In Search of the Perfect Investment

The fantasies never end. It’s 10:33 Thursday night and I’m rummaging through someone’s Powerpoint deck to raise money (from me and others) for their new high-tech invention. The first sentence of the Investor Summary reads:

XYZ Corporation “is pursuing an innovative, agile strategy for the deployment of its….technology.”

OK. That’s a good a beginning. I read further. Here are the projections showing net profit:

2012 — $1.5 million loss
2013 — $31.2 million profit
2014 — $68.5 million profit

The spreadsheet also contains one line for a 9% royalty. In each of the three years, the result is calculated as #REF!

Who writes this stuff? Who checks it?

It’s all over for Yahoo! In desperation they have now hired a nice lady called Marissa Mayer. She stands to earn an extraordinary more than $129million if she stays with Yahoo for more than five years.  She is expected to earn $5.4 million for the remainder of this year. Here’s an except from Mayer’s first memo to employees.

The company has been through a lot of change in the past few months, leaving many open questions around strategy and how to move forward. I am sensitive to this. While I have some ideas, I need to develop a more informed perspective before making strategy or direction changes. In the meantime, please do not stop. You are doing important work. Please don’t stop. If you have questions or concerns about whether to continue or not, please ask. However, with the exception of a few things that might heavily constrain us in the future, the answer is most likely: “Yes, keep moving.”

Imagine you’re a Yahoo! employee or shareholder. And you read this crap? Warms your heart? You can read the rest of the memo on allthingssd.

This is Yahoo over the past 15 years. Pretty bloody miserable. It’s been a series of desperate, failed experiments in management changes.

In February 2008 — four and half years ago — Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo! for $31 a share — 97% higher than it closed last night. What moron said NO to Microsoft’s overly generous offer?

When was the last time you visited Yahoo.com? Go there now. See if you can find something — anything to read. Click here. The big news on Yahoo in recent times was when someone hacked 453,000 email accounts, causing most of them to flee Yahoo! for the safer confines of Gmail.

Meanwhile Microsoft just reported a net loss of $492 million — its first a quarterly loss since going public in 1986. The loss was expected after Microsoft said earlier this month that it would take a $6.2 billion write-down for the value of its online unit after an ill-fated acquisition of a digital advertising agency five years ago. Which confirms two rules of when to sell a stock:

+ After it’s bought something. Most acquisitions don’t work.

+ After its founder leaves. Most follow-on management hasn’t a clue; Most good management has already left to form something else. The employees left behind are unimaginative bureaucrats. Microsoft is classic.

Meanwhile Microsoft’s stock is up nearly 20% this year. Go figure.

Three recent favorite New Yorker cartoons.

Harry Newton whose friend calls them banksters. I thought write a long piece on dishonesty in banking and list all the recent unsavory events from LIBOR rigging to the latest news that HSBC laundered near $16 billion for Iran, terrorists and drug dealers. For what purpose? To tell you that the stocks of our big banks are cockroaches?But you knew that already.