A hedge fund buys over a half billion dollars of stock in the company you work for

[IDemo]

Is there any upside to this? Why does the term "hedge fund" make me think this likely doesn't bode well?

[bhikkhu]

1. Probably not a good sign

the same thing happened in my area, with the biggest regional employer which had been family owned up until it got a little upside-down in the recession. The investment group assured everyone that things would stay basically the same once some unnecessary holdings were sold off. Now a year in they are slowly eliminating all the local management and transferring the headquarters to the east coast, which looks like a prep for breaking up the rest of the company or selling it to some other investment group...

[Yo_Mama]

2. What percentage of the total stock is that?

That's the relevant question.

[IDemo]

4. Not sure

What is the quickest route to that info?

[Yo_Mama]

5. Look up the company's financials.

See how much stock it had outstanding.

The other thing you can do is use Edgar to see if a report was filed. It's a legal requirement to file notices when you acquire certain percentages of stock.
http://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml

[IDemo]

7. Edit

I got it wrong - it looks like they bought 41.5 million shares, only about 4% of shares outstanding.

http://www.idahostatesman.com/2013/08/14/2706383/hedge-fund-takes-595-million-stake.html

http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Micron_Technology_%28MU%29/Data/Key_Metrics (Shares Outstanding = 1.04B)

[Egalitarian Thug]

9. Shit, I'm so sorry for you.

If one of these parasites has bought controlling interest and you're not a partner or equivalently high up the food chain you're fucked. I'm truly sorry, but it's best you know now and can get your plans together.

[IDemo]

10. See the edit - if I'm not mistaken, I was mistaken

It appears to be a 4% interest, nowhere near a controlling percentage.

[Egalitarian Thug]

11. I obviously have no skin in this venture, but 4% can be a controlling interest.

Whatever the case, you would do well to make plans for the worst, and hopefully it will be a complete waste of your time.

[mwrguy]

3. It means that Mitt Romney is your new boss

Or might as well be.

[msongs]

6. they will loot the company, fire the workers, dump the corpse into bankruptcy to screw creditors nt

[Egalitarian Thug]

8. Because you've been paying attention. Hedge funds are simply evil.

You didn't give any indication of the size of your company, but a $500M stock purchase is not good news for you in any scenario. Today's hedge funds are not Berkshire-Hathaway, a company that made huge profits by buying up or into companies in order to make them work and profit from the results they achieved. These funds are purely extractive. If they can make more in the short term by firing your ass and breaking the company up and selling off assets, that's what they're going to do. If they can make more buying your company up and pumping and dumping the stock, leaving a perfectly good and profitable company broken and bankrupt, that's what they're going to do. The bottom line is that there is nothing in their playbook that's going to be good for you.

Get your resume together, or better yet, start working on an idea to make your own cash-generating operation. Co-ops and alternative partnership are the way we are going to get through this.