Lame Lehman

NOTE: I've corrected the link to institutional ownership. You can see that here.
Today Lehman Brothers' analyst, Roger Freeman said ArcaEx lost about 1.2 percent market share in November in Nasdaq-listed stocks so he cut his rating. First, it's interesting to point out that though Lehman Bros. was one of AX's underwriters (see: http://tinyurl.com/5uccj), they are not one of the 33 institutions that own shares of AX -- fortunately, NASDAQ publishes this information - you can see which institutions actually have a position in AX here: http://tinyurl.com/3om2r. Today's big seller appears to be Goldman Sachs - and given that they own over 7,000,000 shares, were AX's lead underwriters, own 90,000 shares which were bought on the day AX went public (8/12/2004) at a price of $12.65/share, and purchased 88,000 shares on 8/17/2004 in a non-open-market transaction it is no surprise that they'd take some profits after AX's phenomenal performance over the last month.

Did Freeman consider ArcaEx's share gain in NYSE-listed names? Year/Year ArcaEx has gained 1.1 percent in market share for NYSE-listed volume and between 9/2004 and 10/2004 ArcaEx claimed .3 percent more market share for NYSE-listed names (source: http://tinyurl.com/5rxvn).

It's not everyday you hear about an analyst cutting a rating, but raising the same stock's price target. But Freeman did just that, he raised his price target to $24 from $18. It's worth noting Warren Buffet's axiom which goes, "In the short run, the market's a voting machine and sometimes people vote very unintelligently. In the long run, it's a weighing machine and the weight of business and how it does is what affects values over time." (source: http://tinyurl.com/4xu75).