Short Interests: Playing field tilts toward Invesco

It’s official – they hope.

Invesco Funds executives, along with officials from the Denver Broncos and the Metropolitan Football Stadium District, unveiled the new stadium logo for the football team’s new home last week. As expected, the logo preserves the “Mile High” moniker, but also includes the new name “Invesco Field” – in much-bigger type.

“In developing this logo, we wanted to ensure that we paid homage to the tradition of the Denver Broncos, while demonstrating our commitment to the people of Colorado, the greatest fans on earth,” Mark Williamson, chairman and chief executive of Invesco, told the Denver Post.

Some of those great fans aren’t happy with the new logo and name, however. A pending state court lawsuit seeks to block the naming-rights deal, for which Invesco will pay $60 million over 20 years. A handful of residents filed the suit in February, saying the stadium district did not consider public sentiment before the naming rights were sold.

A separate life for Merrill vet

A former top executive at Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. is taking his knowledge of fee-based money management and hitting the road.

After 31 years at Merrill, Alan Sislen retired in January as head of the investment consulting group, which includes the fee-based Merrill Lynch Consults program. He now runs his own consulting firm, Managed Account Perspectives LLC of Short Hills, N.J.

Since the end of April, he’s visited about two dozen prospective clients. He’s talking to top executives of mutual fund companies – money managers and broker-dealers who want to either get into the booming market for separate accounts or expand their presence in it.

Mr. Sislen wants his clients to focus on what it takes to get into the business, including a firm’s culture. “Some of these basic questions are key issues,” he says. “Not every money manager should be in this marketplace.”

Short and sweet

Here’s a trick for picking tech stocks that will do well: Look at the length of annual financial filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

A recent Merrill Lynch report says that the shorter a company’s 10-K filing is, the better its stock performs.

The idea is that if a company has a lot to explain, investors aren’t going to like what’s being explained.

The study looked at all stocks on Merrill’s 100 Technology Index that have filed 10-Ks for fiscal year 2000. Of the companies whose 10-Ks were less than 300 kilobytes, 83% outperformed the index.

For 10-Ks between 301 KB and 400 KB, 47% beat it. Thirty-three percent of filings of 401 KB to 500 KB were ahead, and just 18% of 10-Ks over 500 KB beat the index.