M$ acquires YHOO? Now that would be a boost for my stock!

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10 Reasons Why Microsoft Will Aquire Yahoo In 2007

Microsoft sat back while Google showed everyone how to take a search engine from 2 kinds having fun to a top 20 American company. How did they do it? Well just look at their revenue numbers and you will see a massive percentage comes from the Adwords & Adsense products. Now Microsoft is trying to get into the online advertising game but can they hope to compete without acquiring Yahoo and their volume? I think Microsoft will make a move at Yahoo and its going to happen in 2007.

Well, now that would be an interesting choice for M$! I have kind of admired/hated M$ for quite some time, but I have noted that they do do strategic acquisitions from time to time.

Unfortunately, I sold YHOO just recently. I’d be miffed, though, on missing out on the opportunity to make some serious $dosh.

Strategically, I think the deal would make a lot more sense for M$ rather than YHOO. Why? It is M$ that needs a better search ranking for its products. It would certainly spell the end, in many ways, for YHOO as we know it right now. Many services that we use would be merged with their M$ counterpart, cut out, charged for, or just dumped altogether. It would provide M$ with a new core audience, but I doubt the brand name of Yahoo! would fare well, as its traffic would be subsumed under MSN.

For parallels, look what happened to the Netscape name/brand. Now it is hardly known at all, remaining just a historical footnote in Wikipedia, after its acquisition by AOL.com. Compuserve and Prodigy also went away in similar manners. So… while a M$ acquisition of YHOO would be good for shareholders in the short term, it would not be good for the millions of users of YHOO, like myself.

Ambivalent about this at best.

Insurance needn’t be a nightmare, if you keep your cool!

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Insurance is something we rarely spend that much time thinking about. I know that I only thought about my car insurance once in the last 365 days, and that was when I got a much bigger quote for a 2 year old car than I had expected.
It was naturally a big surprise since I hadn’t had any motoring convictions ever, had a full license, nor had ever reported an accident. Like I said, my car had even depreciated in value, but the premium of the insured value had actually increased. Made no sense to me.
So naturally, we looked at other ways to cut the premiums back. We ended up with a much lower quote, because we determined exactly what we needed, item by item. Though we stayed with the same agent and company, the detailed approach we used helped us to cut our insurance premiums a great deal.
With the detailed quotes from ASDA Home Insurance and Car Insurance, you can really find out what your insurance quote will be, BEFORE you pay a penny.

This post has been insured by ASDA Home Insurance and Car Insurance.

Investing: How NOT to get started!

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This is a ‘historical’ posting from Obblogatory.com, but I reposted it as it has a better context here!

My investing experience started off in September 1998 when I opened my first broker account with what was then DATEK online. I remember I funded it with about $5000 dollars, which was quite a lot of money to me at that point in my life! In total, I funded my account with about over $15,600 since then.

Of course, the biggest event that happened during these eight years was the dotcom crash, which took with it about $5000 of my hard earned cash!  So it is this blog that can help me think through the past eight years of investing successes (there have been some) and failures (there have been those too!). See the story about NAT, YHOO, and others.

This is the first time I have really kept a blog like this with such a prominent name! But oh, well. I’m hoping that by sharing with you my experiences over the last six years that I will help to thrash out my own ‘investing values’. I would say that this desire is strongly tempered by two realisations:

  1. I don’t know much (even now); and
  2. the popular financial writers don’t really know that much either, esp. newspaper journalists, about finances, investing and making money.

This blog is not going to be an academic blog either; it will instead focus on the practical issues of investing and money management. But it is from this practical experience that I hope I will be able to derive lessons that can be of use to me, to you and to others!