American Home Mortgage Carnage Continues in Mortgage Land (AHM, BSC, LEND, NLY, CHC, TMA)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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American Home Mortgage Corp. (NYSE:AHM) shares traded over 30 million shares yesterday after being halted for a day and a half.  It is likely that the sub-Saharan tribal residents know of the company’s woes by now and the story has been well exposed.  This was somewhere around an 85% drop yesterday with shares closing down at $1.04 on the day.

This morning, shares are back to $1.01, but it appears that shares traded as high as $1.33 on the day.  There are many who now believe that the margin calls and inverted liquidity crunching its books will implode the company.  It is trying to secure financing, and that will be up to you to decide if they can secure it or not.  We have seen roughly 6 million shares trade so far in the first 15 minutes of trading and it is expected that this will be one of the most active stocks on the day.

As always in near-implosion names, beware the rumor mill as chat room investors talk shares both up and down on no news out of the company.  Other mortgage names are seeing pressure as well after Bear Stearns (NYSE:BSC) is reportedly having another fund write-off.  Accredited Home Lenders (NASDAQ:LEND) are down over 4% today; Annaly Capital Management (NYSE:NLY) is down 1.1%, Thornburg Mortgage Inc. (NYSE:TMA) is down roughly 6%, and Centerline (NYSE:CHC) is down nearly 6%.

Jon C. Ogg
August 1, 2007

Jon Ogg can be reached at [email protected]; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.

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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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