Steven Cohen (Trades, Portfolio), founder and manager of SAC Capital Advisors, a Stamford, Connecticut based hedge fund, bought and sold stakes in Olin Corp (OLN, Financial), a Missouri-based manufacturer of ammunition, chlorine and sodium hydroxide that was founded in 1892, regularly between 2010 and 2013. Between the middle of 2012 and the end of 2013, he bought new stakes in OLN twice and sold out three times, each time making a profit.
He hadn’t traded in Olin stock since the end of 2013, but then in the first quarter of this year, he invested in a new stake in the company, acquiring 227,900 shares for an average price of $26.82 per share. That was nearly four times as many Olin shares as Cohen ever owned between 2010 and 2013, but then he made an astonishing addition at the end of June – buying 3,832,254 shares for an average price of $30.02 per share.
That raised Cohen’s stake in Olin to 4,060,154 shares, which nearly put it in Cohen’s Top 10 by volume, but he wasn’t finished. In early July, he added another 883,799 shares to his stake for an average price of $25.04 per share.
That put Olin solidly in Cohen’s Top 10.
But then on Monday, Cohen sold nearly 1 million shares for an average price of $23.69 per share, reducing his holding by nearly 19%. The stake dropped back into Cohen’s Second 10.
Olin has a market cap of $1.82 billion and an enterprise value of $2.29 billion. It has a P/E of 20.8, a Price/Book of 1.8 and a Price/Sales of 0.9. RS Investment Management (Trades, Portfolio), Joel Greenblatt (Trades, Portfolio), Louis Moore Bacon (Trades, Portfolio), David Dreman (Trades, Portfolio), Mario Gabelli (Trades, Portfolio), Jim Simons (Trades, Portfolio), Chuck Royce (Trades, Portfolio) and Paul Tudor Jones (Trades, Portfolio) have shares of Olin in their portfolios.
Today Olin declared its 355th consecutive quarterly dividend. A dividend of 20 cents per share will be paid on Sept. 10 to all shareholders of record at the end of business on Aug. 10.
To view the portfolios of more gurus, visit the List of Gurus page. Not a premium member of GuruFocus? Try it free for 7 days.
