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Big Merger Time. Opportunities and Lessons

It’s Big Merger time. Personally I wouldn’t touch the stock of the acquirer or the acquired.

There are reasons for Big Mergers, like hungry investment banks and incentivized management.

In my brain, there are two forces working against the long-term success of these gargantuan mergers — evolving technology and the sheer impossibility  of managing gargantuan combined firms. I speak from personal experience.

A big company bought my little company.

My little company was heavily into print — magazines and books. Then came the Internet.

My little gave the acquiring managers more to manage. That got them raises and bigger titles. Then they left for greener pastures.

Meantime, what they bought from me wasted away with neglect and hurt by new technology.

Can you imagine what will happen at AT&T — a phone company — and Time Warner — a media company? Who of talent will want to work in that behemoth?

If I were younger I’d start something in competition to bits and pieces of the combined business.

I bet Jeff Bezos has his eyes peeled.

Have you seen his stock lately?

AmazonTwoYears

Hot buzz

IQ, the Netflix of China.

Here’s the real reason hedge funds give you ideas.

Hedge funds love to pitch stocks to investors at conferences and then exit those positions right after, according to a paper published by Patrick Luo, a Harvard Business School Ph.D. candidate who analyzed 341 stocks pitches by 29 hedge funds over five years.

His paper, published in May, shows how those stocks outperformed the market before managers pitched them. After the pitch, the stocks’ growth tended to slow drastically as the funds sold off their stakes.

Luo found that stocks pitched by hedge funds tend to gain an impressive 20% return in the 18 months before the pitch. Afterward, that growth slows dramatically, though Luo notes stocks tend to still outperform the benchmark  by about 7%

You can read more on BusinessInsider here or Luo’s full paper here.

Neat Father’s Day Present

irrigator

It’s a battery-powered, Bluetooth-equipped $69 device to turn your irrigation on and off. You can join several together and build yourself a  sophisticated irrigation system. Techhive picked it. Read more. Click here.

Buddy Hackett’s Duck Joke

You loved yesterday’s Buddy Hackett joke. Here’s another one.

or click here. 

How to minimize jet lag

Mens Journal has four tips:

+ Fly on a Airbus 350 or 380. The planes have advanced air-purification and humidification systems, which help you avoid feeling tired and dried out.

+ Skip caffeine on flight days,. That stuff makes it hard to sleep and prevents your body from adjusting to a new time zone.

+ Set your watch to the time of your destination once you get on board. Then let that new time guide you for washing, sleeping, eating, etc.

+ Opt for a flight that arrives in daylight. When you arrive, soak up as much of it as you can. Solar power will help your body retune itself faster.

For the full piece, click here.

HarryNewton
Harry Newton, who played three hours of tennis yesterday and biked about five miles. I’m not bragging. I’m simply noting that I feel great this morning. It’s stupid. But the more exercise I do, the greater I feel. I wish I had more time and there were more tennis players.