Companies hedged or holding cash in anticipation of a market downturn

[KinAlberta]

I'm wondering what companies people have encountered that are employing various hedging strategies in anticipation of a significant downturn of some sort. (eg. Hussman's warned of major market retracement.)

 

Also companies that have large cash balances are always interesting but my experience in buying such companies in the lead up to the 2008/2009 crisis was that this was a wasted effort as few such companies seemed to actually do anything with that cash when that opportunity arose.  I did better buying them in the depths the crisis doubling up on them, than buying in advance of that market dip.

 

I'm not normally a big fan of buying into such companies but would love to see a list to ponder over if a market started to slip. 

 

Of course, I'd consider Fairfax Financial as one such company.

[Guest JoelS]

Difficult to go past the Liberty, Malone complex of companies to my mind. You know they will use that cash in the downturn. Liberty Ventures has the highest cash balance. You'd expect the Liberty companies to go down pretty hard in a crisis, but they'll pick up bargains and come back strongly in the rebound.

 

[KinAlberta]

Here's some news on cash rich tech, but from my experience they will do little with their cash in a downturn...  (maybe that's smart where tech buyouts are concerned.

 

For Value, Turn to Mature, Cash-Rich Tech Giants

Thanks to their stronger financials, established IT companies are better insulated against rising rates.

 

"All of this is good news for one sector of America’s technology industry, the so-called mature tech sector, which includes companies such as Apple (ticker: AAPL ), Cisco ( CSCO ) , Google ( GOOGL ; GOOG ), and Microsoft ( MSFT ). But the global surge to connect has made profits for these companies anything but mature: Just those four companies alone possess more than $360.5 billion* in cash reserve—almost a quarter of the total corporate cash reserves in the U.S."

 

http://online.barrons.com/articles/SB51367578116875004693704580494140743840352