The Downward Spiral of the Tech Hardware IPO: Are Acquisitions on the Horizon?

We see this happen so many times. A hot brand new technology hardware company with a cool new product decides to cash in via an IPO. All is good for a little while and then Wall Street's expectations for growth become too ambitious as competition grows and the need to constant upgrade one's device wanes. The company misses financial targets for a few quarters in a row and the stock goes from darling to laughingstock in short order. I think we can all agree that fitness band maker Fitbit (FIT) fits the bill. Here is the stock's chart since the IPO in mid 2015:

fit.png

Another obvious poster child for this phenomenon is GoPro (GPRO):

gpro.png

To me, it seems the only logical play is for these companies to be acquired by larger technology companies who can best harness the value and loyalty behind these solid brands to maximize their profit potential.

So why should a bigger tech player swoop in and take Fitbit and GoPro out of their misery? Quite simply, the public markets become broken for these young disappointments very quickly. Given the competitive landscape, it will be very hard for either of them to reaccelerate its business to the level that would be required for investors to warm back up to the story. As a result, the stocks are being valued extremely cheaply if you consider the value of the brand and the current user base. As a result, it should be a no-brainer for the big guys to snap up the small fries. This becomes especially true if we consider that the IPO markets have allowed these smaller players to amass large cash hoards.

Take Fitbit, for instance. At less than $6 per share, FIT current equity value is a meager $1.4 billion. The company's finances are actually is very solid shape, with no debt and a projected $700 million of cash onhand as of year-end 2016. Net of cash, Wall Street is valuing the Fitbit brand and the more than $2 billion annual revenue base (2016 figure) that it brings are just $700 million. For a strategic acquirer, that price should be mouth-watering. Even offering a big premium of 50-100% to persuade current shareholders to sell would not impede value-creation from the deal. Offer $11 per share/$2.7 billion for FIT ($2 billion for the operating business plus cash onhand) and it is unlikely a company like Apple or Google would regret it.

GoPro would be an even cheaper purchase. At the current $8.75 share price, Wall Street thinks the company is worth just $1 billion (net of $200 million cash, no debt). Could Apple not add value to its company by paying $2 billion for GoPro, innovating the product line further, and integrating it into their existing user base around the globe?

So why have these deals not really happened? In some cases, large tech companies firmly believe they are superior to the upstarts. As a result, they prefer to challenge them with internal product development (me-too copycats) instead of merging and taking out one of their competitors. Apple is probably the most prominent company in this category, as they refuse to acquire any meaningful competitor. And yet, it is almost assured that their competitive positions would be stronger today has they bought companies like Netflix, Spotify, Pandora, etc. Instead, we read stories like the one recently that said that Apple is planning to go into the original content business. All I can do is roll my eyes.

The second hurdle for these combinations is seller willingness to merge. From an emotional perspective, the board of GoPro would not have an easy time agreeing to sell the company for $15 or $20 when the stock price was $100 in 2014 and $60 in 2015. If they just come out with one more hit product the sky could be the limit! Same thing with Fitbit; we went public at $20 in 2015, how can we sell out for $10?

To me the playbook is obvious. Wall Street is telling you that your hyper growth days are over. The big guys have more resources and will slowly take your customers. For some reason, nobody realizes that combining forces is probably the best move for both sides in the long run. I will be interested to see if Fitbit and GoPro are public companies a year from now. Heck, maybe Steve Ballmer comes back to Microsoft and sees synergies with a Nokia/Surface/Fitbit/GoPro/X-Box product lineup (kidding, of course). 

Beware of Seemingly Reasonable P/E's on Growth Tech Companies

Pop Quiz:

Do all technology companies expense stock-based compensation in their financial statements? Perhaps more importantly, do sell-side analysts include such expenses in their quarterly earnings estimates, on which every quarterly report is judged by Wall Street?

Given that stock-based comp has been a hot button accounting issue for a couple of decades, and the chief accounting rule board (FASB) required GAAP financial statements to include such expenses way back in 2004, I suspect that most investors are not really paying attention to the issue anymore.

