Pinky, the more astute of the two eponymous stars of the long-running documentary on genetically engineered mice, once opined that “if they called them Sad Meals, no one would buy them.”  So true.

Wall Street “Happy Meals”

Recently, the Wall Street Journal has been writing about a convertible bond offering technique, known as the Happy Meal, which has come under SEC scrutiny.   It shows what a colorful, inventive but cold-blooded place Wall Street is.

The Happy Meal is/was an offering of convertible bonds, in which the issuer arranged at the same time to lend large amounts of company stock to buyers so that they could sell the stock short.

Got that?  …probably not.

So let’s pull the pieces apart.

1.  A company issues convertible bonds.

Convertibles are bonds with a provision that allows them be exchanged for a specified number of shares of the issuer’s common stock under certain circumstances.  Until they are converted, the buyer collects interest income.

Generally speaking, a company would rather issue common stock or straight bonds, or borrow from a bank.  The fact that the firm is issuing a convertible almost always means these other, more attractive, avenues aren’t open to it.

2.  In the case of the Happy Meal companies, the convertible form wasn’t inducement enough.

Conventional long-only buyers turned thumbs down.  Who would these buyers usually be?  …specialized convertible securities funds, or bond funds looking to boost their returns by holding equities.  They avoid violating the letter of their investment mandates by buying stocks wrapped up in a bond package.

3.  That left hedge funds willing to do convertible arbitrage.

That is  to say, the hedge funds would simultaneously buy the convertibles and sell the stock short.  Exactly what a given hedge fund would do varies.  One technique would be to sell short enough stock to eliminate entirely any effect of stock movements (up or down) on the position–leaving the hedge fund to collect a stream of interest payments.  But a fund could also shade its holding to the positive or negative side.

4.  There’s more.

To sell stock short, you typically borrow the stock from a third party who owns it, using a brokerage firm as a middleman.  In the Happy Meal case, that wasn’t possible–either because there weren’t enough holders of the stock or because holders were reluctant to lend.  So the issuing company itself lent the stock that hedge funds dumped out into the market right after the offering.

What a mess!  A company would have to be really starved for cash, in my view, to contemplate serving up a Happy Meal.

not so appetizing any more

Companies have begun to turn sour on Happy Meals.  Two reasons:

–enough Happy Meal issuers have suffered significant stock price declines after their offerings that simply announcing a Happy Meal issue is now enough to make the common stock swoon, and

–according to the WSJ, a retired investment banker has turned whistleblower and reported the Happy Meal to the SEC.

His claim? …that issuers and their brokers are negligent by failing to disclose in the offering documents  how aggressive post-issue short selling is likely to be.

A concerned citizen, yes.  But one who also stands to collect a bounty under the Dodd Frank Act if the SEC investigation leads to significant fines.  In other words, a vintage Wall Streeter.