General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsA hedge fund buys over a half billion dollars of stock in the company you work for
Is there any upside to this? Why does the term "hedge fund" make me think this likely doesn't bode well?
bhikkhu
(10,722 posts)the same thing happened in my area, with the biggest regional employer which had been family owned up until it got a little upside-down in the recession. The investment group assured everyone that things would stay basically the same once some unnecessary holdings were sold off. Now a year in they are slowly eliminating all the local management and transferring the headquarters to the east coast, which looks like a prep for breaking up the rest of the company or selling it to some other investment group...
Yo_Mama
(8,303 posts)That's the relevant question.
What is the quickest route to that info?
Yo_Mama
(8,303 posts)See how much stock it had outstanding.
The other thing you can do is use Edgar to see if a report was filed. It's a legal requirement to file notices when you acquire certain percentages of stock.
http://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml
I got it wrong - it looks like they bought 41.5 million shares, only about 4% of shares outstanding.
http://www.idahostatesman.com/2013/08/14/2706383/hedge-fund-takes-595-million-stake.html
http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Micron_Technology_%28MU%29/Data/Key_Metrics (Shares Outstanding = 1.04B)
Egalitarian Thug
(12,448 posts)If one of these parasites has bought controlling interest and you're not a partner or equivalently high up the food chain you're fucked. I'm truly sorry, but it's best you know now and can get your plans together.
IDemo
(16,926 posts)It appears to be a 4% interest, nowhere near a controlling percentage.
Egalitarian Thug
(12,448 posts)Whatever the case, you would do well to make plans for the worst, and hopefully it will be a complete waste of your time.
mwrguy
(3,245 posts)Or might as well be.
msongs
(67,436 posts)Egalitarian Thug
(12,448 posts)You didn't give any indication of the size of your company, but a $500M stock purchase is not good news for you in any scenario. Today's hedge funds are not Berkshire-Hathaway, a company that made huge profits by buying up or into companies in order to make them work and profit from the results they achieved. These funds are purely extractive. If they can make more in the short term by firing your ass and breaking the company up and selling off assets, that's what they're going to do. If they can make more buying your company up and pumping and dumping the stock, leaving a perfectly good and profitable company broken and bankrupt, that's what they're going to do. The bottom line is that there is nothing in their playbook that's going to be good for you.
Get your resume together, or better yet, start working on an idea to make your own cash-generating operation. Co-ops and alternative partnership are the way we are going to get through this.