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Filed under: Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO), Time Warner (TWX)There is an interesting piece out of comScore today. The company released its Top 50 Web Rankings for July, and Time Warner Inc.'s (NYSE: TWX) AOL property of Advertising.com looks like it kicked some you know what.In July, Advertising.com remained on the top of the Ad Focus ranking from comScore. The advertising audience of 180 million Americans tracked put AOL's Advertising.com as #1 with 158,905 unique visitors, above ValueClick (NASDAQ: VCLK) with 131.9 million users and both Google and Yahoo! having more than 131 million uniue visitors.It reached some 88% of the more than 180 million Americans online that comScore measures results from. Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) Ad Network, which includes Google Adwords and Google AdSense Programs, joined the ranking ...
I love irony. In a true free market, it is probable that the stock market wouldn’t even exist, or at least would have a totally different form, thanks to the elimination of the “artificial person” a.k.a. the limited liability corporation. It’s also ironic that so many professionals and professional commentators a.k.a. ex-teleprompter readers
Filed under: Deals, InternetAny user of Facebook is probably well aware of its addictive and habit-forming properties. It's these simple characteristics that make Facebook so valuable to a potential acquirer. Users spend an enormous amount of time on the site every day and they visit huge amounts of pages on each visit. Because Facebook seems to be out of reach for just about every American company or venture capital firm, interested parties have begun to enter the Facebook Applications space with hopes of cashing in on the Facebook craze that's taken America by storm.TripAdvisor, owner of TripAdvisor.com, is the reported buyer of the Where I've Been application for a pretty penny of $3 million according to VentueBeat. For those of you who don't use Facebook this is simply ...
Filed under: Analyst reports, Analyst upgrades and downgrades, ColumnsAlvarion (NASDAQ: ALVR) is a WiMax provider that offers wireless broadband systems throughout the world. This stock has been on my watchlist for quite a while with its very attractive balance sheet and positioning in a growth 'sweet-spot.' When the stock received an upgrade today it caught my attention.The analyst covering the stock, Richard Church of C.E. Unterberg, Towbin, upgraded the stock because it's "the best-positioned pure-play on wireless broadband adoption and should see significant growth as WiMax gains traction." On the news of this upgrade Alvarion rose about 6%. Is now the time to jump into Alvarion? Truthfully, the stock remains very speculative despite the coming growth in the WiMax space and the company has struggled to increase its ...
Filed under: Market mattersMy colleague Peter Cohan covered the Sowood Capital debacle on BloggingStocks a few weeks ago. Interestingly, we're seeing much of the same in a recent hedge fund blow-up, most importantly Citadel's involvement.Basically, after hedge funds lose investor interest due to poor performance they suffer from redemptions (or withdrawals) of investor capital. When this happens, its a downward spiral because many funds hold positions in rather illiquid securities. As a result, rapidly 'dumping' these positions to the market wouldn't make sense. Therefore, they need a buyer who can come in and purchase these positions at a lesser discount than they would've received if they were forced to quickly liquidate in the open market.Citadel Investment Group has a growing role in this business. According to a Chicago ...
Filed under: JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Bank of America (BAC), Merrill Lynch (MER), Goldman Sachs Group (GS), Morgan Stanley (MS), Lehman Br Holdings (LEH)Bloomberg News reports that JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM) will take a $1.4 billion charge for leveraged buy out (LBO) loans gone sour. The good news is that the charge represents only 3.4% of its LBO loans outstanding.Interestingly enough, relative exposure to LBO loans does not seem to correlate with loss of stock market value in 2007. Here's the list of the eight biggest LBO lenders ranked by their LBO loans coupled with the percent decline in their stock market value since their 2007 highs (excluding Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse): JPMorgan: $40.76 billion, -11.5% The Goldman Sachs ...
Filed under: Consumer experience, Dell (DELL)Although Dell, Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) likes to trumpet that it carries a whole selection of non-Dell products -- from digital cameras to GPS devices to projectors -- does it sell a lot of those items? Hard to say really, and it's hard for me to think that customers go to Dell when considering an electronic item purchase. Well, unless they are assembling a PC at Dell's website all all the upsells of these items are presented up front as available to the millions of customers who build and order PCs from Dell's website every quarter.Does Dell have these items in stock in warehouses all over the U.S.? If a recent order for a digital camera is any indication, that's hard to imagine. I ...
Filed under: Industry, Money and Finance TodayHedge fund managers, most notably Steven Cohen (SAC Capital) and Ken Griffin (Citadel Investment Group), have become notorious buyers of expensive and trendy contemporary art. It would make sense, then, that the recent poor performance from many mighty hedge funds would have an effect on art prices because hedge fund managers stand to make less money (or perhaps even, gasp, lose money). According to a recent Bloomberg article, "the art market will soften...but it may not happen for six months to a year." However, the article also quotes a Moody's analyst who testified that "we've seen record levels of consigning,..and lots of deals are being done." But I tend to agree with the first source -- the art market will inevitably soften ...
Filed under: InternetHere's a correction you don't see every day:CORRRECTIVE: In an Aug. 16 story about the Philadelphia Stock Exchange hiring an advisor to help it find a buyer or arrange an initial public offering, Dow Jones/AP incorrectly reported how much the exchange lost after taxes last year. It was $424,000 rather than $424 million.Off by a factor of 1000. No big deal, right? Jeff Skilling and Bernie Ebbers are reportedly upset that they never thought to just make a correction to the financial statements at Enron and Worldcom. They tried the "didn't know how to use Quicken" excuse made famous in Fun with Dick and Jane, but regret that they didn't try a simple correction.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
