Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat’s commentary for the week of March 3, 2015

Article Excerpt

This is the second in our regular series of Spinoff Stock Investigator reports. I can still say without reservation that, in investing, spinoffs are the closest thing you can find to a sure thing. When a company carries out a spinoff, it sets up one of its subsidiaries or divisions as a separate company, then hands out shares in the new company to its own shareholders. It may hand out the shares as a special dividend, or give its shareholders an opportunity to swap shares of the parent company for the shares of the newly established spinoff. Study after study has shown that after an initial adjustment period of a few months, spinoffs tend to outperform groups of comparable stocks for several years. (For that matter, the parent companies also tend to outperform comparable firms for several years after a spinoff.) The above-average performance of spinoffs makes sense for a couple of reasons. First, company managers naturally prefer to acquire or expand their assets,…