2008 Q1 13F-HR Filings: The Speculative Edition

T. Boone Pickens, via BP Capital, was fairly active in adding and building positions. Pickens made headlines earlier this year by predicting a drop in oil prices for the first half of 2008 and then quickly backtracking as oil has smashed through record prices. Here are some highlights from the filing:

• Reopened a big position in Transocean (RIG) after divesting his RIG/GSF stake last quarter.
• Like many investors (including myself), Pickens is targeting oil service and E&P companies more so than integrateds or the refiners with big interests in Halliburton (HAL), XTO, Schlumberger (SLB) while selling or reducing the majors like Exxon (XOM), Chevron (CVX) and Valero (VLO).

David Winters runs the Wintergreen Fund and it looks like he spent much of the quarter reducing and selling positions. Whether this was due to money outflow or raising cash to build positions, I don’t know but a few items caught my eye:

• Two short positions on Blackstone Group (BX) and financials via the Ultrashort ProShares ETF (SKF). I looked long and hard at BX when it had dropped to the mid-teens but couldn’t bring myself to buy a stock with such a seemingly unfriendly management structure.
• He sold off a couple of companies on my watchlist (Brookfield Asset Management (BAM) & Weyerhaeuser (WY)). I think I may have missed the train on BAM earlier this year but WY has been drifting along for a while now in the low to mid $60s.

Jim Puplava runs a brokerage service managing individual clients’ money so you have to take his SEC filing with a grain of salt. Regular listeners of his show know that the guy is a bit of a gold bug and as such, it’s always interesting to sift through to see which juniors his group is buying for their clients:

• The biggest positions consist of well-covered PM stocks like Agnico Eagle (AEM), Goldcorp (GG), Central Fund of Canada (CEF), Silver Wheaton (SLW).
• Interesting new stakes for me include Aqua America (WTR), which I’ve looked at but haven’t been able to justify for my portfolio due to their lousy cash flow and DuPont (DD) - probably a play on agriculture.
• Big adds to BP, which has badly lagged the rest of the oil sector so it may benefit from reversion-to-mean with its peers and Minefinders (MFN), which he seems to mention on every show lately.

See my portfolio page for any disclosures. For all the gory details, spreadsheet pages available below:

• BP Capital Q1 2008 13F-HR Breakdown
• Wintergreen Q1 2008 13F-HR Breakdown
• Puplava Financial Q1 2008 13F-HR Breakdown