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  • BlackBerry Revival Rewards Watsa’s Patience With Huge Gain

    (Bloomberg) -- Day traders have pushed BlackBerry Ltd.’s share price to levels not seen in more than nine years. They’ve also given a jolt to a Canadian investment company that got crushed in last spring’s market crash.BlackBerry soared 22.6% to $23.19 as of 9:38 a.m. in New York on Wednesday, bringing its gain for the year to nearly 250%. That is repaying the patience of Prem Watsa and his Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd., which owns 8.3% of the software firm’s shares.Once the toast of the mobile tech world, BlackBerry failed to keep pace with competitors including Apple Inc. and the stock lost most of its value in 2010 and 2011. Around that time, Watsa, a value investor who has tried to model Fairfax after Berkshire Hathaway Inc., began building a large stake, which also includes convertible debentures with a conversion price of $6 each that could be turned into 55 million shares.The run-up in BlackBerry shares this year would drive a pretax gain of about $1.16 billion for Fairfax in the first quarter, Phil Hardie, a Toronto-based analyst at Bank of Nova Scotia, told clients in a note before markets opened on Tuesday. Hardie upgraded his recommendation on Fairfax’s shares to a buy-equivalent.Fairfax closed at C$488.94 on Tuesday. With a 12.7% gain as of Tuesday’s close, it’s the best-performing financial stock in the S&P/TSX Composite Index this year after being one of the worst in 2020 with a 29% drop.Scotiabank’s most bullish scenario for Fairfax “implies almost 50% upside and assumes that the stock sheds its valuation discount and trades at book value, with Fairfax locking in recent gains in BlackBerry through hedging or monetizing its position,” Hardie wrote. Fairfax didn’t respond to a request for comment.Watsa has been waiting for such a payoff for years. Fairfax even organized a bid to take BlackBerry private in 2013 -- the same year the latter changed its name from Research In Motion Ltd. -- then abandoned it in favor of a bond deal and management shakeup that brought in John Chen as chief executive officer.Despite an unrealized loss of $50 million on the investment as of 2019, Fairfax’s letter to shareholders last March made clear Watsa still believed in the CEO, who has focused BlackBerry on enterprise software. “We continue to support John Chen as he works diligently to make BlackBerry a growth company again,” Watsa wrote.The sudden rise has been partly fueled by Reddit forums and social media channels where retail speculators seek out unloved or heavily-shorted stocks like GameStop Corp., hoping to drive them up quickly.RBC Capital Markets downgraded its recommendation on BlackBerry to a sell-equivalent Tuesday, citing the torrid rally and unchanged fundamental outlook. Analyst Paul Treiber kept his price target at $7.50. Scotiabank also elected to cut BlackBerry’s stock rating to a sell-equivalent early Wednesday, as analyst Paul Steep calling the share run “overdone.” Still, shares are gaining about 11% in premarket trading Wednesday.Watsa, 70, founded Fairfax in 1985, following Warren Buffett’s strategy of using insurance float as a way to build an investment portfolio. With a market value of more than C$14 billion it’s a fraction of Berkshire’s size, though it’s more than twice as large as buyout firm Onex Corp.(Updates with Wednesday share move in second paragraph)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

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  • AMC Erases Pandemic Plunge After Shares Quadruple Premarket

    (Bloomberg) -- AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc.’s stock price briefly quadrupled Wednesday, erasing last year’s pandemic-induced slump amid optimism around a recent fundraising. The cinema operator is among a number of heavily shorted stocks rallying this week.The stock rose as much as 310% at the open of the regular trading session in New York, pushing it to the highest level since October 2018. AMC said Monday that $917 million in new funds would get it through the next six months as the industry battles the effects of Covid-19, which has shuttered venues around the world.Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Amine Bensaid said AMC is one of the names that’s been floated in social media for its high short interest, joining the likes of GameStop Corp.The gain “isn’t based on fundamentals and appears to be similar to the GameStop run-up driven by retail investors, yet could help ease a severe liquidity crunch if the company capitalizes on the jump and issues additional shares,” Bensaid wrote Wednesday.AMC shares pared some of their steepest gains, rising 248% to $17.24 as of 9:42 a.m. in New York. Nearly $4.5 billion in shares traded in the premarket session.Short interest as a percentage of free float was 12%, according to data from S3 Partners, down from 61% in December. In London, shares of Cineworld Group Plc, another favorite among short sellers, jumped as much as 21%. The U.K. firm competes with AMC’s Odeon unit in Britain.AMC’s bonds also continued their tear along with the shares, reaching record highs and leading the U.S. high-yield market on Wednesday. The notes due 2026 reached roughly 63 cents on the dollar, up from a low of 5 cents set in November, according to Trace bond trading data.(Updates share move throughout, adds analyst’s comment and bond trading.)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