Since I am a value-oriented investor, most of my investments are outside of the high growth tech sector, where most of the stock-based compensation resides. Nonetheless, a few months ago I wanted to dig a little digging because I did not understand why market commentators in the financial media were seeming to understate the P/E ratio of the S&P 500. I have been closely watching S&P 500 index earnings for most of my career, so it struck me as puzzling when people on CNBC would claim something like "The S&P 500 trades at 17 times earnings, which is only modestly above historical averages." In fact, the numbers I saw on the actual Standard and Poor's web site showed the P/E to be more like 19 or 20x. Given that the historical average is around 15x, there is a big difference between 17x and 20x. So what the heck is going on?

It turns out that there is a large financial data aggregation company called FactSet, which supplies many investors with earnings data on the S&P 500. You can find their earnings data directly on their web site. After reading through it I realized that FactSet was showing higher earnings levels for the S&P 500 (which equates to lower P/E ratios by definition), and that is where the market commentators were getting their valuation information. For instance, the current FactSet report shows that calendar year 2016 earnings for the S&P 500 are projected at $119, which gives the index a trailing P/E of 19.3x. However, the S&P web site shows a figure of $109, which equates to a trailing P/E of 21.1x. Investing is hard enough, but now we can't even agree on what earnings are? Maybe I'm making a big deal out of nothing, but this is frustrating.

The logical question I needed to answer was what accounted for the gap in earnings tallies. If earnings really were 9% above the level I thought, my view of the S&P 500's valuation would undoubtedly change. I was shocked when I learned the answer.

It turns out that FactSet's earnings data does not represent the actual earnings reported by the companies comprising the S&P 500, which is what the figures on the S&P web site show. Instead, FactSet uses the reported earnings that match up most closely with the Wall Street's analysts' quarterly forecasts. Put another way, if the analyst community excludes certain items from their earnings estimates, FactSet will adjust a company's actual reported earnings to reflect those adjustments (for an apples to apples comparison to the Wall Street estimate) and those earnings figure are used when they tell the investment community what the earnings for the index actually are. If this sounds bizarre to you, it should.

Having followed the market for my entire adult life (and all my teenage years too), I immediately knew what accounted for much of the gap between these earnings estimates. Most technology companies still to this day report non-GAAP earnings results right along side GAAP figures in their earnings reports. For reasons I don't understand (since the issue of whether stock compensation is an actual expense was resolved years ago), the analyst community excludes these expenses in their numbers, so when a tech company reports earnings, the non-GAAP number is comparable to the analyst estimate. As such, the non-GAAP number is incorporated into FactSet's data. So whenever a stock market commentator quotes the FactSet's version of the index's P/E ratio, they are inherently ignoring billions of dollars of employee compensation that is being paid out in shares instead of cash.

To illustrate this point, Consider Google/Alphabet's fourth quarter earnings report from last night. The analyst estimate was $9.44 per share and Google reported $9.36 per share. So today's media headlines say that the company "missed estimates." If you read the financial statements carefully you will see that Google's GAAP earnings were actually $7.56 per share. The non-GAAP earnings figure, which is the ones that is reported on because that is how the analysts do their projections, was a stunning 24% higher than the actual earnings under GAAP accounting rules.

You can probably guess why there was such a large gap. During the fourth quarter alone, Google incurred stock-based compensation expense of... $1.846 billion! Multiply that by four and Google's run-rate for stock compensation is $7.4 billion per year! That is $7.4 billion of actual expenses that are being excluded from FactSet's earnings tally, and that is just from one company (albeit a big one) in the S&P 500 index.

So how does this impact investment decisions? Well, there are many people that look at Google and see an $850 stock price and $34.40 earnings for 2016 and conclude that the stock is quite reasonably priced given the company's growth rate, at less than 25 times trailing earnings (850/34.40=24.7). Of course, the actual P/E is 30.5x because when you add back stock-based comp Google's earnings per share decline from $34.40 to $27.85.

The valuation differentials get even larger when you consider younger, smaller technology companies because these firms seem to be addicted to stock-based compensation. Google pays out a lot in stock, but even that $7.4 billion figure is only 7% of the company's revenue. Paying out 7% of sales as stock compensation is indeed a very large figure, but other tech companies dole out far more.

