Word: casino
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...billionaire investor has taken control of 10 casino properties in the past three months and is currently vying for three more. He grabbed control of nine Tropicana Entertainment casinos, including the Tropicana in Atlantic City, acquired the partly built Fontainebleau megacasino in Las Vegas and is currently in a contentious bidding war with Donald Trump for control of three Trump-branded casinos in Atlantic City. (Read TIME's cover story on casinos in Las Vegas...
...bottom? "There's certainly going to be rough sledding ahead in the casino industry - Vegas is overbuilt and Atlantic City has its problems with a lot of [regional] competition. That's precisely why they're selling at the values they're selling at," says Icahn...
...move closely. Some wonder if his move into the sector is a sign to start putting investment chips back on the table and roll the dice on companies with big exposure to the U.S. gaming market. "[Carl Icahn] has always been a very astute investor," concurs Clyde Barrow, a casino expert and professor at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. "There's a lot of upside potential, and if you're investing for the long term, now is the time to buy." (See pictures of hard times in Las Vegas...
...sector has taken a huge hit over the past two years, as the crippling recession, the pullback in business travel, frozen credit markets, the decline in consumer spending and even President Obama's "anti-Las Vegas" comments took a hefty toll on casino companies. Gaming revenue plummeted and a flurry of companies, such as Herbst Gaming, Trump Entertainment and Station Casinos, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Stocks nose-dived, with major names losing more than 85% of their value from their October 2007 peak...
...Icahn, this isn't his first foray into the casino sector. Between 2000 and 2006, he purchased four casinos - the Stratosphere, Arizona's Charlie's Boulder, Arizona Charlie's Decatur and Aquarius Casinos - for $300 million, and sold them for $1.2 billion in 2008 before the recession unleashed the worst of its fury. (The original price was $1.3 billion, but was adjusted down slightly at closing time.) "That's a pretty good reward for waiting, right?" says Icahn. "Hopefully history will repeat itself...