Clifton Robbins’ Blue Harbour Raises Activist Stake to 7.4% In This Financial Stock

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Jim Simons‘ Renaissance Technology is another shareholder of Investors Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:ISBC), although it looks like it is not particularly optimistic about the company’s prospects. In its last 13F filing, Renaissance disclosed holding 7.93 million shares of the company as of the end of September, down by 2.32 million over the quarter. On the other hand, Jonathon Jacobson‘s Highfields Capital Management raised its stake by 1.0 million shares to 9.27 million shares.

Blue Harbour has been investing in activist situations since it was founded in 2004 by Mr. Robbins, a former partner at private equity giant KKR. The fund has an equity portfolio worth $2.6 billion as of the end of September, and aside from Investors Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:ISBC), it also owns an activist position in Allscripts Healthcare Solutions Inc (NASDAQ:MDRX), which represents 7% of the company. Moreover, Blue Harbour’s largest equity position is represented by Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:AKAM), whose stock gained 34% over the last year.

It will be interesting to see how this story surrounding Blue Harbour and Investors Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:ISBC) will develop and we will keep a close eye on it. However, the banking industry is not one in which we can see a lot of activism. Nevertheless, as Blue Harbour has been activist on Investors Bancorp, another fund was prepared to go into a proxy fight with another bank. In December, Nelson Peltz‘s Trian Partners entered into an agreement with Bank of New York Mellon Corp (NYSE:BK), of which it owns 28.90 million shares. Under the terms of the agreement, the company would give the investor a board seat, a move that is considered to have prevented a long and expensive proxy fight.

Disclosure: none

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