From a Bloomberg piece on the risk of another off-balance sheet (in this case, a VIE) potential problem for financial companies: Predictions for losses vary widely because banks aren’t required to specify the type of assets being held in the VIEs or how much they are worth, said Tanya Azarchs, managing director for financial institutions
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Over the weekend, the WSJ had this article on earnings calls being crashed by faux-analyst Joe Herrick. At least seven times just the past three weeks, a mystery caller has cleverly insinuated himself into the normally well-manicured ritual of the quarterly calls. As top executives of publicly traded companies respond to securities analysts’ questions about
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CIBC May Take $4.1 Billion Writedown, CIBC Analyst Says (headline has changed but the original was as we laid out). This just speaks to credibility of CIBC’s (NYSE: CM) equity research department!! ….or the fact that their equity research department just got laid off. Recommendation: Short the employment status of anyone who downgrades their own
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Bill Doyle the baller CEO of Potash Corp (NYSE: POT) recently crushed the spirit of an analyst on a conference call in a swift and brutal way that made even all of us here at LoS (who hate bad sell side research) cringe. The unfortunate recipient of this de-pantsing was Charles Naberg who had recently
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The sell-side is full of hard working people and this isn’t meant to offend any of them, they usually have valuable information. My gripe with them is that they are flippant, fickle, waffley, double-talkers. The examples of this are countless, but today I’ll focus on two recent research report titles that have shown up in
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I just called [unnamed European I-Bank] with questions pertaining to a deal they are banking and in which my firm is participating. [European I-Bank] had sent my office a document, requesting my reply on a certain issue in the aforementioned deal. They listed two contacts at the bottom of the memo, numbers for London capital
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Every investor loves to believe that he is the second coming of Warren Buffet so I’m never surprised to hear allusions to Buffet’s methods and sayings. At least that was true until I met Richard Ji, a nice, well-intentioned equity analyst at Morgan Stanley. Ji, however, frequently refers to Buffet concepts in his writings covering
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Analysts are apparently panting down the trail for some “hot Google action.” Our attention was piqued by reactions of leading sell-side analysts to Google (GOOG) CFO, George Reyes, at a recent Merrill Lynch investor conference. Reyes initially commented that, Google is “getting to a point where the law of large numbers starts to take root…”
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So I’m doing my job, analyzing a company that doesn’t make the widgets, but instead, supplies the engineered material which goes into making the products which protect the machines which make the widgets. They need millions of dollars to finance the widget-producing-protecting-producing procuess. The management and their bank presented the company to a meeting of
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A colleague of mine was talking with the analyst of SellSide Bank who was syndicating a deal that we were taking a look at. The deal was brutal: It was a sub-$50mm EBITDA company that would have negative free cash flow in the short to intermediate term. We were being sold debt in their capital
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