A Minneapolis-area investment manager has been paring its stake in Caliper Life Sciences (NSDQ:CALP), selling into recent strength to pocket some year-end profits.
Kopp Investment Advisors sold nearly 180,000 shares during the three months ended Dec. 31, 2009, taking in around $500,000 in gross proceeds, according to recent stock ownership filings. The recent selling follows from a familiar pattern for the Edina, Minn.-based investment advisor, which typically has bought a few hundred thousand Caliper shares on its way up, only to unload most of them at the first hint of price declines.
Kopp shut down its mutual fund business about three years ago, but continues to advise individual and institutional clients, maintaining a long-held focus on smaller growth stocks and so-called "quality-advantaged" firms, which are generally larger companies that tend to outpace peers when compared on competitive factors such as market share, profitability and productivity.
The firm also tends to stick with companies in its investment portfolio. Kopp has held shares of Hopkinton, Mass.-based Caliper since 2001, starting with an initial purchase of about 700,000 shares and growing to over 2.8 million shares by early 2009. It owned just under 2.5 million shares at the end of 2009, with a stake worth about $7.4 million at Caliper’s current stock price around $3 a share.
Kopp is Caliper’s third-largest stakeholder, behind Manning & Napier Advisors of Freeport, N.Y., and Dimensional Fund Advisors of Austin, Texas.