Activist Stocks: DuPont; WESCO; John Menzies

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Activist ungratefuls, one of those days, forgive the brevity. Cooling off today as we head into the end of week. News and stories for April 30 below. Tip us off @activiststocks, sign up for the free daily activist email (in constant beast iteration mode), and ICYMI the latest newsletter is here.

News-

  • Glass Lewis & Co. recommended that DuPont shareholders add one (Nelson Peltz himself) of four Trian Partners nominees. This comes after ISS supported two of the nominees. The annual meeting is set for May 13.
  • John Menzies has Lakestreet Capital as an activist pushing for a split of the airport services and newspaper distribution company. With the split, the upside would be over 70%.
  • Land & Buildings put out a presentation on MGM [here] and have a conference call scheduled in less than an hour to talk shop on how to break it up.
  • Atlantic Investment is now active on WESCO. Owns 5% and has “canned” plans so far of continuing to talk to management about capital allocation and strategic direction. More on that later via Activist Strategy (paywall, but offering free trials).

Stories-

  • @jamessaft at Reuters pens a piece about why ‘deep-pocketed’ activist do better. Of note, “…activist interventions generated an average abnormal extra return of 5.8 percentage points in the 21 day period around the day the holding was announced.” Within that, the most active funds underperformed and those with the largest campaigns outperformed [link]
  • @Scaramucci puts up a piece @wallstreetweek on why Ben Graham would be proud of today’s activists. We gave Tony a lot of shit this week over Rosenstein’s appearance appearance on Sunday’s show, so we’ll present with as little comment as possible. The post isn’t really about activism at all, but why home-gamers should be in the market [link]

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