“Mantle Ridge LP, the investment vehicle of Paul Hilal, has sold off nearly all of its $1 billion position in CSX, the newspaper reported based on filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. CSX bought back about 4.7 million shares.”
Why is Mantle Ridge selling?
Typical vulture capital investor. Take the money & run. Pick the carcas clean and sneak out under the cloak of darkness when the victim dies so you are not associated with it’s demise. Find new victim.
The 60% operating ratio is a charade and won’t be sustained.(CSX’s future was sold to satisfy a present day vulture Gordon Gecko)
Saw it coming the day they bought in! Sell everything, hoover the proceeds to Mantle Ridge.
Out of all the “traditional” stockholders who owned CSX stock prior to the Mantle Ridge involvement, I wonder how many of them chose to cash-in versus holding on to the stock to see what lies across the abyss?
Probably because they have achieved their investment objective. But only they can say for sure.
Clearly, Mantle Ridge benefited from its investment in CSX.
Just prior to the recent unwinding of its position, it held 4.77 percent of CSX’s common shares. It was behind Vanguard, Capital World Investors, Blackrock, Inc., and Capital Research Global Investors in percentage of shares owned. The number of shares owned by Mantle Ridge was approximately 60 percent of the number of shares owned by Vanguard.
Mantle Ridge was not the only investor that realized a gain from its investment in CSX. Institutional investors hold 52.9 percent of the common shares outstanding. Mutual Funds hold 25.6 percent of the shares, followed by other at 21.2 percent and insiders – executives, key employees, etc., at .3 percent.
Institutional investors include pension funds, university endowment funds, etc. Mutual funds cover the water front.
If you are retired or work for an entity that has a defined pension plan or have an employer sponsored 401(k), and they have invested in CSX common, you too have benefit from the accretion in the value of CSX common shares. If you are invested a mutual fund, chances are it too holds CSX stock and has realized the same gains as Mantle Ridge.
Between January 2, 2015 and October 21, 2019, the market value of CSX’s common shares increased 69.75 percent. Mantle Ridge realized a
Mantle Ridge did not get EHH installed until March 1, 2017 - Jan. 1 2015 to Feb. 28 2017 was on Michael Ward’s watch.
That was not my primary point.
Mantle Ridge’s was not the only investor in CSX that did well. Some of the posters on Train’s forums seem to think that Mantle Ridge ripped off CSX to the detriment of the other shareholders and then ran. That is not what the numbers show.
During the period Mantle Ridge was a minority shareholder, the stock price increased approximately 43 percent. A good return! For every investor!
Right on… my CSX shares went up too…
Primary point or not - Mantle Ridge was the announced vulture capitalist investor - ‘gaining contro’ with less than 5% of the shares.
Investors were not “ripped off.” But what about some employees, some passengers on the Silver Comet, and some customers?
Short-term speculators may have obtained a nice return on their stock, but what happens in the long term when a capital-intensive business is denied the required capital to grow the business?
Who cares? “I” got my money…
Activist investors can provide a huge benefit to a business although whether Mantle Ridge in particular was a positive benefit to CSX remains debatable. Imagine the alternative: Most investors are passive and care so little they don’t vote or even read the reports… they effectively allow management to do whatever they want. Personally I’d prefer someone with a large block of shares who takes an active interest in the business.
And Mantle Ridge got their money from other people who bought their shares… not from CSX… CSX didn’t lose anything when Mantle Ridge bought low and sold high.
There’s an old adage: “The men who manage men manage the men who manage things … and the men who manage money manage the men who manage men.”
So long as that priority is true, expect people like Paul Hilal to have enthusiasm for railroads but not the railroad business… and the tyranny of three-month predictions to continue to ruin practical operations.
I’m thinking that Mantle Ridge chose to exit when they did in anticipation that the political climate is about to change in ways that are not kind to energy intensive businesses. With the oil producing countries at each others throats, the middle east could soon become a crucible.
What is the Silver Comet?
An Amtrak train. On onr run, it plowed into a freight on a siding because of a failure of a freight crew member to realign a switch, although he thought he had done so.
The automatic block signal that would have alerted the engineer with more than sufficient stopping distancer was disabled a week earlier to make installation of PTS easier.
I brlieve that prior to HH’s arrival (One thing he did (which I assume has since been reversed) was remove the three-step safety requirements before doing work under or between locomotives and cars and other locomotives and cars on any train.) the traditional safety culture would have meant either the ATS system would somehow have continued operable up to the hour that the PTS system was made operable, or additional safety measures, even a slow order if necessary, would have prevented the accident. His removable of the traditional three-step process indicates to me that he never really understood how a safety culture should be maintained. I am not saying he did not put “Safety First.” I am saying he did not fully understand how to fully implement that priority. And I am not saying that I do either. But I do thing Ward did. Like Ice, Krebs, Barriger, even Pearlman. I did know how to put Safety First when acting as Dispatcher at Shore Line Trolley, specific for that operation.
I wouldn’t equate EHH’s termination of formal three-step (we still, to my knowledge, didn’t find what it was replaced with for the critical job of ‘securing’ equipment being worked on from moving) with incorrect observation of switch discipline … which is the specific ‘smoking gun’ that would exist for the Cayce accident.
I don’t think any ‘safety culture’ that produced those two effectively knotheaded CSX guys was anything originating with EHH. That was a comedy of errors that might well be traceable back to their training … and hiring … and vetting. I’m effectively a layman and even I know you never leave a facing-point switch open to live rail. (Whether or not you think to yourself ‘the signal system will catch it if I forget’ or whatever…)
Especially if SOP is not to run, as Joe and the New Haven did by default, at speed restricted enough to stop short of any given facing-point switch under conditions of ‘no warning’.
Almost like those people are humans, and probably humans being treated like crap with horrible schedules that can make a mistake.
Not excusing them, but also not treating them like the devil incarnate.
Dave, the Amtrak train that was diverted in South Carolina was the Silver Star. The only Silver Comet that I know of was a Seaboard train that ran from New York to Birmingham, and was discontinued some time before Amtrak began operating.