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Martin Whitman posts

Marty Whitman still comfortable with MBIA holding

Posted Mar 3rd 2008 3:52PM by Zac Bissonnette (RSS feed)
Filed under: MBIA Inc (MBI)

Well-respected value investor Martin Whitman has invested 2.51% of his famed Third Avenue Value Fun in shares of bond-insurer MBIA (NYSE: MBI), putting him at odds with another great value investor, William Ackman, who has been a vocal critic of the company. Whitman's position in the company amounts to 1,600,497 shares -- a substantial drop from the two million shares he owned when he wrote his third quarter letter to shareholders.

The 82-year old Whitman devoted a substantial chunk of the letter to defending his MBIA stake, saying that the company appears to be "very well financed" -- a claim William Ackman has disputed vigorously.

Whitman added that his fund "would probably not lose money if ... MBIA were to go into run-off rather than remain going concerns. Run-off, i.e., liquidation, simply is not a likely outcome, however."

Continue reading Marty Whitman still comfortable with MBIA holding

Should you follow Marty Whitman into Handleman?

Posted Jul 26th 2007 11:00AM by Zac Bissonnette (RSS feed)
Filed under: Bargain Stocks, Stocks to Buy

Any deep value investor who labors late into the night in search of really cheap stocks has heard of Handleman Co. (NYSE: HDL), a distributor of CDs, DVDs and video games for companies including Wal-Mart Corp. (NYSE: WMT). Its anemic price to book ratio of 0.43 lands it near the top of any screen for net-current asset value plays, but there's just one problem: Handleman has been showing up on those screens for more than a year. I first started looking at it when it was trading around $12 per share; it hit a new low today of $4.96.

But now there's a reason to look anew at Handleman, and it's another name every deep value investor has heard of: Marty Whitman (author of one of my favorite books, The Aggressive Conservative Investor) and his firm Third Avenue management recently reported a 17.2% stake in the company, up from the 15.6% it first reported in April.

Continue reading Should you follow Marty Whitman into Handleman?