Why Outerwall, Twitter, and 3 Other Stocks Are Turning Heads Today

Outerwall Sells Itself

Outerwall Inc (NASDAQ:OUTR) shares have surged by 11.4% in morning trading after affiliates of private equity firm Apollo Global Management agreed to buy the company for $52 in cash per share. The transaction has been unanimously approved by Outerwall’s Board of Directors and has an enterprise value of $1.6 billion when including debt. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2016. Of the 766 funds that we track, 22 of them were long Outerwall Inc (NASDAQ:OUTR) on March 31, owning $272.28 million in shares, which accounted for a hefty 44.30% of the float.

E*TRADE Does M&A

E*TRADE Financial Corp (NASDAQ:ETFC) is in the spotlight after the brokerage house announced that it will buy the broker OptionsHouse for $725 million in cash. The transaction will strengthen E*TRADE’s derivatives market share as OptionsHouse has 154,000 customer accounts that have executed an average of 27,000 revenue trades per day over the last 12 months, with 63% of those being options trades. Management expects the transaction to be relatively neutral to earnings in 2017 and to be accretive in 2018 with full run-rate synergies of around $65 million a year at its peak. Traders aren’t as enthusiastic as E*Trade’s management, as shares of the company are off by more than 2% today. 39 funds in our system owned shares of E*TRADE Financial Corp (NASDAQ:ETFC) at the end of the first quarter, down by nine funds from the end of the previous quarter.

Twitter Adds More Live Streaming Content

Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) is slowly but surely building out its streaming content library. A few weeks after announcing a deal to stream two NBA shows, the company announced that it will also live stream weekly out-of-market games from the NHL and MLB. The once-per-week live streams of out-of-market games will be free for Twitter users in the United States and should help Twitter boost its video sales at a time when monetization is still a struggle for the company. During the first quarter, the number of funds that we track with holdings in Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) fell by three to 27.

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