A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that Point72 Asset Management and its founder, billionaire Steven Cohen, own more than 5% of Nationstar Mortgage Holdings (NSM).
According to the SEC filing, Cohen, between Point72 and its associated companies, Point72 Asset Management, Point72 Capital Advisors, Cubist Systematic Strategies, EverPoint Asset Management, and Rubric Capital Management, owns 5,636,083 shares of Nationstar.
Those shares represent 5.2% of the active shares in Nationstar.
Given Nationstar’s closing price of $16.80 on Wednesday, Cohen’s shares are worth nearly $94.7 million.
Nationstar’s is having a rough year on the stock market, with its shares down 41.28% year-to-date. Over the last month, Nationstar’s shares have fallen by more than 15%.
Nationstar’s rough year extends beyond the stock market as well.
The company posted a surprising loss in the first quarter, driven somewhat by a loss of servicing revenue.
The company’s first-quarter servicing segment revenue of $109 million fell 49% from Q4, mostly due to higher prepayments as rates fell, the company said earlier this month.
Those results led several analysts to downgrade the company. Analysts from FBR Capital Markets, Oppenheimer and Barclays (BCS) issued significant reductions to Nationstar’s price targets, and in one case, a downgrade from “market perform” to “underperform.”
FBR Capital downgraded Nationstar from “market perform” to “underperform,” and lowered its price target from $25 to $15. According to a Briefing.com note, FBR said “they continue to view (Nationstar) as the best high-touch, specialty servicer that remains well positioned to make further mortgage servicing rights acquisitions.”
But the FBR analysts cautioned that Nationstar is “transforming into a more traditional mortgage bank that suffers from mortgage servicing rights asset-related earnings volatility, as this quarter demonstrated.”
In the wake of the company’s weaker-than-expected first quarter, the company lost two high-level executives.
In May, Nationstar announced that its president and chief operating officer, Harold Lewis, informed the company that he intends to retire and will resign from his positions, effective May 31.
Nationstar also announced in May that David Hisey, who served as executive vice president, chief strategy and external affairs officer, informed the company that he is resigning, effective at the close of business on June 19, 2015.
