Activist investor urges Hasbro to spin off Wizards of the Coast, Dan Loeb sees Amazon ‘inflection point’

Yahoo Finance's Julie Hyman and Brian Sozzi discuss activist investor Alta Fox urging Hasbro to spin off its Wizards of the Coast business and activist investor Dan Loeb buying more Amazon stock.

Video Transcript

BRIAN SOZZI: And Julie, also watching our shares of Hasbro here. Stock is up close to 7%, and really a situation we have not seen happen at Hasbro, just based on my time covering the company, which is a while. An activist situation here, Alta Fox, which they're nominating five members to Hasbro's board of directors.

Also just got an email from the folks over there. They're ultimately pushing for Hasbro to spin off its Wizards of the Coast digital gaming business. This has been a very key growth driver for Hasbro in recent quarters here and comes as we've seen a lot of transactions in the gaming space right now-- of course, Take Two buying Zynga.

So I think Alta Fox looking for them to extract value. Now that team over there says if that spinoff was to happen, it could unlock about $13 billion in total value, Julie. Hasbro's overall market cap is at about $14 billion. Now Hasbro has responded to Alta Fox, saying they believe they are, quote, "on the right path to deliver sustainable growth." So a very interesting situation to manage and comes here after Hasbro shares up 2% over the past five years, as S&P 500 up 90%.

JULIE HYMAN: Yeah, that Wizards of the Coast, by the way, includes the classic game, "Dungeons and Dragons," as well, not just the new fangled online stuff, but that classic player game. It's interesting here because Alta Fox is not a household name, right, when it comes to activists. So it's interesting here that we see some of these more recent activist campaigns being conducted by sort of newcomers to the activist base or upstarts in the activist base.

That's been an interesting thread that we've been following, even as some of the classic activists have also been quite active, for lack of a better word, as well. Even if they haven't been waging campaigns, have been outspoken. There was a story in "The Wall Street Journal" today about Dan Loeb of Third Point sort of talking up Amazon.

Now he holds those Amazon shares. There's no indication he's going to start some kind of campaign here. But the headline was him saying he sees a trillion dollars in untapped value at the company, perhaps through some of its units, things like AWS. Now, again, there's no reporting that indicates he's going to actually wage a campaign, but it is interesting that these comments are coming out.

BRIAN SOZZI: Yeah, good luck to Dan Loeb trying to put a forward an activist campaign against Amazon. That is one stock that has just minted money for human beings over the past decade. Wish him well. But I do understand where he's coming from. You look at the stock price, it hasn't done much the past year, Julie, in large part because Amazon has been in a major investment cycle.

Now Amazon, I would say, backed off of that, excuse me, investment cycle when they reported earnings a couple of weeks ago. The stock reacted. The market liked to hear that, but still, an argument could be made. There could be more value to the upside here for Amazon. Whether Loeb can help shake that out, to be determined.