A wink-wink-working-at-work FBvian sent along this analysis of how Brian Ferguson and his partners have done since they sunk about $1 million into A.H. Belo Corp. stock. Looks good, right? (Honestly, that is really just a guess, because it took me a few times to read through the e-mail and not have my eyes instantly glaze over when looking at the numbers.)
I was reading your post on the Dallas Morning News this morning and it reminded me to go check on their stock. When I went to look there was a new SEC filing that caught my attention. This summer D ran a story about an investor who had decided to buy newspaper stock. What an idiot was my first reaction. I added the ticker to my stock pages so I could follow the implosion of the investment. (Horrible, I know!)
Anyway, today there was another filing showing the group had dropped below 5%. Their first filing was back on March 13. Yahoo Stock says the stock closed at 78 cents that day. They had 7% of the company. The new filing shows they were down to less than 5% around Aug 20 and finished the month at 3.5%. The price was between 3.25 and 4.00 during that time.
Using a little bit of math it is pretty much a given that they have returned all of their capital, eliminated any downside, made a healthy rate of return, and still have a couple percentage points in the company if there turns out to be any hope for newspapers (which I still doubt).
