Lightspeed submits: Two years ago I posted about the three ways to grow an online media business to $50 million in revenue. In this article I focused on RPM (Revenue per thousand pageviews, = CPM x sell through rate x # of ad units per page) and drew the distinction between three strategies, and the traffic needed for each strategy to get to scale: 1. Broad Reach, low RPM, traffic in the 10s of billions of pageviews/mthComplete Story »

  Veronique Adam submits: Stock price: DK392 ($77.66) Conclusion: Growth in 2010 will be held back by excise increases in Russia. Carlsberg (CGBWF.PK) looks fully priced based on our valuation range of DK390-DK420.Complete Story »

  Brandon Matthews submits: By Brandon MatthewsThere was a time not too long ago, that the media was used by hedge funds to assist those with short positions in Sirius XM Radio (Nasdaq: SIRI). Looking back, I can make this statement with a high degree of certainty following Overstock.com’s (OSTK) victory over short selling hedge fund, Rocker Partners. The suit had claimed that the fund used various media sources to manipulate the company’s stock and the settlement for $5 million would suggest that the suit was indeed valid.Complete Story »

  The Private Equiteer submits: It seems I’ve ruffled a few feathers with my previous post, Private equity returns are misleading (lots of emails and even a few comments over at Seeking Alpha). The main point of contention is that limited partners (LPs) don’t hold committed capital as cash from day one. Someone even suggested it was ludicrous to make this assumption and that the premise of my argument collapses as a result. However, that’s not the point I was making. Of course LPs time their cash flows across their portfolios, which is probably the reason why so many have defaulted on capital calls recently. If anything, this supports my argument rather than refutes it. So let me make my points a little clearer (I concede my last post was a little rushed):Complete Story »

  Dan Rayburn submits: While I've heard some folks say that one of the reasons Akamai (AKAM) is showing signs of their M&E business picking back up is as a result of the adoption of HD quality content, that's not what's driving revenue today. Yes, Akamai and all of the other CDNs are seeing more content owners use HD quality video, but it's not yet happening in large volumes or at mass scale to impact revenue. Based on a recent StreamingMedia.com survey we conducted in September and October, we asked content owners what bitrates they were encoding their content in. Of the 812 content owners who responded only 11.4% said they were encoding video for at least 2Mbps or more. Compare that to the same survey in 2008 when 8.9% of over 1,000 content owners said they were encoding over 2Mbps. That's not a lot of growth.Complete Story »

  Dennis Byron submits: The Financial Times reports on the morning of December 9 that IBM Software Group uberlord Steve Mills has come down on the side of Oracle (ORCL) in its fight to get European Union (EU) approval of the Sun (JAVA) acquisition. Mills confirms what Oracle has been saying: he never sees MySQL in IBM database sales situations. My guess: those 60,000 daily downloads of MySQL are about as significant as the billions of AOL diskettes that were mailed out in the 1990s just to fill up U.S. landfills.Complete Story »

  Kid Dynamite submits: The sworn enemy of high frequency trading, Themis Trading, has a new "white paper" out titled " Latency Arbitrage: The Real Power Behind High Frequency Trading." In my opinion, this paper is better written than Themis's prior missives on the subject of HFT, which is rendering them obsolete as traders, yet there are some glaring errors in the report that undermine its points. The paper attempts to illustrate by way of example how exactly the latency arb algos are eating your lunch - let's call them LAHFT for short. Themis describes it: Here’s an example of how an HFT trading computer takes advantage of a typical institutional algo VWAP order to buy ABC stock:1. The market for ABC is $25.53 bid / offered at $25.54. 2. Due to Latency Arbitrage, an HFT computer knows that there is an order that in a moment will move the NBBO quote higher, to $25.54 bid /offered at $25.56. 3. The HFT speeds ahead, scraping dark and visible pools, buying all available ABC shares at $25.54 and cheaper. 4. The institutional algo gets nothing done at $25.54 (as there is no stock available at this price) and the market moves up to $25.54 bid / offered at $25.56 (as anticipated by the HFT). 5. The HFT turns around and offers ABC at $25.55 or $25.56. 6. Because it is following a volume driven formula, the institutional algo is forced to buy available shares from the HFT at $25.55 or $25.56. 7. The HFT makes $0.01-$0.02 per share at the expense of the institution.Complete Story »

