Yesterday, Apple announced earnings…EVERYONE cared.
After Yahoo announced a tripling of earnings (i imagine all from cost cutting), you CAN’T find one story on TechMeme about them. Apple is still the whole front page. Actually, there is one story on TechMeme…the head of Yahoo Apps ( freaky Bill Gates lookalike) resigned . Oy.
Yahoo is getting lighter for sure. They have gone from an obese 500 pound, ugly American, to a 320 pounder. Still fat, hard to look at and mostly tired, but a flickr (get it) of light and hope.
In my world, if you mention Yahoo, you think of one thing…Yahoo Finance. For all Yahoo’s flaws, Yahoo finance still rocks in it’s aggregation of data. It does everything I need except a normal conversation (go read the comments to Tech Ticker and the message boards) and a completely live, honest and raw video 24 hour finance network. They could fix that pretty quickly .
Yes, they should have taken the Microsoft offer, but it’s kind of cool they told Ballmer to stick it. I probably would not have and you know what I think of Ballmer .
With a market capitalization on $24 billion and sales of $6 billion it is hard for me to get excited about the stock or company on any kind of valuation or momentum formula. That said, kudos to 12-13 year old company that could be this big, hated, loved and ignored this much.
Tiger Woods is maybe the best deal of all time. I remember the way Knight was filmed following Tiger around at his last amateur win, what now seems like decades ago. Turned out to be a bargain. What a wily guy he was.
Until Tiger does something stupid, you are OK with Nike.
The whole country is white and over 80 and ther are enough courses built and being built to have one for every person in the United States. Do the math. Stay out of Jail Tiger, please.
You hear ‘NIKE’ you think of just a few things, Phil Knight, GREAT branding and marketing (Swoosh and commercials), Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods.
You can’t define Yahoo at all…I think of traffic and missed opportunity.
It comes from having no focus and no leadership over a now extended period of time. The board members should be in Putz prison. They should give back any and all compensation since 2003.
So why is Tiger worth more than Yahoo?
Forget market cap for a moment and think about Tiger and Nike as a trend.
Tiger had knee problems and he knew it was in the best long-term interest for him, his career and his fans, to go in for surgery, and take time off to rehabilitate. Eight weeks of pain for all of us (does anyone watch golf anymore if Tiger is not in the field? ) , but Tiger is now moving forward again and based on the U.S. Open results, we have already forgotten about the eight weeks we missed of his greatness.
Yahoo has had ‘knee problems’ for quite a while. They keep putting bandages on it.
Yahoo should just say they are going on for ‘knee surgery’, like Tiger Woods, cut out all the diseased tissue (lawyers, biz dev, acquisition department, bloated management) and get back to focusing on a strategy for their traffic.
They won’t. Instead, they will be fodder for many more ‘Fake Jerry Yang’ posts.
In the meantime, I will stay long Nike as I have since I started this blog.
I just called it a dog a few days with their only hope a takeout. I guess i should have bought it, instead of ripping it. Congrats to al my frinds at Yahoo. I hear Microsoft has better health care for the VP’s.
So Alibaba debuted in the casino of a market they call China. The particluars of this financial screw job are here on Bloomberg (not that it is not an important internet business). Alibaba is the perfect example of why you can own the best FINANCIAL BRANDS, especially on weakness. The credit crunch is just a small setback to these sales machines. These suits make so much money in times like this. They always have product they can package and sell. It’s called scarcity wrapped with great hype.
I love the way people piled into Yahoo as ‘THE’ cheap play on Alibaba. The stock has dropped more than 10 percent in the last week. Same shit, different names and day. Down 10 percent, now may be the time to play it if you believe Alibab holds it’s market cap. That game is not for me.
Hopefully, IPO’s can make a resurgence to open up the market for smaller businesses to tap the public markets. Than you won’t have to pay up as much for young, hot businesses. I think we are headed this way. The investment banks are in a deep hole and they need a new cash cow.
Or, this is just another disgusting warning for impending doom.
Dudes…if you are short this market, you have no skills. Please stick to just managing your money . If you are long these four together, you are likely 58 years old and wear a three piece suit and have underperformed for 7 years.
Disclosure – This daily post is dedicated to the bears who will point to it yet gain as ‘THE’ Top.
I love the movie “The Princess Bride”. Billy Crystal has a great cameo in which he declares of the Prince…”He is only partly dead!”
I could not find that scene on YouTube (Google must be a short and definitely overpaid ), so I hijacked my favorite scene from the movie instead (Google stole YouTube):
The hating hit a crescendo not too long ago with the stock at $22. Today the stock is back at $29 after hours. I have no idea if Yahoo is out of the woods but if the market is happy with Yahoo they will be very happy with Baidu and Google.
Congrats to my friend Mark Pinkus , who was banging the table and buying the stock through the abyss. Today was the potential beginning of the payoff. Or not. Either way, there are better ways to play this bull market. Here is my fun interview a while back with Pinkus .
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