Luk

The New Leucadia Is No Longer Lovable - WSJ

What happens when you merge a quirky but beloved conglomerate with a largely unloved investment bank? The answer: Shareholders flee. That is what happened at Leucadia National Corp., whose shares compounded at 19% a year from 1979 to 2012, topping the market by more than 8 percentage points.
The investment bank is Jefferies Group LLC, the scrappy broker known for its high-yield bond and stock-trading businesses. In 2012, as Jefferies was suffering one of its periodic beatings by investors, Leucadia agreed to buy the 70% of the company it didn’t already own and installed the bank’s longtime boss as Leucadia’s chief executive.
The two firms knew each other well; Jefferies did every capital raising for Leucadia in the previous 22 years. The deal, after Leucadia’s most successful year, allowed the company’s often-bickering leaders, Ian Cumming and Joseph Steinberg, to step back after 35 years and allowed the cash-rich company to put some capital to work.
Since the deal closed, Leucadia’s shares have fallen 41% and were down nearly 50% early last week, near their 2009 financial-crisis low. Some of the decline can be blamed on bad decisions and poor performance by the company, and some is due to lousy markets for investment banks.
Another cause was selling by many of Leucadia’s longtime shareholders, some of whom held the stock for nearly two decades. Their reason: It isn’t the old Leucadia anymore. “It’s a different beast,” said Oppenheimer & Co.’s Chris Kotowski, the only Wall Street analyst covering the stock. Mr. Kotowski is positive on Leucadia, believing many of its businesses will perform better in coming years. But he understands the view of shareholders. “When you did the merger, all of the sudden it was no longer a conglomerate, it was Jefferies,” he said.
Leucadia owned everything from iron-ore producers to wineries to large swaths of land in Southern California. Its executives rarely talked publicly and remained under the radar for all but the most sophisticated value investors, who were willing to put up with complexity and volatility to get solid long-term returns.
It famously bought the owner of S&H Green Stamps long after its heyday as one of the first big loyalty programs. Leucadia’s insight, that fewer people than expected would redeem the stamps, was worth millions. A painting of a sheet of stamps still adorns the wall of a conference room at the firm.
Hits like that drew investors like Fairholme Capital Management LLC, Tweedy Browne Co. and Royce & Associates LLC, all of which have held shares in Leucadia since at least 1999. They and many other longtime shareholders have been selling for the past few years.
“It is more focused on the business of Jefferies than on some of the long-term projects that Leucadia focused on,” said Fairholme’s Bruce Berkowitz, who has reduced his holdings of all financial companies, believing their prospects are weak. Some longtime shareholders have suffered redemptions in recent years, forcing them to cut their holdings.
There are good reasons to sell Leucadia. Jefferies has performed dismally since the deal, as its high-yield bond business and a big bet on commodity trading both struggled. And many of Leucadia’s old businesses have fared equally poorly, in particular its largest revenue generator, meat processor National Beef, which has lost money three years in a row.
Leucadia’s CEO, Richard Handler, has grouped the company’s businesses in three buckets: an investment bank, which is Jefferies; a merchant bank, which holds the company’s nonfinancial business; and an asset manager that is a collection of hedge-fund startups. Leucadia under Mr. Handler is more of a financial firm than it was in the old days, and that shift has come at a terrible time. Most Wall Street banks are trading below tangible book value, and many of their core businesses are struggling. The hedge-fund industry just suffered its worst year for fund launches and liquidations since the financial crisis, as investors push back on high fees and weak performance.
Supporters of the company argue that Leucadia has a brighter future with Jefferies than it would have on its own. The company has trimmed weak investments such as Australian mining company Fortescue Metals Group Ltd., whose shares have tumbled.
Since the deal, Leucadia has taken advantage of troubled sellers to make value-style investments in currency-trading firm FXCM Inc. and in the owner of Spectrum Brands Holdings Inc., which has 48 consumer brands, including Rayovac batteries, George Foreman grills and Kwikset locks.
There have been other positive changes. The company is actually communicating with investors and has reduced Jefferies’s balance sheet to weather the storm in the markets. And other businesses are doing well, including lender Berkadia, its joint venture with Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
Jefferies still reports its own earnings and when it released the lousy numbers last week, Leucadia’s shares fell more than 5% that day. But by the end of the week, they had risen more than 14% off their lows. The old Leucadia has gone the way of S&H Green Stamps. Unless investors fall back in love with investment banks like Jefferies, there are few reasons to believe the new Leucadia will capture its old glory anytime soon.
 