I looked at some other fairly large ($5-50 billion market values) tech firms and the numbers are staggering. During the first three quarters of calendar 2016, Salesforce.com (CRM) paid out 9% of revenue in SBC, but that seemed quite low compared with some others. Zillow (ZG): 13%. ServiceNow (NOW): 23%. Workday (WDAY): 24%. Twitter (TWTR): 26%. Can you believe that some tech companies pay a quarter of revenue in stock-based compensation? Not total compensation, just the stock portion!

Importantly for investors, these companies are getting very large valuations on Wall Street. In fact, those five tech companies have current equity market values that cumulatively exceed $100 billion. I wonder if investors might view them a little less favorably if they realized they might be less profitable than the appear on the surface.

For me, the takeaway from all of this is that all investors should dig deeper into valuations in general. Don't just take figure you hear on CNBC or read in press releases as gospel. Just because a web site says a company has earnings of X or a P/E ratio of Y does not mean there isn't more to the story.

This Is How Amazon Will Become America’s Most Valuable Company

In 2014 I invested in Amazon.com (AMZN), much to the bewilderment of many of my clients. Even though the stock had fallen from more than $400 to below $300 per share, the consensus view was that the company was a money-losing unfocused endeavor that prioritized innovation over financial considerations. In many minds, there was no way to justify Amazon’s market value, so $280 per share was pretty much just as crazy as $400 per share.

Fast forward 30 months and Amazon shares trade in the mid 700’s. The company is reporting GAAP profits and still growing 20% per year. Prior skeptics missed several things, but at the core they did not account for the fact that Amazon sees no boundaries in terms of areas in which it will compete. The company was losing money in the accounting world, but in reality certain businesses were making money and those profits were being used to subsidize growth initiatives in other areas, some of which would fail and others that would succeed but not turn a profit on their own until years later.

We often hear growth investors focusing on a company’s total addressable market, or “TAM,” when trying to figure out how high a stock could go over a 5 or 10 year period when growth is more important to management than short-term profitability. Many Amazon investors try to gauge the company’s TAM by looking at the total retail market, and assuming e-commerce ultimately represents X percent of retail spending, and Amazon gets Y percent of that e-commerce market. That method of analysis would work for most companies, but not Amazon. The problem is that it implied that we know what categories will have an e-commerce component and that the e-commerce penetration of each category will remain somewhat consistent (such that we can predict what it will be).

Why is that problematic? Watch this video, unveiled today by Amazon:

You see, Amazon is not a traditional company. It is creating new businesses that don’t exist and it is re-imagining business models, like the convenience store. There is really no way to know what businesses Amazon will get into in the future. All we really know is that they are more willing than any other company on Earth to venture into something new that may or may not seem to make sense. This is why I believe within the next five years Amazon will become the most valuable U.S. company. There is nothing stopping them from growing because they never limit themselves.

The “Amazon Go” store you saw in the video (see the related Seattle Times article here) will open in 2017 in Seattle, about 10 miles from my house. I will eagerly await its arrival and share my initial experience when it opens. As for the stock, as the price warrants I will reduce my position over time (I already have sold some), but it is probably the only stock I have ever owned that I will continue to hold at least some of my shares almost no matter how high it goes. As long as I cannot predict where Amazon’s growth will take it in the future, it will be hard for me to confidently say the company is overvalued.

Full Disclosure: Long shares of Amazon at the time of writing, but positions may change at any time.

Leading Tech Companies All Chasing The Same "Next Big Things"

I miss the old days of tech investing. Times were simpler. Companies were more focused. There were one or two companies that tended to be dominant within a certain fragment of the industry. Google was search and online advertising. Amazon was e-commerce. Intel was chips. eBay was marketplace. Microsoft was operating systems and productivity software. Cisco was networking. Apple was high-end devices. Facebook was social networking. Netflix was movies. You get the picture. Oh how times have changed.

The tech landscape now has led us down a different path. Each of these companies has been extremely successful in conquering their home turf. They are all wildly profitable and have more money than they know what to do with. So they repurchase shares and pay dividends and buy startups to add talent and new technology. And after they do all of that they still have billions of dollars extra sitting around. What to do?

