Out Fox The $treet

Back in November, Devon Energy ( NYSE: DVN     ) announced a deal to acquire Eagle Ford assets from privately held GeoSouthern Energy. The company heralded in the new Devon concept along with the deal that included several positive financial metrics. Considering every deal involves a seller, one has to wonder whether the presented facts will materialize or what encouraged GeoSouthern to cash out of such valuable assets especially considering Blackstone Group ( NYSE: BX     ) will exit its stake with this transaction. Off the top, the biggest concern is the limited acreage of only 82,000 net acres acquired and the likelihood that GeoSouthern has already maxed out the potential reserves. Did Devon just buy these acres at peak prices? Read the full article here . Disclosure: No positions mentioned. Please review the disclaimer page for more details. 

Next week, Two Harbors Investment Corp ( TWO ) is expected to distribute its remaining shares of Silver Bay Realty Trust ( SBY ) to shareholders via a special dividend. Two Harbors holds 17,824,647 shares or around 45% of the outstanding shares of Silver Bay Realty. While this move was expected after the IPO back in December, the doubling of the public float is the next step making Silver Bay Realty an investable REIT. The company plans to acquire, renovate, lease, and maintain a portfolio of single-family homes in select attractive markets in the U.S. It plans to operate under a REIT where substantially all of future income is returned to shareholders. While Silver Bay still sees favorable trends for purchasing single-family rental houses, some news suggests that the onslaught of private equity money in major markets might be placing pressure on rental rates. As the company moves to invest and stabilize the purchased homes, the abundance of competition to an unprov...

More encouraging signs that CEO and BODs think the market has reached a bottom. Mergers are starting to fly in from even the beaten down sectors like homebuilding. FundMyMutualFund highlights the details of this merger so I won't go into the details. We sold the Centex (CTX) in the Growth fund on the 20% bump. Over the last year it's been costly to hold onto shares of buyout targets The American Homebuilding sector hasn't been a favorite sector of ours though we've had a few shares of CTX and Toll Brothers (TOL). This sector is likely to have a slow few years due to high inventories and the negativity on the housing bubble. The more promising sector is international were demographics is much more pormising. The better plays today were Gafisa (GFA - Brazil) and Homex (HMX - Mexico). Both shot up on the news with GFA being up nearly 10% which I don't really understand. Guess they are somewhat related being in the same sector, but the markets in the US and Brazil are ...