OfficeMax Destroyed On Lehman Exposure & Late Downgrade (OMX)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published

Officemax_logoOfficeMax Inc. (NYSE: OMX) somehow managed to not notice the major stock market rally.  Its shares plunged 29% to $9.38 on 1.5-times an entire day’s average trading volume.  Friedman Billings Ramsey downgraded the stock this morning to a "market perform" rating" from "outperform."  Apparently, the brokerage firm realized that there is a slowdown in office spending for office supplies.  It slashed its price target from $18.00 to $12.00.

Another and perhaps larger component of today’s drop is that yesterday the office supplies retailer disclosed that one of its units has securitization notes guaranteed by Lehman.  No payment default has occurred. Here are the full details.  The 52-week trading range on this stock was $10.89 to $34.89.  Shares are being excessively.  The Lehman exposure looks rather large, although this downgrade looks very late.

Jon C. Ogg
September 19, 2008

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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