On the 45th day of every quarter, fund managers and institutions must file their 13Fs. For anyone managing over $100 million in assets, this list of holdings (for the past quarter) gets published on the SEC’s website. Another great resource for monitoring the portfolio’s of super-investors is GuruFocus.

Below is a list of 5 stocks that were added in the last quarter to the portfolio’s that I watch. These are either potentially interesting investments or just companies to keep an eye on.

1. The Children’s Place Retail Stores (PLCE) — Okumus Capital, Carl Icahn, David Einhorn — Operates 1,193 children’s stores under the Children’s Place and Disney Store names. Down recently because of lower sales forecasts, an internal investigation into policy violations, and problems with their Disney license. Put itself up for sale last month, with the former CEO (who resigned in September) as a potential buyer. Children’s Place has a cheap looking EV/EBIT ratio of 5.6x.

2. CarMax (KMX) — Warren Buffett — Berkshire’s buy sent the shares up over 7% today. CarMax is a great company that’s down from its recent all-time high. Growing quickly over the past few years, CarMax looks relatively undervalued.

3. Stamps.com (STMP) — Mohnish Pabrai — An interesting company with high barriers to entry and return on invested capital. Some downside protection with the large cash balance. If you’re confident that management will continue to grow the customer base, STMP could have a lot of potential.

4. The Home Depot (HD) — Eddie Lampert — Lampert is usually very concentrated, holding no more than 5-7 stocks. So any of his major purchases are worth a look. Home Depot has been beat down lately for a number of reasons. Determining how much the housing downturn will affect earnings is one of the key aspects of this investment. HD is a good company that needs some work, but could be a very successful investment in the long-term.

5. Macy’s Inc. (M ) — Carl Icahn, Fine Capital, Okumus Capital, Snow Capital — Formerly Federated Department Stores, Macy’s has 850 stores under the Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s names. Has been running into problems ever since acquiring May Department Stores in 2005. Down 35% in the last six months. Authorized a huge $4 billion share buyback in April. Macy’s doesn’t look too cheap based on current earnings, but has potential as a turnaround.

Disclosure: I don’t own any stocks mentioned in this post.

There have been a lot of articles and blog posts recently regarding the split-up of IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI). Basically, IAC is an internet/retail/media conglomerate that has been trading at a discount because of its complexity. Last Monday, Barry Diller announced that IAC will be splitting up into 5 separately traded public companies. I won’t go into too much detail as it has been discussed more thoroughly elsewhere. (A few good descriptions can be found here and here).

The two divisions that I’m most interested in as businesses are HSN and Ticketmaster. Below I go over HSN in more detail. Out of all five, I think that (depending on timing) HSN, Interval and LendingTree will have the most downside pressure once spun off.

I don’t know much about LendingTree. But with what’s going on in the housing and mortgage sectors right now, investors will probably dump it in favor of IAC’s more desirable properties. Namely Ticketmaster and the IAC internet properties.

Home Shopping Network

The Home Shopping Network (HSN) is the largest division of IAC in terms of sales. Out of the businesses that IAC currently owns, HSN was also the first to be acquired by Barry Diller. It sells a variety of products over the air, 24 hours a day, in over 89 million homes across the world. HSN has a 30% share of the home shopping market, with QVC(owned by John Malone/Liberty Media) and ShopNBC accounting for the other 60% and 10%, respectively.

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MAIR Holdings (MAIR) - $5.17

MAIR is a very low risk / high uncertainty opportunity that has identifiable catalysts to unlock value in a reasonable amount of time. MAIR is a holding company that at the moment owns a very small regional airline (Big Sky Airlines) but is a majority cash and investments. It previously owned Mesaba Airlines, which went bankrupt in 2005, and was subsequently sold to Northwest Airlines (NWA) in April of this year. The current valuation numbers are below: ($Millions)

I look at this value as the downside, assuming management doesn’t do something stupid with the cash. There are two activist investors (owning over 14% of the company) pushing MAIR to distribute excess cash and sell Big Sky, so I’m hoping this helps things out a bit. The restricted cash account is collateral for a plane hangar MAIR guaranteed to Mesaba bondholders. As long as MAIR finds a sublessor for the hangar by March 2008, the $13mm will be released.

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