It appears the answer now is to become a tech conglomerate. Heck, if we took over one area of the marketplace, why not shoot for the stars? Why not be everything to everybody? So now when we talk about the leading tech companies (Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft) the future looks far less predictable.

In the old world Tesla would be the de facto electric self-driving car play. But Google is building cars. So is Apple.

In the old world Oculus would have been the virtual/augmented reality play. But in the new world Facebook acquires them and then Microsoft and Apple and Google all start working on the same thing.

In the old world Netflix would be the benchmark for streaming video. Nobody would argue that households looking to get rid of their $100/month cable bills would substitute them with a half dozen individual services that cost $10-$20 per month. The expensive cable bundle is no worse than a bundle of Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, HBO Now, YouTube Red, and CBS All Access. And as if there are not enough competitors vying for your TV dollars, it was recently reported that Apple has decided it has identified the next big thing; producing original TV content. Are you kidding me?

I understand that self-driving cars and streaming over-the-top video and virtual reality could all very well be huge markets over the long term. But everyone can't be a winner. Do you really think GM and Ford lack the ability to produce self-driving, electric cars? Are the Big Three auto makers going to be replaced by Apple, Google, and Tesla a decade from now? Are we really going to cancel our Comcast service and pay the same amount of money for less content by buying subscriptions to 6 or 8 streaming services?

The leading tech companies got to where they are today by being laser-focused on creating or improving upon one big tech trend. Becoming indispensable in that arena has made them billions of dollars and created a ton of shareholder wealth. They did not win out after a long, brutal battle with the other tech titans at the time.

The biggest risk to Apple, for example, is that the innovation they are focused on revolves solely around virtual reality, electric cars, and streaming TV and movies. That is not how Apple became Apple. And it is not the secret for them to stay at the top. The same goes for Google and Microsoft and Facebook. As long as these companies are battling against each other, as opposed to paving their own way to the future, I am afraid that those of us hoping for the next big thing to come out of the mega tech stalwarts may be disappointed. To truly develop a market-leading position you have to try something new and do so long before everyone else. Nobody is likely to catch Amazon in the public cloud computing space (although Google and Microsoft are trying, of course). They are years ahead because they saw the trend before anyone else and went all-in to the number one.

Microsoft/LinkedIn: Maybe The Folks In Redmond Will Finally Get An Acquisition Right, But Don't Hold Your Breath

I am often asked why some companies trade for sky-high valuations even when a majority agree that the price does not make a lot of sense. In part, the answer is that there are always people who perceive value differently and will overpay for companies. The saying goes that something is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it. That might be true in many instances (in the short term especially), but many stock market investors would argue that a company's worth is actually tied to its future free cash flow. And that is what makes a market.

If you had to pick a tech company that has a miserable history with acquisitions, it would be Microsoft (MSFT). Just in the last nine years MSFT has paid $6.3 billion for online advertising firm aQuantive, $7.6 billion for Nokia's phone business, and $8.5 billion for Skype. That is more than $22 billion for three companies that have all struggled under Microsoft's ownership. The most logical from a strategic perspective, Skype, seems to be a flop. With its huge installed based of Windows, Outlook, and Office users, Microsoft had a huge opportunity to build and integrate the world's most dominant audio and video corporate communications platform. Oh well.

Today Microsoft announced they are paying more than $26 billion for corporate social network LinkedIn (LNKD), a 50% premium to last week's closing stock price. Will this deal finally be the one that gives MSFT deal credibility? The odds seem long. Product synergies seem sparse and even industry pundits are using odd justifications for the deal. One tech commentator thought this was a boon for Microsoft's Azure cloud business because LinkedIn is big and growing quickly, and therefore would give MSFT a lot more data flowing through its cloud infrastructure. So LinkedIn doesn't use Azure now but it is a smart deal because the tie-up will force them to use Azure in the future? Yikes.

If I was a Microsoft shareholder I would be most concerned with the $26 billion all-cash price tag (to be funded entirely with debt). In 2015 LinkedIn had free cash flow of $300 million. Subtract non-cash stock based compensation of $510 million and you can see that LNKD is not "profitable" really, non-GAAP accounting aside. EBITDA in 2015 was about $270 million, so the deal price equates to a trailing EV/EBITDA multiple of roughly 90 times. Even if one believes the strategic rationale for the deal is sound, making it worthwhile from a financial standpoint is another story.

