Buyer’s Remorse
Time flies...we had lost track of this story. But the intrepid Matthew Goldstein has long been on the case.
Durus Manager Gets Hard Time
Scott Sacane, the disgraced hedge fund manager who claimed to have mistakenly accumulated a controlling stake in a tiny biotech company, is going to jail.
A U.S. judge sentenced Sacane on Tuesday to three years in federal prison. Sacane pleaded guilty in December 2005 to charges that he manipulated shares of two small biotech companies, Esperion and Aksys, by failing to disclose that his hedge fund had purchased huge equity stakes in both companies.
Sacane’s sentencing comes nearly four years after his hedge fund, once worth $500 million, belatedly disclosed that it had amassed a 77% ownership stake in Aksys, a dialysis machine manufacturer, and a 33% stake in Esperion, a drug manufacturer.
Sacane initially said the fund “inadvertently” became the biggest shareholder in both companies, and denied doing anything wrong. He never explained, however, why Durus continued to keep buying shares even after cutting agreements with Aksys and Esperion to halt the purchases.
thestreet.com
The names change...but the stories are always the same
“I was just trying to make some money” ---Bunker Hunt
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The content contained in this blog represents the opinions of 1440 Wall Street. This commentary in no way constitutes a solicitation of business or investment advice. It is intended solely for the entertainment of the reader, and the author.
Here’s the Skinny
Herb wins in a Smackdown...his biggest victory in some time.
NutriSystem Offers Mixed Guidance for Fourth Quarter and 2007 First Quarter Earnings
HORSHAM, Pa. (AP)—Diet company NutriSystem Inc. said Tuesday its fourth quarter earnings per share will top Wall Street estimates, but its 2007 first quarter results will not match analyst projections.
The Philadelphia-area company said its earnings will be between 50 cents per share and 53 cents per share for the quarter and revenues between $131 million and $133 million.
Analysts polled by Thomson Financial are expecting fourth quarter earnings of 47 cents per share on revenue of $127.8 million.
For the year, the company said its earnings will fall between $2.26 and $2.29 per share with revenue ranging between $566 million and $568 million.
For the first quarter of 2007, however, the company is projecting earnings lower than analysts’ estimates. The company said its earnings per share should be between 82 cents and 86 cents with revenue between $200 million and $210 million.
Analysts are predicting earnings of 94 cents per share on revenue of $214 million for the first quarter.
“With the pursuit of new market segments combined with unseasonably higher media rates, we expect to see moderately higher customer acquisition costs in first quarter 2007 on a year-over-year basis,” said James D. Brown, executive vice president and chief financial officer.
AP
December 13, 2006
NutriSystem: Bloated Pig?
Herb Greenberg is back at it...he must be a Jets fan given his distaste for the shares of NutriSytem Inc. (NTRI-NASDAQ). UTC
This one is going to leave a mark
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The content contained represents the opinions of 1440 Wall Street. This commentary in no way constitutes a solicitation of business or investment advice. It is intended solely for the entertainment of the reader, and the author. Underthecounter has no positions in any securities mentioned .
Turf Talk
Mayor Bloomberg is long NYC.....
These look like fat years on Wall Street. In 2006, the city’s biggest financial firms made more than thirty billion dollars in profits. Trading volume on the major exchanges is climbing, while the merger market is booming. And bankers and traders have reaped the benefits, earning close to twenty-five billion dollars in bonuses last year. Yet over the past few months, amid this bounty, a chorus of Cassandras has emerged. “The United States is losing its leading competitive position,” a private-sector commission on capital markets said in a November report, and last week Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Senator Charles Schumer released a study arguing that New York City’s financial dominance was being eroded, thus putting tens of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs at risk. These reports argue that overzealous regulation—as epitomized by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the anti-fraud law passed after the Enron and WorldCom scandals—is making the U.S. an increasingly unalluring place to do business. Unless such regulatory excesses are curbed, they say, New York will soon lose its position as the world’s financial capital.
