Inergy, L.P. Message Board

"you could buy another 500 shares now at $4.50"
"Someone else on this board (davehiers) estimates the 8 distributions left to be worth $3.60 which would be another $1080 in distributions. If he is right then you would only be down about $100 at trust termination if you hold til the end"

So, by buying more units at $4.50 and collecting $3.60 in future distributions before the units end up worthless this guy figures you can cut your losses. No wonder so many people lose money here with math like that.

Not a date, but they do give a very exact statement on the total amount of oil equivalent which will be produced by the trust. And it is that number, not the time, which determines how much more the trust has left to pay out. The time taken is pretty irrelevant, in fact the shorter the better as most people prefer to get their money sooner rather than later.

and the implication is that the yield keeps getting higher and higher (assuming the price drops to reflect the ever shrinking future life). Next year we should have a 'yield' well over 50%.

Although I am one of those who have pointed out most of this for a long time, I'm not really convinced about the decline/depletion rate you mention. I know they make a general statement about depletion in each announcement to cover themselves, but I don't think there has been any clear evidence of depletion affecting the distributions so far. The last distribution was lower as expoected due to hedges coming off - that is a one time event. The previous distribution was a bit lower than expected due to higher than usual costs.

Now that the hedges are off, I think it's quite possible that production stays pretty steady until the trust termination and so distributions vary with oil and NG prices along with costs (if NG prices spike the distribution could even rise). So we may get steady distributions for the next 8 quarters and then they just stop. Even so, 45c times 8 is still only about $3.50 in future distributions even without any decline. And, as has been often pointed out, the termination condition is a fixed production limit, so it really doesn't make much difference whether you get a larger number of smaller distributions or a smaller number of larger ones. Anyway, my guess is that distributions hold up in the .40s (subject to oil and NG price changes) until they just stop in 8 or so quarters.

Over the next couple of years, I guarantee you will see the 3s, then the 2s, the 1s and even the 0s. It's an absolute certainty.

Well I and other people on this board had been warning of this for the last 2 years, so yuo evidently didn't get as far as reading the discussion here. It's been a continual topic of discussion here for at least 2 years.
As for not being a stock, well if you even read one press release by the company you would have understood that. Heck, if you even looked at the name of the security you could have known it. I don't know what research you did, but P/E is irrelevant on a security like this and as you said above the apparent 'dividend' was too good to be true. Your research was not research at all because you never got as far as finding out what the security even represents. Did you realize that it is not a company at all? There are no management, no employees, no buildings, nothing at all? Just a stream of dividends which will not even sum to anything like the price you paid and then the whole thing disolves with no remaining value. If you bought at $11, you were no doubt buying blindly after the first big crash a year ago, without heeding any of the warnings that there were more crashes to follow. I bet you do far more research when buying a TV for a few hundred dollars, even when spending $10 on a CD, than you did for the $3000 you 'invested' here.

Actually, it does.
If you compare the closing price of the day before ex-div date with the open price on ex-div date, you will find that the open is lower than the previous close by an amount approximate to the distribution.
Often the chart software takes this into account and so does not show you the discontinuity, but if you look at actual close and open historical prices, you see the effect.

"The price is not automatically reduced by the amount of the distribution. When deciding how well the trust has done on the day it's ex distribution you have to include the amount of the distribution."

Seems like you wrote two sentences directly contradicting each other. Your first sentence disagrees with me (and is wrong). You second sentence while vaguely worded implies you agree with me after all and it directly contradicts your first sentence.

You really have to ask?
It's been almost the only topic of discussion on the WHX board for about the last 2 years.

I think more or less you are on the right track.
You didn't take into account the box 1-11 income on the K-1s you received in previous years. Since you already paid tax on that income in previous years (or should have), your basis will be adjusted upwards so that you don't pay that tax again. (For other MLPs like pipes or midstreams the box 1-11 income is often negative and so the basis gets adjusted downwards, however PSE tended to produce significant positive box 1 income). So this may reduce the tax a little from your estimate.
Even then, this is an approximation and we won't know the exact amount till we see the Sales schedule in the 2013 K-1.

The dumbest thing is that there is a huge MLP conference this week in Connecticut.
All the big institutional MLP investors who might be buyers are out at the conference.
Why dump this huge number of units on a week when the big buyers are all out of town?

depends if you need the money to pay rent, buy food, etc.

It's not even a stock, so the better question is why did you not even research what this is before you 'loaded up' on it.
Hope you learned a lesson.

"an extension is possible and welcome and benefit to this stock and share holders"

why would you believe that when the trust says otherwise in every single press release they issue?

They have loaned out my trust units on quite a few occasions (and they always do issue a PIL Gross Up to cover the difference in tax between substitute payments (ordinary income) and dividend rates.

However they have never loaned MLP units of which my account holds a lot more than trust units. So either they have a policy not to loan out MLPs because of the resulting complications, or there is not so much demand for borrowing MLP units to short (also quite possible since MLPs overall have been consistent price risers in recent years).

My biggest problem is that the folks who prepare the 1099s for them don't seem to be able to handle substitute payments on trusts. As mentioned I always got a substitute payment from Etrade when the trust units were loaned across ex-dates. And those substitute payments were correctly noted on 1099-MISC. However the trusts distributions in the 1099 seem to have been prepared from the tax booklet without consideration of the fact that I received a substitute payment instead of a distribution. So the 1099 showed me as having received a substitute payment IN ADDITION to a regular trust distribution. This is still unresolved and I'm still waiting for an updated 1099. I filed my taxes using the correct information and a note to the IRS that the 1099 is wrong, however I'm still waiting on a corrected 1099 to match what I filed.

The price of all securities is reduced by the amount of the dividend/distribution on ex-div date.
It makes sense to me - the company/trust/MLP/whatever had that amount of cash the day before and today no longer has it. Therefore the value of the company is lower by that amount. I don't see that this changes just because a trust is a depleting asset while an MLP or corporation is not necessarily so. It still has that much less cash than it did the day before.

Are these all rhetorical questions?
It seems you provided the answer for every question you posed (and your conclusions are hand to argue with).