Mortgage rates moved up this week, with the average conforming 30-year fixed mortgage rate rising to 4.77 percent, according to Bankrate.com's weekly national survey. The average 30-year fixed mortgage has an average of 0.41 discount and origination points.
(This post is part of our series on tracking hedge fund portfolios. If you're unfamiliar with tracking investments they disclose via SEC filings, check out our series preface on hedge fund 13F filings.)
Next up is Philippe Laffont's hedge fund Coatue Management. The fund was founded in 1999 and specifically focuses on technology, media and telecom. Coatue employs a typical long/short strategy and likes to avoid big directional bets. Interestingly, one of Laffont's mantras is to "dare to be different." This means that he likes to focus on stocks not necessarily right in the spotlight. Laffont...
This is the third quarter 2009 edition of our hedge fund portfolio tracking series. If you're unfamiliar with tracking hedge fund movements or SEC filings, check out our series preface on hedge fund 13F filings.
Next up in our series is Brett Barakett's hedge fund Tremblant Capital. The name Barakett might ring a bell because his brother Timothy used to run fellow hedge fund Atticus Capital (which recently announced it will be shutting down). So while Timothy may have stepped away from the hedge fund game, Brett is still going at it. Before founding...
Senator Charles "Deerslayer" Schumer is at it again, this time taking aim not at Bambi but at banks charging ATM fees that the Democrat from New York judges to be "onerous." Said the senator, in demanding that the chairman of the Federal Reserve review the issue:
ATM fees are getting so onerous that the costs of accessing your money easily outweighs the convenience factor. These mounting fees demand a response from federal regulators. Consumers are bearing an unfair burden in maintaining the health of banks' balance sheets.
I was therefore interested to read an article that appeared in last week’s issue of the Economist claiming that private equity might be on the rebound (see The Barbarians are Coming, Again). According to the Economist:
So far it has been a spectacular earnings season for the bulls, as the average stock reporting earnings has risen an average of 1.59% on the first trading day following its report. The market itself is up about 13% this earnings season as well. Below we highlight the individual stocks in the S&P 1500 that have seen the biggest 1-day gains and losses following their earnings reports this season. Trueblue (TBI) has had the best response to earnings so...
Consensus was estimating $55 million in EBITDA for Bankrate in 2009 but management stated that they would likely miss that estimate. RATE reported $22.5 million in EBITDA in the first half of 2009. I assume they could match that run rate and produce $45 million in...
Fortune Small Business is out with its annual FSB 100 list, which measures the fastest growing (by revenues) publicly-traded small business listed on U.S. exchanges. As always, it is both fascinating and frustrating.
Though the FSB 100 has many intriguing prospects, it is horribly laid out and almost impossible to assess in the format provided. For example, there’s no way on the FSB site to get a handle on the market cap of the list except one company at a time. It's another instance of a layout designed to generate unnecessary page...
One of the favorite screening methods of contrarian investors is to search for companies whose stock prices have underperformed the broader market. In the screen presented below, we highlight stocks that have underperformed year-to-date in 2009 (through July 10th).
In order to minimize the occurrence of companies in financial distress as well as those posting large losses, we limit the screen to companies with no net debt and profitable operations (either based on the trailing twelve months or analyst estimates of the next twelve months). This narrowing of the field should result in a superior list...
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