According to a Form 4 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission this week, Seymour Sy Kayfman and Michael Stark‘s Crosslink Capital disposed of 250,000 shares of Pandora Media Inc (NYSE:P), that it owned indirectly through its affiliated funds, at a weighted average price of $18.71. The current stake stands at 6.88 million shares (including the direct and indirect ownership). Previously, the fund reduced its holding in Pandora by 13% during the first three months of the year and then twice more in April by disposing of some 1.30 million shares and 262,000 shares that it held directly, while at the same time adding 345,000 shares to its direct ownership.
shutterstock.com/Irina Nartova
Prior to co-founding Crosslink with Seymour Sy Kaufman, Michael Stark worked at Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) and at tech-focused investment bank Robertson Stephens. Thus it is no surprise that the technology sector represented 75% of the fund’s public equity portfolio at the end of March, with it having a market value of $698.76 million. The fund looks for investment opportunities in both early stage companies and well-established corporations, employing a mix of three strategies: venture capital, long/short hedge and hybrid crossover. Currently, Crosslink boasts 220 private investments including 72 seed investments. It has a total of 99 board seats in companies in its portfolio and has made 54 acquisitions.
Follow Michael Stark's Crosslink Capital
Most investors don’t have enough time to do in-depth analysis on each stock that they want to include in their portfolios. Professional investors like Michael Stark spend weeks conducting due diligence on each company and spend millions on obtaining information and paying the salaries of Ivy League educated analysts. That’s why we have always believed that imitating the stock picks of hedge funds and billionaires is an excellent short cut we can take. It doesn’t cost an arm and a leg either. We analyzed the historical stock picks of these investors and our research revealed that the small cap picks of hedge funds performed better than the market and their large-cap picks. A portfolio of 15 most popular small caps among several hedge funds outperformed the S&P 500 Total Return Index by 95 basis points per month between 1999 and 2012. The exceptional results of this strategy got even better in the forward tests we have been conducting since the end of August 2012. The most popular small-cap stocks among hedge funds beat the market by more than 84 percentage points since then, returning 144.4% (see the details here).
Although down by about 24.3% over the past year, Pandora Media Inc (NYSE:P)’s stock has appreciated by 4.2% so far in 2015. In comparison the radio broadcasting industry is up by 7.26% year-to-date. In its financial results for the first quarter, Pandora Media Inc (NYSE:P) reported a net loss per share of $0.12, which was $0.04 ahead of estimates and revenues of $230.76 million, which were also $6.2 million ahead of estimates. The monthly active users saw a 5% increase from March last year to 79.2 million with a 5% increase in hours per active user to 22.3 hours.
