A Look Into Jeff Smith, John Paulson & Two Other Investors’ Latest Moves

As revealed in a separate 13G filing, Brian Taylor’s Pine River Capital Management L.P. currently owns 2.52 million shares of JAKKS Pacific Inc. (NASDAQ:JAKK), which account for 11.0% of the company’s outstanding shares. This represents an increase from the stake of 1.65 million shares disclosed in the fund’s previous 13G filing on the company, submitted with the SEC in early February. The shares of the multi-line toy company have declined almost 8% since the beginning of 2016, so Mr. Taylor and his team might have decided not to pass up the opportunity of buying more shares at more attractive prices. JAKKS Pacific Inc. (NASDAQ:JAKK) designs, produces, markets and distributes toys and other related products through its in-house sales staff and independent sales representatives to toy and mass-market retail chain stores, departments stores, and others. The company’s three largest customers are represented by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE:WMT), Target Corporation (NYSE:TGT) and Toys ‘R’ Us, which accounted for 21.9%, 13.0% and 9.5% of 2015 net sales. JAKKS Pacific’s net sales for 2015 totaled $745.74 million, which decreased from $810.06 million in 2014. The decrease in the company’s 2015 top-line figure was mainly attributable to the strong performance of the Frozen and Marvel brands in 2014. Even so, net income increased to $23.17 million in 2015 from $21.51 million in 2014. Shares of JAKKS Pacific currently change hands at around 8.5-times expected earnings, versus the forward P/E multiple of 17.4 for the S&P 500 Index or the ratio of 18.5 for the Nasdaq-100 Index. A total of 13 hedge funds from our database had long positions in the toy company at the end of December, accumulating 13% of its outstanding shares. Billionaire Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies had a 1.82 million-share position in JAKKS Pacific Inc. (NASDAQ:JAKK) in its equity portfolio at the end of 2015.

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