This is an insane selloff and represents a screaming buying opportunity. The loss was due entirely due to the impairment / inventory charge on the GEO comsat business, which everyone knew was performing badly. It's a non-cash charge, the company still generated $500 million in sales for the quarter and operating cash flow of $161 million. Almost guaranteed they will be selling off the GEO comsat business and that is a good thing. It will eliminate the drag on earnings going forward and the rest of the business is doing quite well and very profitable with an excellent outlook. The company is almost entirely owned by instititutions and even with the big price drop it is not a big exit by the institutions because the volume yesterday was 3.3 million shares and today will probably end up another 2 million. That's 5 million shares out of 60 million outstanding, or less than 10% of total shares that generated a 50% loss over the last 2 days. This company has spent most of the last 5 years well over $50 per share with excellent overall prospects going forward, particularly after getting the GEO business off the books. They should have strong earnings next year and the stock is getting washed out right now. Quality stocks getting washed out with these crazed selloffs almost always turn out to be wonderful buying opportunities and this should be no exception. There is no company-threatening fundamental issue remotely justifying a selloff like this -it is an extreme over-reaction to an off quarter which should have been no surprise to anyone who understands impairment charges. All the brilliant analysts usually miss the boat on this sort of thing then blame the company when they do what accounting standards require them to do, which is to write down the assets of business that is deemed unrecoverable. MAXR has had problems for a couple of years now with the declining GEO business and now they take the writedown it seems to take everyone by surprise. Crazy. I'm buying on this ridiculous over-reaction. Heavy institutional ownership means smart money is in the stock and most of them are not selling. That means this is mainly small holders getting scared out.