Grazie per aver condiviso l'articolo Leite.
Nulla da eccepire, è la realtà dei fatti. Leucadia sta collezionando errori su errori.
Io ormai sono incastrato con un pmc folle, chi è fuori ne resti fuori.
Il peso di Jefferies è troppo elevato e le prospettive di questa banca non mi sembrano positive.
 
Grazie per aver condiviso l'articolo Leite.
Nulla da eccepire, è la realtà dei fatti. Leucadia sta collezionando errori su errori.
Io ormai sono incastrato con un pmc folle, chi è fuori ne resti fuori.
Il peso di Jefferies è troppo elevato e le prospettive di questa banca non mi sembrano positive.

dnt...ma raccontaci qualcosa di "bello"...
dici...dov'è che NON sei "incastrato"?

:mmmm:
 
:D Ho il ptf metà verde e metà rosso. Sono mediocre lo so :)

non sto dicendo questo...

allora, prova a vedere (e ripassa tutto mentalmente) cosa hai fatto (o letto, o visto) quando hai selezionato i titoli che sono in "verde" adesso...
stesso discorso con quelli che sono in "rosso"...e prendi carta e penna...scrivi tutto il possibile...
usa fantasia, creatività, immaginazione, per costruirti un "metodo"...man mano che scrivi...

mi raccomando, dovresti farlo disciplinatamente...altrimenti, sei condannato a ripetere gli errori...

arrivati in cantiere gli architetti e gl'ingegneri guardano i piani e i disegni...no "s'inventano" tutto il palazzo all'improvviso...:o
 
Ultima modifica:
allora, prova a vedere (e ripassa tutto mentalmente) cosa hai fatto (o letto, o visto) quando hai selezionato i titoli che sono in "verde" adesso...
stesso discorso con quelli che sono in "rosso"...e prendi carta e penna...scrivi tutto il possibile...
usa fantasia, creatività, immaginazione, per costruirti un "metodo"...man mano che scrivi...

mi raccomando, dovresti farlo disciplinatamente...altrimenti, sei condannato a ripetere gli errori...

La mia strategia di investimento si basa su requisiti abbastanza rigidi e questi sono uguali per tutti. Le caratteristiche dei titoli in ptf sono le stesse, cambiano i settori e soprattutto cambia il timing di ingresso.
Infatti sono verde sui titoli acquistati 3/4 anni fa, mentre sono in rosso per gli acquisti fatti negli ultimi 1/2 anni.
Poi c'è la società che ha rispettato il piano industriale (verde in ptf), e quella che ha disatteso le aspettative (profondo rosso).
 
non sei "focalizzato"...sei "fissato"...dubito che combinerai qualcosa di "concreto" agendo cosi...

te l'avevo detto prima...concentrati su UN solo titolo...non hai le risorse (ne mentali ne economiche) per gestire un "portafoglio"...stai dissipando energie inutilmente

Grazie dei consigli :bow:
 
adesso divido i compratori di azioni in due sole categorie: quelli che leggono i documenti finanziari (almeno l'annual report/10k per le americane) e quelli che non li leggono

It’s Time for Investors to Re-Learn the Lost Art of Reading - MoneyBeat - WSJ
By JASON ZWEIG

