Einhorn's Greenlight Capital Ups TicketMaster, Gold Stake

In a 13G filed with the SEC after the close yesterday, David Einhorn's hedge fund Greenlight Capital has disclosed a 5.2% ownership stake in TicketMaster (TKTM). The aggregate amount of shares beneficially owned is 2,953,100, up from the 2,547,346 shares they owned in their most recent 13F filing, which detailed their positions as of December 31st, 2008. So, they have boosted their stake and the filing was made due to activity on March 11th, 2009. You can view the rest of Greenlight's portfolio holdings here.

Greenlight has been pretty active so far this year, as we've also covered their new positions in Jones Apparel & Harman (JNY) (HAR). Additionally, Einhorn has picked up positions in gold (GLD) & gold miners (GDX) among other things, as noted in our recent Greenlight portfolio update.

Greenlight Capital is a $6 billion fund ran by David Einhorn that specializes in spin-offs and value investing and has seen annual returns of over 20%. Einhorn's name has been popping up in the media a lot over the past year, as he talked about his well documented short position in Lehman Brothers (LEH). And, while that position paid off handsomely for him, it barely offset losses he experienced from other positions. He was caught in the massive Volkswagen short squeeze as he detailed in one of his latest investor letters.

Einhorn has also recently detailed the saga between his fund and Allied Capital, a company he shorted, in his book Fooling Some of the People All of the Time: A Long Short Story. It gives you an inside perspective as to how Greenlight constructs and researches their investment theses and we highly recommend it. Greenlight approaches things by identifying mispricings in the markets and going from there.

From Google Finance:

Ticketmaster is "a live ticketing and marketing company. As of August 1, 2008, it operated in 20 countries worldwide, providing ticket sales, ticket resale services, marketing and distribution through www.ticketmaster.com, one of the e-commerce sites on the Internet, and related Internet and mobile channels, approximately 6,700 independent sales outlets and 19 call centers worldwide."

Comments

[mike massey:]

I question why David would buy more ticketmaster stock. This is a very cheap stock and not alot of volume in the stock. I think if i was David i would buy the crb index or the canadian dollar. heck these are just now getting started going good. I also dont like buying a stock such as ticketmaster well under its 50 day moving average. David with all respect sir take a look at chesapeake energy or peabody energy. now those are good stocks.

Mar 25 10:05 AM

[BerkeleyBob:]

David Einhorn's book is on my bought, not yet read, stack and I have read some of his short pieces. He strikes me as a clear, analytical and independent thinker. As a consumer, my experiences with both Ticketmaster and Comcast have been negative but lousy customer service does not rule out a stock in the short run. Long term, yeah. "We are the phone company and we don't care" attitude resulted in a required break up--are we better off? I don't know. I have recently added GLD and GDX to my small portfolio, but not as a piggy back on Mr. Einhorn's research.

Mar 25 02:19 PM