PAD

Commercial Mortgage REIT IPOs: Coming Up Short

Can somebody quantify these "enormous" fee's taken by the managers of the funds?

i've read the S-1's of CLNY and STWD and it looks like they take 20% profits above a stated threshold (i think CLNY's was 8% ROE for the opco). Doesn't seem like that high a fee to pay to invest alongside the private equity folks managing the opco to me.

I haven't done enough work on these new REIT ipo's to make any bold claims but i will offer one observation: This is the most hated sub-sector out there.

Every blog and news source out there hates these new REIT ipo's and they all mention the same things: Blind trust with no track record (not true for CLNY, whose mgt team led the hugely profitable buying from RTC 20 years ago), no dividends (yet), private equity selling to common/retail holders (even though pvt eq not cashing out a penny of the proceeds) and the "wave of IPO's" as a sure sign of a top just like dot-com (no comparison on any book value or other valuation metric).

And finally, the sell-side initiations by the bankers, i mean research analysts, have also been fairly muted (short 5-6 page initiations, not bullish at all).

I'm a buyer of anything this hated. Portfolio strategy--small positions in 4-5 names. Time will tell.

Starwood IPO Benefits Underwriters While Investors Take Losses

wait just a minute, a brand new IPO pays 6% to underwriters and then this company has ongoing expenses like office space and salaries?

no way, what next? the sun is going to come up tomorrow? water is wet?

6% is standard for non-secondary equity issuance, ditto for ongoing O&M expenses

FactSet: A Financial Stock Holding Up Well

I love the FDS product and their customer service is top notch, but when you lose Bear, LEH, MER and now WB as customers, its going to be very hard to grow revenues.
Yet analysts are expecting 15% revenue growth in 2009 and 13% in 2010? (this is from FDS estimates function on fds)

i think not. i'm short.

Energy Transfer Partners Looks Increasingly Interesting

You can't reco ETP w/o mentioning their pending FERC lawsuit alleging energy market manipulation that is weighing on both the stock and bond prices.

and what kind of research is this line:

"the other half (of profit) comes from sources subject to the vagaries of the natural gas market." huh? what does that mean?

To the editors of Seeking Alpha-- do you let anybody publish articles? i used to come to this site and get insightful analysis about stocks for my personal account. detailed analysis has been replaced by these fluff pieces that look like something my summer intern (undergrad) writes.

Magazine Covers as Contrarian Indicators

One more for you, Business Week had the CEO of Cerberus Capital on its cover last Spring saying how great the private equity firm was and how smart they were. Shorty afterwards their massive bets on Chrysler and GMAC turned into absolute disasters.

Being on the cover of Business Week is the kiss of death.

I wish i could remember the timing of Jeff Skillings cover (he had two actually) on BW versus the company blowing up.

Time to Short the Utilities

I disagree entirely. In the 2 years that the fed raised rates from mid '04 until mid '06 the utilities were one of the strongest groups out there. The UTY index was up 41% over that timeframe.

And every single month along the way i read the exact same articles saying utilities had to under-perform because rates were rising. And every single one of those articles was wrong.

Maybe the technical analysis angle is correct, i just don't follow that stuff.

Best of luck to everybody

Investing in Infrastructure

great big picture comments on sector but how about that little thing called valuation? how about some relative value calls within the sector and how does the sector compare to the overall mkt?

Lehman: The End Game

some interesting comments there, so by your reasoning LEH currently has a big loan from the Fed discount window right now?

Doug Kass's Killer Shorts - Barron's

Re: The Berkshire short

I will take Doug Kass over Alan Abelson 7 days/week, 52/weeks a year.

Geothermal Energy Sources 101

Absolutely great article

2008 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Meeting: Detailed Notes

This is great, thanks.

Is Kinder Morgan Just a Fee Trick?

save yourself the time and hassle of dealing w/ MLP K-1 income on your taxes and buy KMR, its a synthetic version of KMP (EXACT SAME COMPANY) that pays its dividend in more shares instead of cash, thus no K-1 on your taxes.

Google’s Killer App for Investors, Consultants and Journalists

great feature, great site, keep it up.
I would not wanna be a TSCM shareholder if you guys keep this up.

Meredith Whitney Threatens Severe Deflation For Your Portfolio

Wow, did the author of this article really just equate a firms market value decline to the pending write-down to shareholders equity? as though market value = book value or something?

Seeking Alpha should hire somebody who knows something about financials to screen the articles like this one before they go up on the site.

Buy-Side Still Loves (Some) Sell-Side Research

The sell-side is good for two things only:

IPO allocations and concert/sporting event tickets. other than that, they are bunch of cockroaches and should be treated accordingly.