Fund manager Geoffrey Abbott is extremely committed. Or maybe he needs to be committed.
Every day for the past seven weeks, Mr. Abbott has read an average of 39 letters that CEOs write to shareholders in their companies’ annual reports. His goal is to peruse the annual report from each of the 3,000 largest companies in the U.S. This past week, Mr. Abbott, who runs a small New York investment partnership called GCA Capital, plowed through the I’s and moved into the J’s. That puts him him on track to finish with Zumiez, Zynerba Pharmaceuticals and Zynga by the end of May, when Mr. Abbott will turn 30. Thus, in a financial world driven largely by mathematical formulas and computers trading thousands of times a second, a young investor is searching for investments in the most old-fashioned way possible: by reading.
Warren Buffett doesn’t think Mr. Abbott is crazy. The chairman of Berkshire Hathaway himself spent much of the early 1950s reading every single entry in the thousands of pages of Moody’s manuals, the corporate encyclopedia of that era. He still spends most of his time reading — including the letters to shareholders in companies’ annual reports. “Over the years, there have been multiple times” when reading the annual letter “has been a factor in my deciding to do something or not to do something,” Mr. Buffett told me this past week when I mentioned Mr. Abbott’s project. Reading a letter was never “the deciding or dominant factor,” he said, “but it was definitely often a factor.”
Not many investors seem willing to do that sort of digging anymore. Timothy Loughran, a finance professor at the University of Notre Dame who studies corporate disclosure, has analyzed computer records for the Securities and Exchange Commission’s filings website. He says only 29 people a day download the average annual report when it comes out. Even General Electric’s annual report was downloaded from GE’s website only 800 times in 2013, according to the company.
Mr. Abbott hopes to discover promising companies he might not have noticed by other means. He wants to see whether the managers are focused on the long term, care about investors, and can clearly explain how the business makes money and how they measure its progress toward their goals. Mr. Abbott has read roughly 1,500 letters so far. Only 16 jumped out as outstanding. “I’ve been flabbergasted at how low the average quality is,” he said. Common red flags include bragging about earnings that went up mainly because of accounting changes and blaming disappointments on outside factors like weather.
His 16 favorites so far: Activision Blizzard, Actuant, Alleghany, Amerco, Atlantic Power, AutoZone, W.R. Berkley, Capital One Financial, Cimpress, Credit Acceptance, Culp, eBay, Everest Re Group, ExamWorks Group, Fossil Group and Hingham Institution for Savings. (He leaves Mr. Buffett out of his analysis, because “everyone” knows he writes a great letter.)
“Writing an extensive letter helps me clarify our strategy and put signposts on the map of where we’re trying to go in the long run,” said Weston Hicks, chief executive of Alleghany Corp. “If you attract short-term shareholders, you can be forced to do things that aren’t in the company’s best long-term interest.”
Mr. Abbott owns only one of those 16 stocks — Credit Acceptance, which he bought years ago, before he began his reading project — and might not invest in any of the others after he studies them more thoroughly. He sets a high bar and holds just six stocks in his fund. But the best letter writers will go on his list of companies to learn more about. “It’s my duty to provide the shareholders with an informative, accurate and transparent report,” says Robert Wilmers, chief executive of M&T Bank, whose blunt and thorough annual letter isn’t (yet) on Mr. Abbott’s list — but is on Mr. Buffett’s. “That’s what they need to make sound investment decisions.”
It makes some sense to start your search for companies this way, Mr. Buffett said. “Where I’m the junior or silent partner” as a minority investor, he said, “I feel better if I’m in partnership with someone who’s on the same wavelength I am and has a sense of stewardship. You can pick up some sense of that from reading the letter.”
“I write it for people like my sisters,” Mr. Buffett said of his own annual letter. “They’re smart, they read a lot, they have a lot invested in the company. They don’t know all the financial jargon, but they don’t want to be treated like five year olds. I try to let them know on paper what I’d tell them about the business if we sat down for the afternoon.” More than 1,600 years ago, St. Augustine was converted to Christianity when a voice came to him chanting, “Take up and read.” In a short-term world, that’s righteous advice for long-term investors, too.
 
Non male la terza trimestrale di Leucadia. Non sono certo dati positivi ma comunque incoraggianti. Speriamo in un andamento migliore rispetto agli ultimi due anni disastrosi.
 
Gran bel recupero Leucadia negli ultimi mesi.
Mantenere o vendere?
 
