CEO: 'I Am Absolutely Confident Athenahealth Is A $1,000 Stock'
Right now the stock price is hovering around $107, and down over 3.5% in premarket trading. That is in part thanks to hedge fund manager David Einhorn. He presented his short thesis on the stock at this year's Sohn Investment conference, and said that it was at best a $50 stock. At worst he valued it at $14.
Einhorn includes athenahealth among a bunch of stocks he talked about in his latest investor letter - "cool kid stocks" that are driven by buzz words and herd mentality, not actual value. He said that he's shorting a basket of them. At Sohn he revealed only one - athenahealth.
And his presentation got personal.
Not only did Einhorn say that athenahealth was confused about its identity as a business processing company ("Jonathan Bush likes to compare Athena Health to Amazon because they both have websites," he said) - but Einhorn also showed a bunch of clips of Bush excitedly talking about his product as if it could fly to the moon.
"Sometimes I sound like the guy who's convinced the aliens are going to land, but so far we've been right," said Bush on CNBC Thursday morning.
athenahealth, he added, is a software service company.
That said, Bush admitted that he didn't know how the valuation of his company was done, but he thinks that Wall Street analysts should be the ones to decide it.
Not that Einhorn didn't bash them too, because he totally did.