Allegiant Travel (ALGT) made good on the shelf filing we pointed out a few weeks ago (Apr 24: Bookkeeping - Adding to Allegiant Travel) ; it has now gone down twice on the same news item; typical market "logic".

Via AP

• Allegiant Travel Co. is planning to sell 2.3 million common shares in a secondary offering. About 2.25 million shares will be offered by Allegiant's second-largest shareholder, PAR Investment Partners, and the rest by Timothy Flynn, who sits on the company's board. After the sale, PAR will own over 1.9 million Allegiant shares.

Almost the entire sale will be from PAR Investment Partners and unlike my first take when I thought it was new dilutive shares, essentially this appears to be an unlocking of shares. The float is only 13.5M shares so this is a pretty large increase from that standpoint. While I don't love seeing a major holder unloaded half their holdings, I don't know PAR Investment Partners reasoning and it could just be a very large gain they are locking in (I don't have time to research the investment history right now) We might see one more hit to the stock price if the PAR sale is relatively concentrated and sloppy - that would provide another opportunity to add.

With that said, Allegiant Travel is simply hitting the cover off the ball - the April numbers are in and splendid. Unlike so many other stocks which have had huge runs and are incredibly expensive, even with this move we still have a unique growth story at just over 11x forward earnings. We're taking a sizeable hit today since this is one of our larger positions, but I continue to add on the dips (including a small purchase today). Certainly if the vacuum that is the market falls, this one can drop but if they are executing like this in such a bad economy just imagine in the green shoot V shaped recovery how well they will be doing. Full report here.

• Allegiant Air said on Monday that its April traffic jumped 32.8 percent as its niche of hauling leisure travelers from smaller cities helped it resist the business travel falloff that has hurt other airlines. Allegiant, a unit of Allegiant Travel Co., said it flew 422 million revenue passenger miles, or one paying passenger one mile, across its whole system.