  The Macro Trader submits: We have been bearish on the EUR/USD for some time now. Some investors are convinced that the USD is going down forever and that the US is the next Zimbabwe. The reality is that while the United States has a ton of issues such as the huge and rapidly expanding deficit, the rest of the world is not exactly in great shape either. One of the weaker areas of the world happens to be the European Union. They continue to have issues such as Spain and its almost 25% unemployment rate, the IMF estimate that EU banks have only written off 50% of their bad debt, and the potential for major defaults in Eastern European nations.Complete Story »

  Brett Steenbarger submits: click charts to enlarge I recently showed several sectors weighing on the stock market. Here are several more that have lagged the large cap averages during November and thus far in December: S&P 600 small caps ($SML; top chart); energy stocks (XLE; middle chart); and insurance shares ($KIX; bottom chart). Energy issues are particularly interesting, given the recent weakness in oil prices. That isn't exactly what we'd expect if investors were anticipating that world economies are growing.Complete Story »

  Trader Mark submits:As denial after denial has been put out the past 2 years that the US is anything like Japan - even as we have done everything they have but bigger, faster and more comprehensive - I find it ironic that Japan just announced another $81 billion stimulus the same day "jobs stimulus plan" will be announced in the US. With the US economy roughly 3.5x the size of Japan's, the stimulus would be just under $300B if a parallel measure was announced domestically. Somehow I see the same discussion in the US circa 2019.Complete Story »

  Erick Schonfeld submits: The magazine industry is falling over itself over a new shiny object. It wants to remake its product for a new class of digital tablets with color screens and touch screens. Tuesday, a group of big publishers—Condé Nast, Time Inc. (TWX), News Corp. (NWS) Hearst, and Meredith (MDP)—announced a joint venture to create standards for digital magazines to be read on tablets, e-readers, Web phones, and the like. The consortium will also create a digital newsstand to sell electronic copies of its magazines. These will be more like downloadable apps than Websites—think of it as an App Store for Magazines, where you can find and download magazine issues and subscriptions in app form.Complete Story »

  Erwan Mahe submits:Throughout this Great Financial Crisis we have systemically been at odds with analysts who claimed to profit from the worsening of the quality of major sovereign issuers, like the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan and eurozone member states.Given the weight of the private-sector de-leveraging process, we have always considered public debt (government issues) to be a good investment, especially since we considered (and continue to consider) that the relentless force of the debt deflation process, as private-sector debt rises to a high level of GDP, will not only nip any inflationary advance in the bud, but may spur a real deflationist spiral, which would render the projected interest rates on government debt very attractive.Complete Story »

  

  The LFB submits:Forex Trader Note: The major currencies are at support against the Usd and all look as though it would be a lot easier to buy them, rather than sell them at these levels. The Usd looks overbought in reaction to equity values dropping, but in a week that still has three interest rate decisions to come, from New Zealand on Wednesday and Swiss and U.K. decisions on Thursday, the dollar may need heavy equity selling to hold the recent long moves. Macro View: Near-term equity volatility, and a general fear of loss after sovereign nation debt rating threats, has hit the global market in trade this week. By default that has allowed the Usd to more easily find buyers around its swing point of 76.00 that is incredibly important to close above or below on a weekly basis to signal a long or short sentiment going forward. With equity markets cashing in recent gains we have seen the bond market find buyers, and that leads to Oil and Gold traders being more susceptible to taking profit that adding to positions. Complete Story »