Sometimes you have to work really hard for those "soft dollars."
Readers will recall that last week [4], one of the stocks that had become a proxy for forced hedge fund liquidations and margin selling, was alternative energy company SunEdison (also known in less polite circles as SunEnron), or SUNE, pronounced Sun-EE which it most certainly wasn't for its prominent hedge fund holders which as we noted previously include the who's who of hedge fund (idea dinner participants), including Greenlight, Third Point, Glenview, Lone Pine, Fir Tree, Steadfast, Omega, York, and Canyon, after plummeting from $33/share to just above $8 in a few months.
Needless to say, these hedge funds are also some of JPM's best buyside clients, and sometime when a client says "we need an upgrade so we can cash out" you have no choice or risk losing millions in soft dollar revenue flow. In this case, the "analyst" staffed with the unpleasant task of building an exit door in the burning Hotel Sun-E-fornia, is JPM's Paul Coster, who moments ago came out with an initiating coverage of SUNE with an "overweight" rating and a price target of $24, about 140% higher than where the stock is trading as of this moment.
From the report:
We are initiating coverage of SUNE with an Overweight rating and a SOTP-based Dec-16 price target of $24.00. SunEdison is a leading developer and owner-operator of wind and solar power assets, executing on massive long-term global growth opportunities, and delivering shareholder value in the form of predictable cash flows from the sale of SPV systems and aggregation of cash flows from its two drop-down YieldCos, TERP and GLBL. Amid liquidity concerns, we are buyers.
Oh you're a buyer of alternative energy, are you with oil at $40 and sliding lower every day? Well, then you will be delighted when Greenlight, Third Point, Glenview, Lone Pine, Fir Tree, Steadfast, Omega, York, and Canyon all line up at your door seeking to sell.
Meanwhile, to all the solar-powered hedge funds stuck in the hedge fund hotel, good luck to all when quietly exiting.
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