While it totally makes sense that Microsoft feels its relevancy fading, and thus wants to make a splash and try to get "cooler" in the world of tech, there are plenty of obstacles in front of them. It will be tough task to make this move one that we look back at in a few years and say "Wow, that LinkedIn deal really paid off." So even with a new CEO, maybe MSFT has not changed all that much at all. Time will tell.

Full Disclosure: No position in any of the companies mentioned at the time of writing, but positions may change at any time

Is Facebook Stock Approaching Bubble Territory?

Here is a list of the U.S. companies that are worth at least $300 billion today based on stock market value:

  1. Apple $522B

  2. Microsoft $392B

  3. Exxon Mobil $365B

  4. Berkshire Hathaway $357B

  5. Facebook $336B

  6. Amazon.com $318B

  7. Johnson & Johnson $311B

If you are surprised to see Facebook (FB) registering as the 5th most valuable U.S. company you are not alone. Given the company's high growth rate, many investors do not mind the stock's valuation. At $117 per share, the stock trades at 33 times this year's consensus forecast of $3.54 per share of earnings. Given that Wall Street is currently estimating more than 30% earnings growth in 2017, this P/E ratio seems high, but warranted, if you are a true believer in the company's future.

I am not going to delve into the company's future growth prospects in this post, as I have been wrong about them so far. My thesis was that Facebook usage would decline over time as early adopters such as myself tired of the service and the network became overloaded with parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc. That has proven to be wrong. Perhaps Facebook has evolved from a cool place to connect with friends to a crucial hub to connect with family. At any rate, the stock's valuation is what has peaked my interest lately.

Facebook is one of a growing number of growth companies in the technology space that is overstating its profitability by paying its employees with stock and not treating it as an expense when speaking to Wall Street analysts. The official GAAP financial statements do disclose how much stock they dole out to employees (for instance, in 2015 the figure was a stunning $3 billion), but when investors quickly look at earnings estimates, they see the $3.54 figure for 2016 which does not include stock-based compensation.

So what happens to the stock's valuation if we treat stock compensation as if it were cash? After all, if Facebook decided to stop paying its employees with stock, we can assume they would have to replace it with cash. Below I have compiled the company's free cash flow generation since 2012 and subtracted the dollar amount of stock they have paid their employees. This simply tells us how much actual free cash flow Facebook would have generated if they compensated solely with good ol' U.S. dollars and cents.

As you can see, adjusted for stock-based compensation Facebook had free cash flow of $1.09 per share in 2015, which is about 50% less than their actual reported free cash flow ($2.13). Put another way, Facebook's employees (not their shareholders) are being paid out half of the company's profits.

From this perspective, Facebook stock looks a lot more overvalued. If you annualize the company's first quarter 2016 free cash flow adjusted for stock compensation ($0.38 per share), the company trades at a P/E of 77 ($1.53 of free cash flow). There is certainly an argument to be made that such a price resembles bubble territory. That potential problem could be rectified if the company continues to grow 30% annually for the next five years, resulting in $4.05 of "adjusted" free cash flow in 2020. But buyers of Facebook stock today at paying about 30 times that 2020 estimate right now, which is still a very high price.

Below is a summary of Facebook's stock market value relative to reported and adjusted free cash flow since 2012, as the stock has nearly quintupled in price:

How do situations like these typically play out? One of two ways. The less likely scenario is probably one where Facebook's growth hits a wall and investors quickly slash the P/E ratio they are willing to pay by 2-3 times. That would be ugly, but does not appear to be the most likely outcome given their momentum right now. The more likely scenario is the one that we usually see with very good companies that have staying power but simply have seen their stock prices get ahead of the fundamentals. In that case, the cash flow multiple comes down slowly over a period of several years, resulting in the stock price lagging the company's underlying profits.

If I had to guess, I would say the latter seems like a real possibility going forward from here. Regardless, investors should check to see how much of a hit a high-flying tech company's cash flow would take if stock compensation was factored into the equation. As Warren Buffett likes to say, "if stock-based compensation is not a real expense, I don't know what it is."

