{"id":38,"date":"2009-07-29T21:31:00","date_gmt":"2009-07-30T01:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/blogs\/dmckee\/index.cfm\/2009\/7\/29\/Strange-happenings-at-Penn-Natl-Harrahs"},"modified":"2009-07-29T21:31:00","modified_gmt":"2009-07-30T01:31:00","slug":"strange-happenings-at-penn-natl-harrahs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/strange-happenings-at-penn-natl-harrahs\/","title":{"rendered":"Strange happenings at Penn Nat&apos;l, Harrah&apos;s"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>While everybody&apos;s been focusing on the implosion of <strong>Station Casinos<\/strong>, the analysts at <strong>J.P. Morgan<\/strong> snuck out one of the more unusual (and entertaining) reports I&apos;ve ever come across. They pored over Penn&apos;s 2Q09 filing and had some tales to tell.<\/p>\n<p>The lead was that Penn was falling short of its cash-flow targets for the quarter. That musn&apos;t have been a complete surprise, given the incapacitation of <em>Empress Joliet<\/em> and the swapping out of one <strong>Lawrenceburg<\/strong> riverboat for another. However, there was trouble in River City, with Morgan analysts noting &quot;<em>an unexpected spike in large employee medical catastrophic claims at that [Lawrenceburg] property (bizarre), and 4) a less than productive new marketing program at <strong>Charlestown<\/strong> (marketing at Charlestown?) that did not produce incremental revs, but increased costs<\/em>.&quot; The medical claims alone were a $1 million black eye.<\/p>\n<p><strong>They counseled against<\/strong> heading for the lifeboats, though, and pointed out that Penn has $795 million in cash in the till. (Do I hear an offer for <strong>Beau Rivage<\/strong>?) Morgan is also bullish on Penn&apos;s expansion prospects in <strong>Kansas<\/strong> (really?), <strong>Ohio<\/strong> and <strong>Maryland<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>There was even some good news for competitor <strong>Ameristar Casinos<\/strong>, thanks to continued troubles at <strong>Harrah&apos;s Entertainment<\/strong>. Wrote the Morgans team: &quot;Harrah&apos;s has not increased its promotional activity (comps, spending, reinvestment),&quot; boding well for everyone else.<\/p>\n<p>As Morgan reported earlier this month, Harrah&apos;s was -18% in <strong>Louisiana<\/strong> in June, by far the worst decline of any operator in the market &#8212; while <strong>Boyd Gaming<\/strong> notched a slight gain (but a major victory in that context). Just as I&apos;ve expected from the start, <strong>Texas Pacific<\/strong> and <strong>Apollo (Mis)Management<\/strong> are nickel-and-diming Harrah&apos;s into the poorhouse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While everybody&apos;s been focusing on the implosion of Station Casinos, the analysts at J.P. Morgan snuck out one of the more unusual (and entertaining) reports I&apos;ve ever come across. They pored over Penn&apos;s 2Q09 filing and had some tales to &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/strange-happenings-at-penn-natl-harrahs\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[40,60,28,14,7,58,68,45,84,53,11,71,69,57,38],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}