Today Yahoo Shareholders are meeting in San Jose. Or maybe we should say non-meeting since there are apparentely mostly empty chairs and uneaten pastry in a venue that was to hold 1000.
With shares now trading about $19 you’d think shareholders would be out in force with torches and pitchforks, but Yahoo management – at enormous cost to shareholders and the company – has kept the corporate raiders and Microsoft at bay partly by granting a newly sheepish Carl Icahn a seat on the board and two more seats. Icahn noted last week that enough large shareholders were sticking with the current board, making it impossible for him to take over the company. His plan was fairly simple – buy a lot of Yahoo and then sell the company to Microsoft at a huge profit. As a shareholder I remain *totally* confused as to why large shareholders were unwilling to support this move – the obvious choice in terms of maximizing shareholder value with minimum risk.
However with challenges come opportunities. Yahoo at $19 is looking pretty ripe right now given that Microsoft offered $31 just months ago when Yahoo’s prospects were not significantly different than they are right now. Either MS is horribly miscalculating Yahoo’s value, or the Market is underestimating that value. Clearly the current board is convinced there is a lot more value, and in this at least I would agree with them.
It’ll be interesting to see how the rank and file Yahoo folks are feeling at SES San Jose in a few weeks. SES is the biggest search conference of the year in the heart of Silicon Valley, and hundreds of Yahoo folks will be there. It will be interesting to get a feel for the current morale challenges at the company.
Disclosure: Long on YHOO. Considering buying more.
Joe Duck 
Speculators (whether in NASDAQ, Dow, or commodity market) should thank their lucky stars that Senator Reid’s anti-energy-speculation bill was defeated by the GOP (who were, as per usual, following orders from Big Oil). Reid had the dem senate behind him (excepting BO, who has other bidness to attend to), and was 10 votes short of shutting down the casino.
Though I am reluctant to bless the Pelosicrats, Reid’s anti-spec. bill was eminently reasonable, and even Keynesian to some degree, in the sense of calling in the Feds to regulate investment in the energy markets. He intends to amend the bill (possibly with proviso of vote on future offshore drilling). If Comrade Reid and the Dems manage to get a few moderate repubs to cross party lines, the fun may be over (at least for big players in commodities, and moves in the com./futures market tend to affect dow jones and NASDAQ, sometimes greatly). Personally I think you will see the Dems move to much more regulated markets across the board–even socialism.
I believe serious and large class action suits will soon follow continuing to haunt Yahoo!. Yang and crew really messed up here and they clearly should be held accountable.
http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/Y/YAHOO_VOTE_RECOUNT?SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2008-08-05-20-44-14
WOW…looks like Yang was up to some dirty tricks here. Gee 100 million miscast votes in support of Yang. How is that possible?
40% of the shareholders voted against Bostock!
34% against Yang…they previously reported it was only 15%. Those silly chads are still causing tabulation problems! I didn’t realize they held the vote in Florida.
Yahoo! is now worth $20 billion less than it was when Microsoft had their offer on the table – does anyone else see the insanity in this?