Weight Watchers International, Inc. WTW shares are up another 4.6 percent on Monday after jumping 25 percent to new three-year highs on Friday following a blowout earnings report. One of the happiest Weight Watchers investors is spokesperson and Weight Watchers board member Oprah Winfrey, who has now made more than $228 million on the 10 percent stake she took in Weight Watchers back in October 2015.
Oprah originally purchased more than 6.3 million shares of Weight Watchers at a price of $6.79 per share. The stock was trading above $43 on Monday afternoon.
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It hasn’t always been smooth sailing for Weight Watchers stock in recent years. Shares dipped as low as $3.67 in the summer of 2015. However, since Oprah disclosed her investment, Weight Watchers stock traded between $10 and $15 throughout most of 2016 before breaking out to the upside in early 2017 and never looking back.
Invest Long And Prosper?
Oprah isn’t the first celebrity to profit in the stock market off of an endorsement deal. Priceline Group Inc PCLN spokesperson William Shatner was awarded 125,000 shares as part of his compensation package. Priceline shares have surged 16,400 percent in the past 15 years to more than $2,000 per share, but Shatner reportedly sold half his shares at a split-adjusted $625.50 back in the 1990s. If Shatner has held onto the other 62,500 shares to today, they are now worth 126.6 million.
For now, Oprah is the queen of celebrity investors. As long as she remains the spokesperson for Weight Watchers, the more weight Oprah loses, the more profit Oprah makes.
Image Credit: By Bill Ebbesen (Transferred from en.wikipedia) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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