Slowly accumulating some positions. They do have a good track record. Now, waiting for Nords to get on me for not providing enough analysis..........
Wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.
These guys (equity partners) are experts at skimming the cream for themselves and using accounting trickery, packaged loans, etc to leave everybody else holding the bag with little to no risk premium. I don't expect them to do anything different with this. I think they are BRILLIANT for using their name to find liquidity for their billions.
No...it smells like cash out time for the insiders. Think they recognize the returns won't be so juicy in the future and they are getting a big payday now.
What's this you financial advisors are supposed to tell people about past records & future performance?
FD, I wouldn't touch Blackstone with
your 10-foot pole. Fidelity offered IPO allocations and I passed. Haven't felt so good about passing up an IPO since Google.
IMO IPOs only benefit one class of shareholders-- the sellers. If you dig deep into Fidelity's IPO website you can find 200+ companies they've been given IPO allocations of since 1996. (Not just the aftermarket.) I downloaded that list and in April 2005 checked the performances of the 2004 IPOs that hadn't already gone into bankruptcy. 20 companies had racked up a 15-month return of +25%. Then I took out Google and the remaining 19 had a return of negative 6%. How much did a stock have to suck in 2004-5 to
lose money?
I felt that I'd seen enough, but if you want I can e-mail you the spreadsheet for updating & calculating the return of the other 180 companies.
Blackstone's stakeholders have lost all motivation for "future" performance. They could have raised plenty of capital from accredited investors but they chose not to-- that's about all the analysis required. The fact that they received such rich payoffs indicates their shareholder perspective is perhaps a bit different than that of Sergey & Larry...
FWIW I've closed out my shorts on FirstFed and Abercrombie & Fitch and I'm shutting down my "brilliant investor" account. I'm done shorting stocks and I know enough about options to not go there. We may keep our remaining individual stocks for some time-- Intel, Eagle, Diana Shipping, Tate & Lyle, Superior, and of course Berkshire Hathaway, but I think my stock-picking days are over. We'll close out Tweedy, Browne Global Value, too, and then we'll be all-equity/ETF.
