It was yet another excellent day for the shareholders of Voltari Corp (NASDAQ:VLTC), as its shares surged in excess of 38% after Benzinga reported Wednesday evening on Carl Icahn’s continued interest in the company. When interviewed at an investment conference in New York, Icahn confirmed that he maintained his last reported position in the company. At the end of the first quarter, Icahn Capital LP reported a 52.3% stake in the digital marketing firm. The shares of Voltari Corp (NASDAQ:VLTC) are up by an enormous 1,112.12% year-to-date, with some of the credit for that certainly being owed to the famed activist investor and his legion of dedicated piggyback investors. Carl Icahn is the largest stockholder of the company with 4.74 million shares valued at $4.79 million at the end of the first quarter. The investment manager is known for his activism in publicly-traded companies, with some of his recent activist campaigns including positions in Hologic, Inc. (NASDAQ:HOLX), Hertz Global Holdings Inc (NYSE:HTZ), Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE:GCI), Nuance Communications Inc. (NASDAQ:NUAN), Chesapeake Energy Corporation (NYSE:CHK), and Manitowoc Company Inc (NYSE:MTW).
Voltari Corp (NASDAQ:VLTC) reported revenues of $2.04 million for the first quarter of 2015 with a net loss of $2.88 million. Its revenues declined compared to the prior year, whereas net loss came out to be lower than the year ago period. Voltari Corp (NASDAQ:VLTC) came into existence in 2012, prior to which it was known as Motricity. As of now, the company offers mobile marketing and advertising solutions to several Fortune 500 companies. The digital marketing company closed a rights offering for 4.3 million shares on March 20, 2015. Under the terms of the offering, shareholders with an existing stake in the company were able to buy an additional 0.9 shares of Voltari for every single share owned. The shares were available at a price of $0.97 for investors purchasing a smaller number of shares, whereas shareholders buying more than 1.3 million shares had to pay $1.36 per share. Voltari Corp (NASDAQ:VLTC) was able to raise $4.6 million out of this rights offering. Carl Icahn purchased these shares through his affiliate investment firms including Hopper Investments, LLC and High River Limited Partnership.
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Jim Simon’s Renaissance Technologies was the only other hedge fund in our database with a position in Voltari Corp (NASDAQ:VLTC) as of March 31. Renaissance Technologies held 31,600 shares of the digital marketing company, with a value of $32,000, a mere drop in the ocean within the fund’s $46.96 billion public equity portfolio.
Following activist funds like Icahn Capital is important because it is a very specific and focused strategy in which the investor doesn’t have to wait for catalysts to realize gains in the holding. A fund like Icahn Capital can simply create its own catalysts by pushing for them through negotiations with the company’s management and directors. In recent years, the average returns of activists’ hedge funds has been much higher than the returns of an average hedge fund. Furthermore, we believe do-it-yourself investors have an advantage over activist hedge fund investors because they don’t have to pay 2% of their assets and 20% of their gains every year to compensate hedge fund managers. We have found through extensive research that the top small-cap picks of hedge funds are also capable of generating high returns and built a system around this premise. In the 34 months since our small-cap strategy was launched it has returned over 139% and beaten the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by more than 80 percentage points (read more details).
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