When we were in the Chicago pits the rallying cry was “Free Markets for Free Men”
Mayor Bloomberg is a democrat who ran as a republican and sometimes sounds like a libertarian
A rich one at that...his net worth is well over $10 billion..and might be pushing $20 billion
Read More of James Surowiecki’s New Yorker piece here
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The content contained in this blog represents the opinions of 1440 Wall Street. This commentary in no way constitutes a solicitation of business or investment advice. It is intended solely for the entertainment of the reader, and the author.
No Quarter
Have you heard of the Seattle Sleuth?
Many plugged-in people on Wall Street have...this gumshoe has been rattling more than windows the past few years with her broadside blasts.
Indeed, Yolanda Holtzee has been taking dead aim at white collar crooks and, believe it or not, wants to land the top job at the Securities and Exchange Commission…
April 18, 2006
Wall Street is full of corporate gadflies, many of whom agitate for corporate-governance reform or focus on arcane bylaw changes. Ms. Holtzee, a self-styled Internet investigator in sweatpants, focuses on exposing out-of-bounds behavior and catching bad guys. And after pointing regulators in the right direction more than once, Ms. Holtzee has achieved two things every gadfly craves: attention from those she targets—and action.
“I think people take her seriously because she has good instincts and actually produces cases,” says former senior SEC official Ari Gabinet, now an executive at Vanguard Group Inc., the fund management giant. “If I could have hired her, we would have had an endless stream of cases.”
Ms. Holtzee swaps notes with regulators, including the enforcement chiefs at both the SEC and another Wall Street regulator, the National Association of Securities Dealers, according to people familiar with the matter. The SEC and NASD review her emails. Earlier this year, when Mary Schapiro was appointed to head the NASD, the Wall Street self-regulatory group gave Ms. Holtzee an early heads up, according to people familiar with the matter. She has been called by the SEC to testify in Washington, and a software firm sued her for her negative comments in an Internet chat room. The case was dismissed.
WSJ/Post-Gazette-reprint
The war drums are beating louder...this is no joke, Yolanda is in it to win it:
Blowing Smoke
All eyes are on Davos...and now you don’t even need to get on a plane to take part in the action…
This year it is clearly about climate change and sustainability. But as is common with such complex topics there is as much confusion as clarity. At Davos there is a consensus that developmental models impacting the environment need to be rethought in the context of global development, especially in the case of India and China. Today, 70% of the world’s carbon emissions originate from the US and Europe. The carbon emission per capita in the US is 24 tons per annum, whereas it is 4 tons in China and 2 tons in India. Everyone agrees that if India and China achieve the same standard of living as the US, we will need more than one planet for all of us to live together. Forum Blog
Get out of the mainstream and park your browser at this one-stop shop
We will be looking to get into the green as we paddle around with Wayne again...pester him about his favorite theme...and try to get him to do some work on Fuel-Tech Inc (FTEK-NASDAQ)
Pat Dorsey of Morningstar piqued our interest in the stock when he pitched it on Bulls & Bears some time ago…
Pat strikes us a deep value guy, and normally champions low P/E stocks with bad charts.
This caught our eye today
7:01AM Fuel-Tech awarded $2.6 mln NOxOUT Ultra contract in the People’s Republic of China (FTEK) 26.11 : Co announces it was awarded its second NOxOUT Ultra contract in the People’s Republic of China. This $2.6 mln order calls for the installation of a NOxOUT Ultra system at Huaneng Beijing Co-Generation in support of four coal-fired thermal electric generating units to be retrofitted with selective catalytic reduction systems for NOx control. Project completion is scheduled for late 2007, in advance of the 2008 Summer Olympics. Briefing/Yahoo
The stock is a bit thin, the valuation dear and and the theme trendy, but we want to roll up our sleeves on this one
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The content contained in this blog represents the opinions of 1440 Wall Street. This commentary in no way constitutes a solicitation of business or investment advice. It is intended solely for the entertainment of the reader, and the author. Underthecounter has no positions in any securities mentioned .Wayne Nef and Sniper Research have no positions in securities mentioned.
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