What are the 10 consumer web companies that are best positioned for the 2010s? continue reading...
The Grinch Who Stole Q1
Tech Crunch has been making the rounds and the projections for Q1 2009 online advertising are bleak: continue reading...
The following is a perpetual-work-in-progress. Once you start to compile a list of mergers and acquisitions, you realize why it’s nearly impossible to have a complete list. We are quite confident that the following is a very good, comprehensive list of the largest, more notable deals… but it is not - and no list will be - fully complete because there are too many countries around the world and too many industries to report (it is highly possible that the Wall Street Journal or Financial Post, for example, has such a list… but it would be thick and unwieldy).
We have included: continue reading...
Today marks the end of my love affair with aQuantive, a company I got to know working in ad sales over the years and a stock I learned to love over the years…
aQuantive got acquired recently by Microsoft in a $6B deal, making it one of the better performing stocks in my portfolio. Please note, for every hit like this, there are misses. In fact, I’ve been working on a post on my biggest trading/investing mistakes and there’s so much there that it’s taking a while. continue reading...
On May 30th I commented that aQuantive was sitting at $5B, even though MSFT had agreed to pay $6B for the company.
Per share, MSFT agreed to pay $66.50 (an 85% premium) even though as recently as May 30th, the stock was only at $63.75. continue reading...
Some interesting tidbits:
FRESH OFF A DEAL TO sell his agency to Microsoft Corp. for $6 billion, all eyes were focused yesterday on aQuantive president and CEO Brian McAndrews, the digital adman of the hour. continue reading...
Yesterday, it was reported that the FTC was going to investigate into potential anti-trust issues in the Google/Doubleclick deal.
That puppy was for a whopping $3.1B, and triggered a plethora of deals, including Yahoo!/Right Media ($800M valuation), WPP/24/7 RealMedia for $680M and MSFT/aQuantive for $6B. continue reading...
There’s been a lot of talk about the steep premium MSFT paid to acquire AQNT, and there are many reasons for that, one being that in the ad networks marketplace, it had become a seller’s market, quickly, after DCLK sold to GOOG for $3.1B.
But in light of the bidding war between MSFT and GOOG for DCLK, I’m not surprised at all that AQNT fetched that much (I own shares in AQNT). I gave my two cents as to why “AQNT is absolutely worth 2 times DCLK” here. Of course, anyone’s guess is as good as mine. Today, TheStreet.com joins the camp of supporters who are bullish on the deal. continue reading...
I posted this earlier as Update #3 in my earlier post on MSFT/AQNT, but reposting cause it looks fishy.
What’s that massive volume spike for AQNT at the end of the trading day yesterday? Did someone have a scoop and scoop in before the market close and buy a lot of shares? Average volume for the stock was in the 50,000 shares each hour, then right before market close, a massive, and I mean massive spike to 2.5M shares? continue reading...
In 2003, I began to buy shares in DCLK, VCLK, AQNT, Fastclick, etc. [Fastclick was bought by VCLK, eventually].
If it was in online ads, I was long. Over the years, I sold most of these shares because the stocks rose from high single digits to $20 or so. The one company I bought back every single time was AQNT. Today was the jackpot for AQNT founders when MSFT paid $66.50 a share or an 85% premium. continue reading...
