market folly

Dmitry Balyasny's hedge fund firm Balyasny Asset Management has filed a 13G with the SEC on Maguire Properties (MPG). In the filing, we see that Balyasny has disclosed a 5.35% ownership stake in the company. This was due to activity on November 3rd and they now hold 2,564,650 shares. This is an increase because as per Balyasny's 13F filing which detailed holdings as of September 30th, they owned 898,172 shares.

This is interesting because fellow hedge fund Dan Loeb's Third Point LLC had owned shares of MPG in the past. However, when we covered their portfolio holdings, we saw they had completely sold out of Maguire. (And, we had noted their selling back in July as well). As the saying goes, there's always two sides to a trade. Balyasny was buying shares of MPG and Dan Loeb was selling.

Our post today really marks the first time we've looked at portfolio movements over at Balyasny. For those of you who may be unfamiliar, Balyasny Asset Management (BAM) was founded by Dmitry Balyasny in 2001 and has over 100 employees with the main office in Chicago and other offices in Greenwich, Hong Kong, London, Mumbai, and New York. Their investment process involves fundamental research by sector as well as dynamic capital allocation. They place a heavy weighting on experience and organize their teams so that they can concentrate on any given idea. They like to "focus on misunderstood situations and companies/sectors undergoing turbulent change from different perspectives." Through their research process they seek to identify unique ideas with attractive risk return. We'll hopefully be covering them more frequently from here on out and will add them to our hedge fund portfolio tracking series.

Taken from Google reader, Maguire Properties is "a self-administered and self-managed real estate investment trust (REIT). The Company is the owner and operator of Class A office properties in the Los Angeles Central Business District (LACBD) and is primarily focused on owning and operating office properties in the high-barrier-to-entry Southern California market."