market folly

Activist investor Carl Icahn has filed an amended 13D with the SEC regarding his position in Chesapeake Energy (CHK).  Per the filing, Icahn now owns 4.55% of the company with 28.27 million CHK shares.

This means he sold over 44.77 million shares since the end of the second quarter as he previously owned over 73 million CHK shares.

Per the filing, he sold the bulk of the position on September 19th at prices of $7.06.

Icahn also issued this statement regarding Chesapeake:  "We believe that over the last few years Doug Lawler and his team have done an admirable job, especially in light of the circumstances. We reduced our position to recognize a capital loss for tax planning purposes."

For more on this investor, we recently posted up Icahn's talk at the Delivering Alpha conference.

Per Google Finance, Chesapeake Energy is "a producer of natural gas, oil and natural gas liquids (NGL) in the United States. The Company operates in two segments: Exploration and Production, and Marketing, Gathering and Compression. The exploration and production segment is responsible for finding and producing oil, natural gas and NGL. The marketing, gathering and compression segment is responsible for marketing, gathering and compression of oil, natural gas and NGL. It has positions in resource plays of the Eagle Ford Shale in South Texas; the Utica Shale in Ohio and Pennsylvania; the Anadarko Basin in northwestern Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle, and the Niobrara Shale in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming. Its natural gas resource plays are the Haynesville/Bossier Shales in northwestern Louisiana and East Texas; the Marcellus Shale in the northern Appalachian Basin in Pennsylvania, and the Barnett Shale in the Fort Worth Basin of north-central Texas."