BlackBerry is strictly a trader’s stock, says Lightwater’s Hass

Unless you are trading Blackberry, the stock is to be avoided, says one fund manager.

Jerome Hass, Partner at Lightwater Partners was on BNN’s “Market Call” with host Michael Hainsworth today to talk about Canadian mid and large cap stocks.

Hass says his firm has been both long and short BlackBerry in recent years, but says there is a simple reason he avoids the company as an investment.

“If you think about how dynamic the industry is,” he says, “…think about five years ago and the products that were available then and how BlackBerry had a dominant position, think about where Apple was….I think it’s very, very difficult for anybody to predict what this company will look like five years from. So if you are discounting back from that I have a very hard time in being either positive or negative on the stock.”

Hass says unless you are trading BlackBerry for momentum, he would rate it as an “avoid”.

Late last month,shares of BlackBerry tumbled nearly 28% after its Q1 showed a loss of $84-million, or 16 cents a share, on revenue of $3.1-billion. The street had been expecting the Canadian company would earn 6 cents a share on revenue of $3.36 billion. Management also warned it would post a loss in its current Q2.

The result reversed the momentum the company had been building under CEO Thorsten Heins, who had delivered several surprising quarters.

At press time, shares of BlackBerry on the TSX were down 3.1% to $9.47.

Click here for the full interview.

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