A Mini-Berkshire Ready to Break Out - Barron's

Five years after Leucadia National announced its merger with investment bank Jefferies Group, the combined company—and its shares—seem poised to prosper. Long a cult stock, known by its fans as a “mini-Berkshire,” Leucadia spent nearly four decades acquiring, turning around, and operating a wide range of properties—everything from wineries to meatpackers to discount-coupon distributors. Then, in 2012, it teamed up with Jefferies CEO Richard Handler for its biggest deal of all—a $4.8 billion takeover that installed Handler as CEO of Leucadia.
Despite an initial burst from $21 to $31 in the next year, the shares succumbed shortly thereafter to the drop in oil prices and oil-related junk bonds, which hurt Jefferies’ commodities and bond units. Another Leucadia purchase, National Beef Packing, was hit by Americans’ craving for health food and the loss of a key contract with Wal-Mart Stores. But both businesses have revived, helping lift Leucadia shares (ticker: LUK) back to $26, and some investors believe they’re worth $30 or more. United Kingdom money manager Baillie Gifford substantially increased its Leucadia position in the first quarter, says Charles Plowden, head of the firm’s global alpha strategy. Like Berkshire, Leucadia is generally valued by growth in book value. Plowden thinks its book value could rise at a 10% to 15% annual pace, doubling in five years.
CEO Handler, who’d run Jefferies since 2001, says he has only begun to exploit the synergies between the investment bank and Leucadia’s merchant bank. Leucadia can supply “permanent capital” to companies that Jefferies helps find, including corporate rescues. “We’re still in the early stages of building Jefferies,” Handler told Barron’s in an interview at his midtown Manhattan office. “Plenty of investment opportunities lie ahead,” he added, especially “when the world turns upside down—and it certainly will again.”
JEFFERIES ITSELF was a rescue project by Leucadia, which was then run by well-respected investors and Harvard Business School friends Joseph Steinberg and Ian Cumming. Together, they amassed a hodgepodge of assets that nonetheless compounded in value. They got to know Handler in the 1980s, when he worked in Drexel Burnham Lambert’s junk-bond department and conducted some trades for them. In 2008, they bought a stake in Jefferies with Handler at the helm. Later still, when Jefferies got dragged down by the collapse of MF Global, they bought the firm at a modest premium. Following its recent problems in the oil patch, Jefferies reduced risk by shrinking its balance sheet. From August 2015 to August 2016, it disposed of almost $5 billion in assets, bringing its total to $38 billion. But it didn’t stop recruiting. Since early 2015, it has hired dozens of senior investment bankers, expanding capability in Europe, China, and Japan. Because of the raft of new banking regulations on everything from proprietary trading to capital standards, many competitors are cutting back. “What got us interested in the first place is that everyone else is in retreat,” says Plowden of Baillie Gifford. Jefferies, he notes, is the largest institutional broker dealer that isn’t part of a regulated holding company. Chris Kotowski of Oppenheimer, the only analyst who follows the stock, adds that Jefferies “is a firm with substantial resources and good management that isn’t a hyperregulated, too-big-to-fail bank holding company. It actually has a good balance sheet and an investment-grade rating.” With its focus on smaller-cap companies below $10 billion, Jefferies has started to regain ground. For the six months ended in May, the firm posted earnings of $183.8 million, compared with a loss of $113 million a year earlier.
National Beef’s prospects have also brightened. Leucadia bought its 79% position in the U.S.’s fourth-biggest beef processor for $868 million in 2011. But the changes in diet and the loss of the Walmart contract hit sales. By 2015, Oppenheimer cut its valuation of the stake to $438 million. Since then, however, volumes and herd sizes have rebounded. And a new trade deal means China will import U.S. beef for the first time since 2003, when fears about mad-cow disease arose. In the first quarter, National Beef reported $81 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, up 69% from a year earlier. Oppenheimer has increased its valuation of Leucadia’s stake in National Beef to $1.2 billion, 42% above its original estimate. Leucadia has other interesting holdings, including alternative-asset overseer Leucadia Asset Management, which Handler thinks will turn profitable this year; Berkadia, a joint venture with Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) that does mortgage banking; and Garcadia, which buys distressed auto dealerships. It also holds small brokers and money managers, some in financial trouble. And Handler has been harvesting investments like Conwed Plastics, a 30-year Leucadia holding. Handler is building cash to deploy as the currently rich market provides new opportunities. According to Oppenheimer, it has net cash of $640 million. “We want to be the one who gets the call,” Handler has said. For the current year, Oppenheimer expects Leucadia to earn $306 million, or $1.58 a share, on revenue of $2.99 billion, and next year, $329 million, or $1.50, on revenue of $3.11 billion. Yet earnings are a sideshow, says Kotowski: “Leucadia is an asset-value story, not an earnings story.” At $26 and change last week, Leucadia trades at a slight discount to its book value of $27. One of its major components, Jefferies, is sometimes compared to banking advisory Greenhill (GHL), whose stock fetches twice book. Oppenheimer’s Kotowski believes the stock is worth $30 a share based on his assessment of its individual businesses. Another Leucadia fan, Larry Pitkowsky of GoodHaven Capital Management, thinks the “mid-to-high $30s” is possible with fuller valuations of Jefferies and National Beef. Leucadia has consistently told investors that everything is for sale. That means many possible catalysts to lift its shares.

