Out Fox The $treet

Investors often read only the earnings headlines, but a ton of useful information can usually be gleaned from the related conference calls. For those interested in the online travel industry, HomeAway ( NASDAQ: AWAY     ) provided some useful information on last week's earnings call on the developing marketplace for vacation rentals. The sector is starting to cross over into the traditional online travel industry with a pilot test with Expedia ( NASDAQ: EXPE     ) , and the company is starting to face tough competition from TripAdvisor ( NASDAQ: TRIP     ). Read the full article here . Disclosure: No positions mentioned. Please review the disclaimer page for more details. 

Kayak ( KYAK )  went public in an IPO at $26 on Friday. This price was above the original $22-$25 range and raised $91M for the company. The stock opened up 15% at $30.10 and now trades in the $33 range. The company proclaims itself as the best place to plan and book travel. The basic focus of the company is to enable people to easily research and compare accurate and relevant information from hundreds of other travel websites in one comprehensive, fast and intuitive display. The initial thought when the company filed to go public was that of just another internet travel company. My past experience on the website wasn't that impressive though my last visit went back a few years. At the time it was vastly underwhelming to use or at least that was my experience. Read the full article at Seeking Alpha.  Disclosure: No positions mentioned. Please review the disclaimer page for more details. 

Every Saturday the StockTwits 50 report is released highlighting stocks with improving fundamentals and strong technical setups for the next trading week. Last week, Stone Fox Capital wrote an  article  on the underfollowed stocks in the StockTwits 50 report. The hope was to find stocks highlighted by the report that were cheap. The original conclusion was that the stocks didn't provide compelling valuations even though the sophisticated Seeking Alpha crowd doesn't follow them. With this weeks  report , the focus shifted to reviewing the bigger names on this list to see if maybe an advantage existed in companies where inclusion in such a publication would not move the price of the stocks. The Big Dogs Within the top 10 ranking this week were  Hansen Natural ( MNST ) ,  Under Armour ( UA ) ,  Expedia ( EXPE ) ,  3D Systems ( DDD ) , and  Whole Foods Market ( WFM ) . Other than 3D Systems, all of these stocks have market caps larger than $5B...

Recent spin-off TripAdvisor (TRIP) [see Spin-Off Mania Benefits Alert Investors] had possibly the most disappointing Q4'11 earnings report reviewed so far. The spin-off from Expedia (EXPE) offered huge potential as it became independent from the bigger corporation. TripAdvisor provides a travel research platform which aggregates reviews and opinions of members about destinations, accommodations, restaurants and activities throughout the world. In a way, the travel version of IPO filer Yelp (YELP) and recent IPO Angie's List (ANGI). With 50M monthly users and expanding Facebook interaction, TripAdvisor appeared to provide huge earnings growth potential. Read the full article on Seeking Alpha. Disclosure: No position mentioned. Please review the disclaimer page for more details. 

The major difference between an IPO and a spin-off is that one gets major media 'spin', while the other can be vastly ignored. The lack of a major financial transaction-- and hence, fees-- tends to reduce the push by investment houses. Just by viewing articles posted on this very website one can quickly derive that the general public has less interests in spin-offs versus IPOs, to their own detriment. This provides a major advantage to alert investors. Outside the major spin-offs, like the upcoming ones at Kraft (KFT) and ConnocoPhillips (COP), the others fall under the radar by the investing community. Historically, spin-offs have provided solid returns for savvy investors. This is partly due to investors ignoring or not understanding the new security, but also because spin-offs allow both the parent and the spun off company to thrive, with each management team free to focus on its direct business. A few interesting spin-offs took place around year-end to little or no fanfare....