Stocks in financial services are low on the priority list for guru Paul Singer (Trades, Portfolio), founder and CEO of multibillion-dollar hedge fund Elliott Management – they have a 3.2% weighting in his portfolio; energy and technology stocks are his preferences – so it wasn’t surprising when he decided to part with a portion of his stake in National Bank Holdings Corp (NBHC, Financial), a holding company that serves its clients through a network of 97 banking centers, many of them in Colorado and Kansas City, last week.
What was surprising was how much he sold.
Singer initially invested in NBHC in the fourth quarter of 2012, buying more than 3.8 million shares for an average price of $18.92 per share. A year later he sold more than 200,000 shares for an average price of $20.77 per share.
Since that time, his stake in NBHC has remained untouched. At the end of 2014, it occupied the #16 spot (in volume) in his portfolio. If Singer had not sold those shares in the fourth quarter of 2013, NBHC would have nosed past Coronado Biosciences Inc (CNDO, Financial), a California-based biopharmaceutical company, for the #15 spot.
After last week, though, his stake in NBHC is barely in his top 40. Singer sold nearly two-thirds of his holdings in the company for about $18.53 per share. At the close of trading on Tuesday, NBHC was selling for $18.69 per share.
National Bank Holdings has a P/E of 84.8, a Price/Book of 0.9 and a Price/Sales of 4.7. It has a market cap of $722.5 million and an enterprise value of $510.94 million.
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