Bullpen.News From Edwin Dorsey
Get Daily Recap Feedback

Sector

Activism

Everything our editor has picked under this sector, best first.

122 stories

@leevalueroach 1 click

Lee Roach on X

The CEO of Beasley Broadcasting $BBGI is seen here wearing a $60,000 Van Cleef necklace in her headshot on the company's website. This is the nepo baby that drove her family's business into the ground and then diluted equity holders to all hell with a nasty equity raise. I think she should sell her high end jewelry collection and start using the funds to pay down the company's debt. Still no word on who the entity was who bought into that deal. They now own 25% of the Class A stock and are past the SEC filing deadline. Could it be members of the family getting a sweetheart deal and really screwing minority shareholders here? Asset sales have been nil. Someone check Caroline's Neiman Marcus credit card transactions! Have more Van Cleef's been acquired in the interim?
@convequity

Convequity on X

Private equity puts a floor under software valuations, and you can work out that floor with simple arithmetic. A private equity buyer takes the company private, removes unnecessary staff, lifts margins to 30%+ and keeps growth in the low teens. A company restructured that way should be worth at least 20x EV/EBIT. At a 33% EBIT margin, 20x EV/EBIT is about 6.7x EV/Sales. That gives a simple test for any software stock. If it trades well below that level, the market values the business at less than a buyer could get from it just by cutting costs. In our view, the market sees no differentiated future for that company. So why don't more of these companies get restructured? One reason is ownership. Dual-class share structures are common across large-cap and mid-cap tech, and they limit how much pressure private equity and activist investors can apply. That makes it hard for a company like $OKTA to accept legacy status and carry out a deep restructuring. We expect many SaaS companies to keep fighting slowing revenue with high operating expenses rather than restructure.
@leevalueroach

Lee Roach on X

The management team running $SGA is filled with idiots. These guys took 50 years to realize that radio was dying and then they decided to switch to a digital first strategy. And guess what their digital strategy is? Search and display ads for websites. Idiots. Probably something that is going to die faster than radio now that AI exists. CEO lives in Florida and calls Saga the greatest media company in the world. It’s deep value here. But you need an activist investor so bad. The board is filled with guys who probably still use a fax machine and use Outlook for their emails. Some really ancient guys running this company. Some would say the most ancient.
@leevalueroach

Lee Roach on X

Disclosing a large short position in $META. Thesis: Muse is offered free of charge with no meaningful cap on inference consumption. Meta is absorbing the full cost of compute, memory, and power on every query in pursuit of user growth. We believe this subsidy is unsustainable under adversarial usage. Position: We have deployed 10,000 endpoints running maximally compute-intensive workloads on a continuous basis. Deployment is scaling at 10,000 units per day. Unit economics: Our marginal cost per endpoint is approximately $300, incurred once. Meta's cost per endpoint is recurring and uncapped. We view this as a highly asymmetric trade. Channel checks: Retail sources confirm unusual laptop demand in the region. We are the source of that demand. Risks: Rate limiting, supply constraints at our primary vendor, and rising operating expenses on our side. Outlook: We expect material margin compression, a miss on next quarter's earnings, and elevated data center thermal risk. This is called activist investing.