Icahn Lift

Carl Icahn. The man. The myth. The legume. (Yes, he ate his veggies as a little boy.)

He's a takeover "artist." He buys a big fat heapin' helpin' of stock in a target company. Think: 10 percent or more. He then...agitates. Like...publicly disses the board for bad performance. Shames the CEO for flying first class. Ridicules the union contracts for being lavish. And then he tries to force the company to sell off assets, piece by piece, at big premium prices.

The companies he goes after generally tend to be "sum of the parts stories," i.e. broken up; they are worth more than where their stock price is trading today. And yes, if it sounds like the "greed is good" guy, this one is close.

So that's Icahn and what he does.

What's the "lift" part? It's that everyone knows all of this. Everyone knows what he'll try to do when they see him show up as a big owner of a stock, and legally, above some minimal threshold like a few percent, investors need to disclose their percent ownership levels. So when that nugget gets press released, everyone buys the stock that day, "Icahn Lifting it." And then the legume goes to work.