  • Covid vaccine plant in Wrexham evacuated over suspicious package

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  • ‘Making up for lost time’: Biden issues stack of executive actions to tackle climate crisis after four years of Trump

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  • Blackstone to Buy an Allstate Life Insurance Business for $2.8 Billion

    (Bloomberg) -- Blackstone Group Inc. agreed to buy a life business from Allstate Corp. for $2.8 billion as the private equity firm expands its foothold in the insurance industry.Entities managed by Blackstone will purchase Allstate Life Insurance Co., the insurer said Tuesday in a statement. Allstate will retain a New York life business and is seeking a way to sell or transfer risk from that unit to a third party.Allstate has been looking to pivot away from life insurance and annuities as the Northbrook, Illinois-based firm focuses more on property-casualty products such as identity protection and personal coverage. The deal will help Blackstone expand further into life insurance and annuities after its work with FGL Holdings, which was bought by Fidelity National Financial Inc. last year.“This transaction represents the next step in the process to deploy capital out of spread-based risks,” Allstate Chief Executive Officer Tom Wilson said Wednesday on a conference call about the transaction. “This transaction is economically attractive when compared to issuing life insurance and running off the closed block of annuities.”Allstate shares were up a touch to $109.7 at 9:35 a.m. in New York Wednesday. The deal is expected to close in the second half of this year, and will cause a roughly $3.1 billion financial book loss for Allstate in the first quarter.Private equity firms such as Blackstone and Apollo Global Management Inc. have been drawn to annuity businesses for a steady stream of assets that can be invested. With the deal, Blackstone will enter into an asset management agreement to help oversee the life business’s $28 billion portfolio.“Private equity firms have been ascendant in the life and annuity space, while multiline insurers have been dialing back from a conglomerate insurance business model,” David Havens, a credit analyst at Imperial Capital, said in a note.(Updates with CEO comment in fourth paragraph, shares in fifth paragraph, Blackstone investment agreement in sixth paragraph and analyst comment in seventh.)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

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  • GameStop Shares Surge Afresh as Short Sellers Start to Surrender

    (Bloomberg) -- GameStop Corp. extended its surge Wednesday as bullish day traders kept the upper hand over short sellers who started to capitulate.The stock rose 140% to $354.83 as of 9:30 a.m. in New York, after having surged more than threefold in the past four days.The meteoric rally has left short sellers counting the cost in a battle with day traders who have taken to Reddit to encourage others to follow their lead. Melvin Capital closed out its short position, while Citron Capital’s Andrew Left said the firm covered the majority of its short in “the $90’s at a loss of 100%.”“It does feel like rationality and fundamentals are just kind of dead,” J Capital Research co-founder Anne Stevenson-Yang said by telephone. “If you’re short you’re in a very difficult position because you have to buy the stock to get out, so you end with a heavily overvalued stock.”GameStop didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.The stock had gyrated wildly outside of regular hours since Tuesday’s 93% surge, a move that meant GameStop has risen more than eightfold this month in a dizzying rally fueled by Reddit-charged day traders.“It really just goes to show the classic saying that markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent,” said Greg Taylor, chief investment officer at Purpose Investments. “So you can try to fight this as long as you want but at some point you just have to give in and just step to the sidelines.”The stock’s gains were fanned late Tuesday after Tesla Inc. chief Elon Musk tweeted a link to a Reddit thread about the company. But famed fund manager Michael Burry warned that the manic rally has gotten out of hand, calling the stock’s rise “unnatural, insane, and dangerous.”“That feels like the phase of the market we’re in right now, where things are going a little crazy and definitely divorced from fundamentals,” Taylor said.Another note of caution was provided Wednesday by Bank of America Corp. analysts. While raising their price target to $10 from $1.60 to reflect the stock’s recent surge, they noted that GameStop is in “a weaker not a stronger place” and reiterated their underperform recommendation.“While it is difficult to know how much very high short interest and retail ownership could continue to put upward pressure on the shares, we think fundamentals will again factor into valuation,” analysts led by Curtis Nagle wrote in a note. “We remain skeptical on the potential for a turnaround.”Euphoria born in day-trader chat rooms has turned GameStop into the biggest story stock of the retail era, its improbable surge an emblem of the newfound power of individual investors. At the same time, it’s become a major headache for institutional investors betting it would fall. An epic short squeeze lifting the shares has set off a search for other companies that might be similarly vulnerable, with Express Inc., Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. among stocks surging in premarket trading on Wednesday.“The thing about these manias is there’s always enough people who make 600% or 1,000% and tell everybody about it that everybody gets excited about it,” said Anne Stevenson-Yang. “The thing is it’s not the majority of those people and eventually a whole bunch of people lose money.”(Updates with additional commentary and latest stock price.)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

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