Harry Potter, The Stock Investor (SCHL)

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

Scholastic Corp. (SCHL-NASDAQ) made an announcement after Friday’s close that the company was starting a $200 million accelerated share buyback plan via Deutsche Bank. The company expects to repurchase an estimated 14% of its currently outstanding common stock.

It looks like the company is using all of its Harry Potter profits to buyback and retire its stock, so in a sense the publisher is having Harry Potter user his allowance buy stock in Scholastic Corp.  The stock closed up 2% at $32.51 on Friday and was basically unchanged in after-hours trading.  The 52-week trading range is $24.99 to $37.08.

Amazon.com announced that it has already secured 1 Million pre-orders on May 8 for the last Harry Potter novel called "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows."  Amazon has reduced its price from $18.99 to $17.99, which is supposed to be a 49% discount.  This was after 95 days of pre-orders, and Amazon said it took 174 days for the sixth Harry Potter book. 

So, Scholastic is already counting its chips.  Does anyone really believe that this will be the last Harry Potter novel?

Jon C. Ogg
June 2, 2007

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

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
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.

Featured Reads

Our top personal finance-related articles today. Your wallet will thank you later.

Continue Reading

Top Gaining Stocks

CBOE Vol: 1,568,143
PSKY Vol: 12,285,993
STX Vol: 7,378,346
ORCL Vol: 26,317,675
DDOG Vol: 6,247,779

Top Losing Stocks

LKQ
LKQ Vol: 4,367,433
CLX Vol: 13,260,523
SYK Vol: 4,519,455
MHK Vol: 1,859,865
AMGN Vol: 3,818,618