Lumber Liquidators (LL, $11.25) is no longer being pursued by founder

Lumber Liquidators shares declined Friday, after news of its founder pulling back from plans to buyout the home-improvement company.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Tom Sullivan indicated that he had been working on a transaction, but had to re-think the plan after  perceiving that the company's stock price had gotten too high and the company had declined to engage in discussions.

Last month, Lumber Liquidators reported second-quarter results that fell short of analysts' expectations, amidst the 25% tariff on imports from China that posed headwinds to the company's margins. The company also cut its full-year guidance, citing softening customer traffic and an tariff uncertainties. It now expects same-store sales to be flat for the year, and forecasts low-single digits growth in revenue.

According to a SEC filing on Friday, during the time span of about a month, Sullivan, bought stock for an average price of $7.88 a share, and then sold 1.25 million shares this week at an average of $11.68. That resulted in a gain of about $4.8 million for him, according to Bloomberg calculations.

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Sergey Savastiouk, Ph.D. has a degree in Applied Mathematics from Moscow University and has extensive experience as an entrepreneur, investor, manager, and mathematician. His professional expertise is in applied mathematics, mathematical modeling, system and pattern analysis, and software and hardware system integration. He has served as the CEO of several hi-tech start-up companies and nonprofit organizations, which has given him proven capabilities in business strategy for high-tech start-up companies, market assessment, company formation, team building, product development, marketing, and sales. He has published numerous articles in journals and magazines on related fields. As a retail investor, he spent 15 years developing his proprietary trading and quantitative algorithms (now Tickeron’s A.I.), which brought him significant returns in trading the stock market. His current work and goal in founding Tickeron is to bring professional, sophisticated stock market analysis capabilities to retail investors via an easy-to-use interface.