The Activist Investor Blog
The Activist Investor Blog
How to Monitor Activist Investing - Update
What’s the best way to stay on top of the activist scene? Besides reading TAI’s blog, of course? It all depends on what you want to track. Investors have a few different ways to stay on top of targeted companies, and to monitor individual activist investors.
We looked at this subject about three years ago. Things have evolved since then, with the addition of a new service, Activist Insight, which offers some attractive features at a decent price.
If you just want to see Form 13D filings at the SEC, your favorite SEC filing service will do the trick. The Edgar database at the SEC website is free, and has most every filing that the SEC uses. But, it does not provide any sort of alert capability, and is barely searchable.
For that, we use SEC Info, basically an Edgar filing reader. You can search it extensively, along a wide range of parameters. It also has a decent notification capability, which we use to track Form 13D filings. So, every time the SEC receives a Form 13D or 13D/A, SEC Info sends us an email message. We also use this same tracking capability to follow a few different companies and activist funds (say, when a fund files a Form 13F). It’s a relative bargain at $120 per year.
Using SEC Info in this way has its limits, of course:
❖For a given company, we see all of its SEC filings, when we really only want Form 13D filings, and maybe Form 4
❖Some activist funds don’t make SEC filings, while others file numerous forms each week, so we either miss some funds entirely, or get way too many email messages on others
❖We receive every Form 13D filing, including all the routine ones that have nothing to do with activist investing.
We know of a few different services that overcome these limits.
Anyone can sign up for a free email update from Hedge Fund Solutions. They send a weekly listing of a few activist situations, which they cull from the preceding week’s Form 13D filings. It is not searchable or exhaustive, but if you have only the most casual interest in activist investing it probably delivers the right level of information.
We know of three subscription services, too: 13D Monitor, SharkRepellent.net, and now Activist Insight.
13D Monitor compiles Form 13D filings, lots of them. With Form 13D as its basic unit of analysis, 13D Monitor profiles both companies and activist investors. Through these filings, it also has a library of related agreements and letters. If you want a detailed analysis of a specific activist investor, they do that, too, with profiles of about 60 prominent ones, including analysis of investment performance. They also have a periodic newsletter, The Activist Report, for clients. When we last checked, 13D Monitor cost $18,000 per year.
SharkRepellent.net provides a huge database of corporate bylaws and state corporation laws, and a smaller database of SEC filings and activist investor information. As their name suggests, it specializes in analysis of takeover and activist defenses. They also put together a few specific research reports each year, on subjects like poison pills and say-on-pay voting, available to everyone. They charge “per unit”, with reports costing as little as $2 and as much as $500, depending on the contents.
A new service, Activist Insight, provides a number of very interesting features, at a reasonable price:
❖They, too, track companies and activist investors, with a searchable database of each, including about 150 activists.
❖Their investor profile includes investment performance data.
❖They also provide an alert capability that generates an email message when a company or activist investor makes news or an SEC filing.
They offer a free monthly newsletter to all comers, with the subscription service costing $5,000 per year.
We sign up for everything we can - the weekly Hedge Fund Solutions newsletter, the monthly Activist Insight report, and the research reports from SharkRepellent.net. The latter two also offer trial subscriptions if you want to take either one for a spin.
Tuesday, March 19, 2013