Full Disclosure: No position in Facebook at the time of writing, but positions may change at any time

Sorry Goldman Sachs, Apple Is A Hardware Company Plain and Simple

Shares of Apple (AAPL) are rising $3 today to $116 after Goldman Sachs added the stock to its "conviction buy list" and raised its price target to $163 per share (from $145). Goldman's thesis is that Apple is transitioning from a hardware company to a recurring revenue services business, which will allow it to garner a higher earnings multiple on Wall Street (which in turn would lead to meaningful price appreciation). While many of my clients are long Apple stock, I don't buy this "Apple is really a software company" argument.

If we take a look at the numbers it is hard to argue otherwise. In fiscal 2015 Apple derived 9% of its total revenue from services, with 91% coming from hardware (led by the iPhone at 66% of sales). Okay, so Apple is a hardware company today but maybe the services segment is growing so fast that it will ascend quickly to be a huge part of Apple's business? In fiscal 2014 services represented 10% of sales. In fiscal 2013 it was 9%. The mix isn't changing at all.

So what services business will really start to grow in the future and allow this software thesis to play out? Goldman Sachs, among many others, point to Apple Pay. Apple's receives a cut of every credit card transaction processed through its Apple Pay iPhone app (the press has reported the rate to be 0.15% but Apple will not confirm this). So if Apple Pay continues to gain market share in credit card processing, will that make a big difference to the company's financial results? Not at all.

Total U.S. credit card volumes are staggering; more than $2 trillion per year. Let's be optimistic and say that Apple Pay can grab 25% of all credit card transactions. The result would be about $900 million of Apple Pay service revenue. That sounds like a lot of money until you realize that Apple is booking more than $230 billion of sales annually. An extra $900 million comes to less than one-half of one percent of incremental sales. Even if we model that as 100% profit, it would add just 16 cents to Apple's annual earnings per share. It's a rounding error.

The bottom line is that Apple is a hardware company. Could that change in 5-10 years? Perhaps, but it's not going to happen anytime soon and as a result, investors should not expect the company's P/E multiple to expand materially. That is not to say the stock won't perform well, I just don't think it's going to trade at or above the valuation of the S&P 500 index, which would be required if the stock is going to see $163 anytime soon.

Full Disclosure: Long shares of Apple at the time of writing but positions may change at any time.

Yahoo Update: I Might Be The Only Person Who Likes Marissa Mayer's Turnaround Plan

Nearly three years ago I wrote a bullish article on Yahoo (YHOO) after ex-Google exec Marissa Mayer took over as CEO, with the stock at $16 per share (Does Marissa Mayer Make Yahoo Stock A Worthwhile Bet?). After the stock had doubled a year later I postulated that it was fairly valued, but for a while now I have moved back into the bullish camp. The skeptics point out (correctly) that the stock's huge run since Mayer's hire is mostly due to a massive increase in the value of its stake in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba (BABA), the last of which will be spun off to shareholders in late 2015 or early 2016.

The consensus view on Mayer's efforts to reinvigorate the company's core business is quite negative. Many of the hedge fund activists who pushed for the BABA spin-off have publicly called for Mayer's exit. While Yahoo's own financial results remain about where they were when Mayer took over three years ago, the make-up of that business has changed dramatically, which positions the company very well for the future.

Back in 2012 Yahoo's core business was like a melting ice cube, as user preferences were moving away from both the Yahoo brand and from desktop search. Much to Mayer's disappointment, the company had hardly any presence in areas like mobile and social media, even though that was clearly where online usage was going. So, Mayer made a big push into what she calls "Mavens" (mobile, video, native, and social). By revamping Yahoo's mobile apps, acquiring upstarts like Tumblr, and refocusing the company on current usage trends, Mayer's plan was to expand into areas of growth in order to offset the slowly declining legacy business (conducting internet searches on yahoo.com from a desktop computer is so 1995). Perfectly logical.

