Yahoo Stock Highest Since May, 2008 | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo Stock Highest Since May, 2008

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68 pointscmstoken34 comments

Its amazing to see such steady growth almost immediately after Marissa Mayer was announced CEO. Marissa, FTW!

https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1...

On the other hand, check out what happened to Google's stock starting on the day she became CEO of Yahoo. Maybe greater market forces are also at work here.

Or it's two great CEO's at work. Larry Page has been doing quite well with Google and it's unfair to conclude market forces are the reason.

At this moment not really because the whole market is rallying, for example look at the S&P 500:

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=%5EGSPC+Interactive#symbo...;

Apple dropped from $600 to $440 during the same time period.

The same steady growth has been seen in the US stock market as a whole. Compare Yahoo! against DJIA, S&P500, and the NASDAQ composite indices. [1].

The US Economy FTW!

[1] http://s831.us/10hgz8D

If I recall correctly, Yahoo!, under Mayer's watch, sold out half of its Alibaba stake at a valuation of $40bn. That sale is looking like a colossally bad decision (that is, a $12b loss).

The 70% rise that Yahoo has had since she started is about $12bn in market cap. Yahoo's remaining 20% stake in Alibaba went from 40bn to a projected 100bn, netting $12bn. So, do you think Mayer's management is responsible, or is it that a legacy asset increased in price?

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/why-alibaba-could-be-...

Whatever. It is easy to make a single decision that is right or wrong. Or, a decision can be right given limited information ("this thing has low odds of paying off"), but "wrong" given what actually happens ("what do you know, against odds, it paid off!") Anyone who plays Poker knows this.

You can't look at one decision and use it as a barometer to know whether a CEO is good or bad. That is just silly. It makes more sense to look at the body of decisions.

That's all fine to say, but unfortunately for this decision, it cost shareholders 12 billion dollars. Her poker hand may have been good, but it lost, and it lost HUGE. And in all fairness, I don't know how much of that decision was hers, per se. But the risk that a good decision has a bad outsome it kind of the risk that CEOs take. People are lazy, and they tend to just look at outcomes. Hedge fund managers don't get paid for good losses. And they get their funds closed when they bet the house on a good decision that goes bad.

I wish her the best, but she's going to have a very difficult time making a body of good decisions that will make up for that one, if it was her doing.

Either way, my point is to say that hiring Mayer has neither hurt nor helped Yahoo's enterprise value. The entire company, just as was was under Jerry Yang, is just moving around with the value of its assets.

Yahoo's stock is indeed at the highest point since 2008, but so is the NASDAQ. While part of the growth may be from Meyer, a huge portion of the growth is simply because the market as a whole is on a major upswing:

https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1...

YHOO was flat until Meyer was hired last July.

And GOOG rocketed to all time highs starting the day she quit.

Her name is Mayer

Kind of ironic, wouldn't this be a bit more apropos:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=YHOO

It's funny you posted this using Google Finance and not Yahoo Finance - share price versus mind share.

The thing is, most people who use a finance data website regularly actually choose Yahoo Finance over Google Finance.

Also, the Google Finance Android app couldn't bring up the US listing of Hitachi, which is pretty bad.

Yahoo Finance is better if you want news and other infotainment to go along with your quotes. If you just want data, G Finance is significantly better and is the go-to resource for sophisticated investors/traders etc.

What I think you meant to say was 'unsophisticated market participants choose Yahoo Finance' in which case you're probably correct.

I'm sorry, but that's a load of pretentious BS. Y! Finance has all the same data and has 15x the traffic of Google Finance, for good reason. Source: http://247wallst.com/2012/04/24/will-google-dump-google-fina...

Your 247wallst.com source aside, I stand by what I said. Go to any online community related to investing, trading or the stock market and you'll find nearly all of the people who know what they are doing prefer G Finance to Y Finance - other than for news and infotainment, where Yahoo does a much better job.

If your traffic figures are accurate, that only goes to show you how many unsophisticated market participants there are.

> Go to any online community related to investing

Such as blogs dedicated to investing, like 247wallst.com, analyzing data from comScore? Here's another investment blog discussing which one is "better" (see comments), http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/08/yahoo-finance-vs-google...

Do all the day traders in the Y! Finance message boards qualify as a "online community related to investing"? Do you think they prefer Google Finance? Probably not.

Here's a relevant Quora discussion, "Why did Google Finance never overtake Yahoo! Finance?" http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Google-Finance-never-overtake-Y...

I'm not saying Google Finance doesn't have value, I'm just saying the burden of proof is against you since everything out there points to the opposite of your statement.

I'll close with this NYT article that argues Yahoo dominates Google in Finance products, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/business/23digi.html?_r=0

As one of the people said on Quora the daytraders are there for the forums and they stay for that reason. If HN started trying to compete with Netflix and I kept coming here, that wouldn't mean HN's streaming videos were superior to Netflix.

Woah, you couldn't have this any more backwards. Google Finance regularly publish bad price and fundamentals data, including for their own ticker. It's been that way since launch. Their database is also full of stub companies that haven't traded in decades (with no useful information attached).

If you spent more than a few days using it you'd know this.

I use G Finance for at least an hour a day and have for several years. Y Finance I only use for news (which they do quite well).

Can you share some examples of this bad data you speak of? I've never seen it. My quotes are always accurate and very close to real time - much faster than Y.

The reason is because on Google Finance, I can link to a specific time frame. I don't think I can do that on Yahoo.

Ah OK, makes sense.

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=YHOO+Interactive#symbol=Y...

Neither site does interactive charts without Flash.

Not true, I'm changing the time frame and see that my URL updates the "range" parameter.

Well, most tech stocks are at their highest in 13 years or so, so this isn't anything special.

No love for Yahoo? I'm not an employee there, but even I find it annoying that even when there is solid good news there's a heap of people on HN trying to tear them down at every decision/move they make (let's not forget about the "forbidding working remotely will be the death of Yahoo..." tirades)

On one hand there were people trying to say that Apple deserved every bit of its stock drop, but when Yahoo gets a boost it deserves no credit?

These (Yahoo team) are your fellow tech community members who are passionate (hopefully) about what they do and have life savings and paychecks riding on this -- let's cheer them on and offer some constructive feedback.

Up 1.4% at the most, day close of up .23%, given tech stock, would prefer to say that it has little relation to tumblr acquisition today

I don't really trade much, but I thought this was an interesting data point: my one share of GOOG has made ~2x more profit in ~6 months relative to the amount of profit obtained by the 10 shares of YHOO I bought one year ago.

Please quote yield, not number of shares.

My $1,200 in Google Stock made x2 more profit than my $100 in Yahoo.

- Hopefuly you don't trade much.

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