David Abrams (Trades, Portfolio) is the founder of Abrams Capital Management, which oversees nearly $8 billion in assets. Most of Abrams’ holdings are in banking, but his buys and adds in the first quarter were largely in communications.
Most of Abrams’ holdings in his 12-stock portfolio were untouched in the first quarter, but his addition of 700,000 shares to his stake in Directv (DTV, Financial), a California-based direct broadcast satellite service provider, had a dramatic influence on his portfolio.
The purchase, for an average price of $86.38 per share, doubled his stake in DTV and raised the value of his holding to nearly $120 million. It had a 4.43% impact on his portfolio.
Directv has a market cap of $46.16 billion and an enterprise value of $61.65 billion. It has a P/E of 15.9 and a Price/Sales of 1.4. Warren Buffett (Trades, Portfolio), PRIMECAP Management (Trades, Portfolio), John Paulson (Trades, Portfolio), Mario Gabelli (Trades, Portfolio), Jeremy Grantham (Trades, Portfolio), Jim Simons (Trades, Portfolio), George Soros (Trades, Portfolio), James Barrow (Trades, Portfolio), Joel Greenblatt (Trades, Portfolio), John Hussman (Trades, Portfolio), Robert Bruce (Trades, Portfolio), Louis Moore Bacon (Trades, Portfolio), First Eagle Investment (Trades, Portfolio), Ruane Cunniff (Trades, Portfolio), Jeff Auxier (Trades, Portfolio), RS Investment Management (Trades, Portfolio), Paul Tudor Jones (Trades, Portfolio) and Lee Ainslie (Trades, Portfolio) have shares of DTV in their portfolios. Ken Fisher (Trades, Portfolio), Wallace Weitz (Trades, Portfolio), Ronald Muhlenkamp (Trades, Portfolio), Lou Simpson (Trades, Portfolio) and David Dreman (Trades, Portfolio) sold their stakes in the first quarter.
Abrams also added enough to his stake in MoneyGram International Inc (MGI, Financial), a Dallas, Texas-based money transfer company, to alter that stock’s status in his portfolio as well.
With the purchase of 2,062,500 shares for an average price of $8.7 per share, Abrams made MGI the fourth-largest holding in his portfolio by volume, leaping past Barnes & Noble Inc (BKS, Financial), Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings Inc (CCO, Financial), Wells Fargo & Co (WFC, Financial), InterXion Holding NV (INXN, Financial) and Opus Bank (OPB, Financial). The acquisition had a 1.32% impact on his portfolio.
MoneyGram International has a market cap of $531.18 million and an enterprise value of $1.5 billion. It has a Price/Sales of 0.5. Chuck Royce (Trades, Portfolio), James Barrow (Trades, Portfolio), Richard Blum (Trades, Portfolio) and Jim Simons (Trades, Portfolio) have shares of MoneyGram in their portfolios.
Abrams had one new buy in the quarter. He purchased 2,959,958 shares of VimpelCom Ltd (VIP, Financial), a global telecommunication services provider based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, for an average price of $4.72 per share. The acquisition, which had a 1.15% impact on his portfolio, is Abrams’ seventh-largest holding by volume.
VimpelCom has a market cap of $10.96 billion and an enterprise value of $28.63 billion. It has a Price/Book of 1.9 and a Price/Sales of 0.6. Paul Tudor Jones (Trades, Portfolio), Mario Gabelli (Trades, Portfolio), Jeremy Grantham (Trades, Portfolio) and Howard Marks (Trades, Portfolio) all have shares of VimpelCom in their portfolios.
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