As noted earlier, the stocks of both Rite Aid and Fred's are tumbling this morning, after Walgreen's terminated its long-running merger agreement, instead opting to buy over 2,000 RAD stores outright. For those who missed it, here is pain trade for Fred's shareholders this morning...
... and Rite-Aid.
However, besides regular retail and vanilla institutional investors, one class that is being hit especially hard on today's news are hedge funds, who according to Bloomberg own ~32% of Fred’s shares and ~26% of Rite Aid.
So who is hurt hardest this morning? By far the most hurt, is Alden Global - the top holder of Fred’s, with 9.27m shares, or 24% stake, as of April 24, when both firms signed a cooperation pact to appoint two directors; Alden bought shares from Nov. 28-Dec. 22, with its largest purchases when FRED was trading ~$20-share
Courtesy of Bloomberg, here is a breakdown of the other top holders as of March 31:
Here are the others:
- Adage Capital 19.5m shares (1.9% stake) in RAD, 2.4m shares (6.3%) in FRED
- Greenlight Capital 16.8m shares (1.6% stake) in RAD, 2.2m shares (5.7%) in FRED
- Mason Capital 7.2m shares (0.7% stake) in RAD, 313k shares (0.8%) in FRED
- Sand Grove Capital 3.2m shares (0.3% stake) in RAD, 187k shares (0.5%) in FRED
Other top hedge fund holders of FRED:
- TIG Advisors 1.5m shares (4% stake)
- ADI Capital Management 391k shares (1% stake)
- Hudson Bay Capital 391k shares (1% stake)
- Highbridge Capital 293k shares (0.8% stake)
- Melvin Capital 150k shares (0.4% stake)
Meanwhile, over in RAD:
- Highfields Capital 19m shares (1.8% stake)
- Two Sigma 21.9m shares (2.1% stake)
- Pentwater Capital 15.6m shares (1.5% stake)
- CNH Partners 12.5m shares (1.2% stake)
- PAR Capital Management 9m shares (0.9% stake)
- Coastland Capital 7.3m shares (0.7% stake)
- Litespeed Management 4.7m shares (0.5% stake)
Source: Bloomberg