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SHLDQ - Sears Holdings Corp


alertmeipp

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What I was saying is if SHLD did a rights offering and sold Lands' End to existing SHLD shareholders, they'd put the cash into their pocket and begin leasing space to Lands' End in all their locations.... Lands' End could also sell externally, but they'd be paying SHLD rent for all the locations they exist in already, which would offset the loss of income to SHLD for being separately owned....  In this case, SHLD would be flush with cash and still producing income from Lands' End. It would just be rental income as opposed to income from selling clothing.

 

I'm not saying that's what will happen. It's just an idea of what could happen.

 

I see, thanks. Haven't they been trying to sell Land's End in the last couple of years? It is not new news. Why yesterday's announcement cause such a big jump? Or was it mainly due to the $400M sales of the stores in Canada?

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Glad I sold 70% of my calls yesterday. :x I have a small position left but would prefer to see the 40's again!

 

Seeing a LE spin off would be great, not much love for it now.

 

Did the same, other than the calls we will now exercise and keep, as I would like the spin-off shares.  I'm also selling off our Sears puts today too.  Cheers!

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Glad I sold 70% of my calls yesterday. :x I have a small position left but would prefer to see the 40's again!

 

Seeing a LE spin off would be great, not much love for it now.

 

Did the same, other than the calls we will now exercise and keep, as I would like the spin-off shares.  I'm also selling off our Sears puts today too.  Cheers!

 

So you bought both calls and puts? Or did you mean you wrote some puts?

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Glad I sold 70% of my calls yesterday. :x I have a small position left but would prefer to see the 40's again!

 

Seeing a LE spin off would be great, not much love for it now.

 

Did the same, other than the calls we will now exercise and keep, as I would like the spin-off shares.  I'm also selling off our Sears puts today too.  Cheers!

 

So you bought both calls and puts? Or did you mean you wrote some puts?

 

We bought the calls early, and then bought short-term, out of the money puts to protect some of the downside.  At this point, with Lampert selling assets quickly now, those puts probably won't go up before they expire...thus we sold them alongside the calls which are up over 100%.  Cheers!

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Lampert sold ~2.6m shares of AN yesterday.

 

 

His concentration goes higher in SHLD. The hedge fund will soon consist of nothing but SHLD. No idea what will happen in the coming months but I suspect he has closed the fund at this point to new investors.

 

 

What will happen when he owns a single stock in a hedge fund?

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“We have seen a big uptick in the number of people shopping with us both in-store and online,” Mr. Lampert said. “It’s very easy to obscure the progress we’ve made because of the financial results.”

 

Assuming he's not exaggerating, a big uptick in traffic in store is a very, very good thing for SHLD. 

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That's a good read. I am convinced that there is no secret plan of "berkshire-hathaway", the only plan for now inside Eddie's mind is the transformation of retail.

 

I agree there's no secret, he's pretty clear on his intentions  :D

 

Could Sears Holdings evolve into another Berkshire Hathaway? "One of the unspoken secrets about business leaders is that they often have no idea about where they're going to end up," Lampert says coyly. "I know the right direction. Whether we end up at the destination -- rebuilding Sears Holdings into a great company on many dimensions -- I don't know. But we're headed in that direction."

http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/03/news/companies/investorsguide_lampert/index.htm

 

"rebuilding Sears Holdings into a great company on many dimensions" certainly sounds like a conglomerate to me.  Also consider he is an avid student of Buffett and lists him as one of his 3 role models.

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Edit: What I find fascinating about Ron Johnson in the whole JCP debacle is that he gave up AAPL stock options and purchased $50 million worth of at the money warrants for JCP (strike of $30, expiring 7.5 years after purchase) with cash from his own pocket. So his incentives were very much aligned with shareholders.

 

 

he was also given $53m of jcp stock as signing bonus in exchange for giving up his apple stock gifts. He  was already extremely wealthy when he left apple. so he was really rolling the dice for a chance to get in the billionaires club, as he was sitting on well over $400m of net worth.

 

On October 31, 2007 Johnson exercised 700,000 stock options in Apple stock with a strike price of $23.72, and then sold the stock later that day for $185 to $185.21 apiece netting him a $112m profit. It has been reported that Johnson earned $400 million during his seven and a half years at Apple.[6]

 

According to this latest Ackman interview, he lost $100 million of restricted stock at AAPL and was awarded $50 million at JCP, and then purchased $50 million in warrants with his own money.

 

at roughly the 13 minute mark
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That's a good read. I am convinced that there is no secret plan of "berkshire-hathaway", the only plan for now inside Eddie's mind is the transformation of retail.