Mayer's critics, however, are unimpressed. Yahoo's annual revenue dropped from $5 billion in 2012 to $4.6 billion in 2014, as legacy declines more than offset growth in Mavens. Since Mavens started from practically zero in 2012, it is going to take a while for the new businesses to get large enough to overshadow the legacy ones, but when that happens Yahoo can begin to see absolute growth again. Mayer is making a lot of progress on this front. Mavens revenue in the second quarter of 2015 was $400 million, or 1/3 of total company sales, representing growth of 60% year-over-year. The plan is working despite the multi-year timeframe.

But the real reason I am bullish on the stock at current prices ($39) is the fact that Wall Street has basically decided that Yahoo's core business has no chance of returning to growth, ever. The soon-to-be spun off Alibaba stake is worth $32 billion or $34 per YHOO share (the after-tax value is less -- $22 per share -- which is relevant if Yahoo cannot get IRS approval for a tax-free spin-off). Add in the market value of Yahoo Japan ($6 per share after-tax) and Yahoo's current net cash position ($6 per share) and you can see that investors are getting core Yahoo for a pittance. Even assuming a fully taxed Alibaba stake, core Yahoo is valued at only $5 per share (around 1 times current annual revenue). Assume a tax-free spin of BABA and you get a ridiculous figure for core Yahoo's value --- negative $7 per share!

Given the momentum the Mavens businesses are seeing right now, coupled with the $7 billion of cash on the company's balance sheet (fuel for more acquisitions, perhaps), I actually think Mayer can turn around the Yahoo ship in the not-too-distant future. Paying just $5 per share for the core business even in the worst case scenario makes the risk/reward trade-off  extremely favorable. For investors who are willing to hold the Alibaba stock for the long-term (that company is very well-positioned), I can easily see Yahoo shares being worth over $50 a year or two from now on a cumulative basis.

Full Disclosure: Long shares of YHOO at the time of writing, but positions may change at any time

New Amazon Disclosures Reinvigorate Bull Case For Investors

Amazon (AMZN) is a fascinating company for many reasons and their latest investor relations move has gotten the markets excited about their stock once again (it's up 57 points today alone as I write this). Bulls and bears on the shares have long had a disagreement about the company. Shareholders argued that Jeff Bezos and Co. were purposely "losing money" in order to invest heavily in growth and attain massive scale. Bears insisted that the spending was required to keep their customers coming back, and that if the company started to show profits the business would suffer dramatically. Regardless of which camp you are in, one thing is clear; Amazon chooses growth over profitability in the short term if it thinks they can be successful.

So when the company announced that it would break out the financial results of its Amazon Web Services (AWS) business segment for the first time in its nine-year history starting in 2015, the consensus view was that the division would show losses. After all, if Amazon embraces short term losses in exchange for growth, and AWS is its fastest growing business, why would you think otherwise? So imagine the surprise last evening when Amazon announced that AWS is profitable, and not just a little bit. Operating margins for AWS during the first quarter of 2015 were 17%. Add back an estimate of depreciation expense and EBITDA margins are likely approaching 50%. And the stock price is rocketing higher on the news.

All of the sudden it is possible that Amazon does not hate reporting profits (some have speculated that income tax avoidance is a motivating factor). Instead, maybe they are being sincere and simply invest capital when they think they have a good reason, regardless of whether it results in short-term GAAP profits. And maybe the thesis that Amazon's business model does not allow for profits is incorrect. That is surely what investors today are thinking. Given their corporate philosophy, there is no reason Amazon should be running AWS at a large profit, but they are. Why? Perhaps they have built a very good business. Simple enough.

The implications for the stock are important. We now have evidence that AWS is probably worth the $60 billion or so that the bulls have long thought. At the lows of the last year (below $300 per share), Amazon's total equity value was only a little more than double that figure ($130 billion). The bears on the stock will probably stick to their guns that the current share price (approaching $450) is irrational, but if you actually run the numbers, it is not that hard to value Amazon in a range of $200-$250 billion based solely on what we know today, given that non-AWS annual revenue will approach $100 billion this year and AWS alone can account for 25-30% of that valuation. The stock is getting close to my personal fair value target, but is not quite there yet. And given that Amazon could very well surprise investors more going forward (they don't exactly set the bar very high), I am not in a big rush to sell.

Full Disclosure: Long shares of AMZN at the time of writing, but positions may change at any time