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Jefferies investments pay off with record year, league tables return - Business Insider

Jefferies on Tuesday announced a monster fourth quarter that helped the bank generate the best annual revenue and profit figures in its 55-year history. The firm, whose fiscal year ends a month earlier than the rest of Wall Street, reported annual revenue of $3.2 billion, up 32%; investment banking revenue of $1.76 billion, up 48%; and profits of $358 million, up from just $15 million last year — all three records. The robust performance is part of a resurgence for Jefferies, which jumped two spots to ninth in US investment banking revenue — which includes fees for providing loans and advising on mergers and acquisitions, debt capital markets, and equity capital markets — according to Dealogic’s preliminary 2017 results released earlier this week. It’s the only independent bank in the top 10; the rest of the list is made up of bulge-bracket conglomerates with massive global operations.
Jefferies CEO Rich Handler says the bank is catching up to some of its competitors and stealing market share in part because it has been investing in talent the past couple of years — especially in telecommunications, healthcare, energy, and industrials — while others were more gun-shy. “Our recent strategy was to basically shrink our balance sheet and invest in quality bankers and quality people,” Handler, who has run Jefferies as CEO since 2001 and is the longest-tenured chief executive on Wall Street, told Business Insider. He added: “Our industry expertise has improved and it’s pretty robust. Quite frankly, we’re in a good position, as many of our larger competitors have pulled back.” Handler, who joined the firm in 1990 and has been a managing director since 1993, has a knack for staffing up when others are retreating. He also added to his roster after markets got choppy in 1998 and 2001 and again after the financial crisis in 2008, he said. “The hardest thing to do is to invest when things are not going well,” Handler said. “It sounds kind of trite. If you do nothing too stupid or arrogant during the good times, you can take advantage during the bad times. We have done that fairly well over the past three decades.”

Getting in on the private-equity boom
The fruits of that investment were on full display in the firm’s fourth quarter, which saw record investment banking revenue of $529 million, a 27% increase from last year. M&A advisory is up, but the independent bank has especially gained ground in underwriting debt and equity. For the full year, DCM revenue more than doubled to $649 million, while ECM revenue climbed 47% to $345 million. Handler said that’s partly a function of Jefferies snatching up a hefty chunk of business from private-equity firms, an industry that is booming with record amounts of fundraising and dry powder. Through the first three quarters of 2017, Jefferies pulled in just shy of $300 million in fees from financial sponsors, as buyout firms are often called in the industry, an 18% increase from the same point in 2016, according to data from Thomson Reuters. “We’ve gained a lot of market share on the sponsor side because of the breadth of our sell-side assignments,” Handler said. “When you sell companies to the sponsor community, you tend to get the financing too.” Given that private-equity firms typically rely on debt to finance acquisitions, establishing ties with these clients helps explain why Jefferies’ debt-underwriting business doubled this year. It’s all adding up to a lucrative 2017 for Jefferies’ bankers. The firm is paying out $1.83 billion in compensation to its 3,450 employees around the world. While payouts of course vary based on individual and department performance, that works out to an average of $530,000 an employee — the highest mark since the financial crisis in 2008.
 
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