Look at the miniscule volume today......15 million shares traded?
SIRIUS XM SATELLITE RADIO FORUM
Look at the miniscule volume today......15 million shares traded?
i thought the maket was closed today wtf? everything i read said it was closed.
SIRI closed up 8% @ .1269 on super low volume of about 16.6 million shares traded. For a change there was a trade right at the close that brought the price up...
ah trade just dropped it from .1275 to .1217
I really watched SIRI today, and it "MAY" have been a good day for the stock. It seems like the trading leveled the playing field. The shorters couldn't make their magic work and the price worked its way up to .1269. It was at .125 for a good portion of the day.
It seems like there is one guy that sells ridiculously low every time that the stock tries to settle at a new level. If you look at the graph for today you will see one huge spike downwards where somebody was selling for .12 when everybody else was way above that. (10ths and 100ths of a cent are big in this stock! lol).
My point is....that a lot of people were brought to a common buying and purchasing price today and eliminated a lot of the scattered amounts that people purchased at. MAYBE, this will help SIRI stock straighten out a little. Next week could give some kind of indication.
I was perplexed with SIRI having a smooth graph today...take a look at it. Usually it looks like a stack of needles.
Who knows......this is all just a thought and comments are welcomed.
Have a great day!
i had the same thought bill, siri's charts as of late are the craziest looking charts ever, anyway its back .127 ah
.13 cent trade just went through ah
Last edited by trippingthespeculatingpos; 12-26-2008 at 06:12 PM.
With such low volume it's hard to read into anything that happened today. There was only about a couple million dollars worth of SIRI stock traded all day....Originally Posted by billhart22
That's true....but hopefully things got a little more organized. I would love to see a good day.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/bu...2&pagewanted=1
Satellite Radio Still Reaches for the Payday
By TIM ARANGO
Published: December 26, 2008
DID you hear what Howard Stern said the other day? Neither did we. But we read about it on a blog.
James Estrin/The New York Times
Mel Karmazin, chief of Sirius XM, says it competes with technology — digital music players, Internet radio via iPhone — rather than other companies.
Mr. Stern, the ribald radio jock who once commanded attention with each off-color utterance and obscene joke, mused recently on the air that he was thinking of retiring when his contract expires in two years. “This is my swan song,” he said.
Back in the day when Mr. Stern was on free radio and had an audience of 12 million, that remark would have cascaded through the media universe. But by switching to satellite radio three years ago, Mr. Stern swapped cultural cachet for big money.
Then — poof! — Mr. Stern all but disappeared. Even Jay Leno, during a recent interview with The New York Times about his decision to stay at NBC to host a prime-time show, cited Mr. Stern as an example of the dangers of obscurity.
“On radio, Howard to me was a populist. The truck driver, the average guy would listen in the cafe, the truck, the old car that’s 50 years old and still has an AM radio,” said Mr. Leno in the interview. “But I don’t hear him quoted anymore. People don’t say: ‘Hey, did you hear what Howard said today?’ ”
Yet Mr. Stern’s retirement chatter did get one group talking: investors fretting over the fate of Sirius XM Radio, the satellite radio company that has been Mr. Stern’s home for the past three years.
Today, five months after regulators approved a merger of Sirius and XM, satellite radio’s pioneers and former rivals, in a deal that was supposed to deliver their industry to the promised land of profits and permanence, the company faces an uncertain future.
Although Mr. Stern brought listeners and prominence to Sirius, the move had a steep cost. His blockbuster, $500 million, five-year deal fueled a high-stakes competition between the two services that contributed to Sirius XM’s current bind.
Unlike free radio, which depends on advertising, satellite radio offers nearly commercial-free music and talk for a subscription fee. It’s akin to the difference between broadcast TV and premium cable, between NBC and HBO.
Even though Sirius XM is one of the very few media companies whose revenue and number of subscribers are growing these days, a dime and a nickel will get you a share of the company’s stock (with some change left over).
Its balance sheet is larded with nearly $1 billion of debt that matures in 2009 and must be refinanced — but try finding a sympathetic banker in our current hard-luck environment. Sirius XM has nearly 20 million paying customers, many of them evangelists for the service, but what does that matter if you can’t pay your debts?
The company has never turned a profit and cannot predict when it ever will. Cap that with the struggles of Detroit — the bulk of new satellite radio subscribers come from partnerships with automakers — and you have a set of obstacles that Sirius XM has to overcome at the very moment the recession seems to be deepening.
The satellite radio industry is relatively young — when Mr. Stern announced that he was joining Sirius in 2004, the company had less than a million subscribers. But it is facing a media environment that is shifting toward cheaply distributed content over the Internet.
