money.  Nevertheless, the exercise price of this warrant is only about 11% more than the current share price.  There is much more liquidity at AFFIN-WC than Affin mother shares.  Given the speculation on Affin Holdings being one of the merger candidates in the consolidation of Malaysia’s banking landscape.  It is not unreasonable to assume a potential acquirer or a “vulture” fund can be collecting the warrant.  The “acquirer” or “vulture” fund should be able to collect much more warrants and exercise it into shares later on than buying mother shares directly from the market.  Even though they may be paying some premium, the possibility of being able to accumulate a much larger stake than collecting the underlying share alone can make the exercise feasible.

Nevertheless, the theory of a party accumulating out-of-money warrants at very cheap absolute price and converting it into ordinary shares to build a meaningful stake in the company may not be applicable in the case of AFFIN-WC as the total number of AFFIC-WC outstanding is only 153.77 million vs. Affin mother share total number of shares of some 1.5 billion.  Full exercise of all warrants only represents slightly over 9% of enlarged share capital.

However, if the total warrants outstanding is about 50% of number of shares outstanding, the story may be different.  There may be some warrants in the list of expiring warrants below that may fit into the above description.  Assuming the underlying company is in good financial health and may be under appreciated by the investment community, a “vulture” fund can come in via buying and exercising the warrants and “threaten” the existing major shareholders if they are not careful.

If punters can spot these types of opportunities, achieving gain like AFFIN-WC is not really out of the question.  They just have to do some home work.

The following is a table that sorts company warrants expiring this year by expiry date follow by gearing and premium.  It should help you to determine which are the warrants that can potentially make you good money if you are willing to take the risk.

 

Alan Voon
Warrants Specialist