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Archive for the 'activist investing' Tag

Welcome to North Dakota!

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

Delaware has long been home to a wide range of corporations, and according to the state’s own site, over 60% of the Fortune 500 are incorporated in the state, even though the vast majority are technically based somewhere else. But this year, Delaware is getting some competition from a seemingly unlikely place: North Dakota, which enacted [...]

Something’s fishy in Ft. Myers…

Friday, January 9th, 2009

Yesterday, Chico’s (CHS), a company I’ve known for quite some time because of its roots in Florida, announced that its 51 year-old CEO, Scott Edmonds, was “retiring”. Make that had retired the day before, according to the agreement attached to the 8K filed yesterday. As the WSJ reports this morning, Chico’s had been under pressure [...]

Gone fishing — seriously…

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

Every now and then, we come across something in a filing that just makes us slap our head and say, “What the heck were they thinking?”. And that’s exactly what happened when we skimmed the proxy that A. Schulman (SHLM) filed yesterday. Here’s the head-slapping part: During fiscal 2008, the Compensation Committee determined that maintaining [...]

Real estate secrets at Syms?…

Friday, June 13th, 2008

The motto of discount clothing retailer Syms Corp (SYMS) is: “An educated consumer is our best customer.” An educated shareholder, on the other hand, can be a pain in the butt.  Esopus Creek, an activist hedge fund holding about 4% of Syms stock (the Syms family controls the majority), has been educating itself about the firm’s [...]

Viva la Revolucion at Furniture Brands…

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

Last week, on May Day no less, investors in Furniture Brands International (FBN), the furniture company whose brands include Thomasville and Broyhill, appear to have elected three directors proposed by activist investors, Sun Capital, which owns about 9.5% of FBN’s shares. Sun offered to buy the company, whose stock has declined sharply since 2002, back [...]