Blue Ridge CapitalBlue Ridge Capital | John A. Griffin Holdings AnalysisThis post is being written as part of my Investment Securities Tool which analyzes the holdings of hedge fund managers.Blue Ridge Capital is ran by John A. Griffin. Griffin is similar to Steve Mandel at Lone Pine Capital and Lee Ainslie at Maverick Capital in that they all are 'Tiger Cubs' (a.k.a. pupils of Julian Robertson while at Tiger Management). Griffin though, is more well known because he was Julian Robertson's right hand man. So, needless to say, the dude knows his stuff. Blue Ridge seeks absolute returns by investing in companies who dominate their industries and shorting the companies who have fundamental problems. And, right off the bat that presents us with a bit ...

I didn't need to look for impropriety at American Home Mortgage to guess that it should be considered if you were to make an investment in their defaulted paper. They appointed Stephen Cooper CEO. Stephen Cooper is who you appoint when you do not want the bankruptcy management looking at your past. See my last post. The Wall Street Journal has however beaten me to the story. In an article about two Bear Stearns executives that face indictment is this little throw-away: Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn are investigating whether the Swiss bank UBS AG improperly valued its holdings and whether the collapsed mortgage lender American Home Mortgage Investment Corp. of Melville, N.Y., engaged in accounting fraud, people familiar with the matters have said. Prosecutors in Manhattan and Los Angeles are respectively probing whether mortgage lender Countrywide Financial Corp. engaged in securities fraud or loan fraud. None ...

Bank of America, National City, and American International are all at 52-week lows. Countrywide Financial and Wachovia are almost there, too.

Oh and those home builders? The ones Wall Street experts fell all over themselves to re-recommend earlier this year? Don’t look now but they’re faltering again:

Condo and single-family home builder WCI Communities recently plunged as low as $1.45. The company is losing money hand over fist and Standard & Poor’s just downgraded its corporate credit rating deeper into junk territory, citing concerns over the firm’s liquidity. A bankruptcy filing can’t be ruled out.

Standard Pacific — a California-based builder — went for $6.50 as recently as early April. It’s worth a bit over $2 now. No wonder: The company lost …

In recent years Bank of America (BAC) CEO Ken Lewis has taken a decent amount of heat from shareholders who have seen his acquisition spending spree as a bit reckless, at least in terms of the prices he has been willing to pay. Deals for the likes of FleetBoston and MBNA have made sense strategically, but the huge premiums offered did little to convince BAC investors that they were getting a good deal. That, in part, has contributed to the fact that BAC has been afforded a low multiple in the marketplace, relative to other large banking institutions, in recent years.

Back in the summer of 2005, I was really excited about the potential of a new wireless technology called WiMax and the prospects of graphics card maker ATI Technologies, which was about to launch its next generation of products to compete against rival Nvidia (NVDA).