It’s also a conundrum that all traditional media face: Who needs satellites — or, for that matter, printing presses and delivery trucks — when the world is wired for broadband and Wi-Fi?
All of these obstacles have Sirius XM’s investors and subscribers worried that they may even be beyond the significant talents of Mel Karmazin, the combative, longtime radio man who is the company’s chief executive.
“I met Mel through my coverage of radio back when radio was something,” said Bishop Cheen, an analyst at Wachovia Capital Markets in Charlotte, N.C. “He’s an amazing guy. It’s never paid to short Mel. But this is his toughest challenge. It’s something that seems even beyond his legend.”
ON a recent morning that would include more meetings with lenders, and three days before Sirius XM’s annual shareholder meeting — which would be a feisty affair — Mr. Karmazin bounds into a glass-walled conference room at the company’s headquarters and sits for an interview.
He says he would prefer lesser surroundings in someplace like Astoria, Queens, but the company has a long-term lease — negotiated, Mr. Karmazin is careful to note, before his tenure as C.E.O. — in fancy, Midtown Manhattan quarters near Rockefeller Center
Mr. Karmazin has a helmet of white hair and is thinner than when he was president of Viacom and in perpetual conflict with Sumner M. Redstone, then his boss. On his left lapel is a pin shaped like a jigsaw puzzle that is the emblem of Autism Speaks, a charity in which Mr. Karmazin is deeply involved because he has a grandson with autism.
He begins off-topic, musing about which friends of his may have lost money in the debacle involving Bernard L. Madoff, whom Mr. Karmazin himself had never heard of until the news erupted about two weeks ago. (Mr. Karmazin says all of his money is in Treasury bills and Sirius XM stock.)
“Some of the stories are just horrific,” he says. But given Sirius XM’s current woes, Mr. Karmazin may soon be facing horrors of his own.
He, of course, has been in financial pinches before during his long career. In the early 1980s, he once had to lend money to Infinity Broadcasting, the radio company he helped found, to meet its payroll.
“I don’t think that the performance of the stock is related to the performance of the company,” he says. “It’s related to the balance sheet of the company and the need for the company to refinance.”
Ironically, one rationale for the merger was the expectation that the combined company could borrow money more cheaply. “The bankers who covered the deal believed that one of the synergies of the merger was the ability to refinance at a lower level,” says Mr. Karmazin.
What he didn’t count on was the year and a half it took the Federal Communications Commission to approve the deal.
The most pressing problem for Sirius XM is refinancing its debt, which includes three batches worth almost $1 billion that come due in 2009, beginning with $193.5 million in February. It’s a rough task right now, given the frozen credit markets.
Consider this: five years ago, Sirius, with 300,000 subscribers and no hint that Mr. Stern would be gracing its channel lineup, borrowed money at 2.5 percent interest. Those days are long gone.
“Warren Buffett managed to get a 10 percent coupon from G.E. and Goldman Sachs,” says Mr. Karmazin, speaking of the interest rate that Mr. Buffett, the Omaha investing legend, was promised for his recent investments in both companies. “So if you are Sirius XM, what should the coupon be?”
Sirius XM simply isn’t a blue-chip stock like General Electric, so the interest the company would have to pay to raise funds is likely to be exorbitant. Mr. Karmazin said many lenders are willing to refinance, “but they are interested in it at very unattractive terms.”
He takes solace in the fact that Sirius XM has growing revenue and is adding subscribers: in the company’s fiscal third quarter, which it reported on Nov. 10, revenue grew 16 percent, to $613 million, and the number of subscribers rose 17 percent, to about 19 million.
“If you take a look around at all of the media space — I’m not trying to paint the rosy picture because we have challenges connected to our liquidity and certainly our stock price is dreadful,” Mr. Karmazin says. “But, you know, our revenues are growing double digits. We’re growing subscribers. We’re not losing subscribers.
“So if would be unfair to compare us to a newspaper business that’s losing circulation and losing revenue, traditional television, traditional radio,” he adds. “They have fundamental company flaws or industry flaws.”
But Sirius XM does have a serious flaw in its capital structure. Its costs, which include servicing its pile of debt, appear to be too high to make the business viable.
Mr. Cheen, the analyst, agrees with Mr. Karmazin that satellite radio is a delightful product and gives him credit for showing revenue growth amid the economic downturn. “But you don’t have any unlevered, free cash flow, dude,” he says of Mr. Karmazin and his company. “In this environment, how do you walk on water?
“This is the drama of it all,” Mr. Cheen continues. “No one is suggesting this media is not a viable media. It’s just poorly capitalized.”
(Continued in the next post on the next page......)
Reply With Quote