NCIB restartedGood to see the NCIB starting up again.
Aside from the obvious benefit to all shareholders in buying back shares at half the NAV per share, I'd say it's important also in a symbolic way, as follows.
The fact that Urbana continues to trade at half NAV per share . . . I wouldn't quite call this an injustice. But there's an aspect to it that should make people at the top, including independent directors, uncomfortable. Bear with me.
If some Joe (Joanna) Shareholder gets into a spot and has to sell, well, he/she will get whatever the market dictates, which currently is roughly half NAV per share.
But suppose, hypothetically, the Caldwell family were to suffer some sort of horrific misfortune or financial reversal such that they had to sell their Urbana holdings. Well, they would not be selling at 1/2 the NAV per share. They would organize things so they'd get something very close to NAV per share. Could be a company sale, or maybe turning the public company side of Urbana into an ETF.
The point is that the Caldwell family would get something like $7 whereas Joe Shareholder, facing retirement expenses, will only get $3.50, if that.
Now this is all in a hypothetical frame. I'm sure the Caldwell balance sheet is just fine and there's no need for them to contemplate selling.
Still, it should make all the directors uncomfortable.
An obvious response would be that this kind of situation could exist at any company where the stock price is lower than the per share value of the underlying assets. That's true, though I'd say this is a particularly dramatic instance of this sort of thing.
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So . . . back to the NCIB. Pushing hard on the NCIB stands out as the primary thing management can do to show they really care about the little shareholders--perhaps more so even than buying good stocks (though that is, of course, important too).
Unlike with buying good stocks, buying under the NCIB increases the NAV per share instantly. Also, even though we may seem never to get to this point, logic dictates that aggressive buying under the NCIB must ultimately shrink the discount to NAV per share.
Finally, working the NCIB aggressively speaks well of Urbana management because it shows them willing to accept the slow erosion of the management fee that goes with it--though they get an offset, of course, in the benefit to their own holdings due to the higher NAV per share.
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I know there are other Canadian closed-end funds that also sell at big discounts to NAV per share where the bosses simply refuse to implement a NCIB. To my mind that is just shameful.