Appomattox Partners’ O’Reilly On: The Evolution in Stock Surveillance, Shareholder Activism
Recently, I caught up with Erin O’Reilly, a veteran in the business of stock surveillance. Erin just opened the doors of Appomattox Partners and serves its principal.
Prior to the firm’s debut, she launched and served as principal of Strategic Stock Surveillance, a market intelligence and surveillance firm that was a subsidiary of Miller Tabak + Co, LLC, a New York Stock Exchange member firm. For the past 15 years, Erin has been providing clients with strategic counsel on crisis and takeover related trading, strategies of equity and debt activists, impact of various financing structures, insight on trading activity in listed instruments and derivatives and counsel on changes to the shareholder base changes across the entire capital structure.
Earlier in her career, she served as an Investor Relations Officer of a publicly traded on-line college, and acted as a financial advisor to Port Parties in their response to Request for Proposal bid to the New York City Economic Development Corporation to secure piers 88, 90, 92, and 94. She is an alumna of the University of Southern California and a surfer girl when she has time (ergo the surf board in the firm’s logo).
We did a quick interview:
Question: What’s different about your new firm?
Erin: Corporate stock watch is evolving rapidly and keeping pace with the market is more challenging than ever. The need for the delivery of timely information is more critical than ever before and that’s where Appomattox Partners comes in. I now have the complete freedom to call anyone I’d like to provide my clients with highly customized information which puts me in a position to offer better strategic counsel on the trading patterns of their stocks. I now have access to all broker / dealers whereas, under my previous structure, there were some limitations.
Question: What services is Appomattox Partners providing?
Erin: We’re offering the services that you would expect… stock watch and shareholder identification as well as high end crisis market intelligence. We’re working with companies and interacting with their directors who have become keenly interested in the way their companies’ stocks are trading and, in particularly, who is doing that trading. In addition, companies and investment firms are coming to us for insights into the area of risk and structured products. Many people don’t have a clue about some of these complex strategies and we are able to help them to understand them.
Question: What trends are you seeing now?
Erin: Activists are ‘noisier’ than ever before which is causing a fair amount of concern. Companies have a lot of cash on their books. They’re doing a number of things like stock buybacks and so on to avoid becoming targets. Companies do need to remain vigilant. And, not just the equity side… They need to be aware of who owns their debt and for what reasons. We do a lot of work on the debt side as well.
Question: What are your plans for staffing Appomattox Partners?
Erin: We will be staffing up with experienced professionals and we’ll have news shortly.
For those interested, you can reach Erin at:
Appomattox Partners LLC
55 West 84 St, Suite 2
New York, NY 10024
P: 646-861-3653
C: 917-204-3792
C: 213-924-6272
F: 646-514-1600
emo@appomattoxpartners.com
###
You may also be interested in...
