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The Yahoo! Chronicles! Is this the End Game?
The big news of the day from the tech world comes from Yahoo (I am going to skip the exclamation point through the entire story, but don't read significance into that exclusion), where stories suggest...
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Aging in Dog Years? The Short, Glorious Life of a Successful Tech Company!
The corporate aging theme is one that I have returned to repeatedly in my posts, and I have looked at how the aging process creates dysfunctional responses on the parts of managers, who want to find...
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The Compressed Tech Life Cycle: The Managerial Challenge
In my last two posts, I first looked at Yahoo, in the context of the challenges associated with turning around an aging technology company, and then argued in my second post that the life cycle of tech...
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The Compressed Tech Life Cycle: The Investor Challenge
Much of what we learn and practice as investors represent models and methods developed in a different age, one where the market was composed of consumer product, infrastructure and manufacturing...
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Intergalactic Finance: Valuing the Star Wars Franchise
I saw the newest Star Wars movie last week and it brought back memories that stretch back almost four decades. Watching Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher on the screen reminded me of my age, though, once...
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January 2016 Data Update 1: The US Equity Markets
Like most of you, I start every new year with optimism and hopeful resolutions, but the first week each year for the last two decades has been what I term my âMoneyballâ week. During the week, I...
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January 2016 Data Update 2: Interest Rates, Exchange Rates and Currencies
In both corporate finance and valuation, interest rates and exchange rates play a big role, the former because they form the basis for estimating required returns on risky investments, and the latter,...
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January 2016 Data Update 3: Country Risk and Pricing
I had a long post on country risk in July 2015, as part of series of posts on the topic. At the time of the post, the Chinese market was in the midst of a meltdown, emerging markets were in turmoil...
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January 2016 Data Update 4: The Costs of Capital
In this post, the fourth in my data update series, I turn my focus to the cost of capital. While the discussion of cost of capital is often obscured by debates about risk and return models, it is a...
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January 2016 Data Update 5: Making a case for corporate governance
In my last post, I looked at the cost of capital, a measure of what it costs firms to raise capital. That capital, if put to good use by businesses, should earn returns higher than the costs to...
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January 2016 Data Update 6: Debt, the double edged sword!
In corporate finance, the decision on whether to borrow money, and if so, how much has divided both practitioners and theorists for as long as the question has been debated. Corporate finance, as a...
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January 2016 Data Update 7: Dividends, Potential Dividends and Cash Balances
In the last six posts, I have tried to look at the global corporate landscape, starting with how the market is pricing risk in the US and globally, how much investors are getting as risk free returns...
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Corporate Finance 101: A Big Picture, Applied Class!
In my last seven posts, I played my version of Moneyball with company data from the end of 2015, looking at how companies invest their shareholders' money, how much they borrow and the determinants of...
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January 2016 Data Update 8: Pricing, with an end of month update
If you have been tracking the posts that I have about my data updates, you probably noticed that early on, I had planned eight posts but that this shrunk to seven by the time I was done. The reason was...
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A Violent Earnings Season: Pricing and Value Perspectives
The earnings season is upon us once again, the quarterly rite of passage where companies report their earnings results, the numbers get measured up against expectations, expectations get reset and...
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Race to the top: The Duel between Alphabet and Apple!
Apple and Alphabet, the two companies jockeying for the prize of âlargest market cap company in the worldâ are both incredibly successful businesses, with unparalleled cash machines (the iPhone...
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The Disruptive Duo: Amazon and Netflix!
Amazon and Netflix! Need I say more? Just the mention of those companies cleaves market participants into opposing camps. In one camp are those who believe that those who invest in these companies are...
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Management Matters: Facebook and Twitter!
I am not a big user on social media. I have a Facebook page, which I donât visit often, never respond to pokes and donât post on at all. I tweet, but my 820 lifetime tweets pale in comparison to...
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Lazarus Rising or Icarus Falling? The GoPro and LinkedIn Question!
As I watch GoPro and LinkedIn, two high flying stocks of not that long ago, come back to earth my mind is drawn to two much-told stories. The first is the Greek myth about Icarus, a man who had wings...
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Negative Interest Rates: Impossible, Unnatural or Just Unusual?
In the years since the 2008 crisis, there is no question in finance that has caused more angst among investors, analysts and even onlookers than what to do about "abnormally low" interest rates. In...
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