On August 6, billionaire hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman took the unusual step of dialing into an earnings call for one of his fund's holdings and asking a question. It was a second-quarter earnings call for SunEdison, a solar-energy company that went public in 1995. At the time, Omega was the 11th-biggest shareholder of SunEdison, with 8.8 million shares. It's a large stake, but it is still unusual for Cooperman to pick up the phone to publicly ask a question on a company's quarterly conference call. These were no ordinary circumstances, however. After enjoying the benefits of a classic Wall Street hedge fund pile-in – when the smartest money in the stock market wants nothing more than to buy, buy, buy – SunEdison was crashing. Cooperman wanted to know if its executives would throw him and other investors a bone and buy back some stock. They responded, in no uncertain terms, that they would not. Since that call, SunEdison's stock has fallen a further 80%. Its two subsidiaries, TerraForm Global and TerraForm Power, have seen their stocks fall 64% and 73%, respectively. There have been management shake-ups at both the subsidiaries. The stock price collapses have burned some of the biggest investors in the business, including Cooperman, David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital, and David Tepper of Appaloosa Management. And it is all because of doubts over a type of financial engineering that fueled explosive growth in the solar sector for two years, and now has investors questioning the entire sector. http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-a-yieldco-and-how-is-it-killing-wall-street-2015-11
Cooperman regularly calls in. He asked management at SD to buy back stock and they did last year and now they're exchanging debt for equity at pennies on the dollar. So highly indebted companies buying back stock is a bad idea. Cooperman just wants to get out of his position.
this is an very interesting article. does it make you wonder about the due diligence and research capabilities of cooperman and others. perhaps they sit around all day smoking cigars and gossiping about the big bosoms of their newly hired secretaries.
The price of oil fell in half and crushed solar and they're all pretending that everything is the same and they should still get their so called low risk returns and go ahead with solar projects. Obama did the same thing in Paris last week. Only with taxpayer money.
This guy Cooperman is real chicky!!!! Phoning the execs to buy their own stocks so as to sustain the price! Priceless