Liberty Media has announced a stock spin-off whose rationale isn’t all that clear to me. For anyone who hasn’t heeded warnings to stay clear of businesses that you can’t understand and Enron wasn’t reason enough for you, recent events should have provided enough confirmation.

Now this certainly does not mean that there isn’t a great opportunity buried in there somewhere and I intend to take some time to understand better what they are doing . . . if I can. And, just because I don’t get it doesn’t mean that it isn’t a good thing. It just means that I’d better watch out because if I don’t understand how it works, how am I ever going to tell when it is showing signs of ceasing to work in time to get out?

However, for now, it just isn’t clear if, how, and for whom this move is going to increase value. Is this another one of those bad times announcements that we have been seeing lately or is it a good idea? Don’t know, but there are so many imponderables and cross currents in this market right now that this one looks like one to watch perhaps, but most likely to just walk on by.

It’s official!  Potlatch has announced that its stock spin-off of Clearwater Paper (CLW) will take place in the form of a stock dividend to shareholders on December 16, 2008.

Though there have been opinions expressed that this is not the best time for such action, Potlatch has decided that all the pieces are in place and they are going ahead.

Who knows?  This may be the perfect time.  We’ll just have to dig through the documents filed with the SEC and watch the price and volume action of both stocks now to figure out if and when it may be a good buy.

For me at least, with the market trending down and so many unknowns still haunting us, no matter how good this one looks it is likely to go onto the watch list and stay there for a while.

If spin-off stock investing is as good an idea as several studies and books would have us believe, then why would an ETF that invested in stock spin-off situations be doing badly?  Has spinoff investing had its day in the sun and now is old news?  Or, might it be something else going on?

A recent article on the Claymore/Clear Spin-Off (CSD) ETF in the Toronto Globe and Mail suggests that the popularity of the approach itself is the likely culprit in the ETF’s declining value.  Could be true, but no one ever thought that successful investing or trading was really that simple, did they?

Each of my sons has gone through stages of having figured out “all you’ve got to do to make money”.  It usually starts with something like figuring out the right kind of letter to write Bill Gates and then meanders closer to reality on successive trials.  Buying spin-offs and waiting the amount of time that the historical studies have determined to be ideal seems a lot like writing the letter to Bill Gates or at least like waiting for a good stock that has gone way down and buying it and then just waiting.  I’ve come to think of it as the “all you’ve got to do” wish.

I have tried to be careful to portray following the activity in stock spin-offs as a way to populate a watchlist, implying that choosing from that watchlist what you will buy when depends on your own system.  Doing anything else is crazy.

If you don’t think so, just look at the news about spin-offs over the last few months.  Most often it has looked more like a way of getting toxic waste off the balance sheet than structuring a win-win for shareholders and management.

Now to be fair, the economic situation has made this the case and a number of them haven’t happened in the end, but it has highlighted the simple fact that the spin-off may or may not be in your or my best interests.  Deciding whether it is or not remains up to us.

Writing during the Great Depression, Gerald Loeb said that you are looking for a move and a reason.  Either one alone is not sufficient (unless you’re a skilled scalper, then maybe just the move will suffice, but for the rest of us having both is the better part of valor.)

The spin-off is the reason, but it never seems to hurt to require the move also.

Tags: ETF, spin-off stock, stock spin-off