 

I agree there's no secret, he's pretty clear on his intentions  :D

 

Could Sears Holdings evolve into another Berkshire Hathaway? "One of the unspoken secrets about business leaders is that they often have no idea about where they're going to end up," Lampert says coyly. "I know the right direction. Whether we end up at the destination -- rebuilding Sears Holdings into a great company on many dimensions -- I don't know. But we're headed in that direction."

http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/03/news/companies/investorsguide_lampert/index.htm

 

"rebuilding Sears Holdings into a great company on many dimensions" certainly sounds like a conglomerate to me.  Also consider he is an avid student of Buffett and lists him as one of his 3 role models.

 

I think it's incredibly hard to predict such outcomes. In general, people mostly see what they want to see.

 

Have been cutting some things in the portfolio to derisk and also decided to sell the remaining stake of calls that I held as they were getting of short duration.

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That's a good read. I am convinced that there is no secret plan of "berkshire-hathaway", the only plan for now inside Eddie's mind is the transformation of retail.

 

I agree there's no secret, he's pretty clear on his intentions  :D

 

Could Sears Holdings evolve into another Berkshire Hathaway? "One of the unspoken secrets about business leaders is that they often have no idea about where they're going to end up," Lampert says coyly. "I know the right direction. Whether we end up at the destination -- rebuilding Sears Holdings into a great company on many dimensions -- I don't know. But we're headed in that direction."

http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/03/news/companies/investorsguide_lampert/index.htm

 

"rebuilding Sears Holdings into a great company on many dimensions" certainly sounds like a conglomerate to me.  Also consider he is an avid student of Buffett and lists him as one of his 3 role models.

 

I think it's incredibly hard to predict such outcomes. In general, people mostly see what they want to see.

 

Have been cutting some things in the portfolio to derisk and also decided to sell the remaining stake of calls that I held as they were getting of short duration.

 

That's why I used the word "intentions" - intentions don't always produce outcomes.  But I do believe it's becoming a clearer picture by the day that his intentions are to one day run SHLD as his permanent investment vehicle (selling everything else at ESL except SHLD, assuming CEO role earlier this year, etc.).

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That's a good read. I am convinced that there is no secret plan of "berkshire-hathaway", the only plan for now inside Eddie's mind is the transformation of retail.

 

I agree there's no secret, he's pretty clear on his intentions  :D

 

Could Sears Holdings evolve into another Berkshire Hathaway? "One of the unspoken secrets about business leaders is that they often have no idea about where they're going to end up," Lampert says coyly. "I know the right direction. Whether we end up at the destination -- rebuilding Sears Holdings into a great company on many dimensions -- I don't know. But we're headed in that direction."

http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/03/news/companies/investorsguide_lampert/index.htm

 

"rebuilding Sears Holdings into a great company on many dimensions" certainly sounds like a conglomerate to me.  Also consider he is an avid student of Buffett and lists him as one of his 3 role models.

 

I think it's incredibly hard to predict such outcomes. In general, people mostly see what they want to see.

 

Have been cutting some things in the portfolio to derisk and also decided to sell the remaining stake of calls that I held as they were getting of short duration.

 

That's why I used the word "intentions" - intentions don't always produce outcomes.  But I do believe it's becoming a clearer picture by the day that his intentions are to one day run SHLD as his permanent investment vehicle (selling everything else at ESL except SHLD, assuming CEO role earlier this year, etc.).

 

I generally agree, except for the talk of a Land's End spin-off.  If he really wants this to be a permanent capital vehicle like BRK or LUK, I think he would keep or sell Land's End - not spin it to shareholders (more like LINTA).  I believe he will make this into a BRK/LUK and I hope the Land's End spin-off talk is just bargaining to get a better price in a sale.  If he actually does spin it to shareholders, I will have to go back to the drawing board.

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Yeah, but look at John Malone at Liberty.  Talk about spinning and tracking etc… but I think you still did pretty well by hanging in with him in his main capital allocation vehicle.

 

On an unrelated note, I did some tooling around on the sears.com family of sites including that shopyourway pinterest rip off thing and I agree they are pretty amazingly crappy.  Has anyone done the math on whether they could have acquired say pinterest and buy.com or newegg for what they've spent on developing these things?

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Yeah, but look at John Malone at Liberty.  Talk about spinning and tracking etc… but I think you still did pretty well by hanging in with him in his main capital allocation vehicle.

 

"Anyone who participated in the Liberty Media rights offering, a spinoff from Tele-Communications, was able to earn ten times his initial investment in less than two years."  -pages 115-116, You Can Be a Stock Market Genius, Joel Greenblatt

 

Also see pages 95-96 of The Outsiders by William Thorndike.

 

I don't think using spin-offs negates the conglomerate thesis at all.

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Yeah, thanks for helping me make my point much more effectively.  Even if you weren't smart enough to follow Malone right off the bat, you did well over the years even with all of the other tracking stocks and spin offs yet he always maintained control.  The website does suck though.  hah!

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