LIVE: Marissa Mayer Posts Big Profit Growth During First Quarter in Yahoo

Monday, October 22, 2012

LIVE: Marissa Mayer Posts Big Profit Growth During First Quarter in Yahoo

Image representing Yahoo! as depicted in Crunc...

San Diego, Oct.23, stock picks .- Yahoo released its Q3 financials this afternoon. We took live notes from the conference call below.

The higlights:

Yahoo is going to make small aquistions in the tens of millions to low hundreds of millions of dollars.
Mayer wants half of Yahoo's engineers to be mobile engineers.
Mayer said Yahoo should own some of the content it features.
Mayer said it will take multiple years to get the company growing to her standards.

Here are the numbers (expectations according to Citi):

Net Revenue: $1.09 billion vs $1.08 billion expectations.
Operating income: $152 million vs. $180 million expectations.
EPS: $.35 vs $0.26 expectations.

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Benjamin Graham Was A Crappy Hedge Fund Manager

Jack Bogle, the outspoken godfather of index funds and passive investing strategies, didn't approve of a recent Wall Street Journal article defending hedge funds.

In particular, he took issue with the author's reference to Benjamin Graham, the legendary Columbia finance professor who literally wrote the book on Security Analysis and mentored Warren Buffett.

Bogle wrote a letter to the editor. Here's an excerpt: Citing Benjamin Graham as the first "hedged fund" operator is an especially unfortunate example. "The trick," Mr. Rice writes, was Graham's "clever way to make money . . . whether it [the market] continued to rise, or started to fall." ...

Proposal for New Hedge Fund Fee Structure: 1% + 33% of Alpha

By The Big Picture

One of my pet peeves is the way that insiders -- whether corporate CEOs, hedge fund managers, or elected politicos -- capture compensation (or credit) for normal cyclical gains they had little or nothing to do with.

This is the approach favored by the Crony Capitalists — those people pretending to be free market participants, and who merely pretend to be creating value. They are taking credit for structural successes that would have occurred with or without them. What they are actually doing is capturing value, not creating it — and then transferring it from its true owners (shareholders/investors) to themselves.

This is wrong; it is legalized theft.

If you want to see a good example of how CEOs transfer shareholder wealth to themselves, a good place to start is Roger Lowenstein’s 2004 book, Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble and Its Undoing. The section on CEO compensation is astounding; these guys were essentially getting wildly overcompensated for being CEOs during a bull market. The prime example was the CEO of Heinz, who gave himself (with the tacit approval of his Board of~~Crony~~ Directors) a $90 million bonus. And this was back in the early 1990s, when $90 million was real money.

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www.ritholtz.com

Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs Asset Management announced that it would launch a new mutual fund that — apparently — will bring the joy of hedge fund investing to the masses. For as little as $1,000, the Multi-Manager Alternatives Fund (GMAMX) allows mom-and-pop investors to put their life savings into some of Wall Street’s riskiest and most expensive products. This “fund of funds” will, according to its prospectus, let investors gain exposure to the trading strategies of hedge funds...

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10 Publicly Traded Hedge Funds That Pay a Dividend
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BMW Pininfarina Gran Lusso Coupé.

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...

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6 Tips to Work From Home Successfully

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Today's top Green Energy Good News

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Texas is set to double its wind energy generation from 60 gigawatts to 120 gigawatts in 2013.

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